Acoustic culture
Acoustic space
“The key characteristic of acoustic space is that it engages multiple senses at the same time. It does not demand that objects be dissected to be understood; rather, the multiple parts co-exist simultaneously. To understand acoustic space, you must perceive all of it, not focus on one part. In other words, acoustic space demands that you apprehend figure and ground simultaneously, that the senses work together. McLuhan believed that oral cultures existed in acoustic space since their primary mode of communicating was speech.”
Marshall McLuhan explains visual and acoustic space, interview with Nina Sutton,
Simultaneous is necessarily acoustic. Anything sequential is necessarily visual . This structure is valid for any period of History. The pre literate world tended to be ear because they didn't have any powerful technology that would equal the power of the ear to order existence, so all people in the world before the semantics of the Greek alphabet allowed to the barbarian world .... what the Greeks call the holy barbarian old science at affair... they come to ... a ...full circle of visual people out there the holy barbarian. Now these are all ear people ... before they took everything including the Greek world ... over two but that is only history .. the simultaneous is automaticlly acoustic because you feel .. at once. you see only a small area and Vision is a continuous as the acoustic world is not continuous... there is no continuun in the ear world.. there is no continuum for the blind
The recording is poor and several passages are not intelligible, but the final mentioning of the blind can be fully understood in anA Galaxia de Gutenberg.doc experience that goes in detail about that at the movie To see and not to see
It is the same for the case of Africans reported by McLuhan in the Gutenberg Galaxy.
When McLuhan predicted Internet, and I quote:
"The next medium, whatever it is — it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”
He did not only foresaw Internet as we know today, but if you mix the above and the new technologies that are around the corner as extensions of consciousness, it becomes very clear that we are about to enter an era exactly as the one he describes to Nina Sutton as the pre literate or barbarian, in an all encompassing acoustic form of communication will be totally allowed, since it is only partially allowed today.
Take a look also at this preview on virtual reality that will be available very soon.
The same way that although the medium is the message and it does not exclude the message, an acoustic culture does not exclude the visual.
Take a look in something constructed visually under an acoustical approach, i.e., there is a continuum in the images that obliges you to think about it the same way a person accustomed in a acoustic culture would.
Acoustic culture is in itself a very broad suject and this exploration should be expanded or, better yet, having a separate project exploring only that.
For the moment it is enough.