The tactile age is the age of multimedia, of cyberspace, which is simply a communicative medium, or, rather, an interconnected web of communicative media. While the transformation of human consciousness brought about by the transition from the acoustic to the visual age is ably explained to us by Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy (1982), we need Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) to help us grasp the idea of the tactile age. McLuhan argued St. Paul's point even if he did not credit it -- that our technologies are extensions of ourselves in the world. What he was insisting upon in his dictum that the medium is the message is that communicative media determine the structure of human intercourse and, thereby, channel the way in which it is conducted. What this means is that our technologies have a tendency to shape us as much as ape us.

	Ong picked up on this idea of determinative media in his vision of what he called 'secondary orality,' in which he foresaw that multimedia would create the second greatest shift in human consciousness in recorded history.  The visual consciousness of the age of literacy has been merging for about a century with the acoustic consciousness of the age of orality, and the web of communicative media that we call cyberspace has greatly facilitated its progress.  What Ong did not articulate in his theory of secondary orality is that multi-sensory engagement through multiple channels of media creates a tactile consciousness, which I coined at the Midwestern Educational Technology Conference in the spring of 2004 during a presentation entitled "Secondary Orality- Synchronous Semblances in Asynchronous Environments."
Marshall McLuhan, Ph.D.		Rev. Walter J. Ong, Ph.D.

The key to this, of course, is held in that relationship between synchronous and asynchronous communication. Accouter the human person with every internal and external technology that can be sanely held and we still come back to the question of how we interact with one another and with our pasts. The communicative channel itself is a tool that signifies the human person, and we become the channels of asynchronous acoustics (e.g., voice mail) and synchronous visuals (e.g., text chat) that we use. Our social interactions are polyvalent rather than linear, geographically non-contiguous rather than adjacent, culturally inclusive rather than exclusive -- in short, we are being rewired and reconnected to our global society in ways that are transformative of our consciousness. What will our stories become, and how will we continue to do history once the linear paradigm of cause/effect no longer seems to work for us? (Back)