2.1. Physics and Chemistry

For those of you hoping that this book would be concerned with warp drive and replicators, you are only a little bit off. Some things do not change. Consider the humble triangle. For all triangles including a right angle, a² + b² = c². For Euclidian geometries, this formula describes the length of the sides of that triangle. Unless there are dramatic changes in the universe, triangles will continue to have three sides, three angles, and operate according to some simple rules.

The items in this section are intended to provide a foundation that allows us to understand the conditions of possibility for the discussion of things that can or will change. Some of these items may seem bizarre—they are included because of the extensive virtual horizon of media moving forward. This book is intended for classes that consider headsets, bodysuits, and brain-computer interfaces just as seriously, or likely more seriously, than they would the design of a front-page headline celebrating the Dodgers’ World Series victory.

Each sub-point in this section will identify something that is unlikely to change, some important basic information about it, and the practical consideration of how that unchanging property impacts your world.

2.2. The Electromagnetic Spectrum

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) provides a handy chart to explain the electromagnetic spectrum (EM).

The spectrum extends all the way from the long waves of radio through the short waves of positron imaging and background radiation in the universe. When you screw the coaxial cable into your cable port for your television or modem, you are attaching a metal conductor for a radio signal.

All electromagnetic radiation is similar, according to NASA:

Electromagnetic radiation can be described in terms of a stream of mass-less particles, called photons, each traveling in a wave-like pattern at the speed of light. Each photon contains a certain amount of energy. The different types of radiation are defined by the amount of energy found in the photons. Radio waves have photons with low energies, microwave photons have a little more energy than radio waves, infrared photons have still more, then visible, ultraviolet, X-rays, and, the most energetic of all, gamma-rays.^[1]

Why do we care? Almost all of our contemporary image media and network-driven technologies depend on the electromagnetic spectrum. All optical media are spectrum dependent: light interacting with paint and screens both rely on the same underlying spectrum dynamics of color.

Does that mean that your microwave is dangerous? No. Your microwave uses a Faraday cage to contain its electromagnetic energy. The same cages are useful for computer security—Faraday bags contain suspicious electronic devices, and Faraday cages protect electrical equipment.^[2] What is the magic here? A web of metallic bars or strands.

This will not change in your lifetime. The fundamental units of all systems will be somewhere on the spectrum.

2.3. Scarcity

Consider a car radio. As you drive away from a city, the signal from your favorite vaporwave station becomes weaker and weaker, until you can no longer hear it at all. Of course, such a hip station would use the FM method of encoding, as it allows greater fidelity to the original (it sounds better). At that point, you might switch to an AM station that carries broadcasts of stand-up comedy. As you approach the next city, you may find that the same frequencies on which you enjoyed vaporwave and jokes now carry jazz and sports. In any given place, there cannot be two transmissions on the same frequency. The waves cancel each other out: this is a key property of waves.

The principle of scarcity is so important that it is the basis of broadcasting law. In Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission, the US Supreme Court ruled that the scarcity of the broadcast spectrum allowed the restraint of speech over radio waves.^[3] Deciding what would be carried on a rivalrous channel over the air would be a matter of public concern. In Miami Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo, the Supreme Court found that newspapers, unlike radio stations, which are carried over limited public airwaves, are not rivalrous.^[4] Economic, rather than electromagnetic, justifications for restriction run afoul of the First Amendment.

This is also the basis of policy discussion in the context of net neutrality. Although at the upper end of utilization Internet bandwidth may have a physical limit, for most intents and purposes, it is a non-rivalrous resource. Advocates of net neutrality contend that such an important electromagnetic service should be considered a common carrier, the same legal regime as telephone service. Opponents contend that operators of Internet systems should be allowed to recoup additional funds from heavy users of the infrastructure and that they may have a First Amendment interest in editing the flow of information. More on this will appear in the methods section 4.7, as policy- and network-shaping technology is likely to change. What is unlikely to change is the rivalrous scarcity of bandwidth.

At this university, this course comes after a course on political economy and legal theory of new media. For those of you reading this book without such a course, the 2 × 2 matrix below can be helpful.

All linkages depend on some interaction with a transmitter. The spectrum is limited, with different bands assigned for different uses.

Radio transmitters and receivers, like those in your cell phone, allow a great deal of access to information. Transmitters will continue to be critical infrastructure. Any method that does not involve transmitters would involve shifts in the laws of physics or biology that are well beyond this book, or the society where people would read it.

2.3.1. Post-Scarcity

It was a bold choice to place scarcity in the list of things that will not change; after all, so much of what we see in popular media today stresses that we are on the threshold of a new era of superabundance, a life transformed by artificial intelligence and humanoid general-purpose robots that will make labor obsolete. Arguments for this world generally travel under two distinct signs: fully automated luxury gay space communism and something like the bitcoin last supper. These are two sides of the same coin—the coin after scarcity. On one side, the prospect that limitless supply of things will lead to freedom; on the other, that the limitless supply of money will lead to freedom.

Even if we were to achieve substantial technical breakthroughs toward post-scarcity, there is the central problem posed by Jenny Edkins’s work on the politics of famine: scarcity is a condition produced by particular configurations of power.^[5] It would be a mistake to presume that a flood of physical material would end hunger or deprivation; if anything, it could worsen as economies collapse under the weight of excess production. Consider the largest cereal production facility on earth, the Quaker Oats plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This technical marvel is a century old and can easily produce more oatmeal than Americans can possibly eat—yet there is still scarcity.^[6]

Another way to describe the challenge: while it might be appealing to think that the changing total supply of gizmos or other material will lead to human flourishing, the truth is that changing mindsets comes first. Technological shifts have negative implications across other technical, social, communal, and market systems—thus the conservative case for postindustrial futurism.^[7] If you assume “all things are equal,” a common trope in economics, it might be reasonable to see the post-scarcity world on the horizon, when in reality if everyone is suddenly unemployed, their willingness to accommodate strangers might dramatically fall. Overshoot, then, is not just environmental, although there are environmental reasons why superabundance is unlikely, but is also possible across humanity.^[8] In this sense, post-scarcity when considered as a solution to social problems likely makes them worse, while exposing the public broadly to unchecked undemocratic change. Unless a change in mindsets is accomplished first, there is no hope for a post-scarcity world that is not dominated by new, increasingly fierce versions of scarcity itself.

2.4. Optics

Light sources emit many photons on many wavelengths in many directions. A bright light source could be more clearly organized by the use of a lens that would organize the light created by the source. The Fresnel lens is a great example. The ridges of the lens allow the light passing through to be organized to flow in a coherent direction.^[9] Light can also be focused with a conventional concave lens. The lens on your camera condenses the light that reaches it into a coherent beam that lands on some kind of sensor or film. When you consider this in the context of the light being electromagnetic energy, it makes sense why you should not take a picture of the sun. All of the energy that the sun emits is scattered, but the camera (or your eye for that matter) uses a lens to focus energy. All sensors in cameras, to be addressed later in this section, are energy collectors.

Polarizing filters use fine lines to block the flow of unorganized light to a source, which can dramatically reduce glare. This is why polarizing sunglasses may not allow you to see your phone, and it is how transparent-glass 3D systems are able to separate channels for the viewer.

Light can also be split apart into discrete wavelengths. A prism reveals the colors within white light, while a mass spectrometer allows you to see which colors are absorbed or reflected by a particular object. These properties have implications for how we understand the design of cameras, displays, and paints.

There are two ways that we can understand primary colors: additive and subtractive. Most students in this course will be familiar with subtractive theories of color. These theories contend that a certain number of basic colors (primaries) can produce all other colors. Typically, the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue or more technically cyan (C), magenta (M), and yellow (Y). The offset printing process uses CMYK (where K is black).^[10] Tiny dots of these colors could then be made and printed in proximity, which the viewer perceives as a field of color. These different inks would absorb some frequencies of light while reflecting others. This is the subtractive primary base; as more colors are added, the reflection profile of the material will move toward black.

Additive primaries exist in light itself. These primaries are red, blue, and green. The absence of light is black, while the presence of all lights is white. Each of these theories is meaningful and correct; they simply describe different optical properties of different media as they interact with light.

2.5. Transistors

The digital revolution depends on the transistor—a semiconductive device that allows the solid-state encoding of logic gates (they can also be used as amplifiers). For the most part, the transistors we are interested in use a field effect. Before we get into the discussion of operators, it is useful to think about the two kinds of transistors: P and N. In order to augment the electrical properties of the semiconductors already used in transistors, specific materials can be added that change those electrical responses.^[11] In the case of P doping, the region in the middle of the potentially conductive zone is treated with a material that will further react when exposed to a proximal electrical field. The P transistor will then turn off an underlying flow. An N-doped semiconductor will turn it on.

At first you might think that this is a fairly low-level innovation; these seem to be simple switches that express binary logic. What is powerful about these systems is that they can be produced in massive volumes at incredibly low prices. Replacing expensive vacuum tubes, transistors made it possible to build many more processing systems than were possible before. Even better, transistor-based processors were so affordable that general-purpose processors could replace specially built electronics in many cases. Transistors make software possible.

The design of logical operators is highly unlikely to change. All computationally legible information can be represented using transistor states of A/B. These are described through truth tables.

The following are descriptions of key logic gates.

In terms of practical transistor design, an AND gate requires two switches aligned in a series. Only if both switches are on will the current flow.

Truth table (AND)

A	B	Output
0	0	0
0	1	0
1	0	0
1	1	1

To read these circuit diagrams, you can see inbound voltages from v, A, or B. In these diagrams I see the world as nMOS, meaning that switches are flipped on by A or B; the voltage is always present with v.

In terms of practical transistor design, the switches are parallel. If either switch is on, the current will flow. The problem is that we cannot easily distinguish between the values A and B. Either could be on.

Truth table (OR)

A	B	Output
0	0	0
0	1	1
1	0	1
1	1	1

As you can see, the operator OR is not particularly revealing, which leads to the gate XOR.

The principle of functional completeness supposes that there are two functionally complete gates, NAND and NOR. All other gates can be constructed using either of these. NAND supposes that two inputs result in one.

Truth table (NAND)

A	B	Output
0	0	1
0	1	1
1	0	1
1	1	0

The transistor setup for the NAND gate is straightforward, as the current would always be flowing across the active region of a P-doped transistor. One of the trickier ideas here is, How would a NAND gate produce a NOT gate? If both leads of a transistor were led into a single input, the presence of that input would produce a 0 outbound signal. The leads of the transistor do not necessarily need to run to the same place.

The complement would be a NOR gate.

Truth table (NOR)

A	B	Output
0	0	1
0	1	0
1	0	0
1	1	0

High Side

A OR B – P region

Result: NAND which switches between high and low voltage states

A AND B – N region

Low Side

Notice the critical idea here: there are four transistors combined into a single circuit that includes both a NAND and a NOR. Instead of the binary logic being on/off, the circuit encodes high/low. When both P-type transistors block the flow, creating the NAND, the path for the NOR is opened.

Why is this such a powerful technology?

At first it might appear that the reduction of all information to binary might appear difficult and confusing. What is important to understand is that binary states rely on the same processing algorithms that you rely on every day. Consider binary addition, which relies on the same process that you use for adding any other numbers. The difference is that you carry the 1 whenever the sum is more than 1.

Notice that I am not required to carry until bit 3, where 1 +1 = 0, carry the 1. In bit 6, we see the next step, where 1 1 = 0, carry the 1, but we have already carried a 1, so the result is 1. Subtraction follows a similar process. On the level of the transistor, mathematical tasks become simple combinations of on and off.

Transistors and logic gates offer the brute force necessary for the simulation of any specific operation.

The underlying principle of semiconductivity is highly unlikely to change. The alternatives to existing semiconducting technologies still rely on the Boolean logic of transistors, meaning that the core of the idea is likely here for the long haul. Beyond that, it is unlikely that quantum computers, spintronics, or other such technologies can replace the signal amplification role of the transistor; after all, the transistor did not replace the vacuum tube.^[12] Quantum computing is interesting and could begin to supplant the transistor binary paradigm, but the technology is not as developed as is generally acknowledged.^[13] The period between the transistor and Facebook was more than 50 years.

This should remind you of Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree’s axiom: new media do not completely replace the old; they resituate and define the use of the others.^[14] Moving forward, we can use these ideas to understand other technologies and the possible limits of computation in understanding—the magical innovation of the digital is the possibility that all information could be quantized and processed through logic gates.

2.6. Heat

All circuits produce heat. Electricity is the movement of electrons, and that physical motion really exists. Bitcoin miners struggle with adequate supplies of electricity, both for their systems and for their cooling. Integrated circuits include resistors, which intentionally deal with excess voltages as heat. Heat further increases resistance, which can cause other problems as well. Quantum computers, and high-precision imaging transistors, must be kept cold. Dissipating heat is the essential task for the design of new systems.Consider the case of crypto mining, an electricity-intensive operation. Access to electricity is key, so some miners have purchased power plants to generate the electricity needed to make their media. In New York, a miner bought a “peaker plant” on Lake Seneca that began to heat up the lake.^[15] There are challenges in making enough heat to boil the water to run the computers, cooling down the computers, and dealing with the waste heat from both.

2.7. Humans and Sensations

We are confronted by “unbearable slowness.” For cognitive scientists Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister, human beings are capable of processing approximately 10 bits per second, while our sensory systems are capable of processing 109 power bits per second.^[16] For some reason, massively outsized perceptional capacities have evolved around what is a fundamentally slow processing system. What this open provocation elides is that the speed of processing differs greatly for different kinds of tasks. Reading and listening operate at four times the rate; memorization tasks operate at a comparatively glacial pace.^[17] Some easy explanations fall under scrutiny, as there is no substantive unconscious processing of scenes, and memory of rich detail is limited. The answer for Zheng and Meister comes in the relationship between the outer and inner brain—where the outer part of the human neural mechanism is processing incredible volumes of information and the inner mechanism is processing the results of that preprocessing. All of that said, it does seem that these structural explanations of the neural system hinge on two-part taxonomies that are comforting. For example, system 1 and 2 thinking have been popular for explaining behavior for many years, despite inconclusive evidence for these being distinct.^[18] Consider the idea of a “pleasure center.” While there are some parts of the brain that do particular things, “hedonic hotspots” is a far more accurate metaphor, but even then they don’t seem to do the same thing, with at least eleven parts responding to reward, five producing wanting, and five producing liking.^[19]

This section of the book presents a limited set of claims about human perception. The material covered here is not intended to supplement a text or course about perception research, which is most often housed in psychology departments. Here we are attempting to provide some theoretical matter that explains the possibilities and limits of sensation as it relates to media, especially the ways that we might perceive differences in stimuli. The second level of this argument is a critique of standardization, which is also a critique of neuro-foundationalism. Corporations want sense experiences to be as similar as possible—movies should look and sound the same. It’s highly variable. The lingering idea here is that neuroimaging, facial electromyography or eFMG, and eye tracking might offer some way of explaining the root causes of behavior and decision-making processes.

Note that this is limited to a banal conception of five senses. It might be more appropriate to divide the senses into three groups: light sensing (vision), vibration sensing (touch and hearing), and chemical sensing (taste and smell). This concerns that which is highly unlikely to change; ideas like expanded senses and ambient awareness are discussed in section 3.

2.7.1. Hearing

The sense of hearing is the result of the complex processing of vibrations, primarily in the cochlea of the human ear, which typically responds to a frequency range of 20-20,000 Hz.^[20] Younger people may hear higher pitches than older people.

Sound as we know it is a longitudinal wave. The mechanics of a wave like this are slightly different than light waves but can be described in similar terms. An energy source, like a speaker or a voice, produces an energy wave that then travels through a medium to reach a reception point. Energy can move around this space and be reflected back at the source.

The image above shows the acoustic envelope. Any sound has an attack, the initial moment when the sound is produced, a time where it is sustained, and the end where it decays and is released. This is an important idea for understanding both sound and sound processing. The envelope represents a sound as an energetic moment, and within that moment the elements of the wave can be further manipulated. If an entire envelope is heard in a reflection with a complete attack, it is called an echo. When the wave interacts with the sustain of a prior envelope, it is called reverb.

When different waves interact, they can form what is called a standing wave, where the energy of the two is merged. It is also possible that a wave could cancel out the other if it is out of phase with the original.

There are two dimensions we should consider: the frequency of a sound and the energy level. The core note of the piano is middle C, with the A of a viola at 440 Hz. Your instructor will likely use a frequency generator to produce some of these tones and harmonics. If they do not, you can use a program like Garage Band or just play around with the random pianos that seem to be around college dorms to explore these concepts.

The energy of sound is expressed in decibels. This is a logarithmic scale, meaning that an increase of 10 dB is 100 times the energy level. Thus, if an employer were to break the 84 dB threshold for hearing protection in an environment by a few decibels, it is a massive increase in energy level.

Reflections may be adjusted. Sounds can be absorbed. An anechoic chamber uses large, absorptive wedges to eliminate sound. Sound can also be diffused by these wedges. Contact with a surface with a great number of cleavages allows the wave to impact over time. This is critical. Once the wave is broken into many smaller reflections in different time frames, the total sound is dramatically reduced.

Reflection can be used strategically in designing spaces that would be advantageous for superior reflection, like a lecture hall. Among the reasons why people enjoy singing in the shower is the propensity for the small space with parallel walls to form standing waves. Further, the humid air of the shower has greater impulse than dry air. This is an important point: sound waves propagate differently depending on the medium.

Objects producing sounds are also limited by their resonance frequencies. If one plucks a string, the wavelength is constrained by the total length of the string. Of course, harmonics may operate on different intervals, but the fundamental frequency of the sound will remain the same.

A barbershop quartet is a fascinating study in harmonics. If you listen to a group with a few singers, you can hear more tones than should be present. Why? Because harmonics form between the frequencies where the singers are.

How is this translated into the brain? The human takes in sound, either received as vibration of the creature directly or through a system of bones in the ear, which is then processed in the inner ear by the cochlea. Christopher Shera, John Guinan, and Andrew Oxenham describe the role of the inner ear:

The mammalian cochlea acts as an acoustic prism, mechanically separating the frequency components of sound so that they stimulate different populations of sensory cells. As a consequence of this frequency separation, or filtering, each sensory cell within the cochlea responds preferentially to sound energy within a limited frequency range. In its role as a frequency analyzer, the cochlea has been likened to a bank of overlapping bandpass filters, often referred to as “cochlear filters.” The frequency tuning of these filters plays a critical role in our ability to distinguish and perceptually segregate different sounds. For instance, hearing loss is often accompanied by a degradation in cochlear tuning, or a broadening of the cochlear filters. Although quiet sounds can be restored to audibility with appropriate hearing-aid amplification, the loss of cochlear tuning leads to pronounced, and as yet largely uncorrectable, deficits in the ability of hearing-impaired listeners to extract meaningful sounds from background noise.^[21]

This research concerns the understanding of the critical band of the cochlea, where the ear may actually interpret signal. This would play a critical role in understanding what kinds of filters and sound modifications could be conducted. It would make little sense to increase the volume of what could not be heard in the first place.

Much of what we understand to be semantically meaningful activity takes place in the relatively low end of this band. Voices can be understood by slicing out 250-1,000 Hz. Once activated, a relatively small number of neurons interact with the hair cells, indicating a tone at a particular point. Sound perception is limited to the bands where the hairs are capable of processing a vibration.

Sound is standardized through the frequency, envelope, and energy level. Special forms of sound organization that take place over time and through the organization of tones is called music. The schemes by which we organize tones are highly likely to change.

2.7.2. Vision

Perception researchers have an interesting question for you to ponder: Why are there no auditory magic tricks? The difference, according to Gustav Kuhn et al., is that much of what we culturally understand to be magic is intrinsically visual.^[22] Magic tricks are not sensory illusions but specific phenomena related to the persistence of perception. Sound is intrinsically fleeting, and most importantly there are rich semiotic qualities to magic that play with established assumptions about permanence.

In humans, vision relies on the retina to interpret light focused by the lens. This information is then relayed through optic nerve to the brain, where it is processed by a number of regions. Although the exact process by which recognition of particular forms is still unknown, the brain appears to first process edges and then work among multiple sets of edges to form an image.^[23] Edge detection seems to be a major function of V1, which is one of the numbered regions of the visual cortex..^[24] As theories about the brain develop, it is important to understand that visual perception is not a stable, linear thing. For example, as your head moves, your vision likely remains stable, thanks to a number of feedback processes between your brain and eye that developmentally train the eye to remain steady.^[25] In terms of processing, it might feel convenient that there would be a linear flow from V1 through the higher visual cortexes, but neuroimaging research on rats suggests that information flows both to V1 and in targeted ways ahead of that signal.^[26] Attention then would attenuate processing, as Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris demonstrated in their experiments with the selective inattention of a gorilla in a scene from a basketball game.^[27] Even the assumption of edge detection and precision is unstable at low light levels; the priority for the retina is the detection of a signal at all, over precision.^[28] This is only a paragraph in a textbook for introductory media futures courses. The key point of this paragraph is that the model for how the brain processes visual information is evolving, and perceptual studies in psychological science are making great strides.

On the level of the retina, there are two distinct receptors: rods and cones. Rods are distributed outside the central fovea, and have little role in color, they are highly sensitive.^[29] Cones are found in the foveal region.

Cones are far more responsive, detecting color. There are three kinds of cones: S, M, and L, which appear to be associated with different perceptions.

Rod sensitivity peaks between S and M. Each cone cell has a single line to the optic nerve, rods.^[30] There are far more L and M cones than S cones.^[31] The receptors of the retina are thus all receiving some particular color, but it is not that the cones see color while the rods do not. The resolution of the retina is roughly 150,000 cones per square millimeter.^[32] By contrast, the most sensitive commercially available film cameras have a pixel density of roughly 42,000 per square millimeter. Most display systems operate at much lower resolutions.

Beyond resolution, the eye and the sensor have different refresh rates. Historically, the normal flicker detection threshold for the eye was understood to be around 70 Hz (just above the refresh rates of an analog television), although research has indicated that detection of flicker for light with a spatial edge can be perceived at much higher frequencies.^[33]

The underlying structures of artistic composition make sense in the context of the eye relying on a combination of edge and color detection, from lines to a variety of other basic features of artwork. At the same time, there are surely codes that interplay with the nature of perception itself. More on this in the next section.

A. Depth Perception

Most depth cues are mono-optical.^[34]

Keep in mind, these dimensions of perception are not singular. Experimental research shows that manipulating blurring (such as atmosphere) can then influence perception of relative size.^[35] As you may have noticed, parallax (mono-optical) depends on the motion of the head. This demonstrates a level of sensory integration with touch, as the proprioception of the head is involved.^[36] Modally, the senses are more integrated than disintegrated.

B. Color

Color is not changing in as much as it does not have a dispositive resolution. What does this mean? Color is ultimately a combination of an object, light, and a perceiver. Where color resides between these sites is an old philosophical debate. What is especially important to understand about color is that it is not separate from vision itself. Color is commonly taught in communication and art programs as something secondary and less than line or form. As you have already read, the idea of color and noncolor receptors is dubious—rods perceive a sort of blue. This lack of color is known as the coloring book hypothesis: the brain produces a world of outlines that are then colored in. As M. Chiriuta describes, the research on vision does not bear out this theory: colors are processed simultaneously in edge detection.^[37]

At the same time, color dysfunction is extremely common among males. It is best practice to not use color as the primary means for encoding information, as many people are unable to detect certain hue differences. Changes on an evolutionary scale are clearly among those in the less likely category for this book.

Attempts at standardizing color hinge on reproduction. Although Pantone is generally known for fun research on color trends, the real products are specialty inks that can be used across product classes. Pantone produces educational materials that can help understand what a particular color is, at least inasmuch as it can be re-created.

2.7.3. Touch

To begin with, there are a few major categories of touch perception: mechanical (pressures and vibrations), temperature, pain, and proprioception (dimensions of the body at present).

In terms of processing, much of the work of touch sensation is accomplished by ganglia, with the majority of touch neural structure devoted to the perceptions of pain and heat.^[38] This paragraph is directly informed by Victoria Abraira and David Ginty’s review for the journal Neuron. Of the neurons that respond to touch sensations, there are low- and high-threshold variants. These perceptions are thought to be mapped to the different conduction potentials of the neurons, such as their myelination (being covered with a protective insulator). Hair also plays an important role—hairs are physical mechanisms that produce sensation and depend on hair type. Receptors also display different adaptation rates, meaning that they might continue firing if repeatedly stimulated; these are likely the key to textures. Fast-adapting fibers have far more intense reactions. The uses of such fibers would be clear: sometimes you need a strong touch to tell you to move your arm, but you don’t want that signal repeated too often. Yet another type of receptor, including Pacinian corpuscles, are important because they can meaningfully transmit vibration frequency. The highest density of these receptors is found in the fingertips. As Abraria and Ginty note in their consideration of the integrative theory of touch:

Our skin, the largest sensory organ that we possess, is well adapted for size, shape, weight, movement, and texture discrimination, and with an estimated 17,000 mechanoreceptors, the human hand, for example, rivals the eye in terms of sensitivity.

They theorize that the dorsal horn of the spinal cord is akin to the retina in the perception of touch, serving as an intermediate rendering point for incoming touch information, although some touch information may pass through another channel.

The processing of touch perception is complex. Christopher Berger and Mar Gonzalez-Franco hinge their research on the idea of the “cutaneous rabbit,” an illusion in touch where taps at two points produce a feeling that the touch moved between those points.^[39] They use this argument to lead to an important debate: Is touch perceived as a connection between particular points on the skin and parts of the brain, or is touch something far more tied into cognitive processes beyond the mapping of the skin? In their experiments, virtual reality equipment (oculus rift) was used to produce an “out-of-body” touch illusion. Importantly, they were able to produce out-of-body touch illusions without corresponding visual stimuli although enhanced by that additional information. Sensation of touch is deeply tied to other cognitive features; it is not simply a push-button effect on the skin. This line of research can also be explored through the work on effect and touch: the absence of conscious-reflection touching can produce pro-social outcomes.^[40]

As much as experiments like the cutaneous rabbit prove, haptic translation is difficult. The limits of the interpretation of touch as haptics will be discussed at greater length in the next section, but the question becomes, Can we account for the known number of sensations that would be needed to replicate the world as we know it? Does a vibrating glove match the grain of velvet?

A further consideration is the role of mapping of the body as it relates to the position of limbs, organs, and the space around the self. Alexander Terekhov and J. Kevin O’Regan have proposed a model where an agent secures an awareness of space as an unchanging medium, rigid displacements, and relative position.^[41] This offers an important insight about the production of spatial awareness both for creatures and AI systems: the foundation of the world can take place without a concept of space itself. In the context of human perception, this becomes something of a sixth sense of body position, movement, and force.^[42] John Tuthill and Eiman Azim argue that the perception of the body in space is critical for stability, protection, and locomotion.^[43] Most animal motor functions depend on the feedback loop of the perceptual system, with a few notable deceptions. Generally, the feedback information provided by various species proprioception systems are similar, suggesting a common origin.

There are clear media applications for the use of hot and cold, and the cases where pain responses would make sense are limited. An example would be the Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire experience at Disney World, which makes use of haptic feedback vests to help guests perceive the impact of laser hits.^[44] Of course this is not true pain, just a gentle tap.

2.7.4. Taste

Taste is a combination of sensations. Some of what we understand as taste is smell, blended with texture, sight, and sound. In terms of the specific sensory differentiation point, the key to taste is the taste bud, which contains specific chemical receptors.

Stephen Roper and Nirupa Chaudhari report in their review of the literature for Nature Reviews Neuroscience that each taste bud contains three distinct types of receptor cells: Type 1 unknown function with a highly heterogeneous makeup (50%), Type 2 larger and spherical detecting sugars, amino acids, and bitter compounds (33%), Type 3 with the mechanism for the detection of sour distributed in patches around the tongue up to 20%.^[45]The taste buds are distributed, along with touch and temperature receptors, in various structures around the mouth called papillae.^[46] The review contains more specific information about the synaptic linkages for each type of cell; this is beyond the scope of this book’s analysis.

First, the simplistic four-flavor model is not supported by the research. The receptors of the taste buds can recognize many different compounds. Consider the amino acid lysine: it is nearly 70% as sweet as sugar and one of the primary flavor elements of pork. Second, the idea of regions of the tongue being associated with particular flavors does not hold. Taste receptors are found in many places in the body, which makes sense as they are sophisticated chemical detectors, and there are many chemical detection tasks that would seem to be key to human life.

The total number of potential flavors ranges between five—salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami (glutamates)—and twelve. Any number of chemicals can be detected by the taste buds described in the research. Some receptors detect carbon dioxide.^[47] Spicy flavors are detected by the VR1 heat receptor (which helps keep you from burning yourself).^[48] Thus the commonsense retort that there is no taste of spicy; it is just hot. But hold on—not only are the receptors for hot in your mouth (and not on your forearms or lower back), but there is also a specific receptor for heat, and another receptor for the perception of coolness that runs along same set of nerves.^[49] Why would flavor be limited to one of the sets of chemical receptors tied to nerves that are enfolded into perception? There also seem to be receptors for calcium, zinc, maltodextrin, and histidine (linked to heartiness or kokumi), and glycerol sensation may hinge on chain length.^[50] It is still unclear how the sense of salty works, yet we know from practical experience that salt can decrease the perception of bitter, and almost everyone enjoys a salty snack.

The hinge of this question is not biochemical but phenomenological: How do we know when a combination of chemical interactions in the taste bud becomes an independent flavor? Andrew Smith, writing for a New York Times blog, noted that a flavor scientist questioned how many different flavors should be recognized due to the lack of a firm basis for the idea of flavor.^[51] More importantly, the body responds in many ways to taste alone, even without swallowing the food. This is the challenge for the role of flavor itself: How do we create a meaningful set of classifiers for such a robust and multidimensional experience? Is it enough to say “sour” when there are so many other sensations and descriptions? Is the ethnological (wine) solution adequate, where experiences are described in a series of other ontologically separate terms? Or does the attempt to encircle the description of a flavor become an endless hermeneutic game?

In a review of the commonalties of mammalian taste, David Yarmolinsky, Charles Zuker, and Nicholas Ryba note that insects and non-insects have distinct neurological structures for taste.^[52] But despite extensive differences, insects and mammals seem to have reactions that sort tastes into a somewhat similar framework—things that keep you alive (sugars and salts) and things that poison you (bitters). Innate flavors are present, at least at the start. This is not to say that people may not enjoy other flavors that they first found overwhelming.

Standardization is difficult. I learned this working as a short-order cook in college, when my classmates from Nepal found the food of the North Dakota region to be entirely too bland. They described the experience of eating foods at the extreme limit of spicy as containing flavors not present in other cuisines, which is an idea supported in the spicy adaptation literature.^[53] The pH of your saliva can change how sweet something tastes.^[54] Absent the ability to truly standardize flavor, or even provide flavors that would not seem injurious to some audience members, it seems unlikely that any meaningful standard for human flavor perception could be created. If such a technology were possible, the implications for human health and industry would be profound.

2.7.5. Smell

Scents are difficult to reproduce, requiring precise chemistry and delivery. Like other senses described in this book, smells are culturally specific. This is the second of the “chemical senses,” along with taste, where the body processes a particular chemical signal through a chemical detection mechanism. Individual reactions in the olfactory system with chemicals come together to form a coherent experience of an odor.

For many years, research on smell lagged that on the other senses; one could seemingly see a rose and get all they need to function, even if they might not smell it. There have been recent advances in research on smell, which are described in this edition of the book. Interestingly, one of these developments is the creation of standardized data structures for smells.^[55] Functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research confirms that exposure to personally relevant aromas is tied to increased activity in the amygdala.^[56] Smell in the brain is generally coded by an ensemble of the piriform context, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex.^[57] In low-dimensional olfactory space, the mapping to the amygdala is understood as follows:  as dimensionality rises, the mapping becomes “idiosyncratic.”^[58] Smelling something really yucky that makes you gag is easier to map than the scent that reminds you of young love.Critical to the operation of the olfactory bulb is the flow of molecules over roughly 400 receptors.^[59] Thomas Cleland describes the process of learning smells thusly:

What we think that the first couple of layers of the olfactory system do is to build odors and define their sort of fuzzy boundaries. . . . You get this messy input, and the perceptual system in your brain tries to match it with what you know already, and based on what you expect the smell to be. The system will suggest that the smell is X and will deliver inhibition back, making it more like X to see if it works. Then we think there are a few loops where it cleans up the signal to say, “Yes, we’re confident it’s X.”^[60]

The future of smell research involves building massive processing models that might accurately the model raw number of connections made between different molecules and the bulb and the processes of memory that then encode the experience of encountering a new smell.^[61] The smell receptor recognizes some sort of chemical feature of interest and then takes in some of those molecules, which then are analyzed for shape and size.^[62] Unlike vision or hearing, this is a sequential action, and the receptor is reacting to multiple chemical features, not merely one. The green receptors of the human retina do not recognize some green light and then stop to consider what other wavelengths may be present—this reconstruction is done by the brain. Organization of olfactory pathways varies between species. Consider that some mosquitos’ olfactory systems are designed to recognize humans—they have multiple redundant mechanisms to find humans to bite.^[63] Humans are not mosquitos. Developing the theory of olfactory media on creature-by-creature basis would be difficult, and surely developing such a model for humans is far away.

What is far closer is the theory of a POM, or principal odor map, which offers some sense of how smells are related in a multidimensional space. That odor space is typically encoded as the relationship between two descriptors, such as garlicky and musky. These descriptors were chosen for a reason, as the POM research then correlates the bivariable smell panels with the molecular structure of what is smelled.^[64] Things that are garlicky can be predicted via their molecular structure—musky not so much, if at all. Sulfur-containing compounds were the most easily predicted by the POM model, which is not that surprising since sulfur is reactive, has a long connection to life on earth, and is important for some essential amino acids.^[65] People are the driving force of the principal odor model, and they are good at smelling for sulfur.

There are many places that require careful olfactory planning. Alfred Taubman, a developer of shopping centers, was careful to avoid errant wafts of scents from food courts into unwelcome places. Stores looking to build a unique brand, particularly those targeting young people, have been known to heavily perfume their entries. Disney World uses pipes to distribute the aroma of cookies in relevant places.

Expert practices in olfactory development include various approaches to tasting particular products. Meister, the coffee columnist for Serious Eats, reports that coffee tasters smell for enzymatic issues, sugar caramelization (mallard reaction), and dry distillation.^[66] Each of these flavors has many subexpressions that circle in on a combination of chemicals and relationships that make the smell meaningful.

The standardization of olfactory experience is perhaps the most difficult. A more formal descriptive language comes from the IFF database, which provides an index of olfactory information much akin to Pantone’s.^[67]

Notice the information provided. An olfactory description, which references other olfactory experiences, and use cases. What might be most important is the concept of chemical stability. Unlike a sound or an image, there are concerns that a distributed scent could ignite levels of use, density, and beyond.Benson Munyan, a professor of somatics at the University of Central Florida, has demonstrated that the use of olfactory cues can increase immersion in an experience. The logistics of using these devices are challenging as errant scents linger.^[68] Commercial approaches to smell offer far fewer scents. The initial challenges may appear to come in the delivery of compounds (tubes, stickers, wafters), but on a deeper level, there is no unifying substance for the production of different aromas. In the context of vision, there is a limited spectrum of light that the eye can process. Sounds are vibrations in a particular band processed by specific elements in the cochlea. In both cases, there is a unifying form of energy and spectrum. The olfactory response involves a much wider variety of media and receptors.

In a world where a basic chemical synthesis method for olfactory experiences remains elusive, experience design in these media will remain tied to particular places and to particular chemical compounds that might be strategically released. Although the IFF database provides the beginning of a theory of olfactory information, it is important to recall the reasons for the existence of Pantones in the first place. All color-mixing methods have weaknesses in their underlying gamut. All reductive methods for the production of stimuli are problematic by their nature. Until micro-synthetic chemistry systems are available, olfactory virtual reality will not exist. The underlying revolution in a chemistry plant on a card will fundamentally change the world. It is not a matter of having all the chemicals that we might want to smell for fun, but that a system capable of producing such a selection of smells could produce any number of industrial chemicals and drugs on a micro on-demand basis.

2.8. Oceans, Mountains, Rivers, Rocks

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens gets a bum rap. His quote that “the internet is a system of tubes” is fundamentally correct. The Internet is a physical thing made of metal and glass. Rhetorics of cloud computing and convergence obscured this fact for some time, as computing seemed to be effortless. Those of you reading this book today likely never experienced a carrier-locked iPhone and may look incredulously on the period where investing in heavy data infrastructure for phones was seen as risky. This section has already dealt with some essential physical properties of the world, chips, and transmission. I want you to also consider oceans, mountains, rivers, and rocks.

• Oceans: There are large bodies of water that impede the easy transport of data. We overcome these via fiber optic cables laid on the bottom of the ocean. Oceans have become smaller as massive supercontainer ships have changed how we understand the economy. Since 2008, large ships have quadrupled in capacity. Massive container ships and oceanic cables have something in common: these systems allow mass transport of information that transforms both terminals.
• Mountains: Early cable systems were CATV, or community antenna television. Mountains (or large buildings) would block signals and be difficult to reach, so a single antenna could connect many users at the end. Today, similar access problems are compensated for via space access. Constellations of satellites provide Internet access with great speed and ubiquity. Without the need to connect to the industrial cable system, one could remotely execute a drone strike or chat with elderly parents. The once singular Global Positioning System now has competition from multiple systems, and it itself is under attack, with GPS spoofing and jamming increasingly common problems around the world.
• Rivers: Flowing energy sources, the lifeblood of civilization. There are many good reasons why large cities are situated on rivers. In some ways, large-scale interstate highways and railways are artificial rivers. Some of our technologies are heating up our lakes and rivers; others merely take advantage of the electrical power that dams might provide for aluminum production. Rivers are physical systems that coexist human communities.
• Rocks: There are many rocks of interest, from simple taconite to uranium. Access to strategic minerals for virgin production is essential to national security (for any country), and access to particular minerals known as rare earths is essential for advanced media technologies. A blast furnace is a giant contained fire that merges two kinds of rocks into fresh steel, which is essential for nuclear technology, electric vehicles, and many other technologies.

There are so many more facets of the natural world to consider as ecologies and infrastructures. A popular expression is to “touch grass,” meaning that someone should disconnect from their device and engage the natural world or even just some noninteractive media. I want to caution you that connecting to the natural world isn’t the outside line discussed here on simulation; there is no outside of discourse. Considering the supply chain for our media devices connects us to both nature and the human world of labor, which is all too often hidden.

2.9. Identity

The operative word for the current dominant US political culture is “woke.” But what does that word even mean? For the Trump administration, it seems to mean anything that they disagree with, or perhaps anything that is difficult to talk about or requires any reflexivity at least on the most superficial level. But what it really means is that Black people would use the Internet and engage in political speech.^[69] On the flip side, it would be incredibly easy to write this book from the perspective of futurism, aligned with design thinking, simply emulating the great designers who transcend positionality entirely. The absence of identity would rely on unmarked white masculinity.

This section is about race, although it could be about gender, sexuality, class, ability, or any number of other elements of identity. Race is an important factor because it structures much of social life in the United States—even in our opening example, the fear of Black awakening alone is a central figure in political life.

Moving beyond representations, Armon Towns connects the work of Franz Fanon and Marshall McLuhan to a shift away from race in media to a consideration of the ways that media forms produce structures of life.^[70] Representational critique does not offer the kind of insight that meaningful work on race requires; we want to know how the forms, technologies, and power relations produce certain social structures. A critique of the representations within a single television program does not do that. Towns then reads the Underground Railroad as media, as logistical and life changing. Consider the struggle over the idea that Netflix adapts its thumbnail images to target who the viewer might be. The firm claims that this is impossible, yet critics note how images of Black actors with bit parts are used to promote content to them.^[71] The issue is not the individual representations in the film but the operation of a system that seems to target people on the basis of race and to make disingenuous arguments to them. The duality of Blackness is apparent, as it is both something that sells and something that is inferior and scary. Timothy Havens excavated this directly in the industry lore of international television negotiations, where race is debated as profit and as risk.^[72] Rather than being concerned with individual representations, the international market for “quality” or “prestige” programming has brought a shift in representational space, where ostensibly positive representations are replaced by fetishistic representations of crime. They perpetuate the idea that Black male bodies are out of control in many ways—sexually, violently, and mentally—but rather than marking these excesses as racial inferiority, they identify them as indexes of the failures of capitalist modernity.^[73] Moving from representations to media forms then calls for criticism of genres, aesthetics, and forms—a nomothetic theory of race, rather an ideographic one.

Media technologies are used by the state to manage populations, which is inherently a matter of race. While this is clearly the case for central police media, sousveillance, or surveillance by other members of the public, produces a profound effect.^[74] Surveillance of Blackness is essential to the structure of public life.^[75] On the flip side, regimes of transparency and universality, which are not neutral, appear that way.^[76] Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin argues that the ways that platforms make certain bodies invisible and others visible is a regime of racial power that should be studies the level of the algorithm, especially in the sense that the regime of visibility is distributed. The ongoing argument that the algorithm is unknowable should be understood racially. The user of the platform and the critic must ask, “What does the platform want from me?”

More abstractly, you will notice that there are repeated references in this book to various works of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. These are directly connected to the constellation of high theory, which has largely come to a close. The major elements that remain from this era are genealogical approaches to the study of power, an ongoing project to deconstruct binaries, and close attention to the affective, psychic life of people in a non-psychological way. These are really ways of getting at our identities—what has shifted is that instead of exploring these ideas to get at Foucault/Nietzsche, Derrida/Kirkegaard, and Lacan/Freud, the ideas are about how we might live. It would be difficult to craft a career in communication today as the person who specializes in one particular European thinker, except in the role of a translator, which is more appropriate for comparative literature. As if the materials around their existence (audiotapes, lecture notes) somehow contain traces of the cypher of the human condition, rather than historically specific documentation of their existence. These critiques then reflexively turn back on the base of theory itself. Alexander Weheliye argued in the landmark book Habeas Viscus that there are key insights in race scholarship, especially the idea that Black studies scholarship offers a powerful archive of material as well as a direct challenge to the transhistorical vision of high theory.^[77] Identity changes theory, and literary and legal universals are replaced by fleshy reality. In this loop is where the possibility of the future exists—real experiences challenging stories, be those humanistic high theory or computational social science. Directly in the context of this book, André Brock offers an alternative, understanding Blackness as death and “eschewing modernist perspectives on digital practice (e.g. brand, labor, and resistance),” which challenges the entire history of the recent Internet.^[78] Rather than continuing to see race as an interruption of the primary vector of history, race offers a way of seeing how people become who they are and who they might want to be. Thus I place race here, in the section on things which will not change, not as a negative but as a possibility.

2.10. Speech

What is distinctive about communication as an academic enterprise is our focus on speech. Talking. I am a certified yapper, both as someone who loves to talk and as a speech and debate coach. Much of the speech we are interested in these days travels via electronic media. Among the most heavily trafficked TikToks of all time was not a sea shanty (how 2021—no one today would be seen enjoying such harmony) or a silly dance, but US Senator Cory Booker taking part in an old-school filibuster.^[79] Sometimes that speech takes place through writing (texts between friends are clearly not literary in character) or visual icons. I take speech broadly to include interpersonal speech all the way through mass public address, with stops at romance, high-reliability teams, and many other interesting places. The impact of our speech, like affection, can protect from harm and stress.^[80] If one speaks in such a way that violates the expectations of others, like if they leak a secret, it can change a relationship. It can also be true that one wants their secrets to not be so secret.^[81] Speech persists; it will not be replaced by mediation, even if that fleeting moment where so many conversations happened in public on a Facebook wall has passed. Public address itself is the place where we coordinate action and build community, and the dynamics of the actual means by which these goals are enacted are not trivial.^[82]

Speech persists as a fundamental human form of world making. Speech is visceral and risky. There is no editing in the turn-taking flow of a public debate. Balancing listening and speaking in real time is a way of knowing; it is not less than writing an essay. Audience is plural. Books and pamphlets will come and go. Chatter remains undefeated.

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