The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality

Author

Derrick de Kerckhove (b. 1944), Belgian-born Canadian communication theorist. He worked with Marshall McLuhan at the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto from 1972 to 1980 and directed the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology from 1983 to 2008.

Publication Details

The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality. Edited by Christopher Dewdney. Toronto: Somerville House Publishing, 1995. 226 pp. UK edition London: Kogan Page, 1997. ISBN 978-0-7494-2480-0.

Description

De Kerckhove's title states his thesis. If, as McLuhan argued, electronic media extend the human nervous system outward, then the boundary between a person and their environment is no longer the skin. Media form a second skin — a shared, technologically produced sensory surface through which a culture feels itself. The book collects essays and interviews written across the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it reads as a set of probes rather than a single sustained argument, which is a McLuhanite methodological choice as much as an editorial one.

The questions the book raises include: whether representative democracy, designed for the speed of print and the postal service, is structurally obsolete at electronic speed and needs redesigning to reflect how technology redistributes power; whether electronic media have extended human psychology as well as the nervous system and the body; whether art must recover its historical role as the early-warning system of a culture and reclaim technology from science; and whether electronic media are reversing the perceptual effects of the alphabet, language and literacy — and whether that reversal should be welcomed.

Key Ideas

• Cultural skin. Media are not channels between separate people but a connective tissue that makes a population sensorially continuous.
• Brainframes. De Kerckhove's term for the cognitive architecture a dominant medium installs. The alphabet produced one brainframe — linear, sequential, analytic, private. Television and networked media produce another.
• Psychotechnologies. Technologies that extend mental rather than physical function, and that therefore reorganise consciousness rather than merely extending reach.
• The reversal of literacy. Alphabetic literacy fragmented perception and privileged the eye; electronic media re-integrate the senses and restore something closer to an oral, tactile, participatory condition — without restoring the small-scale community that condition originally belonged to.
• Speed as a political variable. Institutions are calibrated to the transmission speed of their era. Change the speed and the institution stops fitting.

Criticism

The book inherits McLuhan's strengths and weaknesses together. Its aphoristic method generates unusually productive questions and unusually unfalsifiable claims; critics have noted that "brainframe" and "psychotechnology" are asserted rather than demonstrated, and that the technological determinism McLuhan was accused of is, if anything, more pronounced here. Read as provocation rather than as evidence, it remains one of the more useful bridges between mid-century media theory and networked culture.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

"The skin of culture" is a compact statement of the cyborg-anthropological premise: that the unit of analysis is not the human body but the body plus its technical envelope. De Kerckhove was writing before the web was a mass medium, which makes the accuracy of some passages — and the strangeness of others — instructive.

Related Reading

• Marshall McLuhan
• Understanding Media
• The Pleasure of the Interface
• Immersive technology