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Ecology of the media and hyperhumanism
Hervé Fischer
Ecology of the media and hyperhumanism
This paper on the ecology of the media intends to analyse the historical, sociological,
institutional and economic characteristics of the production, diffusion and social uses
of cultural contents.
The myth of the Tower of Babel is the first myth of modernity. It places God as the
initiator of the information society and it is the founding myth of linguistic and
cultural diversity. Then we may consider a strange myth of the digital age: is the
Internet actually a planetary hyper-cortex?
The faithful of the Internet religion believe that digital globalization is the end
result of human evolution. They invoke the prediction of Teilhard de Chardin that at
the end of the process of creation there will be a kingdom of the mind‚ of a superior
human intelligence characterized by shared knowledge and wisdom. They see the
Internet as the instrument of this evolution towards perfection and employ metaphors
of a connective skin that grows to cover the world, or of neurons of a planetary
hyper-cortex. It’s that old nostalgia, that time-worn myth of human unity that will
return with the digital realm. Chateaubriand, among others, had already spoken of the
dream of a universal society: “The folly of the moment is to achieve a unity of peoples
and to make a single man of the entire species.”
Is the Web as unified as Internet devotees dream? Is it not in fact an ocean on which
voyagers immediately lose their way? A complicated cacophony rather than a dream
of a unifying global connection? Perhaps we could say of the Internet what Jorge Luis
Borges said in La Biblioteca de Babel about old books:
“O Time thy pyramids. This much is known: For every rational line or forthright
statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and
incoherency. (I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the
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