Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER orbiting on Triptine and saying over and over, "Christ what an imagination I've got!"

===


One of the famous through lines of the multi-viewpoint novel is provided by a stoner named Bennie Noakes, who spends most of his time wasted on a drug called Triptine, randomly flipping through the 1000 channels available on the teevee and musing
"Christ, what an imagination I've got!"
because the sheer weirdness of what he is seeing is getting so dense that it has become impossible for him to believe it.

...

Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.

Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, "Christ, what an imagination I've got."

https://driftglass.blogspot.com/2010/11/sunday-morning-comin-down_14.html


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https://bitpig.livejournal.com/215433.html
23rd April 2010
3:41am: special / SCANALYZER (3) the cool and detached view

John Brunner was SF's prophet of the Information Age: to a degree much greater than any of his "brainier" contemporaries (hello, Isaac Asimov!), Brunner got the impact that computers + telecommunications + media would have on society. (Asimov, on the other hand, was so tied to the 1940s concept of Computer as Mechanical Man that he completely failed to recognize the rise of the real cybernetic revolution, such as ARPANET and digital switching). While the rest of the New Wave gang were busy writing tendentious tomes about a future where Man Explores Inner Space With LSD, JB's books were introducing the world to the real future: his descriptions of phreaking, hacking, computer viruses, and Columbine-style media-driven mass murder as we know them today were spot-on and decades ahread of their time.

And if Brunner was the Prophet of the Information Age, his archangel Michael was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), McGill University's madcap Messenger of Media Theory. McLuhan, who was pretty much the first Big Brain to realize that modern electronic technology would become a global "extension of Man" (he also coined the term "surfing", as in websurfing), is the genius of Stand On Zanzibar; his ideas form the (literal) context and framework of the book, and his ghost haunts its every page. McLuhan's famous phrase "the medium is the message" is realized on every level of Stand On Zanzibar, from its physical substance (Brunner puckishly gives his Smith-Corona typewriter, its ribbon, and his favorite brand of typing paper a chapter of their own) to its literary structure: the Innis Mode.

(The Innis Mode? WTF?)

Canadian economist and communications theorist Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) was one of the first intellectuals to realize that the nature of a given communication mode tends to bend the civilization around it into its own image. McLuhan, Innis' protégé, took the ball and ran with it, carrying Innis' ideas of time- and space-dependent media down the field of '50s and '60s sociology and technology and across the freaking goal line in his masterful 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. In Galaxy, McLuhan unites Innis' theory with ripped-from-the-then-headlines (!) fact and pretty much forsees the world we live in today: a world where electronic communications have replaced the visual, individualistic print culture with a reborn aural//oral culture.

I'll explain. "Print", sez Marshall McLu, "is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism."

With the waning of printed modes of communication like newspapers and books, predicted McLuhan, would come a new freeform style of information. No more would info flow visually, from the top down to fragmented individuals, as it did during the print era; now a flood of information in audible and spoken form would engulf mankind, returning us to our tribal roots. Voilà: welcome to the global village.

And as members of the global village, sez McLuhan, we are no longer able to depend upon The Authorities to define our world. That security is gone. It its place rises

a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.
In other words, "If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified". Well, we decided it, back in the 1930s, when electronic media first took the place of the printed word as the source of information for the average joe. And it was during that same period of time that this new mode of information flow first began to have its impact upon culture.

Which brings us to tonight's guest: Ladies and gentlemen: Mr. John dos Passos, [Applause]. JdP, a major American writer whose works you aren't familiar with but should be, was arguably the first of the capital-L Literary set to break away from the Big Lumps of Prose model of storytelling and adopt the montage techniques pioneered by cinema artist Sergei Eisenstein and the "clip" technique of radio production. His big trilogy, U.S.A. [The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)] brings the early Twentieth Century to life as few other works have; by giving you the story in random, bite-size chunks instead of long strings of Dickensian prose. In U.S.A., dos Passos kicks the privileged observer to the curb (dos Passos was a Communist at the time) and gives you the complete picture -- a scrapbook compiled by the reader from many different points of view.

It is this freeform info technique that was codified by McLuhan into the Innis Mode of expression. If McLuhan was Brunner's muse, dos Passos was Brunner's model, throwing the pieces of his world onto the table and letting you figure out what the puzzle looks like. As Brunner puts it at the beginning of Stand On Zanzibar:

there is nothing wilful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowlege. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits...
Brunner's prediction of a world driven by computer information systems and the twenty-four-hour global news cycle is frighteningly prescient. Our world is indeed a constant "phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence". In AD 2010 terror is indeed the normal state of our society, as the omnipresent electronic media affect everything all the time.

Which brings us back to Stand On Zanzibar. Brunner doesn't insult your intelligence by attempting to describe an entire world from one point of view, nor does he attempt to steer the good ship Narrator through every pitching sea of plot in turn. Instead, taking a page from dos Passos, he gives you four parallel bands of information, from which you can assemble your own point of view. These are:

• continuity, which tracks the various plot threads;

• tracking with closeups, a series of "clickable" capsules focusing on secondary characters or world-aspects;

• the happening world, lists of facts from the world of 2010 as a means of keeping the reader "up to date"; and

• context, assemblages of news items, narratives, advertising, and various literary mise-en-scene.

This mode of storytelling -- the Innis Mode-- is what made Stand On Zanzibar so controversial in its day, and also what makes it so hard to read for today's spoonfed fiction fan. Stand On Zanzibar is not a book for pansies. It is a challenging book to read. By requiring the reader to put the pieces together on his or her own, Brunner guarantees total involvement by the reader -- and total involvement is the mother of versimilitude. It is the Innis Mode that stands as both the great weakness and the greatest strength of Stand On Zanzibar: weakness, because it serves as a barrier to entry for the casual reader; strength, because it makes it all seem real.