The Digital Counter-culture - Digital Culture - page 96

4. The Digital Counter-culture

the post-industrial society

Marshall McLuhan once suggested that 'art was a distant early
warning system that can always tell the old culture what is beginning
to happen to it'. 1 The work of Cage and others involved with the
post-war avant-garde would seem to confirm McLuhan's theory in
their prefiguring of the interactive and multimedia technologies
which have come to dominate our lives. This was a less a case of
prescience and more a grasp of emerging technological possibilities.
Cage and the others offered a framework in which the technologies
of Cold War paranoia could be translated into tools for realizing
utopian ideals of interconnectivity and self-realization. The use of
computers by artists also reflected the growing importance of such
technologies as part of the so-called 'post-industrial society'. This
was most famously advocated by the American sociologist Daniel
Bell in his

topic The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society , 2
but was anticipated as early on as the

1973

s in work by Bell himself,
as well by Ralph Dahrendorf, Fritz Machlup, Marshall McLuhan,
Jacques Ellul and others. The general thrust of such ideas was that
the United States and other developed countries are in the process
of developing new forms of social organization that will supersede
the prevailing industrial model. Taking their cue from statistics
concerning employment, they proposed that as automated industry
required fewer and fewer workers, more people would be employed

1950