Towards a Post-Sport: The Phases of Electricity
A framework on "Phases of Electricity" from Derrick de Kerckhove, Mark Federman and others over at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. The parallels to my own work here at sportsBabel are very evident (to me), and I will try to expound on them more clearly in the very near future. In the meantime, I think this will prove to be a very exciting and useful thinking tool.
| Analog | Digital | Quantum |
| Muscular | Cognitive | Existential |
| Heat, light, motion; Extension of body via electromechanical devices | Connected, emergent consciousness; Obsolescence of body as it becomes smaller relative to its extensions in digital space | Emergent beings formed via pervasive proximity (infinitely many entities packed into zero space) |
| Cyborg (pre-cyber); the interface boundary is ground | Cyber (post-cyborg); interface is obviously evident (moves from ground to figure), becoming ubiquitous and hence, obsolescent | Transcendent (post-cyber; i.e. no distinction in reality between cyber and physical) |
| Surveillance | Dataveillance | Emergent transparency (reversal of dataveillance) |
| Non-reality is ground effect; "on the air, man becomes no-body" | Remote control is ground effect; our digiSelves become the voodoo dolls through which we are controlled and manipulated. | Mysticism is ground effect; connection to the "higher consciousness" that exists in the plasma of simultaneous experience |
| Public identity; celebrity (inflection point of obsolescence of privacy; e.g. paparazzi) | Digital persona; publicy | Emergent identity(ies) as an attribute of tribal affiliation(s). |
Global Village Basketball is an 
The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.
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