Today computers held out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson, the condition of "weightlessness," that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace."A perpetuity of collective harmony and peace" is NOT how I would describe the blogosphere. Although computer-based translation exists today (http://babelfish.yahoo.com), accurate and complete machine translation is still what it was when McLuhan wrote the above quote in 1964: A promise of the future.
I read an article from Tech Crunch that described how Facebook got its own translations done not by a computer, but by people connected through computers (Facebook itself, in this case). This is a little different from what McLuhan is describing above, but it still follows his idea of technology/media becoming extensions of mankind's central nervous system.
Instead of instant machine-generated translations, as McLuhan seems to envision, the technology allows for an instant, very low cost vote, in which the crowd gets to pick the translations. I wonder if Facebook used a human to generate the translation options, or if they used machine translation, and relied on the users to ferret out the software's mistakes?
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