Review by J.S. Porter
FROM GLOBAL VILLAGE TO GLOBAL MEMBRANE:
A REVIEW OF B.W. POWE’S THE CHARGE IN THE GLOBAL MEMBRANE,
WITH STREET ART PHOTOS BY MARSHALL SOULES
“The new electric environment is a collective poem.” - Marshall McLuhan
Two implicit questions skulk around in B.W. Powe’s new book: Who are we? Or, is the more accurate question, What are we? And: Where are we?
The short answer to the first question is: No one. No one or nothing yet. We are still under construction. We are still making our character, our identity, our destiny. And the answer to the second question is: Nowhere. “Increasingly we reside in cyberspace - on cell phones, online, in the mediascape. We’re plugged in beings who move like ghosts through electronic membranes”. In Powe’s words, “We’re wired up, inside borderless, transnational, immediate, entangling, speeding, here-there-everywhere-now states, in an always intensifying, mutable milieu.”