Visual

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Extended in space, the city is visual spectacle. There is much to see that is pleasing, and there are also obstacles and dangers that must be seen to be avoided. The city privileges vision and the visual, and this privileging seems to me to contrast with the village or the home, where sound may well be more important than sight.

A village does not have an architecture in the same way that a city does. A traditional village is largely just a collection of homes, a symbolic extension of the home. We find less visual novelty when we move about a village than when we move in the city. We find still less visually novelty in the home itself. And we do not need the elaborate signs and labels at home or in a village, as we do when finding our way through a city. Village life can thrive in a preliterate culture, but the city seems to need writing. The city suggests a reorganization of our senses - both a new reliance on the visual and a new and complex relationship between spectacle or perception on the one hand and symbolic communication on the other.

Ultimately the revolutionary aspect of Telepolis will be the way that it forces us to renegotiate the ratios of seeing and hearing in communication.

For example, throughout its history the ancient world remained alive to the resonance of the spoken word. The space of ancient culture was the acoustic space of the theatre, the marketplace, and the assembly. Although its name is constructured from Greek roots, Telepolis will not be a Greek city. It will not be the Athens of Pericles or the Thebes of Sophocles's Oedipus the King.

Indeed, the two roots "tele" and "polis" were incompatible at least in the age of Sophocles or Plato and Aristotle. The city for the Greek had to be small and self-contained: Aristotle favored about 10,000 citizens. The available communication technologies (such as public oratory) would only allow that number of citizens to remain in contact. But the nature of the contact was different, because, as McLuhan and Walter Ong have put it, the sensorium was differently organized.

In cyberspace the ratio between the visual and the aural has certainly shifted in favor of the visual. Cyberspace is a visual plenum, as well as, and in preference to, an oral one. (For a review of the literature on the orality/literacy question, see Daniel Chandler on Biases of the Ear and Eye). And the ratios of the perceptual and the symbolicin representation will experience a deep change.

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Electronic technology and the metaphor of the city

Heterogeneous

Spatial

Visual

Conclusion