Waving or drowning?

They described the strange feeling of peace that came over them when they handled The Book Of The Machine, the pleasure that it was to repeat certain numerals out of it, however little meaning those numerals conveyed to the outward ear, the ecstasy of touching a button however unimportant, or of ringing an electric bell however superfluously.

In The Machine Stops, his 1928 short story, E.M.Forster presents a scene of worshippers in awe of "the machine". Today's hardware and software manufacturers are fond of telling us their latest awesome upgrade is the solution to all our problems, promising greater flexibility and control. This technological arms race is often accompanied by an arrogance in new media, as emerging genres and platforms strain to be incorporated.

But in tandem with Marshall McLuhan's notion of technology as an extension of our central nervous system is the idea of the computer as a fluid environment to explore. Think of the terminology, with its sense of adventure: navigation, cyberspace, surfing.

Yet why is the multimedia environment so creaky and disruptive? It's as though you're in a diving suit 20,000 leagues under the sea, but instead of taking in your external surroundings, you're more worried about leaks and whether your air supply is about to crash.

You're working on the Web, for example, and are suddenly F, or portable document format, file. Even the mode of address has an imperious ring. This forces you to move from one medium - the Web - to another - Adobe Acrobat - when nine times out of 10 the PDF format, file could probably have been made available as Web pages in the first place. Instead it's a media collision, a case of "media interruptus", an interruption in the flow because of a format fetish and an arrogant refusal to translate the document for the Web medium.

Perhaps it's laziness, or a failure to recognise the strengths and depths of different media and their immersive properties. Take the frustration of e-mail attachments. You're again forced to stagger from one medium - e-mail - to another - Microsoft Word - and often to a later version that you don't have. Many institutions use the Web as just an add-on to their existing documents - "brochureware" - and miss its potential as a medium in its own right.

The tyranny of plug-ins and the limitations and congestion of different applications thwart our experience of an immersive environment, especially if we compare it with other media experiences. The theatre manages to lure audiences into a fictional space where we don't need any additional media apparatus to engage with the performance - except, perhaps, opera glasses or programme notes. Any interruption is due largely to the activities of the audience or the shrill trill of a mobile phone, that great Brechtian distancing device of the 21st century.

There are smooth convergences of media, of course. Big Brother on Channel 4 amalgamates television genres but, more significantly, has merged media: television, telephones and computers (for counting the votes and broadcasting on the Web). And while the programme's tag line - "View, Vote, Control" - may seem overstated, it highlights the viewercentric approach at the heart of its appeal.

Or take a visual technology from the ancient past. Visiting the Camera Obscura at the top of Princes Street in Edinburgh, you are struck by the immediacy of the experience, the live images of Edinburgh's cityscape and its citizens going about their daily business. It's uncluttered magic at the flick of a light switch, darkness being the only plug-in (or plug-out) necessary for the image to appear.

One storey beneath the camera, other precursors of the cinema are reminders of the manual nature of early image technology, such as the phenakistoscope and praxinoscope. Their flickering images evolved into the high-definition experiences of today.

And despite admirable modernist experiments to draw attention to the means of representation, mainstream cinema's drive is to erase the apparatus and close the gap between the audience and the image in an uninterrupted flow of narrative pleasure.

Books, as media technology, had to evolve and develop conventions of pagination, typefaces, chapters, indexes and back-page blurbs for a coherent yet immersive reader experience. From projected rays of light on a screen to worlds constructed of ink marks on paper, or ones and zeros in a silicon architecture, a central aim is an expressive, immersive environment, free from clunky interruptions.

If the main goal of the conglomerates is a convergence of media in our living rooms, then a flashback to these older media may be useful. At least it might remind them of how even basic technologies, such as the camera obscura, can create highly immersive environments rather than media interruptus.

Stephanie McBride lectures in film studies at Dublin City University