The Economist is carrying some very interesting articles on global challenges and policies (some only online). Turns out that these are part of its engagement in the Copenhagen Consensus. The premise of the project is that the world is willing to spend money on solving global problems but needs help in prioritizing issues and projects in terms of costs and benefits.
For each of 10 global challenges, an author reviews a broad range of literature, data, and policy alternatives and suggests solutions. Each paper is critiqued by two 'opponents.' Finally, all 10 challenges are discussed by a panel of 9 experts on 24 - 28 May, 2004. And judging by the articles in the Economist, the discussions promise to be highly interesting. (A synthetic emerging market currency to reduce financial turbulence? Foreign 'imperial' intervention in civil wars as a cost-effective remedy? Stop throwing money at education?)
The Economist will be carrying more articles, and the CC website has its own newsletter. The results will be published in a book later this year.
Monday
Tuesday
The locus of globalization
Global networks - Linked cities (Introduction), Saskia Sassen, 2002
Saskia Sassen has been following global capital markets for years. In the introduction of this edited volume, she uses capital markets to explain the strange relationship between economic globalization and geography. While Sassen focuses on global cities (New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and more recently Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Bombay, Shanghai, etc.), many of her insights are applicable to specialized clusters. Since much of her analysis is based on the finance industry, the leap to apply it to other information-based industries is not very large. Of course, her aim is a different one than mine. In the larger argument on globalization, financial markets are probably a better indicator of the global economy than the new technologies I'm looking at.
By analogy, her comments on the relationships between global cities is also much-welcome support for my proposition that we are seeing a network of cooperating and competing hi-tech clusters emerge. As Sassen sees it, such a network of global cities already exists.
There is a growing number of transnational actors: not only MNCs, but also NGOs, government regulators, professional associations, mayors etc. As the nation state loses power (e.g. by giving up state monopolies), other geographic entities gain: cities, regions, cross-border regions, and supranational entities (e.g. the EU). Add to this the existence of new 'virtual spaces' and the picture can easily become confusing. On the one hand, cities and regional economies are becoming more important, agglomeration economies are increasingly powerful. On the other hand, ICTs allow a dispersion of information, capital, and thereby business. According to Sassen, these two trends are not wholly contradictory, and 'global cities' are the links between national economies and global circuits.
Cities provide the pronounced territorial concentrations of resources necessary for the management and servicing of more dispersed and mobile resources. By doing so, they reinforce the global influence and the global links of their respective cities - strengthen their position in the global economy. While they therefore remain dependent on their surrounding regions, these cities become a part of the global center: the network of global cities.
The geography of globalization contains dynamics of both dispersal and centralization. The massive trends toward the spatial dispersal of economic activities at the metropolitan, national, and global levels that we associate with globalization have contributed to a demand for new forms of territorial centralization of top-level management and control functions. Insofar as these functions benefit from agglomeration economies even in the face of telematic integration of a firm's globally dispersed manufacturing and service operations, they tend to locate in cities. An important reason why they might benefit from agglomeration economies lies in the presence of business networks.
By central functions I do not only mean headquarters functions; I am referring to all the top-level functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in multiple countries. These central functions are partly embedded in headquarters, but also in good part in what has been called the corporate services complex, that is, the network of financial, legal, accounting, and advertising firms that handle the complexities of operating in more than one national legal system, national accounting system, advertising culture, and so forth and do so under conditions of rapid innovations in all these fields. Such services have become so specialized and complex that headquarters increasingly buy them from specialized firms rather than produce them in-house. These agglomerations of firms producing central functions for the management and coordination of global economic systems are disproportionately concentrated in an expanding network of global cities. This network represents a strategic factor in the organization of the global economy.
Further, leading firms in information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyperconcentration of facilities; we need to distinguish between the capacity for global transmission/communication and the material conditions that make this possible.
Sassen goes on to explore the new economic geography that combines agglomerations and global dispersal.
This type of analysis of globalization, which seeks to map the strategic sites with hyperconcentration of resources as well as the cross-border networks that link these sites and others, helps us understand to what extent there is a specific geography of globalization and the fact that it is not a planetary event encompassing all of the world. It is, furthermore, a changing geography, one that has undergone multiple, often specialized transformations over the last few centuries and over the last two decades, and most recently has come to include electronic space.
Today, partly as a result of the new technologies, the spatial correlates of the center can assume several geographic forms, ranging from the CBD (central business district) to a new global grid of cities. Simplifying one could identify three forms of centrality today.
First, while there is no longer a direct relation between centrality and geographic entities such as the downtown, the CBD remains a key form of centrality. But the CBD in major international business centers is one profoundly reconfigured by technological and economic change. ...
Second, the center can extend into a metropolitan area in the form of a grid of nodes of intense business activity. ... Insofar as these various nodes are articulated through cyberroutes or digital highways, they form a grid that is a geographic correlate of the most advanced type of "center." The places that fall outside this new grid of digital highways, however, are peripheralized. This grid of nodes represents, in my analysis a reconstitution of the concept of region. Far from neutralizing geography, the grid is likely to be embedded in conventional forms of transport infrastructure, notably rapid rail and highways connecting to airports. ... (Compare this to the Silicon Valley notion that the diameter of the cluster is defined by a 2-hour drive.)
Third, we are seeing the formation of a transterritorial "center" constituted via telematics and intense economic transactions. It consists of the multiple and diversifying inter-city links that take place partly in electronic markets and transactions and partly through the intensifying circulation of goods, information, firms, and workers. In this regard this is both a territorialized and deterritorialized space of centrality. It requires both a specific logic for territorial development and the infrastructure for global networking technologies.
The relationship of cities within this last transterritorial center sounds much like that of organizations within a conventional agglomeration economy.
The global integration of markets make many ... activities redundant and makes collaboration a far more complex matter, one that has the effect of sharpening the division of labor within the network. Beyond the necessary range of specialized services present in all these centers, we now also see a trend toward the formation of specialized capabilities that partially differentiate centers and simultaneously integrate them into a larger global network. This configuration also promotes the formation of strategic alliances. ...
In my reading the globally integrated financial system is not only about competition among countries as is typically assumed. The trend is toward an increase in specialized collaborative efforts among these centers. Further, insofar as markets are integrated, growth overall is maximized through growth in all centers.
But why have financial centers at all? It comes back to well-known arguments about social networks and interpretation vs/ information.
The continuing weight of major centers is, in a way, countersensical, as is, for that matter, the existence of an expanding network of financial centers. The rapid development of electronic exchanges the growing digitization of much financial activity, and the fact that finance produces a dematerialized and hypermobile product, all suggest that location should not matter.
3 reasons that explain the trend toward consolidation in a few centers rather than massive dispersal:
a) The importance of social connectivity and central functions.
First, while ICTs do indeed enable geographic dispersal of economic activities without losing system integration, they have also had the effect of strengthening the importance of central coordination and control functions for firms and even for markets. ...
One fact that has become increasingly evident is that to maximize the benefits of ICTs firms need not only the infrastructure but a complex mix of other resources. Most of the value added that these technologies can produce for advanced service firms lies in so-called externalities - material and human resources such as state-of-the-art office buildings, top talent, and the social networking infrastructure that maximizes connectivity. ...
A second fact that is emerging with greater clarity concerns the nature of "information." There are two types of information. One is the datum, which may be complex yet is standard knowledge: the level at which a stock market closes, a privatization of a public utility, the bankruptcy of a bank. But there is a far more difficult type of "information," akin to and interpretation/evaluation/judgment. ... Access to the first kind of information is now global and immediate ... But the second type of information requires a complicated mixture of elements, which we could think of as the social infrastructure for global connectivity. It is these specialized kinds of social connectivity that give major financial centers a leading edge. ...
b) Cross-border mergers and alliances.
Global firms in the financial industry need enormous resources, which is leading to rapid mergers and acquisitions of firms and strategic alliances among markets in different countries. ...
I would argue that another kind of "merger" is the consolidation of electronic networks that connect a very select number of markets. In the late 1990s several financial exchanges sought to form highly integrated alliances. ...
What we are seeing now is a ... pattern whereby the cooperation or division of functions is somewhat institutionalized: strategic alliances not only between firms across borders but also between markets. There is competition, strategic collaboration, and hierarchy.
c)Denationalized elites and agendas. ...
Major international business centers produce what we can think of as a new subculture, a move from the "national" version of international activities to the "global" version. ... I would posit that major cities, and the variety of so-called global business meetings (such as those of the World Economic Forum in Davos and other similar occasions), contribute to denationalize corporate elites.
Essentially: The global economy and the people that are more part of it than of their national/regional economies still need a place or home. Global cities provide it.
Some numbers on the global economy:
By 1999 companies had well over half a million affiliates outside their home countries accounting for U.S. $11 trillion in sales, a very significant figure if we consider that global trade stood at U.S. $8 trillion.
The orders of magnitude of cross-border financial transactions have risen sharply, as illustrated by the 1999 U.S. $68 trillion in the value of internationally traded derivatives, a major component of the global economy.
Saskia Sassen has been following global capital markets for years. In the introduction of this edited volume, she uses capital markets to explain the strange relationship between economic globalization and geography. While Sassen focuses on global cities (New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and more recently Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Bombay, Shanghai, etc.), many of her insights are applicable to specialized clusters. Since much of her analysis is based on the finance industry, the leap to apply it to other information-based industries is not very large. Of course, her aim is a different one than mine. In the larger argument on globalization, financial markets are probably a better indicator of the global economy than the new technologies I'm looking at.
By analogy, her comments on the relationships between global cities is also much-welcome support for my proposition that we are seeing a network of cooperating and competing hi-tech clusters emerge. As Sassen sees it, such a network of global cities already exists.
There is a growing number of transnational actors: not only MNCs, but also NGOs, government regulators, professional associations, mayors etc. As the nation state loses power (e.g. by giving up state monopolies), other geographic entities gain: cities, regions, cross-border regions, and supranational entities (e.g. the EU). Add to this the existence of new 'virtual spaces' and the picture can easily become confusing. On the one hand, cities and regional economies are becoming more important, agglomeration economies are increasingly powerful. On the other hand, ICTs allow a dispersion of information, capital, and thereby business. According to Sassen, these two trends are not wholly contradictory, and 'global cities' are the links between national economies and global circuits.
Cities provide the pronounced territorial concentrations of resources necessary for the management and servicing of more dispersed and mobile resources. By doing so, they reinforce the global influence and the global links of their respective cities - strengthen their position in the global economy. While they therefore remain dependent on their surrounding regions, these cities become a part of the global center: the network of global cities.
The geography of globalization contains dynamics of both dispersal and centralization. The massive trends toward the spatial dispersal of economic activities at the metropolitan, national, and global levels that we associate with globalization have contributed to a demand for new forms of territorial centralization of top-level management and control functions. Insofar as these functions benefit from agglomeration economies even in the face of telematic integration of a firm's globally dispersed manufacturing and service operations, they tend to locate in cities. An important reason why they might benefit from agglomeration economies lies in the presence of business networks.
By central functions I do not only mean headquarters functions; I am referring to all the top-level functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in multiple countries. These central functions are partly embedded in headquarters, but also in good part in what has been called the corporate services complex, that is, the network of financial, legal, accounting, and advertising firms that handle the complexities of operating in more than one national legal system, national accounting system, advertising culture, and so forth and do so under conditions of rapid innovations in all these fields. Such services have become so specialized and complex that headquarters increasingly buy them from specialized firms rather than produce them in-house. These agglomerations of firms producing central functions for the management and coordination of global economic systems are disproportionately concentrated in an expanding network of global cities. This network represents a strategic factor in the organization of the global economy.
Further, leading firms in information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyperconcentration of facilities; we need to distinguish between the capacity for global transmission/communication and the material conditions that make this possible.
Sassen goes on to explore the new economic geography that combines agglomerations and global dispersal.
This type of analysis of globalization, which seeks to map the strategic sites with hyperconcentration of resources as well as the cross-border networks that link these sites and others, helps us understand to what extent there is a specific geography of globalization and the fact that it is not a planetary event encompassing all of the world. It is, furthermore, a changing geography, one that has undergone multiple, often specialized transformations over the last few centuries and over the last two decades, and most recently has come to include electronic space.
Today, partly as a result of the new technologies, the spatial correlates of the center can assume several geographic forms, ranging from the CBD (central business district) to a new global grid of cities. Simplifying one could identify three forms of centrality today.
First, while there is no longer a direct relation between centrality and geographic entities such as the downtown, the CBD remains a key form of centrality. But the CBD in major international business centers is one profoundly reconfigured by technological and economic change. ...
Second, the center can extend into a metropolitan area in the form of a grid of nodes of intense business activity. ... Insofar as these various nodes are articulated through cyberroutes or digital highways, they form a grid that is a geographic correlate of the most advanced type of "center." The places that fall outside this new grid of digital highways, however, are peripheralized. This grid of nodes represents, in my analysis a reconstitution of the concept of region. Far from neutralizing geography, the grid is likely to be embedded in conventional forms of transport infrastructure, notably rapid rail and highways connecting to airports. ... (Compare this to the Silicon Valley notion that the diameter of the cluster is defined by a 2-hour drive.)
Third, we are seeing the formation of a transterritorial "center" constituted via telematics and intense economic transactions. It consists of the multiple and diversifying inter-city links that take place partly in electronic markets and transactions and partly through the intensifying circulation of goods, information, firms, and workers. In this regard this is both a territorialized and deterritorialized space of centrality. It requires both a specific logic for territorial development and the infrastructure for global networking technologies.
The relationship of cities within this last transterritorial center sounds much like that of organizations within a conventional agglomeration economy.
The global integration of markets make many ... activities redundant and makes collaboration a far more complex matter, one that has the effect of sharpening the division of labor within the network. Beyond the necessary range of specialized services present in all these centers, we now also see a trend toward the formation of specialized capabilities that partially differentiate centers and simultaneously integrate them into a larger global network. This configuration also promotes the formation of strategic alliances. ...
In my reading the globally integrated financial system is not only about competition among countries as is typically assumed. The trend is toward an increase in specialized collaborative efforts among these centers. Further, insofar as markets are integrated, growth overall is maximized through growth in all centers.
But why have financial centers at all? It comes back to well-known arguments about social networks and interpretation vs/ information.
The continuing weight of major centers is, in a way, countersensical, as is, for that matter, the existence of an expanding network of financial centers. The rapid development of electronic exchanges the growing digitization of much financial activity, and the fact that finance produces a dematerialized and hypermobile product, all suggest that location should not matter.
3 reasons that explain the trend toward consolidation in a few centers rather than massive dispersal:
a) The importance of social connectivity and central functions.
First, while ICTs do indeed enable geographic dispersal of economic activities without losing system integration, they have also had the effect of strengthening the importance of central coordination and control functions for firms and even for markets. ...
One fact that has become increasingly evident is that to maximize the benefits of ICTs firms need not only the infrastructure but a complex mix of other resources. Most of the value added that these technologies can produce for advanced service firms lies in so-called externalities - material and human resources such as state-of-the-art office buildings, top talent, and the social networking infrastructure that maximizes connectivity. ...
A second fact that is emerging with greater clarity concerns the nature of "information." There are two types of information. One is the datum, which may be complex yet is standard knowledge: the level at which a stock market closes, a privatization of a public utility, the bankruptcy of a bank. But there is a far more difficult type of "information," akin to and interpretation/evaluation/judgment. ... Access to the first kind of information is now global and immediate ... But the second type of information requires a complicated mixture of elements, which we could think of as the social infrastructure for global connectivity. It is these specialized kinds of social connectivity that give major financial centers a leading edge. ...
b) Cross-border mergers and alliances.
Global firms in the financial industry need enormous resources, which is leading to rapid mergers and acquisitions of firms and strategic alliances among markets in different countries. ...
I would argue that another kind of "merger" is the consolidation of electronic networks that connect a very select number of markets. In the late 1990s several financial exchanges sought to form highly integrated alliances. ...
What we are seeing now is a ... pattern whereby the cooperation or division of functions is somewhat institutionalized: strategic alliances not only between firms across borders but also between markets. There is competition, strategic collaboration, and hierarchy.
c)Denationalized elites and agendas. ...
Major international business centers produce what we can think of as a new subculture, a move from the "national" version of international activities to the "global" version. ... I would posit that major cities, and the variety of so-called global business meetings (such as those of the World Economic Forum in Davos and other similar occasions), contribute to denationalize corporate elites.
Essentially: The global economy and the people that are more part of it than of their national/regional economies still need a place or home. Global cities provide it.
Some numbers on the global economy:
By 1999 companies had well over half a million affiliates outside their home countries accounting for U.S. $11 trillion in sales, a very significant figure if we consider that global trade stood at U.S. $8 trillion.
The orders of magnitude of cross-border financial transactions have risen sharply, as illustrated by the 1999 U.S. $68 trillion in the value of internationally traded derivatives, a major component of the global economy.
Thursday
Forgotten questions about the internet, space and text
Interface Culture, Steven Johnson, 1997
Steven Johnson sets out to bridge the cultural differences between art and technology. His premise is that the computer interface is an art form, with similar functions today as the novel had in the 19th century: mediating between society and new technology, creating a sense of coherence in a time of upheaval.
Johnson addresses many questions that were popular with net-philosophers of his time but seem to have slipped off the radar screen more recently (unless I am much mistaken).
- How do we find our way around virtual information space?
- Does writing on a computer, for a blog or a website change the way we write? The way we organize our thoughts?
- How will pictures, videos, animations, text etc. combine to create a truly new medium?
Summary
Links mentioned in the book: FEED, Suck
Where the Victorian novel shaped our understanding of the new towns wrapped around the steel mill and the cotton gin, and fifties television served as an imaginative guide to the new suburban enclaves created by the automobile, the interface makes the teeming, invisible world of zeros and ones sensible to us. There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences.
This may seem like a gross exaggeration, but Johnson puts this perception down to the fact that computers and the internet are relatively new, and their full potential has yet to be discovered. As he points out, the first radio and television shows were adaptations of theater productions. Similarly, Johnson sees the current internet landscape as souped up television rather than a truly independent medium; a PC functions mostly as a glorified typewriter, or file cabinet, or calculator.
As our machines are increasingly jacked into global networks of information, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine the dataspace at our fingertips, to picture all that complexity in our mind’s eye – the way city dwellers, in the sociologist Kevin Lunch’s phrase, “cognitively map” their real-world environs.
Representing all that information is going to require a new visual language, as complex and meaningful as the great metropolitan narratives of the nineteenth-century novel. We can already see the first stirrings of this new form in recent interface designs that have moved beyond the two-dimensional desktop metaphor into more immersive digital environments. … As the infosphere continues its exponential growth, the metaphors used to describe it will also grow in both scale and complexity.
Self-reflexivity
Johnson looks at ‘bad’ TV and sees precursors of new forms better suited to the internet. He calls these forms ‘parasite forms’ – they riff, comment on, and parody traditional storytelling and culture, e.g. Zoo TV, the Daily Show, tabloid news shows, Beavis and Butthead.
The technological changes that ushered in merchant capitalism did away with the old, aristocratic morality plays and introduced a new, rougher form – the realis novel, with its orphans and scoundrels and wayward heroines. In the same way, the electric technologies of the twentieth century have done away with the old storytelling forms, or at least scaled them down to assembly-line repetition, while simultaneously unleashing a flock of new organisms into the larger cultural ecology.
But here’s the rub: these new organisms don’t tell stories. They riff, annotate, dismantle, dissect, sample. Everything they do refracts back onto som other “straight” media, on which they rely for their livelihood. They relate to their story-driven predecessors the way a movie review relates to a movie. …
There may not be a great deal of “quality programming” in this mix, but the sheer quantity of this new genre – the diversity of the species – is remarkable. All the evidence suggests that the metaforms are evolving at a much faster clip than their storytelling competitors. … while the sitcom has languished, the self-referential “commentary” show has come into its own. …
Most critics who have addressed the growth of the “meta” form have acted as though there were something abnormal, something malignant about it. … using the language of epidemics.
It’s worth stressing here that the shift from story-telling to commentary – from host organism to parasite – is more than just standard-issue postmodernism. [The shift happened] because the mass media is now a fundamental, irreversible component of … everyday life … The infosphere is now a part of out “real life” – which makes commenting on it as natural as commenting on the weather. …
Metaforms don’t fare well in the analog world of television … But the digital world is another story. That world is the home planet of information filters. The parasite forms are fringe benefit on analog TV, a flourish. In the digital world, they are a fact of life. There is no such thing as digital information without filters. …
These metaforms, these bitmappings will come to occupy nearly every facet of modern society: work, play, romance, family, high art, pop culture, politics. But the form itself will be the same, despite its many guises, laboring away in that strange new zone between medium and message. That zone is what we call the interface.
The desktop metaphor
When Apple launched the Mac and its graphical user interface, the ‘cartoon’ icons led people to believe that this wasn’t a serious, work-oriented tool. For proper work, the text-input interface was considered superior. It took a long time for people to understand that the desktop metaphor allowed users to find their way intuitively around a computer.
The first reviews of the Mac and its brethren testify to the conceptual limitations that come out of working under one paradigm and then struggling to adapt to another: There are invariably blind spots and omissions in these transition points, things that seem intuitive with hindsight but were almost impossible to grasp at the time.
Once people figured out that metaphors worked, however, they overdid it. Johnson cites Bob and Magic Cap as two examples of applications that took their metaphors too literally. Bob used a living room and Magic Cap an office as their metaphors and tried to create simulations of these environments that were as close to reality as possible. In the world according to Chairman Gates, programmers seemed fated to become interior decorators, scattering bric-a-brac and binary potpourri across computer monitors world wide.
The paradoxical thing about these hypermetaphors was that they weren’t metaphorical enough. In the Poetics, Aristotle defined metaphor as the act of “givint the thing a name that belongs to something else.” The crucial element in this formula is the difference that exists between “the thing” and the “something else.” … Metaphors create relations ships between things that are not directly equivalent. Metaphors based on complete identity are not metaphors at all.”
A programmed living room on your screen can never compete with your real living room. In fact, it’s boring, just more-of-the-same. It takes the metaphor to its literal extreme at the expense of exploring the new medium’s unique potential. A bad simulation will never match up to a good metaphor. (Could this be one of the reasons that video-phones and video-conferences were so slow to catch on?)
There’s something perverse in this total deference to user-friendly simulation, like building a word processor that faithfully reproduces a mechanical typewriter; complete with stuck keys and worn-out ribbons.
Good metaphors enhance the user experience. However, in 1997, as perhaps still today, for the most part, the social fabric of cyberspace is still stitched together by the gossamer thread of text. A graphical environment often diminishes the depth of the social experience. However when graphic environments become content (rather than context) – as in online or video gaming, the role of architecture suddenly shifts. The architecture of that virtual space doesn’t frame the conversation – it’s a central component of it.
Links
The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries, but it is only a hint of things to come. Hypertext, in fact suggests a whole new grammar of possibilities, a new way of writing and telling stories. But to make that new frontier accessible, we need more than one type of link. Microsoft and Netscape may be content with the simple, one-dimensional links of the Web’s current incarnation. But for the rest of us, it’s like trying to write a novel where the words are separated only by semicolons.
Johnson introduces Vannevar Bush’s idea of ‘trails.’ Essentially trails work the same way links do, linking information together based on meaning and context. However, trails are stable – they can be recalled and followed again. Instead of bookmarking a site, you can see all the other sites you called up in connection with a site to remind yourself of the meanings you found in them. (Today, that’s something we can only do mentally, building rough and ready maps of the internet in our heads.)
Text
Johnson finds text the most drastically changed and most underrated aspect of the internet as a new medium.
Writing on a word processor is radically different than longhand. It allows trial-and-error while writing and constant editing as you write. Many early computer users missed the direct flow of thoughts from mind to pen, but fast-forward a decade or two, and I can’t imagine writing without a computer. Even jotting down a note with pen and paper feels strained, like a paraplegic suddenly granted the use of his liegs. I have to think about writing, think about it consciously as my hand scratches out the words on the page, think about the act itself. Earlier each sentence had to be worked out in your mind before you wrote it down.
In a world dominated by icons and visual metaphors, the role of text – letters and word, rather than images and animations – has come to seem like an afterthought, an obscure walk-on part in a grand Hollywood epic. Words, in this lopsided paradigm, are always inferior to images. Anyone who knows anything about the history of writing systems – specifically the shift from hieroglyphic-style pictograms to phonetic spelling – will sense something bizarre in this hierarchy.
This is a very important point, but not explored enough in the book. Maybe Johnson underestimates visuals because they were more likely silly animations in his day and he didn’t experience the same seamless interplay between text and video or pictures.
Steven Johnson sets out to bridge the cultural differences between art and technology. His premise is that the computer interface is an art form, with similar functions today as the novel had in the 19th century: mediating between society and new technology, creating a sense of coherence in a time of upheaval.
Johnson addresses many questions that were popular with net-philosophers of his time but seem to have slipped off the radar screen more recently (unless I am much mistaken).
- How do we find our way around virtual information space?
- Does writing on a computer, for a blog or a website change the way we write? The way we organize our thoughts?
- How will pictures, videos, animations, text etc. combine to create a truly new medium?
Summary
Links mentioned in the book: FEED, Suck
Where the Victorian novel shaped our understanding of the new towns wrapped around the steel mill and the cotton gin, and fifties television served as an imaginative guide to the new suburban enclaves created by the automobile, the interface makes the teeming, invisible world of zeros and ones sensible to us. There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences.
This may seem like a gross exaggeration, but Johnson puts this perception down to the fact that computers and the internet are relatively new, and their full potential has yet to be discovered. As he points out, the first radio and television shows were adaptations of theater productions. Similarly, Johnson sees the current internet landscape as souped up television rather than a truly independent medium; a PC functions mostly as a glorified typewriter, or file cabinet, or calculator.
As our machines are increasingly jacked into global networks of information, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine the dataspace at our fingertips, to picture all that complexity in our mind’s eye – the way city dwellers, in the sociologist Kevin Lunch’s phrase, “cognitively map” their real-world environs.
Representing all that information is going to require a new visual language, as complex and meaningful as the great metropolitan narratives of the nineteenth-century novel. We can already see the first stirrings of this new form in recent interface designs that have moved beyond the two-dimensional desktop metaphor into more immersive digital environments. … As the infosphere continues its exponential growth, the metaphors used to describe it will also grow in both scale and complexity.
Self-reflexivity
Johnson looks at ‘bad’ TV and sees precursors of new forms better suited to the internet. He calls these forms ‘parasite forms’ – they riff, comment on, and parody traditional storytelling and culture, e.g. Zoo TV, the Daily Show, tabloid news shows, Beavis and Butthead.
The technological changes that ushered in merchant capitalism did away with the old, aristocratic morality plays and introduced a new, rougher form – the realis novel, with its orphans and scoundrels and wayward heroines. In the same way, the electric technologies of the twentieth century have done away with the old storytelling forms, or at least scaled them down to assembly-line repetition, while simultaneously unleashing a flock of new organisms into the larger cultural ecology.
But here’s the rub: these new organisms don’t tell stories. They riff, annotate, dismantle, dissect, sample. Everything they do refracts back onto som other “straight” media, on which they rely for their livelihood. They relate to their story-driven predecessors the way a movie review relates to a movie. …
There may not be a great deal of “quality programming” in this mix, but the sheer quantity of this new genre – the diversity of the species – is remarkable. All the evidence suggests that the metaforms are evolving at a much faster clip than their storytelling competitors. … while the sitcom has languished, the self-referential “commentary” show has come into its own. …
Most critics who have addressed the growth of the “meta” form have acted as though there were something abnormal, something malignant about it. … using the language of epidemics.
It’s worth stressing here that the shift from story-telling to commentary – from host organism to parasite – is more than just standard-issue postmodernism. [The shift happened] because the mass media is now a fundamental, irreversible component of … everyday life … The infosphere is now a part of out “real life” – which makes commenting on it as natural as commenting on the weather. …
Metaforms don’t fare well in the analog world of television … But the digital world is another story. That world is the home planet of information filters. The parasite forms are fringe benefit on analog TV, a flourish. In the digital world, they are a fact of life. There is no such thing as digital information without filters. …
These metaforms, these bitmappings will come to occupy nearly every facet of modern society: work, play, romance, family, high art, pop culture, politics. But the form itself will be the same, despite its many guises, laboring away in that strange new zone between medium and message. That zone is what we call the interface.
The desktop metaphor
When Apple launched the Mac and its graphical user interface, the ‘cartoon’ icons led people to believe that this wasn’t a serious, work-oriented tool. For proper work, the text-input interface was considered superior. It took a long time for people to understand that the desktop metaphor allowed users to find their way intuitively around a computer.
The first reviews of the Mac and its brethren testify to the conceptual limitations that come out of working under one paradigm and then struggling to adapt to another: There are invariably blind spots and omissions in these transition points, things that seem intuitive with hindsight but were almost impossible to grasp at the time.
Once people figured out that metaphors worked, however, they overdid it. Johnson cites Bob and Magic Cap as two examples of applications that took their metaphors too literally. Bob used a living room and Magic Cap an office as their metaphors and tried to create simulations of these environments that were as close to reality as possible. In the world according to Chairman Gates, programmers seemed fated to become interior decorators, scattering bric-a-brac and binary potpourri across computer monitors world wide.
The paradoxical thing about these hypermetaphors was that they weren’t metaphorical enough. In the Poetics, Aristotle defined metaphor as the act of “givint the thing a name that belongs to something else.” The crucial element in this formula is the difference that exists between “the thing” and the “something else.” … Metaphors create relations ships between things that are not directly equivalent. Metaphors based on complete identity are not metaphors at all.”
A programmed living room on your screen can never compete with your real living room. In fact, it’s boring, just more-of-the-same. It takes the metaphor to its literal extreme at the expense of exploring the new medium’s unique potential. A bad simulation will never match up to a good metaphor. (Could this be one of the reasons that video-phones and video-conferences were so slow to catch on?)
There’s something perverse in this total deference to user-friendly simulation, like building a word processor that faithfully reproduces a mechanical typewriter; complete with stuck keys and worn-out ribbons.
Good metaphors enhance the user experience. However, in 1997, as perhaps still today, for the most part, the social fabric of cyberspace is still stitched together by the gossamer thread of text. A graphical environment often diminishes the depth of the social experience. However when graphic environments become content (rather than context) – as in online or video gaming, the role of architecture suddenly shifts. The architecture of that virtual space doesn’t frame the conversation – it’s a central component of it.
Links
The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries, but it is only a hint of things to come. Hypertext, in fact suggests a whole new grammar of possibilities, a new way of writing and telling stories. But to make that new frontier accessible, we need more than one type of link. Microsoft and Netscape may be content with the simple, one-dimensional links of the Web’s current incarnation. But for the rest of us, it’s like trying to write a novel where the words are separated only by semicolons.
Johnson introduces Vannevar Bush’s idea of ‘trails.’ Essentially trails work the same way links do, linking information together based on meaning and context. However, trails are stable – they can be recalled and followed again. Instead of bookmarking a site, you can see all the other sites you called up in connection with a site to remind yourself of the meanings you found in them. (Today, that’s something we can only do mentally, building rough and ready maps of the internet in our heads.)
Text
Johnson finds text the most drastically changed and most underrated aspect of the internet as a new medium.
Writing on a word processor is radically different than longhand. It allows trial-and-error while writing and constant editing as you write. Many early computer users missed the direct flow of thoughts from mind to pen, but fast-forward a decade or two, and I can’t imagine writing without a computer. Even jotting down a note with pen and paper feels strained, like a paraplegic suddenly granted the use of his liegs. I have to think about writing, think about it consciously as my hand scratches out the words on the page, think about the act itself. Earlier each sentence had to be worked out in your mind before you wrote it down.
In a world dominated by icons and visual metaphors, the role of text – letters and word, rather than images and animations – has come to seem like an afterthought, an obscure walk-on part in a grand Hollywood epic. Words, in this lopsided paradigm, are always inferior to images. Anyone who knows anything about the history of writing systems – specifically the shift from hieroglyphic-style pictograms to phonetic spelling – will sense something bizarre in this hierarchy.
This is a very important point, but not explored enough in the book. Maybe Johnson underestimates visuals because they were more likely silly animations in his day and he didn’t experience the same seamless interplay between text and video or pictures.
Saturday
Life on the Screen
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry Turkle, 1995
Again, something I wrote a while back... Sherry Turkle's book about internet, postmodern philosophy and psychology remains interesting even though many of her examples sound rather dated today (1995 being something like the Triassic Period of the internet). See also some great reviews at Amazon, and Marshall Soules' collection of links about Sherry Turkle.
In “Life on the Screen” Sherry Turkle explores the many ways in which our sense of self, life, reality and society have changed with the rise of the internet and postmodern culture. She presents changes in attitudes and methods in areas ranging from computer programming and artificial intelligence to biology, psychology and language. As her focus is on the reciprocal effects of technology and society, she never presents a deterministic model, at one point specifically exploring all possible permutations of cause and effect between our technology (computers), the times we live in, and ourselves.
Throughout the book, Sherry Turkle explores how the development of computers and the internet was paralleled by changes of how we define life and intelligence. (Sherry Turkle’s interviews with young children facing this question for the first time in their development are particularly evocative.) Language was always a catalyst for these changes. Speaking of machines in terms of intelligence, thought, life and growth provoked strong reactions. As long as ideas about machines were not culturally appropriated as objects-to-think-with about living beings, the comparisons usually inspired a defensive stance and definitions of humans centered on emotions, and later physicality. As work on artificial intelligence and artificial life progressed, these definitions were highly threatened. Yet, the resistance lessened. New programming models were readily used as metaphors for evolution, growth and brain functions. As the metaphors became more familiar, they were no longer declared as such – the quotation marks around them were dropped – and it became normal to think of machines as intelligent, programs as evolving, or brains as networks. In such an environment, people even became willing to give computer-based psychoanalysis a try. Sherry Turkle provides many such examples of individual experience, technological progress and social trends to create a sense of their complex, simultaneous developments and interaction.
A central theme of the book is the “pastiche” of post-modern society and “tinkering” as the method suitable to working in it. This represents a move away from the modernist belief that our world can and should be explained in linear, rational, all-encompassing models, and a move away from the dominance of the plan. In contrast, society and the world are defined by their complexity and should be accepted as such. Understanding is reached by arranging thoughts, objects and information, and exploring the patterns and links which emerge as the original arrangement is changed and adapted. Infinite regress and circular reasoning are seen as useful tools rather than as flawed logic. When this iterative process of interaction is applied to computer programming, an artificial intelligence program may not only surpass its creator in skill (e.g. win at chess), but deliver surprising, unexpected outcomes. At the same time, the idea of a machine as a complex network of interacting parts, that allows for random variables and doesn’t require total understanding to function, has allowed us to accept such outcomes. We feel more comfortable with a machine modeled on the human brain achieving near-human effects, than if a completely rational, explainable machine achieves the same. Sherry Turkle shows how changes in psychological methods, computer-user interfaces, programming techniques, biology research and people’s experience with the internet contributed to “bringing post-modern philosophy down to earth”.
Another effect of the shift towards pastiche and tinkering is the dissolution of authoritative rules, methods or forms: Anything goes – all of it simultaneously. Different rules, conventions and morals co-exist, forcing each individual to engage in a “continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of the self”, choosing who to be and how to relate to a constantly changing perception of the world. Using the anonymity of the internet and windows-styled personal computers, more and more people are not just de- and reconstructing one self, but multiple personae. In online games and chats they can present themselves in any way they want. They can change their gender, appearance, interests, personality, opinions and more – and they can do this as many times as they like to create multiple selves who can engage in virtual society simultaneously. At best, people use their virtual personae to explore and expand the range of their own personalities; at worst, they will reinforce self-destructive behavior. In exploring psychological dimensions Sherry Turkle presents the idea that people can achieve a “moratorium”, a safe place for personal reflection and experimentation, in their online characters. Much like the ability to write allowed mankind to compare and analyze different versions of a story, multiple personae may allow a reflection on different aspects of one’s personality – fermenting an inner dialogue on identity. In a more pessimistic sense, the phenomenon of fragmentation so widely present in post-modern culture is particularly frightening in the context of multiple-personality disorders.
Sherry Turkle places a special emphasis in her book on the MUDs (rule-based role-playing games in virtual worlds) and the way people use and experience them for everything from relaxation or escapism to social networking and personality development. Her many examples show a highly individual approach. While this emphasis is at times irritating – there is so much else going on in the internet, which she only touches on – she is certainly right in viewing MUDs as a type of virtual frontier that of users are playfully exploring and creating. Also, MUDs are a part of programmer culture and thus very influential in other “more serious” developments of the virtual world. In MUDs as virtual societies, our cultural norms are being renegotiated: Many MUDs have virtual governments and economies which are developed and also challenged by its virtual inhabitants. New values are formed: Power is a function of playing and programming skill; ownership must be redefined; in open-ended games playing and creating becomes more important than winning. Throughout the game, players must agree on acceptable norms of virtual behavior, the accountability of real, anonymous people for digression from these norms, and most of all: How real is this virtual world? If killing is an essential feature of many adventure MUDs, does this mean rape is acceptable in the game? As MUDs fulfill more and more social functions, how real is the game becoming?
While civic discourse thrives in virtual environments, it seems to be disappearing from ordinary real life. Is real life not worth it? Or not vivid enough to merit attention? Experiencing the world through our screens, our sense of reality is distorted. Life can be boring, ordinary and slow; it depends less on our projections and imaginations. The more we model our physical world to resemble its simulations, the more consumerist and disappointing it becomes (e.g. in changing from town center to mall center). The reader experiences a shift from the traditional dichotomy of real and virtual to a continuum ranging from make-believe, to social engagement in a virtual environment, to relationships that shift between the real and the virtual, and finally to the world of physical objects. The extremes of this continuum are not clear: Real people shape the virtual world and the machines where it takes place; hardly any aspect of our “real” lives is unaffected by the internet.
As the boundary between real and virtual is blurred, as social norms lose their importance, as traditional social groups disintegrate, as people change their personae like their clothes, we no longer know what to rely on. We are also overwhelmed by complexity, and in true post-modern spirit, we begin to take things at face value – or rather at interface value. We forget that an icon on a screen is just a graphic representation or that a page on screen consists of bits and bytes, and nonchalantly take things as they are. However, in a world, where “anything goes”, the fundamental questions and values that make us human are all too easily forgotten. We find it convenient to change our answers or principles according to context. To remain true to ourselves as humans, our multiple personae and personalities must be joined in a constant dialogue, discussing our moral outlook.
“Life on the Screen” is based on hundreds of interviews Sherry Turkle conducted with MIT students, children, new computer users and others. They are presented as illustrative excerpts, all too quickly dismissed by some as a collection of anecdotes. Cycling through voices of scholar, author, writer, psychoanalyst, teacher, computer user and woman in society, Sherry Turkle’s observant pastiche of research, analysis and dialogue provides a rich imaginary landscape to explore and reflect upon.
Again, something I wrote a while back... Sherry Turkle's book about internet, postmodern philosophy and psychology remains interesting even though many of her examples sound rather dated today (1995 being something like the Triassic Period of the internet). See also some great reviews at Amazon, and Marshall Soules' collection of links about Sherry Turkle.
In “Life on the Screen” Sherry Turkle explores the many ways in which our sense of self, life, reality and society have changed with the rise of the internet and postmodern culture. She presents changes in attitudes and methods in areas ranging from computer programming and artificial intelligence to biology, psychology and language. As her focus is on the reciprocal effects of technology and society, she never presents a deterministic model, at one point specifically exploring all possible permutations of cause and effect between our technology (computers), the times we live in, and ourselves.
Throughout the book, Sherry Turkle explores how the development of computers and the internet was paralleled by changes of how we define life and intelligence. (Sherry Turkle’s interviews with young children facing this question for the first time in their development are particularly evocative.) Language was always a catalyst for these changes. Speaking of machines in terms of intelligence, thought, life and growth provoked strong reactions. As long as ideas about machines were not culturally appropriated as objects-to-think-with about living beings, the comparisons usually inspired a defensive stance and definitions of humans centered on emotions, and later physicality. As work on artificial intelligence and artificial life progressed, these definitions were highly threatened. Yet, the resistance lessened. New programming models were readily used as metaphors for evolution, growth and brain functions. As the metaphors became more familiar, they were no longer declared as such – the quotation marks around them were dropped – and it became normal to think of machines as intelligent, programs as evolving, or brains as networks. In such an environment, people even became willing to give computer-based psychoanalysis a try. Sherry Turkle provides many such examples of individual experience, technological progress and social trends to create a sense of their complex, simultaneous developments and interaction.
A central theme of the book is the “pastiche” of post-modern society and “tinkering” as the method suitable to working in it. This represents a move away from the modernist belief that our world can and should be explained in linear, rational, all-encompassing models, and a move away from the dominance of the plan. In contrast, society and the world are defined by their complexity and should be accepted as such. Understanding is reached by arranging thoughts, objects and information, and exploring the patterns and links which emerge as the original arrangement is changed and adapted. Infinite regress and circular reasoning are seen as useful tools rather than as flawed logic. When this iterative process of interaction is applied to computer programming, an artificial intelligence program may not only surpass its creator in skill (e.g. win at chess), but deliver surprising, unexpected outcomes. At the same time, the idea of a machine as a complex network of interacting parts, that allows for random variables and doesn’t require total understanding to function, has allowed us to accept such outcomes. We feel more comfortable with a machine modeled on the human brain achieving near-human effects, than if a completely rational, explainable machine achieves the same. Sherry Turkle shows how changes in psychological methods, computer-user interfaces, programming techniques, biology research and people’s experience with the internet contributed to “bringing post-modern philosophy down to earth”.
Another effect of the shift towards pastiche and tinkering is the dissolution of authoritative rules, methods or forms: Anything goes – all of it simultaneously. Different rules, conventions and morals co-exist, forcing each individual to engage in a “continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of the self”, choosing who to be and how to relate to a constantly changing perception of the world. Using the anonymity of the internet and windows-styled personal computers, more and more people are not just de- and reconstructing one self, but multiple personae. In online games and chats they can present themselves in any way they want. They can change their gender, appearance, interests, personality, opinions and more – and they can do this as many times as they like to create multiple selves who can engage in virtual society simultaneously. At best, people use their virtual personae to explore and expand the range of their own personalities; at worst, they will reinforce self-destructive behavior. In exploring psychological dimensions Sherry Turkle presents the idea that people can achieve a “moratorium”, a safe place for personal reflection and experimentation, in their online characters. Much like the ability to write allowed mankind to compare and analyze different versions of a story, multiple personae may allow a reflection on different aspects of one’s personality – fermenting an inner dialogue on identity. In a more pessimistic sense, the phenomenon of fragmentation so widely present in post-modern culture is particularly frightening in the context of multiple-personality disorders.
Sherry Turkle places a special emphasis in her book on the MUDs (rule-based role-playing games in virtual worlds) and the way people use and experience them for everything from relaxation or escapism to social networking and personality development. Her many examples show a highly individual approach. While this emphasis is at times irritating – there is so much else going on in the internet, which she only touches on – she is certainly right in viewing MUDs as a type of virtual frontier that of users are playfully exploring and creating. Also, MUDs are a part of programmer culture and thus very influential in other “more serious” developments of the virtual world. In MUDs as virtual societies, our cultural norms are being renegotiated: Many MUDs have virtual governments and economies which are developed and also challenged by its virtual inhabitants. New values are formed: Power is a function of playing and programming skill; ownership must be redefined; in open-ended games playing and creating becomes more important than winning. Throughout the game, players must agree on acceptable norms of virtual behavior, the accountability of real, anonymous people for digression from these norms, and most of all: How real is this virtual world? If killing is an essential feature of many adventure MUDs, does this mean rape is acceptable in the game? As MUDs fulfill more and more social functions, how real is the game becoming?
While civic discourse thrives in virtual environments, it seems to be disappearing from ordinary real life. Is real life not worth it? Or not vivid enough to merit attention? Experiencing the world through our screens, our sense of reality is distorted. Life can be boring, ordinary and slow; it depends less on our projections and imaginations. The more we model our physical world to resemble its simulations, the more consumerist and disappointing it becomes (e.g. in changing from town center to mall center). The reader experiences a shift from the traditional dichotomy of real and virtual to a continuum ranging from make-believe, to social engagement in a virtual environment, to relationships that shift between the real and the virtual, and finally to the world of physical objects. The extremes of this continuum are not clear: Real people shape the virtual world and the machines where it takes place; hardly any aspect of our “real” lives is unaffected by the internet.
As the boundary between real and virtual is blurred, as social norms lose their importance, as traditional social groups disintegrate, as people change their personae like their clothes, we no longer know what to rely on. We are also overwhelmed by complexity, and in true post-modern spirit, we begin to take things at face value – or rather at interface value. We forget that an icon on a screen is just a graphic representation or that a page on screen consists of bits and bytes, and nonchalantly take things as they are. However, in a world, where “anything goes”, the fundamental questions and values that make us human are all too easily forgotten. We find it convenient to change our answers or principles according to context. To remain true to ourselves as humans, our multiple personae and personalities must be joined in a constant dialogue, discussing our moral outlook.
“Life on the Screen” is based on hundreds of interviews Sherry Turkle conducted with MIT students, children, new computer users and others. They are presented as illustrative excerpts, all too quickly dismissed by some as a collection of anecdotes. Cycling through voices of scholar, author, writer, psychoanalyst, teacher, computer user and woman in society, Sherry Turkle’s observant pastiche of research, analysis and dialogue provides a rich imaginary landscape to explore and reflect upon.
Friday
Notes on 'Preface to Plato'
Preface to Plato, Eric A. Havelock, 1982
On the transition from orality to literacy in ancient Greece, ca. 5th century BC.
More on this subject here. Another review here. Some thoughts on 'secondary orality' and digital-oral culture today here, here, and here.
A review of Walter Ong's related work.
Summary (from the publisher)
Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always constituted a problem for sympathetic students of the philosopher, and it has often been explained away or otherwise defended. This book begins with the proposition that the attack must be taken seriously and that indeed it holds a clue to Plato's essential role in the culture of his period. His hostility becomes understandable on the assumption that the Greek cultural tradition had remained for practical purposes a poetic tradition down to the end of the fifth century.
The reason for this was technological. The stored experience necessary to maintain cultural stability was in the main preserved only in the living memories of the people. The arts and mechanisms of literacy had remained marginal to the day's work until about the time of the Peloponnesian War. The tradition had to be poetized in order to be memorized and so preserved. Hence, Plato correctly attacks the poets and in particular Homer as the sole encyclopedic source of Greek moral and technical instruction - for, in fact, the ILIAD functions as a cultural encyclopedia for a nonliterate people.
Chapters 3, 4, 9
Havelock sets out to understand the changes in Greek culture between Homer and Plato - symbolized by Plato's attack on the poets. Part of this shift can be explained by looking at the shift from orality to literacy.
First, to understand Plato's antagonism toward poets it is important to understand what he means by poetry: a mnemonic device for preserving and passing on knowledge and culture.
The only possible verbal technology available to guarantee the preservation and fixity of transmission was that of the rhythmic word organized cunningly in verbal and metrical patterns which were unique enough to retain their shape. Poetry is first and last a didactic instrument for transmitting the tradition.
All memorization of the poeticized tradition depends on constant and reiterated recitation. You could not refer to a bmemorizeemorise from a book. Hence poetry exists and is effective as an educational instrument only as it is performed. ... The pupil will grow up and perhaps forget. His living memory must at every turn be reinforced by social pressure. ... The community has to enter into an unconscious conspiracy with itself to keep the tradition alive.
The character or mnemonic mechanism that allows such feats of memory can be summed up if we describe it as a state of total personal involvement and therefore of emotional identification with the substance of the poeticized statement that you are required to retain. ... Such enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity. Plato's target was indeed an educational procedure and a whole way of life.
The device worked, for example, with jingles that characteristically creep into the formulas of religious ceremony, revealing their character as familiar and popular definitions but ones for which, however familiar, there was the felt need of constant recall.
Most of the content would be intended and accepted as generalized rules, proverbs, standards and aphorisms beyond the immediate action in the narrative. The story is told in such a way that the rules themselves are continually recalled and repeated. Descriptions are always typical rather than detailed. ... the poet was not an expert.
The Homeric poet controlled the culture in which he lived for the simple reason that his poetry became and remained the only authorized version of important utterance. He did not need to argue about this. It was a fact of life accepted by his community and by himself without reflection or analysis. ... His role as encyclopedist was shared by all members of his craft. The methods he used to hold sway over his audience were personal to himself. ... This in effect meant that his poetry was a mechanism of power and personal power.
What the poet was saying was in Plato's eyes important and maybe dangerous, but how he was saying it and manipulating it might seem even more important and more dangerous.
To reinforce memorization, the text was practically embodied. Repetition and musical accompaniment created a rhythm that reinforced memory. Dancing (or simply movement in time with the rhythm) helped to absorb the rhythm. There was no 'translation process' between seeing symbols, and saying them aloud to remember them. Oral memorization was more like absorption, and - as opposed to reading - it was never solitary.
The various motor reflexes, despite the complexity of their interaction, were so organized that they operated without any need on the part of the subject to think about them. This meant that like similar reflexes of the sexual or digestive apparatus they were highly sensual and were closely linked with the physical pleasures. Moreover, they could confer upon the human subject a specific type of pleasure. The regularity of the performance had a certain effect of hypnosis which relaxed the body's physical tensions and so also relaxed mental tensions, the fears, anxieties, and uncertainties which are the normal lot of our mortal existence. ... It is therefore to be concluded that the recital of the tribal encyclopedia, because of the technology of the recital, was also a tribal recreation.
This brings us back to that picture of the performance and its effect which so preoccupied Plato. For in analyzing the technique used for preserving the shaped word in the living memory we have also uncovered the secret of the enormous power wielded by the minstrel over his audience.
In this context, there was no warfare possible between body and spirit. Duty and moral norms are imparted/absorbed in an extremely pleasant atmosphere with total emotional involvement.
You did not learn your ethics and politics, skills and directives, by having them presented to you as a corpus for silent study, reflection and absorption. You were not asked to grasp their principles through rational analysis. You were not invited to so much as think of them. Instead you submitted to the paideutic spell. ... Psychologically it is an act of personal commitment, of total engagement and of emotional identification. The term mimesis is chosen by Plato as the one most adequate to describe both re-enactment and also identification, and as one most applicable to the common psychology shared both by artist and by audience.
Havelock proposes that the introduction of the alphabet changed this 'way of life.' However, this didn't happen instantaneously.
Alphabetic skill was available to a few not later than 700 B.C. ... The circle of alphabet-users became wider as time passed, but what more natural than that previous habits of instruction and communication along with the corresponding states of mind should persist long after the alphabet had theoretically made a reading culture possible.
It is certain that all Homer's poet successors were writers. But it is equally certain that they always wrote for recitation and for listeners. They composed it can be said under audience control. The advantages of literacy were private to themselves and their peers.
(Think of how the Gutenberg press was first used to print Latin bibles. Books in the vernacular, novels and newspapers took much longer to develop.)
Plato considers the 'poetic' state of mind a chief obstacle to scientific rationalism.
The poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy. ... He asks of men instead that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it.
On the transition from orality to literacy in ancient Greece, ca. 5th century BC.
More on this subject here. Another review here. Some thoughts on 'secondary orality' and digital-oral culture today here, here, and here.
A review of Walter Ong's related work.
Summary (from the publisher)
Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always constituted a problem for sympathetic students of the philosopher, and it has often been explained away or otherwise defended. This book begins with the proposition that the attack must be taken seriously and that indeed it holds a clue to Plato's essential role in the culture of his period. His hostility becomes understandable on the assumption that the Greek cultural tradition had remained for practical purposes a poetic tradition down to the end of the fifth century.
The reason for this was technological. The stored experience necessary to maintain cultural stability was in the main preserved only in the living memories of the people. The arts and mechanisms of literacy had remained marginal to the day's work until about the time of the Peloponnesian War. The tradition had to be poetized in order to be memorized and so preserved. Hence, Plato correctly attacks the poets and in particular Homer as the sole encyclopedic source of Greek moral and technical instruction - for, in fact, the ILIAD functions as a cultural encyclopedia for a nonliterate people.
Chapters 3, 4, 9
Havelock sets out to understand the changes in Greek culture between Homer and Plato - symbolized by Plato's attack on the poets. Part of this shift can be explained by looking at the shift from orality to literacy.
First, to understand Plato's antagonism toward poets it is important to understand what he means by poetry: a mnemonic device for preserving and passing on knowledge and culture.
The only possible verbal technology available to guarantee the preservation and fixity of transmission was that of the rhythmic word organized cunningly in verbal and metrical patterns which were unique enough to retain their shape. Poetry is first and last a didactic instrument for transmitting the tradition.
All memorization of the poeticized tradition depends on constant and reiterated recitation. You could not refer to a bmemorizeemorise from a book. Hence poetry exists and is effective as an educational instrument only as it is performed. ... The pupil will grow up and perhaps forget. His living memory must at every turn be reinforced by social pressure. ... The community has to enter into an unconscious conspiracy with itself to keep the tradition alive.
The character or mnemonic mechanism that allows such feats of memory can be summed up if we describe it as a state of total personal involvement and therefore of emotional identification with the substance of the poeticized statement that you are required to retain. ... Such enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity. Plato's target was indeed an educational procedure and a whole way of life.
The device worked, for example, with jingles that characteristically creep into the formulas of religious ceremony, revealing their character as familiar and popular definitions but ones for which, however familiar, there was the felt need of constant recall.
Most of the content would be intended and accepted as generalized rules, proverbs, standards and aphorisms beyond the immediate action in the narrative. The story is told in such a way that the rules themselves are continually recalled and repeated. Descriptions are always typical rather than detailed. ... the poet was not an expert.
The Homeric poet controlled the culture in which he lived for the simple reason that his poetry became and remained the only authorized version of important utterance. He did not need to argue about this. It was a fact of life accepted by his community and by himself without reflection or analysis. ... His role as encyclopedist was shared by all members of his craft. The methods he used to hold sway over his audience were personal to himself. ... This in effect meant that his poetry was a mechanism of power and personal power.
What the poet was saying was in Plato's eyes important and maybe dangerous, but how he was saying it and manipulating it might seem even more important and more dangerous.
To reinforce memorization, the text was practically embodied. Repetition and musical accompaniment created a rhythm that reinforced memory. Dancing (or simply movement in time with the rhythm) helped to absorb the rhythm. There was no 'translation process' between seeing symbols, and saying them aloud to remember them. Oral memorization was more like absorption, and - as opposed to reading - it was never solitary.
The various motor reflexes, despite the complexity of their interaction, were so organized that they operated without any need on the part of the subject to think about them. This meant that like similar reflexes of the sexual or digestive apparatus they were highly sensual and were closely linked with the physical pleasures. Moreover, they could confer upon the human subject a specific type of pleasure. The regularity of the performance had a certain effect of hypnosis which relaxed the body's physical tensions and so also relaxed mental tensions, the fears, anxieties, and uncertainties which are the normal lot of our mortal existence. ... It is therefore to be concluded that the recital of the tribal encyclopedia, because of the technology of the recital, was also a tribal recreation.
This brings us back to that picture of the performance and its effect which so preoccupied Plato. For in analyzing the technique used for preserving the shaped word in the living memory we have also uncovered the secret of the enormous power wielded by the minstrel over his audience.
In this context, there was no warfare possible between body and spirit. Duty and moral norms are imparted/absorbed in an extremely pleasant atmosphere with total emotional involvement.
You did not learn your ethics and politics, skills and directives, by having them presented to you as a corpus for silent study, reflection and absorption. You were not asked to grasp their principles through rational analysis. You were not invited to so much as think of them. Instead you submitted to the paideutic spell. ... Psychologically it is an act of personal commitment, of total engagement and of emotional identification. The term mimesis is chosen by Plato as the one most adequate to describe both re-enactment and also identification, and as one most applicable to the common psychology shared both by artist and by audience.
Havelock proposes that the introduction of the alphabet changed this 'way of life.' However, this didn't happen instantaneously.
Alphabetic skill was available to a few not later than 700 B.C. ... The circle of alphabet-users became wider as time passed, but what more natural than that previous habits of instruction and communication along with the corresponding states of mind should persist long after the alphabet had theoretically made a reading culture possible.
It is certain that all Homer's poet successors were writers. But it is equally certain that they always wrote for recitation and for listeners. They composed it can be said under audience control. The advantages of literacy were private to themselves and their peers.
(Think of how the Gutenberg press was first used to print Latin bibles. Books in the vernacular, novels and newspapers took much longer to develop.)
Plato considers the 'poetic' state of mind a chief obstacle to scientific rationalism.
The poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy. ... He asks of men instead that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it.
Do women lack ambition?
No, this isn't an excuse for infrequent blogging....
HBR is carrying an interesting study on gender differences by Anna Fels, author of Necessary Dreams.
For women - far more than for men - the decision to pursue an interest is reconsidered repeatedly and often abandoned. To realize their dreams, women need to understand why they are willing to walk away from them.
A lot of aspects presented here are things we've heard before: girls receive less attention in school; women are socialized to be givers, not receivers of care and recognition; on average women underestimate and men overestimate their abilities; etc. The interesting part of this study is the analysis of ambition, skills and rewards that highlights an important shift in the discrimination debate.
The elimination of the barriers that have historically kept women from mastering a subject - such as restrictions on admission to professional schools or the habit of doing business and advancing careers inside men-only clubs - has brought women a long way toward realizing their ambitions. But the pressure on girls and women to relinquish opportunities for recognition in the workplace continues to have powerful repercussions.
One key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation the "feminine" women will forfeit opportunities for recognition at home and at work. Being silenced or ignored often remains a baffling and frustrating barrier to women's understanding of how their lives are shaped. This is a "sin of omission" rather than one of commission, so it's hard to spot. It's not as obvious as being denied the right to vote or access to birth control. Women tend to feel foolish asking for appropriate acknowledgement of their contributions.
Anna Fels approaches the topic through exploratory interviews (her own and others'), and this gives her study a welcome subjective perspective that explains more than the many statistics out there. Many of her interview partners try to downplay their own importance or move out of the limelight.
"Can't you just say that I'm this totally bumbling person?" An acclaimed architect
"Everything has been rather serendipitous... I was able to get good positions and good things just happened." A senator
"I didn't want to be recognized in the streets." A journalist
Anna Fels proposes that ambition has 2 sides: mastery of a skill and recognition for it. The most intense social pressures are no longer about mastery. Hardly anyone claims today that women lack the native ability to become neurosurgeons or executives. And the problems don't tend to arise in college or in the first few years of a career. These days, the threat to women's ambitions comes at a later phase of women's lives, when they have families and are advancing to more competitive positions in their work. Women who pursue careers must cope with jobs structured to accommodate the life cycles of men with wives who don't have full-time careers. And they must suffer the social pressure to fulfill more traditional, "feminine" roles."
Women have greater opportunities for forming and pursuing their own goals now than at any time in history. But doing so is socially condoned only if they have first satisfied the needs of all their family members: husbands, children, elderly parents and others. If this requirement isn't met, women's ambitions as well as their femininity will be called into question.
This leaves women with a skewed set of rewards for their work and achievements, Although they may find mastery as satisfying as do their male peers, the social rewards that women can expect to reap for their skills are diminished. The personal and societal recognition they receive for their accomplishments is quantitatively poorer, qualitatively more ambivalent, and, perhaps most discouraging, less predictable.
Given such low and uncertain reward expectations it's sometimes surprising that women even bother. And, as a matter of fact, they often give up. As one author discovered, "Women are only slightly more likely to follow the paths they expect to [early on] than not." Anyone who ever championed traditional women's rights by saying that society would otherwise miss out on 50% of its potential talent and contributions should feel very depressed...
HBR is carrying an interesting study on gender differences by Anna Fels, author of Necessary Dreams.
For women - far more than for men - the decision to pursue an interest is reconsidered repeatedly and often abandoned. To realize their dreams, women need to understand why they are willing to walk away from them.
A lot of aspects presented here are things we've heard before: girls receive less attention in school; women are socialized to be givers, not receivers of care and recognition; on average women underestimate and men overestimate their abilities; etc. The interesting part of this study is the analysis of ambition, skills and rewards that highlights an important shift in the discrimination debate.
The elimination of the barriers that have historically kept women from mastering a subject - such as restrictions on admission to professional schools or the habit of doing business and advancing careers inside men-only clubs - has brought women a long way toward realizing their ambitions. But the pressure on girls and women to relinquish opportunities for recognition in the workplace continues to have powerful repercussions.
One key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation the "feminine" women will forfeit opportunities for recognition at home and at work. Being silenced or ignored often remains a baffling and frustrating barrier to women's understanding of how their lives are shaped. This is a "sin of omission" rather than one of commission, so it's hard to spot. It's not as obvious as being denied the right to vote or access to birth control. Women tend to feel foolish asking for appropriate acknowledgement of their contributions.
Anna Fels approaches the topic through exploratory interviews (her own and others'), and this gives her study a welcome subjective perspective that explains more than the many statistics out there. Many of her interview partners try to downplay their own importance or move out of the limelight.
"Can't you just say that I'm this totally bumbling person?" An acclaimed architect
"Everything has been rather serendipitous... I was able to get good positions and good things just happened." A senator
"I didn't want to be recognized in the streets." A journalist
Anna Fels proposes that ambition has 2 sides: mastery of a skill and recognition for it. The most intense social pressures are no longer about mastery. Hardly anyone claims today that women lack the native ability to become neurosurgeons or executives. And the problems don't tend to arise in college or in the first few years of a career. These days, the threat to women's ambitions comes at a later phase of women's lives, when they have families and are advancing to more competitive positions in their work. Women who pursue careers must cope with jobs structured to accommodate the life cycles of men with wives who don't have full-time careers. And they must suffer the social pressure to fulfill more traditional, "feminine" roles."
Women have greater opportunities for forming and pursuing their own goals now than at any time in history. But doing so is socially condoned only if they have first satisfied the needs of all their family members: husbands, children, elderly parents and others. If this requirement isn't met, women's ambitions as well as their femininity will be called into question.
This leaves women with a skewed set of rewards for their work and achievements, Although they may find mastery as satisfying as do their male peers, the social rewards that women can expect to reap for their skills are diminished. The personal and societal recognition they receive for their accomplishments is quantitatively poorer, qualitatively more ambivalent, and, perhaps most discouraging, less predictable.
Given such low and uncertain reward expectations it's sometimes surprising that women even bother. And, as a matter of fact, they often give up. As one author discovered, "Women are only slightly more likely to follow the paths they expect to [early on] than not." Anyone who ever championed traditional women's rights by saying that society would otherwise miss out on 50% of its potential talent and contributions should feel very depressed...
Imagined communities
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, 1991
I wrote this about Benedict Anderson's book a while back and thought it would work well on the blog, too.
Benedict Anderson points out that the ideologies of Marxism and Liberalism failed to unite their followers at critical moments because they failed to address issues of death and immortality. Nations by contrast were able to create imagined communities, which provided a sense of belonging, of connectedness with the past and the future at a time when religious modes of thought and society were faltering. Print media, technology and economy played a vital role in creating these communities.
We are currently witnessing the weakening of the nation state. It is assumed that internet media, technology and economy will shape new communities which will “emerge from the rubble”. Yet no new set of widely accepted beliefs or form of social organization has arisen that addresses issues of death and immortality in a world shaped by an ephemeral, ever-changing medium. Some attempts have been made to refocus on previous models of religious, geographical, ethnic or linguistic communities. But they have not been adopted by a majority of that population which is increasingly immersed in an internet society. Religious models are often accompanied by hierarchical structures that seem incompatible with the world of the web; geographical models appear irrelevant when physical location is not a factor limiting communication; ethnic models also seem to have little relevance as long as anonymity is easy to protect and communication is text or voice based. Linguistic structures seem attractive only as long as automatic translation remains at the level of Babel Fish and foreign characters (e.g. Japanese or Cyrillic) require separate software.
Trust was formerly built through mutual obligations and frequent civic interaction , through a feeling of jointly belonging to a large eternal community. How is trust built in an internet world, where communication is disembodied and anyone can easily pretend to be someone they are not? Understandably, fears run deep as the old imagined communities lose their power to organize and protect, and no new transcendental communities are available to replace them – fears voiced in anti-globalization demonstrations, calls for government regulation or censorship of the internet, attempts to exclude computers from classrooms.
In terms of new communities, the internet has several familiar community institutions. There are shared habits: Reading e-mail first thing in the morning has displaced earlier rituals of watching the morning TV news, reading the newspaper or saying prayers. There are public spaces such as forums and chat rooms – virtual counterparts of public houses, salons, malls or town squares. The internet community has started creating its own language, faintly recalling the power of Latin to unite Christendom and the power of written vernacular to support nation building. Words and even facial expressions are fragmented and reduced to abbreviations and emoticons. “Tech-speak” provides metaphors for modern life: People speak of the human brain in terms of electrical signals, parallel processing, even “wet-drives”. There is a protective border to the community that is crossed by connecting one’s computer to a modem and by typing a username and password. Access is gained by using technology, not by owning a passport or tracing the sign of the cross.
Still, most people don’t feel a sense of belonging when they log onto the internet. How do communities and their institutions in the internet environment differ? And why might these differences be unsettling?
One important distinction of internet communication is that often media technology is shared but content is not. While reading e-mail is a collective, often simultaneous ritual, there is no shared information or common narrative that joins community members as news or prayers could. E-mail as a highly individual medium tends to encourage personalized relationships rather than communal ones. Chat rooms provide virtual public space, yet they also have private rooms. Quite often the objective in joining the public space is to move the resulting conversation to a private room or to e-mail, achieving fragmentation of relationships rather than forging communities. All the while, the furnishers of earlier shared narratives are becoming more disparate: For example, dozens of cable TV channels are replacing the unified voices of broadcast TV.
Chain-mails, hoaxes and viruses are important exceptions to the vehicles of social fragmentation in the internet environment. They provide a sense of connectedness with a wider community, because they reach many different members and affect them in a similar way – and because the members are aware of these effects on people entirely unknown to them. The effect recalls the tall story of early newspapers. Newsletters are another exception, providing common knowledge and narratives for specific groups as the newspaper did for the nation.
Another important distinction between print or broadcast TV communities and internet communities is choice. In the world of internet and interconnection, I can choose which and how many communities I want to be a part of. Conversely, if I don’t choose any, no community will consider me one of its members. The internet environment hasn’t yielded a community that people are born into – a community that includes them from the moment they are born, regardless of ability or achievement, as a religion or nation will. Also, it is relatively easy to leave any internet-based community. No bond is sacred in the Web – a development paralleled in the “real world”, where once sacrosanct communities (from marriages to patron-employer relationships) are breaking up. Thus the current world of internet seems to lead to existential isolation, failing to offer a feeling of belonging, failing to sanction transgressions. The choices are so numerous and the boundaries so flexible as to diminish the value of belonging or not belonging to a certain community. It seems a small reassurance that expulsion from the overall web community is practically impossible, except through lack of hardware or software.
Perhaps it is the attraction of the internet environment that – as old borders are crumbling – few new ones have yet been defined. And as long as not all people have access to the internet, a loose “digital” community has a means of distinguishing itself from others (through access to technology and skill in using it).
In this type of environment a variety of people thrive: the people who created the new medium and know it best, researchers and all curious people who have a new frontier to discover, artists, and people disadvantaged or isolated in the world of nation states. To all of these groups, a new medium in general and the internet in specific can offer a glimpse of eternity.
Creators and inventors of the internet and the World Wide Web can today assume that their new medium will outlive them. They have created a paradoxically ephemeral monument of bits and bytes. Any skilled internet user can contribute a small part to this monument by adding to its growth and to the understanding of its uses and potential, leaving a virtual footprint in the world of bits and bytes. Not surprisingly, programmers, hackers and web-designers are among the most closely-knit communities around the internet.
As experts, researchers have lost some of their power of superior knowledge, in a similar way that medieval scholars lost their monopoly of knowledge to humanists and others. However, they also have an entirely new and expanded knowledge base to work with. If medieval scholars had to move physically to acquire knowledge and 19th century scholars had to physically move books, 21st century researchers can access knowledge independently of its physical location. In addition, this new knowledge base is not organized hierarchically or chronologically (one of the great achievement of print culture) but can be searched by a variety of criteria. The internet creates webs of information as opposed to distinct libraries. In this context interdisciplinary research becomes easier and more natural as does cross-continental research involving teams of otherwise isolated experts from around the world.
In addition, anyone can learn or teach (almost) anything, independently of formal education. The spread of printed books went hand in hand with the bourgeoisie’s entitlement to personal opinion. The internet environment revives this entitlement, extending it beyond any single class and to previously closed domains such as medicine.
Artists have not even begun to explore the limits and potential of hypertext, internet-video, music, collaborative art etc. offered by the internet. As early TV mimicked radio, these forms are still mimicking current “real world” art forms. As new communities emerge in the internet environment, artists will find new audiences – and interactivity will allow them to be close to these audiences, as early authors and journalists had close relations with their readers. In the exploration of the medium and its possibilities both artists and audiences will shape the internet and the communities around it.
New media have typically offered new chances of success for anyone challenging the old social powers (which usually dominated the old medium). Some people isolated in traditional society have been able to meet through the internet and form large cross-national communities of support. Subversive and violent groups also have new channels and venues for communication, chillingly exemplified by Al Qaeda’s mastery of digital encryption techniques. Many people fear that large transnational corporations will be the most successful challengers. It remains to be seen whether they can inspire trust, loyalty and a sense of community.
For each of these groups (from programmers to terrorists), shared technology can be uniting, because they are already creating their own content with the aim of sharing it. They already have a type of common narrative which technology helps to distribute. They are neither isolationist, nor have they created the new community that will give meaning to the internet world. They have simply adapted to and made particularly good use of the new medium. Other communities will also adapt with various degrees of success, dividing power between them in new ways. Perhaps the wider freedom to choose which community or communities one wants to belong to and the freedom to create one’s own world within the Web will remain.
I wrote this about Benedict Anderson's book a while back and thought it would work well on the blog, too.
Benedict Anderson points out that the ideologies of Marxism and Liberalism failed to unite their followers at critical moments because they failed to address issues of death and immortality. Nations by contrast were able to create imagined communities, which provided a sense of belonging, of connectedness with the past and the future at a time when religious modes of thought and society were faltering. Print media, technology and economy played a vital role in creating these communities.
We are currently witnessing the weakening of the nation state. It is assumed that internet media, technology and economy will shape new communities which will “emerge from the rubble”. Yet no new set of widely accepted beliefs or form of social organization has arisen that addresses issues of death and immortality in a world shaped by an ephemeral, ever-changing medium. Some attempts have been made to refocus on previous models of religious, geographical, ethnic or linguistic communities. But they have not been adopted by a majority of that population which is increasingly immersed in an internet society. Religious models are often accompanied by hierarchical structures that seem incompatible with the world of the web; geographical models appear irrelevant when physical location is not a factor limiting communication; ethnic models also seem to have little relevance as long as anonymity is easy to protect and communication is text or voice based. Linguistic structures seem attractive only as long as automatic translation remains at the level of Babel Fish and foreign characters (e.g. Japanese or Cyrillic) require separate software.
Trust was formerly built through mutual obligations and frequent civic interaction , through a feeling of jointly belonging to a large eternal community. How is trust built in an internet world, where communication is disembodied and anyone can easily pretend to be someone they are not? Understandably, fears run deep as the old imagined communities lose their power to organize and protect, and no new transcendental communities are available to replace them – fears voiced in anti-globalization demonstrations, calls for government regulation or censorship of the internet, attempts to exclude computers from classrooms.
In terms of new communities, the internet has several familiar community institutions. There are shared habits: Reading e-mail first thing in the morning has displaced earlier rituals of watching the morning TV news, reading the newspaper or saying prayers. There are public spaces such as forums and chat rooms – virtual counterparts of public houses, salons, malls or town squares. The internet community has started creating its own language, faintly recalling the power of Latin to unite Christendom and the power of written vernacular to support nation building. Words and even facial expressions are fragmented and reduced to abbreviations and emoticons. “Tech-speak” provides metaphors for modern life: People speak of the human brain in terms of electrical signals, parallel processing, even “wet-drives”. There is a protective border to the community that is crossed by connecting one’s computer to a modem and by typing a username and password. Access is gained by using technology, not by owning a passport or tracing the sign of the cross.
Still, most people don’t feel a sense of belonging when they log onto the internet. How do communities and their institutions in the internet environment differ? And why might these differences be unsettling?
One important distinction of internet communication is that often media technology is shared but content is not. While reading e-mail is a collective, often simultaneous ritual, there is no shared information or common narrative that joins community members as news or prayers could. E-mail as a highly individual medium tends to encourage personalized relationships rather than communal ones. Chat rooms provide virtual public space, yet they also have private rooms. Quite often the objective in joining the public space is to move the resulting conversation to a private room or to e-mail, achieving fragmentation of relationships rather than forging communities. All the while, the furnishers of earlier shared narratives are becoming more disparate: For example, dozens of cable TV channels are replacing the unified voices of broadcast TV.
Chain-mails, hoaxes and viruses are important exceptions to the vehicles of social fragmentation in the internet environment. They provide a sense of connectedness with a wider community, because they reach many different members and affect them in a similar way – and because the members are aware of these effects on people entirely unknown to them. The effect recalls the tall story of early newspapers. Newsletters are another exception, providing common knowledge and narratives for specific groups as the newspaper did for the nation.
Another important distinction between print or broadcast TV communities and internet communities is choice. In the world of internet and interconnection, I can choose which and how many communities I want to be a part of. Conversely, if I don’t choose any, no community will consider me one of its members. The internet environment hasn’t yielded a community that people are born into – a community that includes them from the moment they are born, regardless of ability or achievement, as a religion or nation will. Also, it is relatively easy to leave any internet-based community. No bond is sacred in the Web – a development paralleled in the “real world”, where once sacrosanct communities (from marriages to patron-employer relationships) are breaking up. Thus the current world of internet seems to lead to existential isolation, failing to offer a feeling of belonging, failing to sanction transgressions. The choices are so numerous and the boundaries so flexible as to diminish the value of belonging or not belonging to a certain community. It seems a small reassurance that expulsion from the overall web community is practically impossible, except through lack of hardware or software.
Perhaps it is the attraction of the internet environment that – as old borders are crumbling – few new ones have yet been defined. And as long as not all people have access to the internet, a loose “digital” community has a means of distinguishing itself from others (through access to technology and skill in using it).
In this type of environment a variety of people thrive: the people who created the new medium and know it best, researchers and all curious people who have a new frontier to discover, artists, and people disadvantaged or isolated in the world of nation states. To all of these groups, a new medium in general and the internet in specific can offer a glimpse of eternity.
Creators and inventors of the internet and the World Wide Web can today assume that their new medium will outlive them. They have created a paradoxically ephemeral monument of bits and bytes. Any skilled internet user can contribute a small part to this monument by adding to its growth and to the understanding of its uses and potential, leaving a virtual footprint in the world of bits and bytes. Not surprisingly, programmers, hackers and web-designers are among the most closely-knit communities around the internet.
As experts, researchers have lost some of their power of superior knowledge, in a similar way that medieval scholars lost their monopoly of knowledge to humanists and others. However, they also have an entirely new and expanded knowledge base to work with. If medieval scholars had to move physically to acquire knowledge and 19th century scholars had to physically move books, 21st century researchers can access knowledge independently of its physical location. In addition, this new knowledge base is not organized hierarchically or chronologically (one of the great achievement of print culture) but can be searched by a variety of criteria. The internet creates webs of information as opposed to distinct libraries. In this context interdisciplinary research becomes easier and more natural as does cross-continental research involving teams of otherwise isolated experts from around the world.
In addition, anyone can learn or teach (almost) anything, independently of formal education. The spread of printed books went hand in hand with the bourgeoisie’s entitlement to personal opinion. The internet environment revives this entitlement, extending it beyond any single class and to previously closed domains such as medicine.
Artists have not even begun to explore the limits and potential of hypertext, internet-video, music, collaborative art etc. offered by the internet. As early TV mimicked radio, these forms are still mimicking current “real world” art forms. As new communities emerge in the internet environment, artists will find new audiences – and interactivity will allow them to be close to these audiences, as early authors and journalists had close relations with their readers. In the exploration of the medium and its possibilities both artists and audiences will shape the internet and the communities around it.
New media have typically offered new chances of success for anyone challenging the old social powers (which usually dominated the old medium). Some people isolated in traditional society have been able to meet through the internet and form large cross-national communities of support. Subversive and violent groups also have new channels and venues for communication, chillingly exemplified by Al Qaeda’s mastery of digital encryption techniques. Many people fear that large transnational corporations will be the most successful challengers. It remains to be seen whether they can inspire trust, loyalty and a sense of community.
For each of these groups (from programmers to terrorists), shared technology can be uniting, because they are already creating their own content with the aim of sharing it. They already have a type of common narrative which technology helps to distribute. They are neither isolationist, nor have they created the new community that will give meaning to the internet world. They have simply adapted to and made particularly good use of the new medium. Other communities will also adapt with various degrees of success, dividing power between them in new ways. Perhaps the wider freedom to choose which community or communities one wants to belong to and the freedom to create one’s own world within the Web will remain.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
