Soft Edge:Nat Hist&Future Info

Paul Levinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134641932
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Soft Edge is a one-of-a-kind history of the information revolution. In his lucid and direct style, Paul Levinson, historian and philosopher of media and communications, gives us more than just a history of information technologies. The Soft Edge is a book about theories on the evolution of technology, the effects that human choice has on this (r)evolution, and what's in store for us in the future.

Paul Levinson's engaging voice guides us on a tour that explains how communications media have been responsible for major developments in history and for profound changes in our day-to-day lives. Levinson presents the intriguing argument that technology actually becomes more human. We see how information technologies are selected on the basis of how well they meet human needs. Why is email more like speech than print is? Why didn't the arrival of television destroy the radio? These and many more thought provoking questions are answered in The Soft Edge.

Boldly extending and deepening the pathways blazed by McLuhan, Paul Levinson has provided us with a brilliant and exciting study of life with our old media, our new media, and the media still to come.

1 INTRODUCTION

“Natural histories” abound in scholarship and popular treatments of human affairs —a recently re-issued, not entirely inapt, example being Tabori’s The Natural History of Stupidity (1993).

So why risk the danger of adding to Tabori’s volume with a natural history of information technology?

The association is more than attractive, provocative packaging. Information and the structures that disseminate, preserve, and thus shape it are, in their very origin, natural: what else is DNA, and the living structures that it both shapes and is shaped by, if not a system of information technology par excellence? As the pioneer cyberneticist Norbert Wiener recognized—and clearly articulated (1948) —a half-century ago, biological and technological systems both run on patterns of information dispersal, including feedback, which was Wiener’s greatest interest.

We should not be surprised, then, to find in the history of information technology, and in its current configurations and future projections as well, an evolutionary dynamic in many respects very much like that of the literally natural, organic world. This complex process of media evolution, of course different from as well as similar to the evolution of living things, will be the backdrop against which we will consider each of the episodes of information technology and its impact on the world in this book. Each of the episodes will be probed, in other words, not only in terms of its influence in its immediate human environment, but as an expression, clarification, on occasion refutation, of a larger theory of technological evolution also being developed in this book.

We begin, in this Introduction, with a brief description of some of the evolutionary dynamics of information technology.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES COUNT

In the natural world, information not only counts on the genetic level in the ordering of proteins to form living structures, but on the environmental level, where living organisms daily face life-and-death encounters with all that surrounds them. Information about those surrounds is clearly crucial: the amoeba that lacks information about a noxious element in its vicinity may well embrace it and die.

Donald T.Campbell (e.g., 1974a) has shown how various modes of perception that have arisen in the organic world—touch, taste, smell, hearing, and vision— each provide a means of vicarious interaction with the environment, a knowledge which in some way allows the organism to encounter the environment from a distance, to embrace it without the possible payoff of immediate death. Two cardinal characteristics of this vicariousness, which will be considered extensively in our discussion of information technology in this volume, are that (1) it always entails some loss in accuracy of information, some potential for error, in comparison to the mere total embracing of any object in the environment (amoebas do not suffer from optical illusions), and (2) the particular sensory modes favored by the specific perceptual apparatus of any organism are crucial determinants of what the organism is, and how it functions in the world (sightless organisms live in a very different realm from those with vision, and indeed look very different, as well as differently).

In human beings, the vicarious mechanism of abstract thought and language works in all of the above ways. We, its possessors, have a palpable survival advantage over similar organisms that do not. To tell a group of hominids that there may be a lion a few hills away gives that group an edge not enjoyed by an otherwise equivalent group of chimps, whose only information about the possible lion comes from a member of its troupe frantically pointing and gesturing. Of course, abstract thought and language—facilitating the capacity to communicate about things not immediately present—also opens up large possibilities for lying. And these two consequences, the amplification of our survival as well as our capacity for error, are a fair shorthand for what we are as a species.

No information technology developed by humans since our emergence as thinking-speaking beings has come close to equalling, let alone exceeding or in any way replacing, the centrality of language as the essence of our species. But these technologies have had nonetheless, in more limited ways, a profound impact on our existence. We turn now to one useful means of categorizing that impact.

MEDIA DETERMINISM : HARD AND SOFT

The origins of speech and thought are so deeply entwined with our very emergence as a species that questions of which came first—abstract words or abstract thought—are very difficult to settle, as are issues of to what extent we were meaningfully human prior to our capacity for abstract language in its external and internal ramifications. I have argued for years (e.g., Levinson, 1979, 1988) that abstract thought at very least presupposes a capacity for its communication via abstract speech. Absent an ability to communicate abstractions, they provide limited evolutionary advantage: thinking a lion may be over the next hill the next day is hardly as effective, in terms of group/species survival, as speaking that thought to neighbors who can understand it.

The question of what role the powerful co-evolutionary combination of abstract speech and abstract thought may have played in determining our human existence is probably a bit easier to answer, though by no means uncomplicated. Clearly, abstract language (comprising speech and thought) is a necessary condition of our humanity: we could not be human without it. Whether language is a sufficient condition—meaning that its emergence made our humanity inevitable—is not as clear. Certainly other aspects, including bipedality and digital opposability, played crucial roles.

To the extent that an information system has an inevitable, irresistible social (or other) effect, media theorists refer to that relationship as “hard” media determinism. The relationship of abstract language to humanity comes closest to that extreme or ideal; the fact that it does not fully achieve it highlights a very profound point about information technologies and their impact on human beings, to wit, that media rarely, if ever, have absolute, unavoidable social consequences. Rather, they make events possible—events whose shape and impact are the result of factors other than the information technology at hand. Media theorists refer to this type of determinism as “soft.”

To appreciate the difference between hard and soft determinism, consider the operation of information technology in creating organic structures and systems on the genetic level. Here the relationship of genotype to phenotype is not close to 100 per cent either—other factors like catalysts for the operation of DNA are significant—but there are clear pathways of cause-and-effect between DNA and organisms lacking (other than in metaphor) in the relationship of information technologies and social structures. Genes determine the colors of eyes in far less soft a manner than telescopes and microscopes applied to those eyes determine the scientific revolutions that may ensue. Indeed, though neither relationship is absolute, or “hard,” which means that each is actually a variant of soft determinism, we may reasonably call the genetic hard and the social soft.

Soft determinism, then, will be the modus operandi of all the social consequences of information technology we will be considering in this book. It is a system of making things possible—of the result not being able to occur without the technology—rather than the technology inevitably and unalterably creating that result. It is a system that operates synergistically in its power, meaning that other crucial factors played a role in the result. The elevator made the skyscraper possible. Clearly, tall buildings would never have been constructed were there not a way to get up and down them in a few steps. But equally clearly, architecture competent to construct tall buildings was also necessary. What good is a tall building with an elevator or escalator inside, if it crumbles in the first strong wind that comes along?

Provocative assertions of media theorists may appear to be claims of hard determinism, and have been derided as such, when in fact they are assertions of soft determinism, dressed to kill as hard. When McLuhan, for example, observes that “Had TV come first there would have been no Hitler at all” (1964, p. 261), he is claiming that the substance and style of Hitler’s message found essential support in the intensely personal but faceless mass delivery of radio—an intimacy between speaker and audience shattered in the more arm’s-length, antiseptic images of television. Such an assertion is provocative enough, but it is hardly an insistence that radio alone or inevitably brought Hitler or the Nazis into being. McLuhan’s critics (see, e.g., McLuhan: Hot and Cool, edited by Stearn, 1967) often miss this. Obviously, Hitler was also the result of other factors and human choices—though, as we will explore in more detail in Chapter 8, the simultaneous mass acoustic audience created by radio resulted, even in open societies, in the two most powerful democratic leaders of the century: FDR and Churchill.

Soft determinism, then, entails an interplay between the information technology making something possible, and human beings turning that possibility into a reality. Human choice—the capacity for rational, deliberate decision and planning regarding media—is an ever-present factor in our consideration of the impact of media.

In the next two sections, we will briefly consider how human rational control of media has been and can be manifested, and then how media nonetheless seem to teem with unintended consequences.

HUMAN DIRECTION

Before we address the question of human control of media, we first must consider the larger issue of human control over any events at all. Do we have free will, or is everything we do determined (in a “hard” way) by our genetic programming, environmental influences, over-arching currents of fate in the cosmos, or whatever?

I have always found the most persuasive reason for rejecting such blanket determinism, and therein keeping the possibilities of free will in play, to reside in the recognition that were everything indeed so predetermined, so would this very text, so would your and my and everyone’s consideration of this very issue be a complete sham or illusion. And since I believe with every fiber of my being that I most certainly have a choice in everything I write, not to mention a healthy suspicion for any argument that inherently undermines itself (to argue for total determinism, i.e., no free will, is to argue against the efficacy of argument itself, which plays no role in the predetermined outcome), I feel comfortable rejecting any doctrine of total determinism—scientific, religious, or otherwise. At the same time, I readily admit that this choice is one of emotion as well as reason—for my brief that argument counts may indeed be a self-reflective illusion—just as beliefs that the world is real, not my dream, or rationality is preferable to irrationality, are pre-rational, or choices which cannot be unparadoxically defended by reason alone (see Levinson, 1988, for more). As someone who believes that critical rationality is the best path toward progress, I’m not particularly happy about this; but as a critical rationalist, I have no choice but to admit it.

The invocation of free will as a fundamental principle, however, is no writ for a free ride in a universe in which anything goes. Free will comes with all manner of strings attached. For example, as I frequently point out to colleague devotees of science fiction (e.g., Levinson, 1994c), free will is incompatible with time travel to the future (unless we also claim an existence of cascading ever-emerging alternate realities), for if someone could travel to a time five minutes from when I was first sitting down to write at my computer, and look over my shoulder to see what I had written, then I would have no choice but to write just and only what the time traveler had seen.

And free will, of course, also entails responsibility: for to have control is to have responsibility about how we control. In a world in which free will operates, in which the impacts of media are possible outcomes among which we may select and discard, mitigate and enhance, what control have we exhibited over our information technologies?

Unsurprisingly, as we will see in the very next section, the instances of human intention proceeding unimpeded from inception to invention to implementation are few in the realm of information technology. Indeed, unintended consequences of invention abound: Edison first thought his phonograph would be most used as a device for recording conversations on the telephone, which was in turn invented by Bell in pursuit of a hearing aid for his wife.

But there is an indirect, after-the-fact exercise of human rationality in media which is equally ubiquitous, and best captured in what I call the phenomenon of remedial media and the parable of the window shade:

Once upon a time, the only way we could look out of walls, necessary for our protection from climate and people alike, was to make holes in the walls. But these small holes resulted in our being rained on every time we used them in inclement weather. So, we invented the window. This information technology allowed us the protection of the wall from rainy, cold conditions even as we looked outside: the window was a wall, or a piece of a wall, that acted, informationally but not physically, like a hole. And therein was its great advantage.

But the advantage—like the advantage of all things evolutionary, and all things technological—was not without drawback. For as the window greatly enhanced comfortable perception from the inside out, it also enhanced easy perception from the outside in. The window brought into being the Peeping Tom. It increased our protection from climate outside the wall—for it replaced holes—but as it did this it decreased our protection from people outside the wall, at least insofar as they had increased informational access to the inside of our homes.

One very significant lesson we can derive from this is that all technological evolution—indeed, all evolution—entails tradeoffs. We who have vision and abstract language can be victims of optical illusions and lies which, as indicated above, are unknown to the lowly amoeba. So the window, like the vision it was designed to enhance, and the rationality that helped bring it into being, is a tradeoff.

But that same rationality allows us to do something more about tradeoffs than just accept them. Unlike the amoeba—and, indeed, all other living organisms, as far as we know—we can evaluate the tradeoff, and perhaps invent and bring to bear new technologies, remedial media, which improve the balance, if ever so slightly, in our favor.

And that is indeed what we did with the window. Rather than acquiescing to the Peeping Tom, or reverting back to holes in the wall, we invented a battery of remedial media to give us the advantages of the window without its informational disadvantages: we invented window shades, Venetian blinds, all manner of curtains. Of course, these media do not bestow perfection—a window covered with a shade can still be broken into, whereas a wall cannot—but they do increase the ratio of benefits to drawbacks in this environment.

And we can see the operation of remedial media analogous to the window shade in diverse other media systems. Television once was criticized for its ephemerality, for the incapacity of its programming to be browsed before viewing, or captured for viewing or re-viewing in the future. These drawbacks were significant indeed, for they made television on a very basic structural level less amenable to human control than the book. Indeed, some of the more extreme critics of television (e.g., Mander, 1978) urged that it be abandoned entirely, if possible, in favor of the book. Fortunately, this advice, on a par with going back to walls in response to the problem of naked new-born windows, was not followed. Instead, we invented video-taping devices, which endow television with a reviewable past and a programmable future vis-à-vis the viewing audience. We might say that the VCR is to TV as the window shade is to the window.

As we will see in subsequent chapters (especially 10–13), the personal computer and its impact on writing can be seen as a remedial medium that addresses the inadequacies of writing lamented as far back as Socrates, who yearned for an “intelligent writing” which could respond to questions put to it, as in a dialogue, rather than preserving a “solemn silence” (Plato, secs 275–276). Of course, not all remedial media are invented for the corrective role they may come to play—computers certainly were not invented, in the first instance, as a way to improve upon the shortcomings of text wedded to paper.

Unintended consequences thus are pervasive, even in the deliberate application of human reason in the development of remedial media. We now take a closer look at this essential Darwinian process.

THE REVOLUTION OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

A fundamental tenet of Darwinian theory is that the generation of organic characteristics and organisms occurs independently of environmental influences— that is, the environment exerts its influence, makes its selection, after the organic characteristics have been generated. In this way, the environment’s influence is expressed subsequent to its encounter with an organism, which, if it survives and procreates, conveys genes that give rise to traits in some way compatible with the original environment.

This means that the gene pool and thus the generative process is far from random—the message in its code is rather at very least a blueprint for some kind of organic victory, or non-defeat, of the past. Moths, after all, do not come in all possible colors. The difference between all possible colors and the actual colors of moths is one measure of the nonrandom component of Darwinian generation.

But of the limited range of moth colors that are generated, those that survive at any given time do so because the color confers an advantage in a current environment. Moths whose wings are mottled in black-and-white, to use a famous example from England, once had a...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: THE FIRST DIGITAL MEDIUM: THE ALPHABET AND THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM
• 3: THE PRINTED AUTHORSHIP OF THE MODERN WORLD
• 4: THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE AGELESS IMAGE
• 5: TELEGRAPHY: THE SUSPECT MESSENGER
• 6: TELEPHONE: THE TOY THAT ROARED
• 7: ELECTRICITY: THE BOOK’S BEST FRIEND
• 8: RADIO: ALL TOGETHER NOW
• 9: SURVIVAL OF THE MEDIA FIT: RADIO, MOTION PICTURES, AND TV IN HUMAN ECOLOGICAL NICHES
• 10: REMEDIAL MEDIA: VIEWS VIA VCR AND WINDOW
• 11: WORD PROCESSING AND ITS MASTERS
• 12: THE ONLINE AUTHOR AS PUBLISHER AND BOOKSTOR
• 13: HYPERTEXT AND AUTHOR/ READER INVERSIONS
• 14: THE OPEN WEB AND ITS ENEMIES
• 15: TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCREENS
• 16: PAPER FUTURES
• 17: ELECTRONIC WATERMARKS: A HIGH PROFILE FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
• 18: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN REAL LIFE
• 19: YOU CAN’T TOUCH THAT IN CYBERSPACE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY