Misunderstanding Media

Brian Winston

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138699984
• eBook ISBN: 9781315512198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie sociale

The 1980s saw constant reports of an information revolution. This book, first published in 1986, challenges this view. It argues that the information revolution is an illusion, a rhetorical gambit, an expression of profound historical ignorance, and a movement dedicated to purveying misunderstanding and disseminating disinformation. In this historically based attack on the information revolution, Professor Winston takes a had look at the four central information technologies – telephones, television, computers and satellites. He describes how these technologies were created and diffused, showing that instead of revolution we just have 'business as usual'. He formulates a 'law' of the suppression of radical potential – a law which states that new telecommunication technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is contained. Despite the so-called information revolution, the major institutions of society remain unchanged, and most of us remain in total ignorance of the history of technology.

1
Breakages Limited

The past is prologue

The suggestion that we are not in the midst of monumental and increasingly frequent change in telecommunications runs so counter to our whole underlying philosophy of progress, as well as the particular rhetoric of the 'information revolution', that it must surely be doubted by right-thinking persons. But the position taken here, rather, is that Western civilisation over the past three centuries has displayed, despite enormous changes in detail, fundamental continuity. While it is impossible to predict that such continuity will be sustained over either the short or the long term, it is contended that any discontinuities, should they occur, will not primarily be attributable to telecommunications technologies. Other more traditionally disruptive social forces –disaffected proletarian youth, for example – rather than communications, will make greater contributions to such upheavals as might occur. This is to deny telecommunications the role of engine of change and also thereby to deny the possibility that a revolution in information technology (however that be defined) is any species of general revolution.

'Revolution' is used here in its commonly understood sense of alteration and change, rather than in its original technical sense of recurrence or turning. This is the meaning, with its modern connotation of rapid political change, intended by those who coined the phrase 'information revolution'.

Revolution and revolutionary and revolutionize have of course also come to be used, outside of political contexts, to indicate fundamental changes, or fundamentally new developments, in a very wide range of activities. It can seem curious to read of 'a revolution in shopping habits' or of the 'revolution in transport' and of course there are cases when this is simply the language of publicity to describe some 'dynamic' new product. But in some ways this is at least no more strange than the association of revolution with VIOLENCE, since one of the crucial tendencies of the word was simply towards important or fundamental change. Once the factory system and the new technology of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century had been called, by analogy with the French Revolution, the INDUSTRIAL Revolution, one basis for description of new institutions and new technologies as revolutionary had been laid, (capitals and brackets in original)¹

Revolution, in whatever sense it is used, implies movement, and in these developed usages, that means movement through time. The concept of the 'information revolution' is therefore in essence historical; and the critique of the concept offered in this book is also grounded in the past, a past limited to the particular circumstances surrounding the application, over the last two centuries, of science to the human communication process. We shall argue that there is nothing in this history to indicate that significant major changes have not been accommodated by pre-existing social formations, and that 'revolution' is therefore quite the wrong word to apply to the current situation. Indeed, it is possible to see this historical record as being regular enough, if the above premise of continuity is accepted, to serve as a model for all such communication technologies, certainly past and present and, probably, in the short term future too.

The pattern of change in telecommunications, although historical (which is to say, diachronic), can also be expressed as a field in which three elements – science, technology and society – intersect. The relationship between these three elements can be elucidated by reference to another conceptual model – one taken from Saussurian linguistics.

Utterance is, for Saussure, the surface expression of a deep-seated mental competence. In Chomskyan terms, each utterance is a performance dependent on this competence. By analogy, then, these communication technologies are also performances but of a sort of scientific competence. Technology can be seen as standing in a structural relationship to science – as it were – utterances of a scientific language, performances of a scientific competence. In the linguistic model the link between competence and performance is achieved by the operation of transformations which move the utterance from deep to surface level. These movements are rule-governed and it is the rules – grammar in language – which enable a speaker to generate comprehensible but unique utterances. In the model proposed for technological change these transformations are not claimed to be so regular as to be rule-governed. The notion of transformation in our model, on the contrary, allows the model to accommodate less predictable factors. Transformations address the operation of factors external to the actual performance of technology, factors which work to transform a scientifically grounded notion into a widely diffused device.

Phase one: scientific competence

The development of telecommunications devices can be seen as a series of performances ('utterances') by technologists in response to the first phase of the model – the ground of scientific competence. The centuries-old investigations of electromagnetic phenomena and photo-kinesics are the two fundamental lines of scientific inquiry which make up this first phase. The poss6ibilities of using electricity for signalling march, from the mid-eighteenth century on, virtually hand in hand with the growth of the scientific understanding of electricity. Similarly, the discovery of photography involved knowledge of the different effects light has on various substances, a scientific agenda item from at least the Middle Ages on. The propensity of certain solids to conduct sounds seems to have been known in ancient times and was certainly a well-observed phenomenon by the late eighteenth century. The photoelectric responses of selenium were known more than a century ago.

Note
Transformations in general: the three transformations

In the model (see Fig. 1) phases, such as the phase of scientific competence just described, are acted upon and transformed.

(i) The first of these transformations moves the technology from the phase of scientific competence into the phase of technological performance. The first transformation (which will be designated the ideation transformation) thus moves from science to technology, its effect being to activate the technologist.

The two subsequent transformations alter the work of the technologist, or, to use the terminology of the model, the on-going work of technological performance.

(ii) The second transformation (the transformation occasioned by supervening social necessity) pushes the work of the technologist from prototypes into what is popularly conceived of as 'invention'.

(iii) The third (a transformation which will be called the 'law' ' of the suppression of radical potential) moves from the invention of devices to their diffusion.

Each transformation takes the technology further from the realm of pure science and closer to the everyday world of actual generally-used devices.

We shall examine each of these three transformations in a little greater detail as they occur in the model, beginning with the ideation transformation.

Figure 1 The model

The first transformation: ideation

The first of these transformations is the most local, which is to say it occurs within the laboratory. To continue with the linguistic metaphor the ideation transformation is akin to the processes whereby a transformation at the level of competence takes place, in the human brain, so that utterance, performance, can be generated. Ideation occurs when the technologist envisages the device – gets the idea, formulates the problems involved and hypothesises a solution. Those mysterious mental forces – creativity, intuition, imagination, what has been called 'the will to think' – are subsumed by ideation.

Although the technological idea will be grounded in scientific competence, it will not necessarily relate directly to science any more than a conscious understanding of linguistic competence is needed to generate utterance. Rather, just as in language a formal understanding of the deep structure of linguistic competence is not a prerequisite of utterance, so too a lack of formal scientific competence is no bar to technological performance. But the technologist will, at some level, have absorbed the science; just as a speaker, at some level, has absorbed grammar.

The ideation transformation interacts with the first phase and occurs concurrently with it; in telecommunications, transformations never precede science since the formulation of technological problems has always followed agenda set by scientific inquiry – and this, contrary to received opinion which sees the primacy of science in technological research as a recent development, has always been true of electrical telecommunications.

How the idea of television was first triggered by scientific advances has been outlined in the introduction. A Frenchman hypothesised the telephone in 1854, more than 20 years before Bell. A German thought of the telegraph in the last years of the eighteenth century, three decades before the first working device. Bell Laboratory workers began worrying about the transistor in the 1930s when solid state amplifiers had already been envisaged for a decade. Some of these thinkers went on to test their ideas technically; many did not. But more often than not their work was known to those who set about building devices.

Note
Technological performances in general

The three phases of technological performance

Before proceeding, we must now examine, in general, the last recurring element of the model – technological performances.

Ideation transforms the processes of science into the testing of solutions – the building of devices which is the business of technological performance. This will go on until the device is widely diffused and even beyond, as spin-offs and refinements are developed. Performance is triggered by a transformation (ideation) and each successive transformation alters the nature of what the performance produces.

(i) The second phase, after scientific competence, is designated the phase of technological performance – prototypes. During this phase, the technologists begin to build devices working towards fulfilling the plans which emerged from the ideation transformation.

(ii) The third phase, technological performance – invention, is, from the perspective of the technologist, exactly similar but the operation of supervening social necessity (the second transformation) is catalytic. So within the laboratory the work continues as it did in the prototype phase, but the second transformation – supervening necessity – means the devices now produced are inventions. This third phase, then, shall be designated technological performance – invention.

(iii) The operation of the next transformation, the 'law' of the suppression of radical potential, similarly affects the last phase of technological performance. Supervening social necessity guarantees that the invention will be produced. The above 'law' operates as a constraint on that production. This final transformation occasions a tripartite phase of technological performance – production, spin-offs and redundant devices or redundancies, which reflects the effects of the contradictions which are at work.

These phases of technological performance are all discussed below as they occur, beginning with the prototype phase.

Phase two: technological performance – prototypes

The four classes of prototypes

The solution to a problem raised by possibilities in the advance of science has been proposed in the ideation transformation. Devices must now be built.

Prototypes, such devices, can be of four distinct classes.

(i) The prototype can be rejected because a supervening necessity has not yet operated and no possible use for the device is seen, Rowland's demonstration of a working telegraph in 1816 would be an example of this. The British naval authorities, understanding that the semaphore was the only machine to use in long distance signalling, simply refused to acknowledge the superiority of the electromagnetic machine. Nearly every technology has its Rowland.

(ii) The prototype can be accepted because the early and incomplete operation of a supervening necessity has created a partial need which the prototype partially fills. The daguerreotype photographic process which was widely used between 1850 and 1862 is among the clearest examples of this accepted group. It was eventually superseded by processes which used negatives, the essential mark of modern photography. Another example can be found in the development by AT&T of non-geostationary communications satellites. These were built and used a few years before the introduction, by Hughes, of the current geostationary device. The efficiency of Hollerith punch-card calculators, introduced at the turn of the century but increasingly sophisticated in the years after the First World War, can be said to have been so well accepted that the development of the electronic computer was delayed.

(iii) Parallel prototypes. These will occur when the device which will become the parallel prototype is already in existence solving another technological problem. Its potential use for a secondary purpose is realised only after the operation of a supervening necessity. Various devices existed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century to demonstrate the validity of electromagnetic wave theory. Distinguished physicists such as Hertz and Lodge are associated with these demonstration machines. They were in fact a species of radio but were not seen as such. Their existence is, however, of importance in tracing the work of Marconi, Popov and others which led to radio. The cathode ray tube, before Rozing, would be another example.

(iv) Finally, in this second phase of technological performance, there can be partial prototypes which are machines designed to perform effectively in a given area but which do not. The telephonic apparatus developed by Reis in the 1860s and, arguably, Bell's earliest machines were of this type. Baird and Jenkins's mechanical televisions were also partial prototypes.

These then are the four prototypes of the second phase – rejected, accepted, parallel and partial. This classification is without prejudice to the efficacy of the devices. Except for partial prototypes which simply did not work very well, the other three classes of prototype in this phase all worked, more rather than less. The degree of their subsequent diffusion, though, depends more on the operation of the supervening necessity transformation than o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Dedication
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 BREAKAGES LIMITED
• 2 FUGITIVE PICTURES
• 3 ‘INVENTIONS FOR CASTING UP SUMS, VERY PRETTY’
• 4 DIGRESSION – ‘THE MOST REMARKABLE TECHNOLOGY’
• 5 LITTLE BIRD OF UNION AND UNDERSTANDING
• 6 COMMUNICATE BY WORD OF MOUTH
• IN CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Index