Communication, Technology and Cultural Change

Gary J Krug

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761972013, 9780761972006
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

With a foreword by Norman Denzin

Communication and the history of technology have invariably been examined in terms of artefacts and people.

Gary Krug argues that communication technology must be studied as an integral part of culture and lived-experience.

Rather than stand in awe of the apparent explosion of new technologies, this book links key moments and developments in communication technology with the social conditions of their time. It traces the evolution of technology, culture, and the self as mutually dependent and influential.

This innovative approach will be welcomed by undergraduates and postgraduates needing to develop their understanding of the cultural effects of communication technology, and the history of key communication systems and techniques.

ONE

Technology as Culture

Our tragedy today is a general and a universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the heart in conflict with itself … His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. (William Faulkner 1950)

A common truism of the current day is that technology is accelerating at unprecedented speeds. While many refinements and extensions of communication technology into the personal world are indeed occurring with great rapidity, the truism overlooks the more important observation that the greatest changes in communications took place in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth or twenty-first. In that earlier century and for the first time in human history, the message was commonly separated from a messenger, becoming electronic. The speed of a rider on horseback was superseded. The manufacture of books and papers became inexpensive enough to finally permeate the great masses of people in the industrializing world. Most of the basic forms of narrative, the semiotic conventions of images, and the large social relations formed between mass society and mass media appeared over 100 years ago. Yet, despite their origins in earlier times, the contemporary inflections of technology, especially in media, appear with a ubiquity that is simultaneously familiar and strange. Consequentially, the social and personal effects of mediated communications have become more obvious and more celebrated and also more subtle and threatening.

The pace of change remains a factor, however, in the most immediate and generally noticed transformations of the world from something familiar and having historical depth to a place which appears transient and alien even as it becomes the shared world of contemporary life. The speed of change and the acceleration of technological development are major factors in the destabilization of the local and vernacular world. The most cogent of the philosophers of speed, Paul Virilio (1994), has written at length upon the dissolution of the real into vectors of speed and movement. The real, he notes, is being ‘accidented’ by the virtual: that is, by the creation of the new, the railroad and the airplane create with them the destruction of the old, the derailment and the airplane crash. In just this way, the creation of the virtual world, the electronic world of ‘glocalized’ presence, destroys the physical presence (Virilio 1997). So, too, the familiar and known disappear into the new products and systems of technology. With a book such as this, for example, the author and reader are guaranteed that specific examples of technology will already be outmoded and superseded before the ink is dried. Books are certainly too slow as a medium to track the changes of communication technologies; monthly magazines barely suffice for the expert. Only electronic communications such as the internet or the television can provide information quickly enough to be even remotely current. As such, the book as a topical source is accidented; it disappears from that position in the social discourses.

This does not mean that the book is finished, though. If reality is too swift, if technology outpaces even science fiction, perhaps the book is more suited to another, more traditional use. The book still excels in its ability to present complex, synthesized ideas and to provide them in a form for contemplation. Such a use changes the subject matter and the focus of the book, but it is a deliberately slow medium of communication and is uniquely suited to this end. Further, the act of reading the book, as opposed to being online, links us back in time to other ways of perceiving the world. It establishes a linkage to the physical and psychical processes of earlier times.

Much of this book is concerned with describing the differences between communication technologies of the present and those of the past. I do not seek merely to document the physical and social forms of these technologies, however. Communication as a human activity has, for most of its history, existed as activities taking place between the minds of people. The book and the paper were dumb and deaf without living voices and minds to give them existence in the shared human world. Only the electronically mediated world can appear to have existence and indeed a life separate from the human. Thus, the relationships between physical communication technologies, the social settings in which they appear, the cultural meanings that people construct around them, and the selves and beliefs of human beings, are integral to understanding this history.

The 9–11 Event

Like many people around the world, I watched the burning buildings at the World Trade Center collapse on television. This event took place in ‘real time’, that is to say, ‘live’. Excluding the insignificant delay of some fractions of a second in transmission between the cameras and my television, I saw the events as they happened. Or did I? What in fact did I witness? Linked into a global network of observers, I participated with others in two activities. First, I observed passively, watching the barely edited stream of images and listening to the commentary of newscasters. Second, I tried to make sense of the emerging events. In the second task, I was guided by the comments, hypotheses, and statements of the newscasters. How was such an event to be framed either as experience or as meaning?

Regarding the experience of the event, I was struck by the disbelief that people in TV interviews and in real life expressed about what they had seen. This was the immediate state which came from the event, and only after innumerable special reports and mini-documentaries and special newspaper segments has this story been woven into a form. The recurring statement of witnesses was: it was like a movie. Our only experience of this order of event is in movies, and even the coverage on TV of the planes striking the towers quickly employed the editing techniques of film: the slow-motion shot, the multiple angles of the same event, etc. Time was frozen, dissected, rearranged, and presented for us as ‘that which happened’. Signifiers of attack and disaster drawn from times long past were invoked and their images commingled with these new ones: 1941, Pearl Harbor, the explosion of the battleship Arizona – all this in a year that had seen the release of a new film about Pearl Harbor.

During the 9–11 event, the entire technology of advanced electronic media and the institutions of journalism were fulfilling one of their primary social functions: the creation of memory and meaning in ways that can be taken for granted. Luhman writes that ‘memory consists in being able to take certain assumptions about reality as given and known about in every communication, without having to introduce them specially into the communication and justify them’ (2000: 65). The World Trade Center attacks, now commonly known and referred to in the US simply as ‘9–11’, had to be written and rewritten into the memory of the media, bound to signifiers from the past, framed as a ‘terrorist attack’, and so on. What had appeared to everyone watching that morning as the unfolding of more and more strange images, as more and more shocking revelations (other planes, all air traffic grounded), and as apprehension (which is the purpose of this sort of ‘spot terrorism’), became meaningful. In so doing, the meaning of the event in the media solidified in several senses.

Obviously the idea of attack would be solidified as the stimulus for an American counter-attack, a plateau of political discourse upon which policy could be constructed. However, the silences of that morning, poignant amongst the incessant chatter, rumors, and misinformation, revealed the incapacity of the media in the face of an event that was ongoing. The unfolding event that flooded initially in unedited and uninterpreted streams throughout the world could not be made to stand still. It resisted the objectification necessary for modern communications, the modern social, and the modern self. The world cannot simply be, it must be some thing. The 9–11 event is what happens when events visibly outstrip the ability of media to position the world as object.

Captured now and held forever as a few moments of digitally encoded patterns of light and sound, the 9–11 event is no longer a part of a historical process of material events driving the perception and understanding of the world. Rather, it has become a moment upon which we can gaze, indeed are compelled to gaze back upon, but it is not the event we see. The media, the government, and the endless entourage of talking heads and experts have paralyzed and frozen the meaning. The 9–11 event has ceased to be a part of the present and exists as a past moment understood from the vantage point of the present.

Yet it is the silence amongst the public chatter, the lacunae in speech and discourse, which most eloquently revealed the process of consciousness confronting the emergence of historical reality. This process is precisely what the media subsequently effaced, encapsulating the event forever in a few repeating seconds of image and sound, all safely bundled into the ‘ideas’, ‘opinions’, and ‘responses’ which followed. Instead of seeing the event as one of those moments when events shatter our ability to contain them, we now reflect upon what it meant; and for a brief moment, what the world meant was not determined by technological systems because they had not yet framed the events which were so unexpected and inconceivable as to appear truly new.

That the event was symbolic is a banal observation already captured in the compression of thousands of moments into the single word ‘event’. Certainly those responsible planned their actions as a kind of theater on the global stage, and the world was already positioned in the drama that Baudrillard called terrorismo dell’arte (1990: 45). Newspapers in the US and UK devoted the whole of their front pages to full color photographs of exploding towers. The event was especially shocking and incomprehensible to the West for there was no sense of either the history or the reality of the terrorists in political or popular rhetoric. As Robert Fiske (2001) observed, ‘we will be told about “mindless terrorism”, the “mindless” bit being essential if we are not to realize how hated America has become in the land of the birth of three great religions’. Despite such attempts to historicize and so make meaningful the 9–11 event, the logic of contemporary politics and representation demanded a causality equally removed from history: terrorism as an abstract politics rather than as a means to an end.

Ensconced in the Western fetish with the fixity of meaning, we find that only shocking events have the power to make us ponder the oblivion so created. From Duchamp’s playful ennui, through the manifestos of Marinetti and the Futurists, through numerous artistic attempts to find another way to shock and so awaken the sleeping consciousness, meaning has proven the consistent modernist enemy of aesthetics and perception. But this is not quite accurate. ‘Meaning’ becomes limiting only to the extent that it minimizes our relationship both to the world and to our historically grounded understanding of being in the world. ‘Meaning’ becomes limiting if it is construed to be the socially accepted positioning of a subject within some dominant system of signification and the orientation of that position to the exclusion of other possible positions and relationships of signs. Meaning in the modern, capitalist, patriarchal sense is always an exclusion, a terminus of the processes of consciousness writing histories of itself through language.

These processes stop with the assumption of ‘meaning’ and one particular point of view emerges, one that always faces away both from the event and from the historical project of consciousness. What remains is consciousness gazing at the frozen moment which now stands in place of the world. The 9–11 event now stands in the social domain as an event justifying a ‘war on terror’ that can have no end. Once the meaning had coalesced into a form, both the history and the future could be written in terms of this form. Despite numerous unanswered questions, inconsistencies of narrative and chronology, and unexplained improbable events, the 9–11 event has settled into public discourse and discussion in an official form.¹ It means something.

As persons possessing this ‘meaning’, we need neither examine the world circumscribed by this meaning nor extend consciousness into new forms of language to link this meaning to existing beliefs. Rather, the world is already given and its meaning is already bound to the prevailing and dominant beliefs and myths. The outcome of ‘meaning’ severs people from the praxis of their own historical projects and from relationships to others. Kovel notes that ‘a person is correctly seen as a member of a faceless mass because of a lack of concrete relatedness to others in a historical project’ (1981: 223). Paradoxically, the more that people find themselves isolated from meaningful histories, the more appealing become the myths and meanings of the social in an eternal procession of moments in present time. The events in the world, defined for us as ‘the way things are’ and proclaimed by a thousand media heralds, are parroted again and again in everyday interaction, ensuring that even the personal is reinscribed into this overdetermined history.

A Brief History of Objectification

Eric Voegelin (1987) pointed out that noetic philosophy emerges out of a tripartite formula involving consciousness, the world, and language. To change any one of these three components is to alter the others as well. None of these three is independent of the other, and each arises in a particular way from its relationship with the other two. The technologies of communication, especially as these develop as systems, directly transform both our language and what stands for us as the world. In addition to our vision of the immediate world as what stands before us, we have also a shared common world, already replete with meaning, that is not known by us directly. This common world constitutes the shared social of news, of nations, and of the often anonymous powers that affect us in a thousand ways every day. The mediated world has the force of law, government, and social approval. It is ubiquitous and nearly omnipresent. As a consequence, our consciousness is increasingly our awareness of and participation in this created world through languages and symbolic systems that are themselves already structured by technology. Any philosophy of mind or self in the contemporary world must account for this relationship.

The inability to account for all the elements of mind, language, and world is one of the major failings of philosophies and histories that embrace a technological determinist perspective. When McLuhan (1964) wrote of the extension of the human senses and nervous system into the world through the electronic media, he was guilty of the homunculus fallacy, a finally atomistic belief that the mind, the self, and consciousness exist as independent and autonomous entities that use media, technology, and language rather than being created through their implication in the same social processes as those which produced technology and media and the forms of language. Even if one accepts McLuhan’s words as a kind of trope or metaphor, his idea lacks a verisimilitude with the world necessary to be believable. McLuhan begins with the contemporary perspective that sees language already as a tool. In famously writing ‘the medium is the message’, he adopts the modern understanding in which ‘message’ and ‘medium’ have already replaced ‘speech’ and ‘presence of the other’.

Similar liberal presuppositions influenced the thought and writing of many scholars in their evaluation of the uses of media in such tasks as national development. Daniel Lerner (1958), Wilbur Schramm (1964), and others saw a role for the technology of mass media in extending the virtues of modern society into those areas of the world apparently most in need of industrialization, that is, improvement. It is not enough to say that the theories, and often policies, that developed out of these writers elide questions of power and of the ethics of its use. Rather, their understanding of technology as a kind of amplifier of power together with their understanding of media as a conduit for the transmission of ideas make any possibilities of dialogue superfluous. Framed as essentially linear models of human communication, such formulations do lead us to examine those processes in which consciousness and the self are implicated.

The self becomes aware of itself in the mediated world as a part of it. As this world has moved toward a consolidation of itself in language, in representation, and in its development of ever more self-referential forms, the process of the formation of the self becomes linked to this consolidation. The development of the self, the individuation of consciousness as a sense of itself in the mediated world, shares the same vector as the social itself. The emerging sense of a self-directed, self-aware person takes place within the context of symbolic systems that are increasingly only internally referential. Awareness is not of the world but of the systems of mediated representation. An increase in personal knowledge about the world equates with the extension of mind ever deeper into the mediated systems of representation and meaning. Individual choice and personal freedom thus become based on the ability to discriminate between a limited number of elements presented and represented in the mediated world, whether shampoo or political candidates. Consciousness and desire, as markers of individuation, exist more and more in the already constituted and finished social forms. Notions such as personal freedom emerge from the consolidating system and ultimately refer back to it. As there is no other world that matters, freedom is the freedom to choose from among existing forms.

If we perceive the world primarily through mediated systems of representation, the world becomes largely another aspect of technology, and this changes both consciousness and language. We do not then perceive a world emerging through our engagement with it, a process that Heidegger called aletheia, that is, unhiddenness or revealing. For the ancient Greeks, the apparent or seeming reality of the world, doxa, was incomplete. The true world, the world as it is, had to be revealed through an engagement with it. We perceive instead a world whose purpose and meaning are already given. Heidegger notes a shift in meaning with the Latin philosophers: ‘The Romans translated this [aletheia] with veritas. We say “truth” and usually understand it as the correctness of an idea’ (1977: 12). The correctness of an idea, of course, has little to do with the notion of aletheia. Western societies commonly rely upon either science or religion for answers to questions of truth, but this is only because the responsibility for producing the unhiddenness of the world, for bringing the world into existence in perception and thought, has been largely replaced with a duty to consume information properly combined with the ability to reproduce the currently fashionable truths of the world. The mediated world appears as a world, yet all attempts to produce the aletheia or truth of this world finally return to our doxa, to the way that our world appears, that is, as various statements that ultimately can be neither legitimated nor dismissed. The contrast between the two meanings is easily seen in the contemporary triumph of opinion over knowledge.

I am not saying that we no longer see the world or that our perception is wholly of television and movies ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Norman K. Denzin
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Technology as Culture
• Chapter 2 Technologies of Language: Writing, Reading, and the Text
• Chapter 3 The Trajectory of the Image
• Chapter 4 The Rise of a Literary Epistemology: the Social Background of Self
• Chapter 5 Building the Divided Self: Letter Writing
• Chapter 6 Technology, Truth, and the Military-Industrial Complex
• Chapter 7 Information and Social Order: Pornography and the Public
• Chapter 8 The Metaphysics of Information
• Notes
• References
• Index