Another one from the Archives…

I have this theory that digital technology marks the turning point of human communication.

I don’t think it’s ‘a’ turning point – I said ‘the’ turning point. Theorists argue whether or not the internet is revolutionary. If they’re talking revolutionary in the sense that it’s turned things around so they start to move in the opposite direction, then I’m inclined to take the affirmative.

The history of communication has moved through seven main stages, as far as I can figure it. At the different stages, a human’s ability to communicate, for example, ‘something to do with apples’ would appear like this:

- facial expression and body language of hunger, perhaps some crying
- pointing to the apple and grunting enthusiastically
- saying ‘Would you mind passing an apple’
- drawing a picture of an apple, and a man pointing to his mouth
- leaving a handwritten note on the fridge saying ‘don’t forget apples’
- publishing a book about the health benefits of apples
- hosting a television reality show called ‘When Apples Go Bad’

Now, of course, there are places where those phases overlap, are extended or, in some cases are skipped entirely. Some social circumstances require an earlier form of communication – particularly when there is physical co-presence involved (stages 1 to 3). No need to type a letter to someone who’s in the room with you – often a simple gesture will do. However, these phases are additive. The ability to create movable type grew from, but did not replace the ability to draw phonetic characters on a page freehand.

Let’s give the phases convenient terms:
1) non-symbolic
2) gestural
3) verbal
4) pictographic
5) scribal
6) mechanical
7) electric

The logical thing to do on first inspection would be to label number 8 ‘digital’, and include in that category everything from webpages, email and chatrooms to compact discs, global positioning satellites and cellphones.

In fact, digital technologies are starting to take us down a path back the way we came, but without losing the knowledge of the ones before. It’s not number 8, but number 7 again, number 6 again, number 5 again…

We’ve been here before. We recognise the landmarks. We’re travelling the other way in a different vehicle, but the process is going to take a lot less time because we know the way.

We can already disseminate sound and video via the internet. The electric phase (7) is contained within the digital. We can mass produce typewritten text and so the mechanical phase (6) is absorbed. Handwriting recognition software exists on PDAs and other hand-held devices. There goes the scribal (5). Pictures are equally simple to convert to a digital mode (4).

It’s the stuff that was so easy first time round that seems to be slowing us up a bit. The stuff that used to require co-presence. We seem to be part of the way through folding the verbal (3) into the digital realm. Speech recognition software isn’t all it could be, but while we still have to type text into our computers, and read text messages back from them, the HAL9000 computer doesn’t seem as much like science fiction as it used to.

The term ‘virtual reality’ has been with us 20 years now. It still remains itself a virtuality – never quite meeting the expectations or delivering on its promises. However, a large proportion of software development advances over the past few years have been in the area of 3D graphic animation and image rendering (thanks in no small part to the gaming industry). If the next logical step in our progressive regression on the communication path is gesture (2), then that doesn’t seem like such a stretch either.

The man who coined the phrase ‘virtual reality’ also coined the term ‘post-symbolic communication’. By this he meant the digital mediation of what I’ve called the pre-symbolic mode (1). I stressed earlier that these phases were additive. As we develop new modes, we do not abandon the previous ones. Different modes have different strengths, and having a well-rounded pallette at your disposal enhances your ability to interact with other human beings.

Post-symbolic communication goes the last step. Computer-mediated facial expressions, body language and other emotional cues round off and complete our communicative abilities. It’s probably the toughest one to navigate. It’s a long time since we were last here, and we had no way of mapping the territory. It’s the area that depends most on physical co-presence, which is not something we’re terribly good at with computers yet. I’ll email my sister in Australia, but won’t bother with the PC if she comes over for a coffee when she’s back on holiday.

But the question arises – does the completion of the return down the path of these modes represent some sort of finished project? An apocalyptic ‘Completion Backwards Principle’? Probably not. Communication has always been and will always be a process. No matter how good at it we become, we still need to do it. At least until we actually become each other and know and feel everything everyone else knows and feels, which I have to say seems unlikely.

The point at which digital technology emerges (actually some 40-odd years ago now) is simply the point at which we start to return down the path of our communication modes. As such, it’s revolutionary. However, this belief neither represents a form of technological determinism, nor does it suggest that digital technologies are some form of cultural improvement.

Extolling the virtues of digital technology with disproportionate vigour all too often coincides with the abandonment of earlier modes. People who spend their lives online quite often end up socially backward, because they forget that it’s just one more extension of their ability to get on with other humans – and not a retreat from them. Virtual Communities, as Howard Rheingold calls them, extend rather than replace actual communities. And of course, we haven’t even begun to see analogue computing yet. Then I’ll get excited.

I’ve been going back through some of my earliest notes for this project, and struck this one, which raises some interesting ideas around online geography. It’s good to note that we have moved away from such overt travel and movement metaphors, which were always an ill fit, though a useful bridging metaphor until we worked out exactly how to conceptualise digital space as natives (or settlers) rather than tourists.

Wednesday, April 10, 2002
I said yesterday I’d give some thought to spatial relationships in as much as they reflect upon the question of how we know where an ‘Information Society’ starts. Manuel Castells seems a good kick-off point in this regard. His conception of the ‘space of flows’ is an interesting one – far more so than the frontier metaphor espoused by the likes of John Perry Barlow, Alvin Toffler, Howard Rheingold, etc.

Despite the fact that the internet fails to stack up against ideas of ‘staking a claim’ and ‘declarations of independence‘, you can’t get away from the point that human beings inhabit physical space. To go online does not obsolesce the human body, however much it expands or extends the human mind. Castells’ ‘space of flows’ takes this into consideration, while observing that communication between parties happens in the space between – in the movement of information from physical place to place.

Although the quantity of ‘space of flows’ information cannot reliably be measured and compared to the amount of ‘space of places’ interaction – and therefore it’s difficult to pinpoint the precise spot at which we shift (or shifted) into an information society, it’s possible to assume that such a transformation is at least taking place – if it hasn’t already.

But what gets me is the fact that we rely on spatial metaphors when dealing with the Internet. We use an Internet ‘Explorer’ or a Netscape ‘Navigator’ when we wish to ‘go’ online [or on 'Safari'] and ‘visit’ a website. Is there any reason for this other than the fact that we are (at least for the moment) psychologically tied to a physical space of places? That is to say, if our mind derives information from a point outside of our immediate surroundings, must we necessarily have ‘gone somewhere’?

One of the holy grails of computing technology seems to be the illusion of physical co-presence – Virtual Reality. Much of the literature in this still emergent and largely speculative field seems to involve inhabiting an artificial space, then moving through it from place to place, seeking information, communicating with representations of other people inhabiting the space – moving in three dimensions – whether flying, walking, swimming or even driving in the digital realm. Imagine a VR shopping mall (as many entrepreneurs have tried). Is it necessary that we move from shop to shop, browsing through books, then moving past another couple of virtual stalls to look at clothes (for instance). Why is it necessary for us to have had to travel in a straight line or combination of vectors to ‘arrive’ at the clothing store?

That to me is the major flaw in the conceptualisation of VR technologies – especially those designed for personal and communicative purposes (VR surgery, scientific modelling and telerobotics have a somewhat different approach). Is there any reason that we should encounter distance in digital ‘space’?

Surely it’s just as easy to consider a Godlike approach to the whole thing – to be omni-present online is no more technically difficult (in theory) than to be physically constrained (God never travels because he’s always already everywhere). Alternatively, it is just as feasible to create micro universes – everything co-present with the VR-connected user. Hypertext liberated the online world from sequential, linear processes, allowing for a world of signposts and destinations, but no roads – and no need for them (although one common criticism of the world wide web is that it’s a land of signposts and no destinations).

In other words, Digital Man has the option of being extended omnipotently – or to have his universe collapsed to the place he inhabits – a being whose borders are nowhere and whose centre is everywhere. In trying to emulate reality, VR lacks ambition.

That said, I think spatial relations play an important part in thinking about Digital Man for a number of reasons. The first of these is economic. The Digital Divide is a concept which revolves around technological manifestations of the ever-growing disparity between rich and poor. In the physical world, freedom of movement is restricted by poverty. There are things you can’t do, places you can’t go, areas you won’t live, countries and even neighbouring towns you’ll never visit. Likewise, the reflection of this in the online world revolves around the two phases of digital divide – access to technology (the ultimate online restriction of movement) and lower skillsets in using technology – akin to having a car, but not much ability to drive the damn thing.

Another reason that spatial relations are important to consider is that the way that space is interpreted by Digital Man is transformed according to the new sense ratios created by the new media. Just as a literate society, with its linear thinking, was able to develop vanishing point perspective, and as an electric ground was able to accomodate a new ‘acoustic space’, as McLuhan liked to call it, so too is the digital ground likely to change conceptions of space – perhaps on a more synaesthetic model (this will take some further consideration – I’m not sure yet where it’s going). However, it does suggest that perhaps the spatial metaphor (‘going’ online / ‘visiting’ webpages) is not such a dud after all. If our conception of space changes to prove the metaphor appropriate, then navigating and exploring the online world are perhaps activities we undertake – even if we mean these terms in a whole different way than we use them in the ‘real’ world.

Here are some notes I wrote when I first started thinking about these issues (and, thankfully, started blogging so I still have those notes) back in 2002. As you might expect, I no longer agree with everything I wrote, and I’ve developed my thinking about this stuff over the last 7 years – but since I’m using this blog as a scrapbook and a single place to capture all this stuff, it would be useful to throw it up here.

If you can think of any texts that would be useful along any of these lines, or have any thoughts on any of this, please be sure to let me know in the comments.

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How do you measure the point at which an ‘industrial society’ becomes an ‘information society’?

Digitisation
The reduction of knowledge to binary data marks a significant shift from analogue, linear, sequential and continuous thought patterns, to non-linear, non-sequential and discrete thought. Technology itself does not does not distinguish a significant break in societal patterns (how do you measure when there is sufficient technology to make for a break from one to another?) – otherwise what we would be living in would be a ‘high-tech’ (or possibly ‘high-mech’) cuture. Digitisation – moreover, binary digitisation – leads to an informational society.

Economy
In fact, since the development of labour capital, economy has always been informational. Money is an exchange of value – or of perceived value. An amount of work is assigned a value, then exchanged. This representation of labour in fiscal terms is no more than informational, despite the direct, tangible effect of its exchange (food, clothing, shelter, freedom of movement). Arguments over whether an ‘information economy’ has superceded a goods and services economy overlook the fact that all economy is, by definition, informational. However, at the basis of this economy, labour is no longer the sole or even primary means of deriving value. Knowledge, thought, ideas, creativity – these become the basis of a knowledge-based informational economy. That information can be codified and transmitted at light speed around the world provides a seemingly significant break. Ideas have always been exchangable for money. But money, unlike those ideas, has always been tangible. In an ‘information age’, finance is no more real or tangible than the thoughts for which they are exchanged.

The economy of a computer gaming community – Everquest, for instance, with its Platinum Points, or the Neopets web community, with its neopoints monetary system – is freely convertible (often sold for US dollars on e-Bay) and of as much tangible value as any other currency. The monetary system – an abstract construct like any other monetary system (at least since the removal of ties between the US dollar and gold bullion) – is represented as an exchange of value for time spent labouring online in the context for which that economy exists – no longer geographically place-bound, but set in the context of the space of the online game or web community.

Occupation
The point at which an information society commences can be perceived, at least in part, at the point at which the majority of employment becomes informational. However, this too overlooks certain key criteria of the digital mode. “Digital Man” is defined not in terms of what he does, but how his reality is interpreted and mediated.

A farmer still grows crops, but these are now configured in calculated yield ratios, price per hectare and so on – and these ratios are even analysed in a paddock-by-paddock analysis with the aid of GPS devices; linked to multinational conglomerates and computer-mediated accounting practices. That said, a farmer’s existence, whilst dominated by day-to-day activity, is still shaped by forces outside the manual labour engaged in as ‘work’. He is not his job. Recreational time is largely computer-mediated. Satellite TV, the Internet and mobile phones all play their part. The isolationism once experienced as a West Coast farmhand is intruded upon by an ability to participate in global events. He is brought face-to-face with murderers and politicians, the world of the celebrity and the arguments of the political dissident. Compact discs, DVDs, email – a proliferation of digital media impacts as significantly upon the thought processes of the manual labourer as on his white collar information sector counterpart.

A knowledge-worker is not necessarily someone whose livelihood depends upon the movement (or storage) of information – lawyer, accountant, teacher, librarian, network consultant – but someone whose daily activities are bound in informational representation. While your activities and the fruit of your labour may well be completely organic, tangible and physical, the conception of that labour is typically understood and configured digitally.

Lifeworlds
‘Digital Man’ speaks of lifeworlds – interior existence configured digitally, rather than merely behavioural exteriors. ‘Information Workers’, though – both information providers and information distributors (perhaps even information storers – and information gatekeepers) – are not distinguished hierarchically in this analysis. The sheer ratio of info workers to non-info workers does not provide any information as to the perceived importance of what it is they do. As more people enter the digital “priesthood” (priests were perhaps the only real pre-Gutenberg information workers), the social status of these latter-day priests is devalued – or rather, revalued – to be no more or less significant than that of their non-info counterparts. The de-mystification process that mass media provides impacts heavily on this: the curtain behind which the priesthood operates has been drawn back.

Education
The electric ground came into its own when the first generation of children grew up watching TV before learning to read. The digital ground seems likely to follow the same path, as the first generation of children grows up using digital services (playstation, the Internet, CDs, DVDs) before attending school.

Interestingly, the new mindset is not reinforced – or even reflected – in the school system. While nobody would argue that text literacy should be phased out in schools, they remain largely immune even to the electric age – let alone the digital age.

New forms of intelligence are being exhibited by the Playstation generation. For instance, the ability to cope with simultaneous multiple strands of problem solving goes far beyond the mere hand-eye coordination advantages typically ascribed to the medium. Complex problem solving skills operating with multiple variables goes beyond the print-bound, ’cause and effect’ single strand analysis currently favoured in scientific schools of thought. Is it possible that a cure for AIDS or cancer could result from an approach that does not simply look for linear causality from within a print-bound culture?

I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s ‘The Singularity is Near‘. It’s an interesting book. Fascinating, even. It’s full of insight and explanations of some of the most important technological advances in human history – and some of its predictions may well come to pass in some form or another. The man, frankly, is amazing.

But I’m reading it as speculative fiction rather than as a guide to the future, because I simply don’t believe that you can extrapolate like that.

Essentially, Kurzweil’s premise is that the way things are going, what with the exponential acceleration of technology, we will at some point in the very near future reach the point where artificial intelligence and human intelligence combine to provide a utopian world, where our thought, wealth and creativity will know no bounds.

I suspect an obstacle around the corner.

The most compelling and convincing parts of the book are diagrammatic. Points are plotted along a curve, representing specific (and carefully selected) events and technological milestones in our history – and then that curve is extended upwards, on into the future.

But of course, one of the problems of prediction is that while you can extend backwards and identify a narrative that neatly fits a curve, as that history was unfolding each point along that curve could have easily been replaced at any moment with a completely different ‘natural’ next point.

History is not causative – or at least, not in such a deterministic way.

The computer scientists of the 1950s who predicted that by 2005 there’d be five computers in the world, and they’d be the size of skyscrapers, were just as good at predicting the future as Kurzweil. That was, at the time, the most obvious extrapolation of the trends. The inescapable future of computing.

But the most obvious extrapolation of the trends are never where we end up.

Kurzweil quotes McLuhan, but he clearly hasn’t internalised his message. The fourth Law of Media is Reversal.

Whatever it looks like a technology is about, and wherever it looks like we’re going to arrive as a result of it, is generally the opposite of what its effect will actually be – and you simply can’t predict the way in which that opposite will manifest.

So while Kurzweil is clearly a genius – off-the-charts smart, creative, inventive, and able to express his beliefs about the future in a convincing, well-evidenced and coherent way – I’m equally convinced that he cannot help but be wrong, simply by nature of the fact that he is predicting the future.

But that’s not to dispute his broader thesis of human evolution in response to technology. That’s more or less what this book I’m writing is about. But you don’t have to become a fortune-teller in order to support that theory. You just have to look around at the present with your eyes open. There’s enough evidence of profound change all around us without having to start making up wide-eyed, fanciful, sci-fi, near-future predictions.

And, importantly, when you look at what’s around us, you get a much more complete and far messier picture of what actually goes on in reality. You start to notice that the technologies are not evenly distributed. That most people miss out. That developments in the technological assistance of human cognition are not unproblematic. That human beings are not developing in a uniform way. That sometimes events conspire to change our course.

Wars happen, tyrants prevail, natural disasters occur, religions exert influence, politicians change laws, dissenting voices are heard, priorities are re-appraised. In other words, profound change happens in an unpredictable and non-uniform way. Those changes upset and alter the predicted outcome of any set of determining variables.

And you simply can’t adjust your predictive models for the inevitable unexpected occurrence – because we don’t know what that unexpected occurrence might be. It’s an unknown unknown.

It’s fascinating, of course, to paint a picture of a bright new tomorrow or a brave new world, and I can think of few people who could do it in a more engaging and compelling way than Kurzweil.

I’m not saying that he’s likely to be wrong. I’m saying that it’s important that he must be.

Technological determinism insists that history is what happens to us as a result of technological advancement. But if we genuinely understand the technologies that surround us – and the ways in which they work on us – then we can have agency in what happens next.

That’s essentially what I’m arguing for: a clear and intelligent response to a deep and engaged understanding of the parameters as they exist right now. The future’s uncertain, and that’s good.

If you understand that we are different, and why we are different, then we can begin to choose in what ways we can be different. We can actually have a hand in selecting our responses and adaptations – they aren’t just a pre-destined result of the curves made from dots on a graph.

In other words: the future’s not for predicting – it’s for inventing.

I was particularly interested in a small article in the latest issue of New Scientist magazine, which outlined how the human brain understands tools as part of our physical body.

When we brush our teeth, for instance, the brain conceives of our limb being slightly longer, which is how we map the information about where the end of our brush is, so that we don’t knock our teeth out in the process.

It makes sense, of course, but this is, theoretically, the first instance of a scientific underpinning for McLuhan’s now 30+ year old assertion that media are extensions of ourselves. And in altering the media forms (ie: the tools we use) we thereby alter ourselves and the ways in which we understand our relationship to the world around us.

Cars are an interesting case in point. As we become familiar with driving and the brain is able to map the car onto our physical conception of our place in physical space, we actually have a sense of our width, velocity and proximity as if the car was a part of ourselves.

“I can squeeze through that gap” is a really good example of that sort of physical sense that goes beyond merely visual estimation, but is a sense of our own boundaries, extended through the medium of a tool. I can sense where I stop and you begin.

It’s not because I can see all of the edges of our respective vehicles, but because my brain has a sense of my own total width. The car is part of me.

But if a physical extension of ourselves is mapped in the brain as being part of our physical being, then it’s not such a stretch to imagine (or even, as I plan to do, assert) that psychological extensions of ourselves are similarly mapped in the brain as being part of our conceptual being.

That is to say – our communicative media are extensions of ourselves. How we use our technologies and which technologies we use inscribe our sense of self – our personhood – and where the boundaries of that lie.

Digital and internet technologies extend us in almost unimaginable ways.

As McLuhan pointed out, a good definition of God is a being with its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere. I don’t believe in God (nor in the property of God-ness, for that matter) – but I do think its interesting to note that this is also a pretty good definition of ourselves when we’re online.

Of course, the obvious thing to point out here is that the ways in which we tell stories, the form they take, the types of stories they are and the ways in which we take them in also change over time – so not only do narratives and storytelling shape our brain, changes in which those stories are manifest alters the kinds of change that result.

Digital narrative differs from printed narrative, which is different again than oral tradition. The hypertextual, interactive nature of storytelling, and the more chronology-independent tales we now tell are characteristic of a digital mode. Digital stories also tend to be far more collaborative than the private world of books, or the rehearsed myths of the campfire storyteller.

And as the stories we tell about ourselves change – and as the myths that guide our beliefs and behaviours change – so too do we change. Humans are not only creatures of communication, we are completely hard-wired for narrative.

And so, we not only evolve in response to the stories we tell, but we also evolve in response to the ways in which we tell stories. This is going to be an interesting thread to watch.

It got me thinking about how we experience things through our senses, and the way in which (as McLuhan would have it) new media extend our senses.

Simply put, television lets us see things that are much further away than our eyes would ordinarily allow. Radio does the same for our ears. But just as we can extend our senses in terms of distance, we can also extend them in terms of our relationship to time.

Recording can extend our hearing back through time. Digital editing and, in particular, hypertext changes the relationship of our senses to time and space. In a way, digital technology allows us to perceive in 4 dimensions, travelling up and down, side to side and jumping around in the chronology as we see fit.

We can see some of these things being explored in narrative. This is, admittedly, not new – and experimental cinema has messed with sequence for some decades. However, our capacity to process multi-linear and non-sequential narrative has changed with an increasing familiarity with the 4-dimensional perception that comes with digital media.

Mental note made to explore and research this further – and I’d welcome any links to work that may have already been done in this area.

I still think that the premise is not only an interesting one – but an important one: that we ourselves are quite literally changing and adapting in response to our technological environment. And I think it’s one that we need to think more clearly about because those responses and adaptations should be deliberately selected rather than haphazard.

But interestingly, it’s only because I’ve started work on another book – one that will take a great deal of time away from any chance I ever had of working on this one – that has spurred me to revisit Now We Are Different and pick up the story. Sometimes you just get into the right frame of mind for things – and something as simple as discovering a new WordPress theme can galvanise you into action.

So – actually, I’m writing three books right now: this one, Deleting Music and a co-authored undergrad text book called ‘Understanding the Music Industries’.

When I say I remember my 10th birthday or I remember what happened at the party last night, you know what I mean. But there’s an amazing array of processes that go into that – in terms of imagery, emotional connection and recall of facts and impressions.

However, although you can remember an event that took a long time to transpire, the act of rememberance happens in a very short space of time.

Obviously, you’re not recalling a sequential series of instants, but an overall sense of the recalled event. But the ways we have to explain that are derived from various different fields: literary criticism (metaphor seems to be the most useful framework we have to understand this), psychology, biochemistry, sociology – and so on.

And each perspective gives us a different view of what is going on… but none of them really address the brain itself and the complexities that it really presents.

One thing that is clear is that the brain changes in a concrete and very real way as a result of experiences. The information that makes its way into the brain rewires pathways, causes physical impressions, creates and reinforces connections… and this is entirely mediated through our senses.

As we change the way in which we take in visual, auditory and other information – that is, if the mode of mediation shifts – so too do the resulting physical processes that occur in our brains change.

Culturally, as our technologies change – and those extensions of our senses provide new ways of processing and importing information – so too do the meanings that we create change, thereby altering and adapting ourselves to the media environment.

Even if not ‘evolutionary’, it has to be said that the process of memory is an adaptive one. There’s a lot more to be said about this, but I’m still processing…

I get accused from time to time of being a Technological Determinist. It’s sort of true: I believe that technology affects history. But I don’t believe that we are powerless in the face of our technologies. The whole point of evolution is that it is a creative response to an environmental change.

Computers don’t make us send emails, they allow us to. The fact that we send and receive so many of the damn things is not an inevitable consequence of digital technology, but the fact that we approach it uncritically and strategy-less.

So I guess the central purpose of the book (and this blog) is to underline the notion that it’s impossible to have a useful creative response to change unless you actually understand what’s going on. Ignorance killed the dinosaurs.

In the interests of adaptation to media shift and active resistance to unwanted technological change, please watch this video.