Thoughts on technology and the evolution of political, cultural, social and religious forms (Part 5)

Part 4

Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad: enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal, provides a way to explore the effects of new developments or new technologies.

Enhancement is the extension of an ability in time, space, strength, speed, agility or other quality. A telescope enhances vision across large distances while a microscope enhances vision of  very small objects. Enhancement always leads to imbalance because as one sense or ability is enhanced, less attention flows to other senses. McLuhan’s term for this phenomenon was auto-anaesthesia. When you talk on a telephone, for instance, your attention is focused on the sense of hearing. You have no physical sense of the other person and you are less aware of your own body. When you read a book, attention is focused through the sense of sight and you lose touch with your body. The book makes it possible to create an imagined world, a world of stories and ideas in which the body does not participate.

Obsolescence means that one way of relating or communicating is replaced by another. The older way of doing things doesn’t disappear completely. Instead, its relative  importance, position or role changes and usually becomes highly specialized. Some people still drive a horse and buggy even though most use a car. The horse and buggy are retained by particular communities or become specialized for purposes such as entertainment, sulky racing, for example. Film is still used by some photographers who are looking for particular effects, but the vast majority of photographs today are taken with cell phones.

Retrieval involves bringing back the experience of an older technology or an older way of relating or interacting. Facebook, for instance, brings back the experience of living in a small town; everybody knows everything about you. You cannot keep anything secret. Even as one moves forward with technology, the past returns in a different form.

Reversal is the principle that any development creates its own negation. The car, for instance, gives rise to gridlock. Email gives rise to miscommunication, especially if you write anything humorous. The advent of the car led to decades of experiments with freeways until it became clear that building freeways does not eliminate gridlock. Traffic just increases to the point that the same degree of gridlock occurs. In many cases, reversal reveals the limits and problems associated with growth in use of new developments.

The changes that take place with the advent of new developments or technologies are complex, partly because all four of McLuhan’s effects take place simultaneously, and partly because individuals, societies and environments interact with new developments in unpredictable ways. Cultural values, social norms and even geography all play a part. For example, gunpowder was invented in China, but it was in the highly competitive environment of Europe that it was put to military use.

To be continued...

Thoughts on technology and the evolution of political, cultural, social and religious forms (Part 3)

Part 2

Daniel Dennett proposed in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that variation, selection and heredity necessarily give rise to evolution; the emergence of order and structure without a guiding intelligence. Long before Dennett published this insight, McLuhan saw modern education, democracy and the nation state as products of evolution brought about by the development of two technologies: the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. The phonetic alphabet enabled large numbers of people to become literate. The printing press made possible large numbers of copies of books and other writings. The two together made it possible to standardize knowledge in large populations and create imagined communities of people who took in their information from common sources —newspapers, periodicals, journals and books.

In Understanding Media, McLuhan wrote:

The availability of cheap writing materials affected power in the Mediterranean. The Romans depended on papyrus from Egypt. When the supply was cut off by the Muslims, they lost control of the Mediterranean. Parchment was too expensive and the influence of Byzantium was limited. Only when paper was imported from China did learning revive, and the result was the Renaissance and eventually printing.

Technological innovations change the way people interact and the changes are not always welcome. Socrates, as Plato presents him in Phaedrus, expresses reservations about the technology of writing, saying that writing:

…is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Similar concerns have been voiced about the book, about newspapers, as well as the telephone, the computer and many other inventions.

Part 4

Thoughts on technology and the evolution of political, cultural, social and religious forms (Part 2)

Part 1

Marshall McLuhan also realized that each new medium creates enables a new way of retaining the past. More and more of the past is present in people’s lives, stored in museums, books, libraries, and now social networks, YouTube, email archives, etc. The result is that we live more and more with the past, if not in the past. People grow up in a bubble of self-chosen interests, friends, news sources and music. As Jared Lanier observes in You Are Not a Gadget, the evolution of music has changed in a fundamental way: up to the point that the internet became widespread, each decade had its own distinct music, Ragtime, Jazz, Swing, Rock and Roll, Disco, Hip-hop, Rap, etc., but the music of the last two decades has no clearly defining sound. Much of it consists of the reworking and recombining of music from earlier eras.

The magnification of the role of the past in modern society is in stark contrast to the role the past played in traditional societies. In traditional societies, the past was revered. The overarching view was that one realized one’s highest potential as a human being by emulating examples from the past, whether Christ, Mohammed, or Buddha. In today’s world, the past is to be transcended and one realizes one’s highest potential through exploration and individuation.

Each person’s past is now a scattered mass of fragments, an ever present but fractured mirror in which he or she is reflected. Few take the time to assemble the fragments into a narrative, and even if they do, the narrative itself depends on what is selected and emphasized, and that, again, is influenced by the medium in which the narrative is presented. Because the past is always present, a creative urge arises for a future that is open to new possibilities and free from the constraints of the past. Ironically, the extent to which the past endures in the present makes such transcendence more and more difficult.

Part 3

Thoughts on technology and the evolution of political, cultural, social and religious forms (Part I)

New technologies create new forms of communication and new media. Language, writing, the phonetic alphabet, the printing press, the telegraph and telephone, film, radio, television, fax, email, cell phones, the internet in general and now social networks and robots, all make different forms of communication possible and have led, or are leading, to significant social, cultural and political changes.

Marshall McLuhan pointed out that "the medium changes the message." Consider presenting the traditional account of Buddha Shakyamuni encountering old age, illness and death up to his awakening. Imagine this story presented as a novel, a short story, a film,  an opera, a television series, a monologue, a play, a graphic novel, a YouTube video or as a tweet. Each medium emphasizes certain elements and downplays others, and the result is a different message in each case.

Each new medium  also creates a new form of interaction. For example, writing enabled personal and cultural histories to be retained without reliance on human memory. With the invention of paper, they could be retained indefinitely. With the invention of printing, they could be distributed widely and become part of the cultural heritage. The new form of interaction often arises in unexpected and unforeseen ways, such as the immediate distribution of photos and videos through cell phones or the tracking of new trends by hashtags in Twitter.

These new uses lead to different kinds of relationships and new forms of intimacy and solitude, as Sherry Turkle describes in Alone Together. They also lead to new social forms. For instance, the telephone enables people to talk with each other even though they are physically separate. Because, communication is limited to voice, body language and other nuances are limited or eliminated by the medium. Thus, people who communicate by telephone may have a very different relationship compared to when they are conversing in person. Email, of course, takes disembodied communication a step further: mass emails are possible and communication in widespread communities is easy. Email and texting also change the way phones are used. One is now more likely to set up a phone meeting via email than call someone out of the blue.

Part 2