Mosaic: Wiener, McLuhan, & the Politics of Technology (I)
Note: I have pulled thinking from Wiener's and McLuhan's two works – The Human Use of Human Beings and Understanding Media respectively – attempting to combine the similarity of their thought as a basis for what can be considered a politics of technology. The similarities are quite striking and valuable, somewhat fascinating coming their different perspectives. Where appropriate I've added various thinking I've done over the years.
The writing is set up in sections and blocks of thought, aphorisms in certain respects, not meant as traditional narrative, but more as a mosaic, distinct pieces coming together to form a pattern or picture. It is meant in the words of Wiener not as know-how, but know-what, an attempt to provoke thought and invite the participation of the reader for full definition.
The quotes come from either McLuhan's Understanding Media – (Mc), Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings – (W), or Cybernetics – (W Cy).
Wiener and McLuhan
In his seminal 1964 work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan notes a speech given by Radio Corporation of America Chairman of the Board David Sarnoff where he states, "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." What's fascinating about this statement is its given by the head of one of the 20th century's great technology companies and it is completely wrong, but it remains the dominant belief of technologists, tech corporations, and most people today.
McLuhan wrote his book in direct opposition to this thinking. “Technological media are staples or natural resources, exactly as are coal and cotton and oil. Anybody will concede that a society whose economy is dependent upon one or two major staples like cotton, or grain, or lumber, or fish, or cattle is going to have some obvious social patterns of organization as a result.” (Mc) Yet, as Sarnoff ignorantly and illustriously demonstrated such thinking was and remains completely lacking. Instead, it is believed technologies are simply tools for shaping the larger environment, not environments in and of themselves.
“To the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to social effects of these radical forces. …So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain.” (Mc)
“Political scientists have been quite unaware of the effects of media anywhere at any time, simply because nobody has been willing to study the personal and social effects of media apart from their 'content'." (Mc)
Fourteen years before Understanding Media, the great mathematician and scientist Norbert Wiener wrote an even more seminal work on technology titled, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. Two years later, he produced a less mathematical work on the same subjects, The Human Use of Human Beings. While McLuhan's included a deeper historical view of technology, Wiener focused more on the impact of the then new and developing compute, information, and communication technologies, though he also had a strong historical perspective. Wiener wrote of the new technologies,
“I have been occupied for many years with problems of communication engineering. These have led to the design and investigation of various sorts of communication machines, some of which have shown an uncanny ability to simulate human behavior, and thereby to throw light on the possible nature of human behavior. They have even shown the existence of a tremendous possibility of replacing human behavior, in many cases in which the human being is relatively slow and ineffective. We are thus in an immediate need of discussing the powers of these machines as they impinge on the human being, and the consequences of this new and fundamental revolution in technique.” (W)
Unlike Sarnoff, Wiener and McLuhan understood technologies themselves, not just their content, have social and political implications inherent in their very natures, requiring forethought in their implementation, and, importantly, continual reassessment using the “feedback” received from their implementation. The difference between McLuhan's and Wiener's understanding and Sarnoff's is best summed-up by Wiener, “There is one quality more important than know-how and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is 'know-what': by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.” Know-how is engineering, the exclusive factor in the historical development of technology, something America has been profoundly adept. Know-what is the politics of technology and America is completely bereft.
Technology and its adoption implements organization and values regardless of content, shaping culture, politics, and society as a whole. This politics has largely been missed or dismissed from our historical understanding, despite two-centuries of industrial technology radically altering human existence. Now, compute technologies promise even more radical change to society as a whole.
Without a politics of technology, technological development continues to be measured either with existing values, most determinedly and detrimentally those of profit, and increasingly the values of the technology themselves. Any politics of technology's fundamental principle would be “the machines are secondary in all matters of value that concern us to the proper evaluation of human beings for their own sake and to their employment as human beings, and not as second-rate surrogates for possible machines of the future.” (W)
McLuhan was a Canadian literature professor, who luckily or smartly, was little impacted in any way by the the drivel theory that came out of many 20th century literature departments across Europe and America. It might not be so odd in that McLuhan looked at the development of the phonetic alphabet and millennia later the development of the printing press, regardless of their content, as two of the greatest technologies shaping world history. McLuhan was the greater historian, with his knowledge of literature helping offer wonderful expositions on technology's impact.
Wiener was a quintessential, if time now reveals disappearing American democrat, a mathematician, scientist, and engineer. These three fields greatly shaped his perspective. Wiener also had a background in both history and literature, both proved invaluable in shaping his perspective. However, it was the science of 20th century physics, the most revolutionary since Newton's three centuries before, that greatly shaped his thinking, providing an integral understanding of developing compute and information technologies.
If there is a great difference between the two, it would be McLuhan's view of all technology as an extension of the human body. In this literal sense, technology defines how we physically and mentally interact with the world. Most significantly, Homo sapiens experienced all technology through the body's established sensory architecture, whether sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste. The senses are how we receive information. In this thinking, McLuhan at times can be most confusing, at other times most wrong, and at times most valuable. Even today, our understanding of how our minds actually receive and process sensory information remains, lets say, primitive, if understood at all. Yet, McLuhan's thinking in this regards remains valuable and original. His very complex thinking about the screen and how we interact with it still deserves greater thought. The screen's entrancement, its staring into the fire quality, remains not well understood. Again, a big part of this is our still limited understanding on how the brain actually functions, but it is completely obvious from its inception the screen has proved infinitely captivating and addictive no matter its content. For what precise reasons might still not be understood, but no one can doubt the affliction.
Wiener deals with the human organism’s and machine’s interaction more indirectly, though with complete understanding of the machine as a mimic of human action and its growing ability to mimic human thought. Both understood technology redefines not simply human relations with the machine, but human relations between each other. The ability for humanity to come to terms with this power was in its very essence politics.
Communication and Information
In defining the species Homo sapiens, the greatest characteristic setting us apart might be our hyper-communication traits. Communication implies the transference of information, thus in talking about communication you are by definition talking about information. The definition of information has always been rather nebulous. With the growth of information technologies over the last three-quarters of a century, information has been predominately conceived statistically. With his groundbreaking theory on information, Claude Shannon paradoxically explained his definition had nothing to do with meaning, that is content. “The concept of information developed in this theory at first seems disappointing and bizarre - disappointing because it has nothing to do with meaning, and bizarre because it deals not with a single message but rather with the statistical character of a whole ensemble of messages, bizarre also because in these statistical terms the two words information and uncertainty find themselves to be partners.” If you're dissatisfied with this definition remember the entire compute and communication industry has been built on it.
Human vocabulary is remarkably generalized and can be extremely nebulous, an inherent characteristic of our communication. As J. Robert Oppenheimer explained our communications in every day life are highly ambiguous. It is only with science and technological development a certain stringency becomes necessity. With ambiguity, or maybe better generality, comes a certain subjectivity and imprecision, yet human verbal communication is amazingly powerful, creating and holding together an almost infinite number of complex social networks.
Since the invention of the printing press five centuries ago, the processes of communication and the sheer quantity of information have risen exponentially. In the last century, both increased more rapidly with the rise of electric and then compute technologies. “The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, have been developed to meet the needs of this process. To live effectively is to live with adequate information.”(W) Today, adequate information is not simply necessary to live effectively, but to live at all, with human produced information increasingly incorporated into and shaping every aspect of life.
Largely imperceptible, information technology brings a content analogy of Shannon's definition of information as a statistical value into measure for each individual. As a daily information tsunami washes across each person, unnecessary information is “noise” surrounding “signals” of specific value, though this value may as likely be instilled as opposed to sought. “Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why.”(Mc)
Organization has always played a fundamental role in valuing information. Both state and church have long asserted great power in valuing information, primarily by controlling various media of communication even if it was simply promoting or censoring specific words. “Those who have made the clear maintenance of the channels of communication their business are those who have most to do with the continued existence or the fall of our civilization.”(W) Today, the business of communication is largely that a business.
Overwhelmingly it is the mega-corporation who control the media of communication and assert specific value. The “communicative integrity of man I find to be violated and crippled by the present tendency to huddle together according to a comprehensive prearranged plan, which is handed to us from above. We must cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.”(W)
The whip Wiener metaphorically notes is presently electronic communication, electric media having redefined the channels of communication and thus information. “Nowadays, with computers and electric programming, the means of storing and moving information become less and less visual and mechanical, while increasingly integral and organic. The total field created by the instantaneous electric forms cannot be visualized any more than the velocities of electronic particles can be visualized. The instantaneous creates an interplay among time and space and human occupations, for which the older forms of currency exchange become increasingly inadequate.” (Mc)
McLuhan notes two interesting phenomenon; first, electric speed decreases the value of stored information. “The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation in its value is false. …information is even more a matter of process than a matter of storage.” (W) Secondly, information increasingly defines every activity, every process, in so doing, established methods of valuing information via separate media, “forms of currency exchange,” money being both the easiest and powerful example, become increasingly incapable of providing meaningful value. Money evolved in an era of less information. It's value derived by providing a simple numerical, quantitative value to all information. Much information is devalued in this process. The massive increase in debt across the economic system correlated with the ever greater adoption of electronic compute and communication technology is symptomatic to this process. At this point we haven't the social means of directly valuing most information without first assigning it a monetary value. At the same time, the entire political structure is largely built on this value system and its preservation. Reform to incorporate more direct values, an appreciation of the value of process, requires not new technologies, but new human associations.
Linear and Mosaic
Technology creates its own environment. The use of any technology employs a certain perspective of the world. As any technology becomes ubiquitously adopted, its perspective can become so dominant people have difficult time discerning the world outside this specific perspective. A technology can come to be seen as natural or as necessary as water to human life. In the US, the easiest example is the automobile, which has so altered the physical landscape, it has come to define the individual, making it logical for most to consider life without an automobile an impossibility as a fish would consider water.
The automobile is a relatively recent technology. However, technology's shaping of human perspective reaches far back across the human story. One defining perspective provided by technological development, though little conceived of as technology has been the phonetic alphabet. There's a number of powerful perspectives provided by the phonetic alphabet and writing, most important is the ability to define and think linearly. “The visual stress on continuity, uniformity, and connectedness, as it derives from literacy, confronts us with the great technological means of implementing continuity and linearity by fragmented repetition. The ancient world found this means in the brick, whether for wall or road. The repetitive, uniform brick, indispensable agent of road and wall, of cities and empires, is an extension, via letters, of the visual sense.”(Mc)
At this point, the idea of linear thinking is so culturally embedded, it is almost impossible to imagine it was fostered by the phonetic alphabet and literacy. “Literacy is indispensable for habits of uniformity at all times and places. Above all, it is needed for the workability of price systems and markets.”(Mc) That these developments derived from the technology of the phonetic alphabet and literacy are rarely considered. Yet, in the last century, with the development of electric media and particularly the screen, literacy as a dominant medium for communication is increasingly challenged along with linearity as the governing organizational scheme. “This factor has been ignored exactly as TV is now being ignored, for TV fosters many preferences that are quite at variance with literate uniformity and repeatability.”(Mc)
This was McLuhan's greatest insight, the challenge to the dominance of literacy and linear thinking by electricity and the screen. He deduced perspective created by electricity as not linear, – where B follows A and C follows B – but more of a mosaic, where perspective comes simultaneously from A, B, and C. Just as important, the receiver is not passive, but a participant in shaping the pattern received. “The plunge into depth experience via the TV image can only be explained in terms of the differences between visual and mosaic space. Ability to discriminate between these radically different forms is quite rare in our Western world.”(Mc)
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