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I. One of Marshall McLuhan's better-known oracular sayings is "We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us." Of course, he was talking about our communication tools. Having examined the entrails of his TV set, he issued some sibylline mutterings about what these tools were doing to us.
The harder-nosed few among those who bothered with McLuhan's mysteries usually found his views about the effects of the media unwarranted or exaggerated. It's probably impossible to provide a good basis for speculations of the sort McLuhan indul ged in. Causal hypotheses such as these are hard to establish even when the most rigorous scientific techniques of psychology or sociology are deployed, and there's little of that sort of investigation of his hypotheses. The best we can do is to speculate from our armchairs, hoping that our guesses are plausible; and it's this kind of speculation I'm going to do, with apologies for its high degree of dubitability. I shall try, however, to avoid exaggeration (see qualificatory footnotes).
Communication technology has advanced apace since the stone age (the 70's) when McLuhan wrote, adding knickknacks such as the cellular phone, home video, cable, interactive TV (soon), and the Internet. These developments, which he did not live to see, have made his predictions about effects perhaps a bit more believable, if not easier to understand. I'm going to defend and extend a bit a McLuhanesque line about the probable effects of electronic communication.
A second line of criticism against McLuhan accepted, to some extent, his predictions, but objected to his apparent approval of the tendencies encouraged by the new technology. I'll indulge in some moralizing too. Don't be alarmed -- I'm not a Luddite. I love machines, and never write with a quill. But I do have qualms, and the time is right for airing these, now that the hoopla is starting to fade and the backlash is blooming.
II. McLuhan argued, plausibly on the whole, that differences in communication technology result in differences in how and what we communicate, and even in our social arrangements our patterns of perception and thought. I'll begin by looking at one of his major concerns: the differences between TV and print communication.
A book or a letter is "linear," McLuhan argued, so its writer and its reader are encouraged into linear patterns of thought. A written work must be apprehended in order, and its temporal, spatial, and logical structure is often isomorphic to, and clarificatory of, what it talks about. (FOOTNOTE 1) Its semantic units are the word and the sentence, and these are, we might say, more particular and determinate in import than the TV's pictures. (FOOTNOTE 2) TV's largest units of organization -- typically the hour or half-hour show -- contain far less content than the average book. And within that frame, the next smaller units of organization are typically quite small: TV shows are often hodgepodges, medleys: loosely connected small bits piled together, connected (if at all) by intuited suggestions, whereas the structure of a book -- even a book of fiction or poetry -- is more often more explicit and rational. A comparison of TV and print news provides a good example of the con trast. Even more than in McLuhan's time, the unit of organization of TV news is the sound-bite, and its items have a fraction of the content of the corresponding newspaper story, even in your terrible local newspaper. The TV viewer, unlike the book reader, does not put it aside for a moment and stop and think, or back up and repeat. One reads a book at one's own pace, but the pace of a TV transmission is predetermined.
A book or letter is a small physical object, whereas a TV transmission, constituted by radiated and otherwise transmitted modulated waves, is not. A printed object has a particular location; a TV transmission, however, is everywhere and nowhere, until it is manifested on a particular TV receiver. The links on the causal chain from writer to reader of a letter or a book are concrete and particular, while those from TV producer to audience are literally ethereal. Books can travel as far as TV transmissions, but not as fast, and not as casually. And their travel through space is in the same easily comprehensible material mode as the movement of the other familiar bits of matter like ships and shoes: they don't seem to come out of the blue. The result of this is that we might tend to see print communication as having come from somewhere and someone -- more like a communication, and less like a magical sign from nowhere.
Books are generally more serious things than TV shows. It takes more effort to get a book, and it takes more time to consume one. One does not channel-surf quickly and casually through a large variety of books.(FOOTNOTE 3 )
Written matter often compels serious treatment because it's written, and it's matter: it's a thing; it can be held in your hand. Many of us are quite reluctant to part with old books and letter, which are often kept well beyond the point of any utility; but we're not bothered by the fact that TV broadcasts disappear forever. (FOOTNOTE 4) The TV medium pronounces its own immateriality, its own ephemeral nature, its own lack of permanence and seriousness.
Because of these differences, the TV generation may already have suffered changes in the way they communicate, in the way they connect to others, and even in the way they perceive and think. Disconnected bits, repetitive and discontinuous, replace orderly structure. Impression, intuition, and suggestion replace perception, analysis, and logic. The passivity of the TV voyeur replaces the collaborative activity of the reader. Magic replaces cause-and-effect. Celebrity replaces earned authority. A bizarre fantasy-world replaces a connection with reality; the distinction between fiction and non- deteriorates. (FOOTNOTE 5) Can McLuhan really have welcomed all of this?
During the last 40 years, in which TV has grown from nothing to its now significant place in our culture, the population, it's been claimed, has been dumbing-down, manifesting a shrinking literacy, an increase in moral and intellectual passivity, a decrease in attention-span, a diminution of theoretical and practical concern with what used to be considered reality, a substitution of intuition and impression for analysis, a movement toward mythology and superstition, and a decrease in the ability to see and think straight. Has this really happened? It's hard to measure these supposed phenomena, and harder to establish the causal connection to TV. But, still ...
III. Post-McLuhan communication technology manifests the characteristics he talked about to a greater degree; and it adds new features that have potentially more sweeping -- perhaps more dangerous -- effects.
The cellular phone and the walkman mean that we can be communicated-to anywhere, any time, even in bizarrely inappropriate circumstances. Their ubiquity tends to divide our attention between the communication and the context, to diminish our attention to both, to trivialize the content of each. Even when not accompanied by our cell-phone or attached to our walkman, we may tend to pay less serious and extended attention to things.
The TV music video, contemporary pop music, and the computer game show the characteristics McLuhan mentioned to a high degree, and they are likely to have some considerable influence on the many who spend a lot of time at them. It's no accident that the walkman, the video game, and the music video are the domain of the especially mindless and disconnected among young people, and that what's presented on these media is so often glitzy crap. Their technologies and the natural contexts of their use make this highly likely.
Pop music, TV, and computer games already seem to have removed large segments of the population from reality and from each other somewhat; but it's possible that we ain't seen nothing yet. Virtual Reality simulations promise to be able to provide vastly more compelling and addicting trips into bizarre cyberspace. VR futurologists report that the most interesting possibility for many people is cybersex: you don goggles and an electronic bodysuit, and interact visually and tactually with a computer-simulated Madonna. (FOOTNOTE 6) Consider the effects on that area of interpersonal relations which has always provided the greatest opportunities for real contact and real disaster.
And no cranky survey of the unfortunate effects of modern technology should ignore the backwards baseball-cap, which cuts off blood circulation to the brain. (FOOTNOTE 7)
IV. The most important current innovation may well be the Internet. Hooray! for e-mail, as substitute for the expensive and snail-paced Canada Post. But there are other differences. Computer mail is characteristically written while attached to the remote sending computer, in close to real time, and its style, attention, pace, and organization can be expected to differ from what's produced with pen or typewriter or word-processor.(FOOTNOTE 8 ) E-mail is, thus, not precisely a parthenogenetic offspring of the post: it also resembles its other parent, the telephone.
But e-mail also differs from telephone communication. For one thing, e-mail communication does not generally allow the feedback typical of a telephone conversation. Response follows immediately on the telephone. We often interrupt each other; talk often overlaps. A telephone talk is conversation, while e-mail proceeds by short monologues. We habitually and usually unconsciously give small bits of continuous feedback to speakers on the telephone, in the form of small noises we intersperse in the other's talk.(FOOTNOTE 9) Of course telephone, not e-mail, transmits laughter, sighs, tone of voice, pauses, speed of speaking, and other conscious and unconscious aspects of viva voce communication. All this must make some difference in the form and content of our interaction.
E-mail also loses the non-word aspects of paper communication. A handwritten letter can communicate as much by how it looks as by what it says. Even typewritten or computer-printed letters can have a communicative look to them -- not, of course, because of the penmanship, (oops, penpersonship) but because of the kind of paper, the placement on the page, the font and format, the signs of correction, and so on. But the uniformity of format imposed by e-mail eliminates this...
V. There's something hugely attractive to many people about the Internet's bulletin board function. You probably have seen much in the popular press about the incredible volume of communication already going on there. What's the attraction?
While thinking about Internet, I was reminded of two related phenomena I encountered long ago. When I was in high school, a couple of my friends were ham radio operators. They had spent a great deal of money, time, and effort to train and equip themselves to be able to talk to people, more or less at random, all over the world. Ham radio operators' talk is very constrained, extremely limited in duration and in technical possibility. Curiously, nobody seemed to have much to say. They exchanged some natter about the weather and described their equipment; that about exhausted the conversation.
The other encounter with peculiar communication was earlier -- I suppose I was about 14 at the time. Somebody in my school had discovered a local telephone number such that everyone who called that number was connected to everyone else on that line, at once. What you could hear on the line was an enormous hubbub -- hundreds of voices, fading out into the electronic distance, and you could join in. Some voices were, for some reason, closer and more distinct, and you could hear and try to participate in these many-sided conversations. Again, the content was peculiarly limited: mostly "What school are you going to?" and "Are you cute?" and attempted responses.
These two modes of communication share with the Internet significant constraints on communication because of narrow bandwidth. And all three manifest a remarkable vacuity, on average, of what's communicated. A fact about the Internet bulletin boards that is not much commented on is that so many of the posted messages are silly stupid, or trivial.. There's even less evidence of significant mentition than on the Oprah show.
The generally low tone and quality of public Internet communication is a consequence of the fact that it is casual, direct and private, unedited and uncensored. Access to radio, TV, newspapers, even to the bulletin boards hung on the walls in the university where I teach, is controlled and limited by those in charge. You can write a letter to your newspaper, but they can edit it, and they don't have to publish it. Books to be published are of course chosen and edited by their publishers. There is even the remote possibility of control by authorities of what you say over the telephone or the ham radio.
The pile of accumulated litter is not really a terrible consequence in itself. Internet storage capacity is unbelievably, unprecidentedly, huge and cheap, so why not? Of course, it's hard to extract anything of value from the pile, but this is largely a matter of knowing where to look, and maybe new organizational tools will facilitate your finding what you want -- that is, if you're looking for something worthwhile, which most Internetters are not. Should we be alarmed at the avidity with which Internet contributors produce and consume vacuity? On the one hand, apparently a need is being filled. But on the other hand, tolerance for the fast and stupid may tend to spread.
VI. But the most striking similarities of ham radio, the mass telephone line, and the Internet bulletin board is that they are all ways of attempting to make contact with random strangers, and this appears to be a good part of their attraction.
Pop commentaries on pop culture (like this one) sometimes remark on the isolation of people from one-another. In the good old days (the story goes), the days of the genuine village, personal contacts were easy, frequent, natural, and organically connected to our other activities. We all met each other in the square, or on the way to the public grazing areas, or to the public latrines. But nowadays, we're all unfortunately isolated in our high-rises, our private cars, our huge anonymous cities, etc. All three phenomena I have mentioned might be seen as somewhat flawed attempts to escape from our alienation and isolation -- as ways of attempting (in the famous cliche of the Telephone Company ads) to "reach out and touch someone." (Don't worry -- I'm not going to start singing "Feelings.") Too bad, then, that all three are so limited in their bandwidth, and that the touching they foster is so trivial.
Architects interested in town planning often bewail the isolation induced by our living arrangements, and sometimes try to remedy this. Shopping malls, for example, have been designed to include housing, medical services, entertainment, and so on, in imitation of the old presumably non-alienating village; they're given names like "Village Square." Communal gathering areas are designed into them, with airless versions of open-air cafes, and the inevitable fountain. Sometimes there are large public bulletin boards to encourage communication.
Of course, after some time in the Village Square Mall, you feel more alienated and isolated than ever -- not to mention your incipient migraine. But let's imagine how this might be done right, in a way that really encourages interpersonal contact between strangers. Let's design a mall with a genuine central meeting place. The rules of this place are that anyone is allowed to stand up on a little platform and address strangers gathered around, about anything at all. Anyone who enters is allowed to go up to any other stranger and start a conversation. Facilitators are hired to introduce people to each other. Now: would you be interested in frequenting this place? Would you like to be introduced to strangers? Would you stand up and make a speech? Why not?
No doubt ham radio, the open telephone line, and the Internet are responses to a genuine need for contact that our civilization isn't satisfactorily providing These and other media are failures at producing the kind of snuggly warm genuine mean ingful (etc.) contact the real village is supposed to have: the "global village" that McLuhan announced is nothing like a real one. But it just might be that the limitations of these media are (as we say in the Computer Age) features, not bugs.
The distance, the insubstantiality and triviality of connection of all three modes is perhaps a necessary condition for their attractiveness. Maybe we prefer such communication to the real thing. Banks have discovered that the majority of their customers prefer using banking machines to dealing with tellers, even when this takes longer. The reason why you wouldn't want to spend any time in the imaginary non-alienating mall we've designed is, I suspect, that you don't really want all that contact. The contact we're imagining in this mall is face-to-face, unlimited by technological interfaces; it runs the risk of not being trivial. This is perhaps what's undesirable about it. We prefer contact with strangers which is mediated by the technological screen, minimizing or eliminating eye-contact, and (at least at first) empty of significant content.
VII. Perhaps the most important feature of Internet is the extent to which it substitutes for face-to-face conversation: E-mail to some extent replaces this contact with acquaintances; bulletin boards (initially) with strangers.
Our paradigm for communication is the face-to-face conversation. What we're doing here (according to the influential Austin/Grice "speech act" analysis) (FOOTNOTE 10) is trying to achieve an effect on a particular person by means of getting that person to recognize this intention. When you assert something, you normally are trying to get your "audience" to believe what you say. Asking a question or making a request aims at other responses. The person who hears you will respond the way you want him to only if the appropriate relation exists between you. He'll believe you only if he trusts you. Your wanting him to respond in a certain sort of way will act as a reason for him to do this only if he's cooperative -- if he feels a certain sort of responsibility to you in particular. Thus that response depends on a certain sort of trust, or desire to be cooperative, in your audience: an inclination to trust you. This sort of communication depends on cooperation, and it also fosters it, as past cooperation breeds future trust.
But media communication -- "publication" -- diverges from this paradigm. TV and radio, books and other written publication "speak" to some extent anonymously, and aim their "speech acts" at no one in particular. When a speech act is broadcast, it is no longer tailored for an individual hearer, and its aims for audience response tend to be less particular. Insofar as it is to some extent anonymously produced, responsibility for its production is diffused: it's shared by the publisher or the TV network. The characteristics noted by the speech act analysis tend to weaken or disappear. The bonds of individual trust and responsibility weaken.
Publication of course didn't arrive on the scene with Internet bulletin boards. It's as old as writing, and perhaps even older: pre-literate societies have other ways of sending messages to nobody in particular, if only by shouting into the dark. With the invention of moveable type (the technological revolution McLuhan made much of) publication became enormously more easy, and speakers were removed from their audiences to an unprecedented extent. But the Internet BB carries this much further, because it provides faster, cheaper, easier, and wider publication than any previous form.
VIII. I have been discussing how publication differs from the paradigm of the face-to-face conversation. But technologically-fostered communication, even when it's not publication, differs from this paradigm in additional ways. Even when it is sent by a particular person to a particular person, it is "screened." The audience characteristically can't see the speaker's face, and even when the communication is signed -- not anonymous. Its "narrower bandwidth" means that less information (e.g. "body language") gets across. It's also indirect -- at a distance, transformed. All this can make communicants feel disconnected.
We often can say certain things more easily under the constraints imposed by the telephone, the personal letter, the letter-to-the-newspaper-editor, the published article, than face-to-face. It's easier to give bad news through these media than in person, and it's easier to lie. By consequence, care for our interlocutor, and trust and cooperation tend to be diminished by this distancing. The cues we get to let us know whether we should trust what someon says are often screened off by distanced narrow-bandwidth contact.
Internet removes and screens to a far greater extent than earlier technologies. What you hear on the telephone are the actual noises the speaker makes. A letter is the actual piece of paper its writer once held. Internet's narrower bandwidth, its immateriality and its passage through virtual electronic space, and its imposition of standard form make it a more removed form of communication than any of these. Even the two peculiar examples I discussed above -- the anonymous shouting over the common telephone line, and the messages of the ham radio operator, offer more directness of communication than the Internet: on the common telephone line, and over ham radio, listeners can hear your voice, after all, and this makes for a small personal connection.
IX. Consider how important seeing others' faces is to us, and why. Humans have evolved with an astounding facial-recognition ability; it's such a complex and difficult job that it has been taken to be one of the central and definitive tasks -- and one of the hardest -- for artificial intelligence. We also have evolved with a huge variety of facial configuration, far greater than that among other species. I take it that the evolutionary reason for this is that we use faces more than anything else to recognize others. Human voices provide another such identifying factor, though a secondary one, with far less application, accuracy and importance. The individualities of handwriting -- even those of the typed and posted letter -- still provide the personal touches that make us feel to a small extent that we recognize our communicant.
Recognizing others -- identifying and re-identifying them -- plays a crucial moral role in our social lives. The practical solution to the prisoner's dilemma, it has been shown, is to cooperate with those who will cooperate with us. To do this, we must be able to recognize the person we've encountered, to identify that person as a past cooperator or defector.
The primary way we solve the prisoner's dilemma is through re-identification of cooperators, but we can also get some evidence that the other will cooperate, even the first time we meet. Visual clues about the particular person are important. Consider how you decide whether or not to pick up a particular hitchhiker, or whether to start a casual conversation with particular strangers, or to believe what they say. We want to look into the other person's eyes to see if that person can be trusted. But the more distant and screened contact is, the less we are able to make these judgments; thus screening encourages uncooperative or hostile behaviour. It is no accident that personal crime tends to happen at night; and that Halloween night, when our faces are masked, is often violent and chaotic. On the Internet, we're always masked, and it's perpetual night. One thing that may diminish this effect is technological development itself. No doubt electronic communication will increase its power, making possible sending live picture of communicants' faces on their monitors. It's predicted that soon video Internet capacity and Virtual Reality techniques will make much more interaction and (seeming) contact possible. But the same technologies will provide opportunity for easy simulation and faking, so they may actually decrease trust. In any case, as I've indicated, significant screening is an essential, desirable feature of contact with strangers, so bulletin-board publication may never become more intimate, trustworthy, and responsible.
X. Much has been made recently of the huge proportion of nasty stuff on the Internet: hate speech, obscenity, generalized insult, and the brutal response (the "flame"). These make Internet unique among mass publication media. Well, not quite uni que. There is another medium which rivals Internet in the extent to which communication is unlimited by editors, and in which anonymous authors are behind a liberating screen: the bathroom wall.
Life on the Internet is already surprisingly verbally violent, but one cannot commit a genuine mugging on-line. Verbal violence is not exactly the same thing as physical violence. The victims of physical violence are usually unwilling ones, whereas all you have to do to avoid Internet violence is to log off. Verbal violence may breed its physical second-cousin, or it may offer a pressure-reducing comparatively harmless relief-valve. A great deal of noise has been made recently about the related question about the effects of TV violence-representation on the habits of today's youth, blah blah blah, but there's not much hard evidence on this, so some agnosticism is still healthy.
Identical considerations arise regarding cyberporn. There are recent reports that swapping sexually explicit pictures, descriptions and stories has become one of the largest (if not the largest) recreational applications of users on computer networks. I regard the question of the effects of porn as equally open. (I apologize for relying here on the widely discredited distinction between the erotic and the violent.) Some people used to think (and used to be able to say) that verbal and pictorial eros was generally harmless fun, and at least sometimes a Good Thing. Cybersex does have some advantages. In sharp contrast to rape, it always has a willing victim, one who can escape merely by pushing the "Quit" button. And the HIV is not a computer virus.
Not all personal net contact is pornographic: there's a great deal of old-fashioned getting-to-know you chitchat in cyberspace as well. One hears increasingly of purely electronic relationships which have advanced to an astounding degree, even to the marriage proposal's having been made and accepted. (Earlier, I complained about the triviality of most Internet communication; but I admit here that some of it is not. Only a tiny percent of electronic communication is non-trivial; but a tin y percent of trillions of bytes is a large quantity.) It cannot be all bad that a new path to the formation of significant relationships has opened.
And consider the way computer relationships develop: exclusively, to begin with, through verbal contact. The length of your hair, the shape of your pecs, and the colour of your Miata are irrelevant. Remember when some people thought that the mind, especially as verbally revealed, ought to be a factor in relations with others? To anyone who still thinks this, the Internet might even be good news.
XI. The Internet will not go the way of the hula-hoop. The hype is dying down a bit, but electronic interaction seems to be here to stay, for a while anyway.
It's well known that panicky conservative voices always have reacted to every innovation in history with the cry that this will cause the end of civilization as we know it. Never serve chicken little without a grain of salt; but do remember, nevertheless, that the sky sometimes actually does fall: civilizations do end, or transmute into something very different and unexpected.
Electronic communication will itself certainly continue to mutate with increasing velocity, unpredictably. This, plus our ignorance of what might result from even current technology, not to mention future developments, together mean that we're facing the great unknown. (So what else is new? Futurology has never been a science.) We can't do more now than speculate. Forewarned is not always forearmed -- it's usually one-armed or less; and I've issued no warnings with any certainty. But thinking about what might happen might be a good idea anyway..(FOOTNOTE 11)
1. TV programs are, in one way, more linear than printed matter, in that they force their own order of presentation. It's possible, of course, to read the last chapter of a book, or the last paragraph of a letter, first; whereas it's impossible to see the end of a TV program before its beginning (except when it's on tape, but I doubt that's done much.
2. On the other hand, what's said by a novel or book of poetry can be quite a good deal more suggestive, inexplicit, and open-ended, than what's said by a dumb and literal-minded TV show.
3. People sometimes do something like this in bookstores, but it's not the typical mode. The advent of the TV remote control has made channel surfing typical.
4. Certain bits of writing are, on the other hand, entirely trivial and disposable -- the newspaper comics, the jotted note. And, in a few instances, we do save TV transmissions on tape, but note that we tend to be more willing to erase old tapes than to throw out old books. The old films of Nazi book burning evoke a peculiar horror that I don't think would be evinced were this a mass video-tape erasure.
5. It has been reported that the stars of U.S. daytime soap opera receive 10,000 letters a week from fans confessing the secrets of their heart that they presumably dare not reveal to their actual loved ones. Sherlock Holmes has received lots of mail too, so there may be merely a difference in degree; nevertheless, visual media can be expected to produce a more compelling substitute for reality than print.
6. This would amount to a hypersimulation, since the "real" Madonna is already a media simulation.
7. I here express my gratitude for critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper from an anonymous reviewer (not for this journal) who objected to my unsubstantiated and often implausible claims. "Are we really supposed to believe," this reviewer asked, "the author's contention that a 'backwards baseball cap...cuts off blood circulation to the brain'?" In answer to this critic, and as a general caveat lector, I offer the apology that this was meant as (what we call, in the trade) a Joke. A tiny Joke, perhaps so tiny as to be undetectable to the naked eye; but mine own.
8. It's possible, of course, to write an email while disconnected, with the same care and revision as any other computer-writing; but we don't often do this.
9. The existence and importance of the little noises we intersperse on the telephone become vivid when one makes a call to a distant country and the telephone lines seem to operate unidirectionally: your little interspersed noises temporarily interrupt the sound from the other end, interfering substantially and disconcertingly with the flow of conversation.
10. the best expression of which is found in John R. Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
11. Thanks to Duncan MacIntosh for suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.
Robert M. Martin
Department of Philosophy
Dalhousie University
Halifax, NS
B3H 3J5
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