One of the features which distinguish media from other types of communication, is that processes of mediation necessarily involve some form of technology. Media technologies take many forms, ranging from the technological apparatus of a pen and paper, through printing presses, film, video, radio, television to digital technologies associated with the Internet. In each case, the technologies which are used involve a complex network of elements, whose role within the process of mediated communication has been a source of debate and contestation within media and cultural studies.
This chapter outlines a number of the debates which are central to thinking about technology and mediation, with each section exploring a different area within these debates. Central questions which will be considered from a number of perspectives will include: Can technology be considered an active agent, or are technology’s impacts a result of the ways they are designed, implemented and legislated around? How does technology shape our perceptions of what it means to be human? What is the relationship between technology and the human body? What kinds of roles might technologies and processes of mediation play in constructions of time and space? Finally we will consider what kinds of relationship exist between technologies and politics?
One of the questions which has been debated within media studies since the 1960’s is the extent to which we can understand technology to be something which determines society, or whether technologies are themselves socially determined. Two important theorists who are often used to exemplify both ends of this spectrum are Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams.
McLuhan was a Canadian theorist of media and technology who rose to prominence in the 1960s following the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which McLuhan argued that the vast majority of previous works which explored media effectively missed the point. Whereas traditional explorations of media considered the ways that content and production are shaped by ideological factors, which then condition the readings and meanings of texts, McLuhan argued that this focus upon the content of media was entirely misplaced, as the primary meaning or effect of ‘any medium or technology, is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’ (1964:16). This leads to McLuhan’s famous declaration that the ‘message is the medium’ and that ‘our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how it is used that counts,’ is merely ‘the numb stance of the technological idiot.’ (1964:26)
McLuhan argued that media and technologies in general were used by humans to extend their bodily capabilities into the environment, with different technologies augmenting the capacities of different sensory organs. For example McLuhan argues that the phonetic alphabet and subsequent technologies surrounding the printing press extended human vision, whilst numbing hearing as communication which had previously been verbal and involved listening had become based upon reading and sight. McLuhan additionally argues that the printing press, and the mode of standardising writing which it introduced was responsible for the rise of nationalism and centralised mode of governance and social organisation. This McLuhan contrasts with electric technologies, which he contends extends the human nervous system, and is necessarily decentralising. McLuhan’s insistence that particular technologies necessarily have specific impacts which are direct results of their form exemplify a type of thought which is described as technological determinism – as the technology is said to directly determine society. The link below is to McLuhan’s seminal Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and the first chapter provides a useful introduction to his influential mode of thought.
While McLuhan’s statements were initially very well received within both academia and popular culture, his arguments were subsequently critiqued by a range of scholars, the best known of which is the British cultural and literary theorist Raymond Williams.
Williams writes from a Marxist position which is concerned with understanding the power relations which are implicit within forms of mediation, and how these power relations promote particular forms of social relationship which tend to support dominant ideological formations within society. Consequently, Williams was highly dismissive of McLuhan’s notion that the ways that media are used is unimportant, arguing that:
The technical abstractions in their unnoticed projections into the social world, have the effect of cancelling all attention to existing and developing (and already challenged) social institutions If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself’ (1974:131).
This would seem to resonate with how we think about media, whereby readers of the Australian tend to have a different understanding of politically charged issues such as climate change to people who get their news from ABC, and consequently are likely to act in very different ways as a result of their different understandings of the issue.If the technology itself was the primary message, then the differences in content which have been shown by empirical studies (eg Philo and Berry 2004) to affect whether or not people will support actions as important as overseas military interventions, are somehow relatively unimportant. Consequently Williams accuses McLuhan of reducing the effects of the social uses of technology which is designed, implemented, regulated and used in differing ways which have a multitude of impacts, to a simple technological essentialism which effectively ratifies the existing political system, as the crucial motor of social change is not human actions, but technological usage. In contrast to McLuhan’s technological determinism, Williams position can be understood as social constructivism, whereby the impacts of technologies are socially and culturally constructed by the ways in which they are employed by humans. The link below presents Williams’s extended critique of McLuhan.
Raymond Williams – The Technology and the Society pp1-23
Whilst Williams’s argument was largely seen to have refuted the claims of technological determinism within media and cultural studies, the societal shifts surrounding digital technologies and networked computing from the 1980’s onwards have somewhat revitalised some of McLuhan’s claims. The technological changes seemed to be creating some of the types of shift in terms of how we experience time and space. McLuhan was named the patron saint of Wired magazine, a publication which explores various issues surrounding digital technologies from a pro-technology and pro-capitalist perspective.
The issue with the straightforward determinism which McLuhan presented, however, was the claim that ‘electricity does not centralise but decentralises’ (McLuhan 1964:55)This was obviously not true in cases such as the use of national electricity grids or nuclear power stations.The simple deterministic consequences which McLuhan ascribes to particular technologies are overly simplistic, just as Williams’s (1974:133) claim that ‘We must reject technological determinism in all its forms’ is equally an over-simplification. Recently there have been a range of approaches which attempt to construct alternative understandings of technology which suggest a form of soft determinism, whereby technology impacts and affects society, whilst society simultaneously affects and shapes technology (Bennett 2011, Terranova 2004, Steigler 1998, Braidotti 2013) Below is a link to Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, a text which introduces the approach of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which is a good example of a soft determinism.
Bruno Latour – Reassembling the Social, Introduction pp1-17
In this section we have explored a number of theories which explore the relationships between that technology and agency, considering viewpoints which asks whether or to what extent technology and technological changes can be said to construct or determine society, and conversely exploring the range of ways that societies determine technologies. We finished by thinking about how some contemporary approaches have argued that technology and society are mutually co-constitutive, meaning that technology and society cannot be functionally separated and evolve together.
Discussion:
Do you agree with McLuhan or Williams on the subject of technological determinism?
Do you think that technologies which have emerged during your lifetime, such as smartphones and tablets have changed the way that you live?
References
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press, 2009.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013.
Latour, Bruno. “Reassembling the Social.” (2008).
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media: the extensions of man.(1964).
Philo, Greg, and Mike Berry. Bad news from Israel. Pluto Press, 2004.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus. Vol. 1. Stanford University Press, 1998.
Terranova, Tiziana. Network culture: Politics for the information age. Pluto Press, 2004.
Williams, Raymond. “Television: Technology and cultural form.” (1974).
A second body of literature surrounding technology and mediation relates to the ways in which technology can be understood to relate to the human body. As we saw in the previous section, one way that this relationship has been theorised is Marshall McLuhan’s argument that technology extends the human body into the environment. This approach assumes that that was an essential human body which pre-exists technological relations, which can then be extended through technological prosthesis. The three approaches to technology and the body can be understood as challenging this assumption that being human can be separated from being technological, suggesting in quite different ways that humans and technology cannot be separated, and that being human is also about being technological.
This is quite different from the type of thought which has largely dominated Western philosophical thought for hundreds of years, in which nature, culture, humans and technology are understood as being incommensurate with one another. Inspired by the findings of the science of cybernetics and related systems theories such as chaos and complexity theory, writers like Donna Haraway, and artists such as Stelarc have explored how the couplings of contemporary technologies and the body break down the barriers between nature and culture, human and technology. The links below lead to Stelarc’s online catalogue of performance art projects which visually and conceptually engage with a series of issues surrounding technology and body. The interview with Haraway presents some of the conceptual work around her notion that by the 1980s we had all become cyborgs – part human part machine – and how this alters our understandings of how technology and ethics can be approached.
Whilst Haraway and Stelarc provide ways of thinking about how technologies are incorporated into the body, there has been considerable interest recently in the emerging field of biotechnology, in which bodies are not merely augmented through technologies, but are instead modified and mediated at the design stage. Whilst you may be familiar with some of the debates surrounding the use of genetically modified food or the ethics of cloning, the two videos below demonstrate two different perspectives on contemporary usages of biotechnology. Ray Kurzweil provides an optimistic perspective on the variety of ways that biotechnology could be used to enhance various relationships, whilst Paul Root Wolpe examines some of the ethical quandaries which are raised through the possibilities which biotechnologies offers, questions which are going to become increasingly relevant as the technologies mature.
A final area surrounding technology and the body which has recently gained a lot of coverage in both academic writing and mainstream media, surrounds cognitive neuroscience and in particular the phenomena of neuroplasticity. It is now known that the human brain develops neural pathways according to the type of environment in which it exists. Humans are born with far more synaptic pathways than they will have as adults, as through a process called synaptogenesis the pathways which are not used disappear, whilst those which are used are strengthened. Whilst the traditional debate surrounding humans tended to oppose nature and nurture, we now know that human ‘nature’ is to be plastic, malleable and adaptable to the type of environment in which we find ourselves.
As the texts below from N Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Carr argue, a huge part of contemporary life is experienced through technological mediation. For example it is often thought that children today spend far more time with various forms of media than they do learning from their parents. Consequently, there have been a range of discussions considering what the implications are of this understanding that our relationships with our environment and technologies are altering the wiring of our brains. Both Hayles and Carr suggest that forms of attention are being modified through this process, and that broadly this can be characterised as a shift from sustained and deep engagement with singular texts to a shallow engagement with multiple forms of media, which Hayles terms hyper attention, and connects with the rise in cases of attention deficit disorder.
Finally, this short video from the conference Paying Attention: Digital Media Cultures and Generational responsibilities highlights a range of ways that contemporary academics theorise the relationship between media technologies, neuroplasticity and economies of attention[S1] .
There is a long history exploring the relationship between technology and the ways that people experience time and space. Early theorists to explore this relationship include French philosopher Henri Bergson and German sociologist Georg Simmel. Writing at the start of the 20th Century, Simmel was particularly taken by how the invention of the pocketwatch was crucial to the structuring of time within the newly industrialised cities, how the pocketwatch had allowed time to be quantified in a far more precise way than previous technologies, and how this had ramifications for the emerging industrial economy. In a famous essay entitled The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel writes:
If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time. In addition an apparently mere external factor: long distances, would make all waiting and broken appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule.
Thinking about the relationships between technology, time, and space returns us to one of the more interesting aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s thought; technology defines how we collectively understand time and space. This video below from 1967 is a useful introduction to McLuhan’s thoughts about some of the ways that our technological relationships affect how we perceive time and space. Whilst it contains some rather wild claims, especially pertaining to how hardware will disappear, it proves a useful starting point for thinking about technology time and space.
While McLuhan’s arguments are often intriguing but somewhat slippery and lacking in the type of rigorous analysis typical of academic scholarship, James Carey’s essay ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph’ explores similar themes but in a more traditional style. Carey gives a detailed history of the telegraph, looking at the way that the telegraph transformed the speed at which information could travel, and was thus a major driver of economic changes which resulted from the change in the way that people could act in space and understood time. Indeed, Carey argues that the telegraph was a pivotal technology which led to the introduction of standardised time zones:
Standard time zones were established because in the eyes of some they were necessary. They were established, to return to the point of this chapter, because of the technological power of the telegraph. Time was sent via the telegraph wire; but today, thanks to technical improvements, it is sent via radio waves from the Naval observatory in Maryland. The telegraph could send time faster than a railroad car could move; and therefore it facilitated the temporal coordination and integration of the entire system. Once that was possible, the new definitions of time could be used by industry and government to control and coordinate activity across the country, infiltrate into the practical consciousness of ordinary men and women, and uproot older notions of rhythm and temporality.
Carey p19
Moving on to think about some of the spatio-temporal consequences of contemporary technologies, we are confronted with the ways that globalised (although not global in a unified and totalising way, as the enduring digital divisions entail) networks of computers have ushered in a what Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells (1996) has called the space of flows and timeless time. Paul Virillio provides a provocative perspective within these debates, in which he somewhat counterintuitively argues that:
The very word “globalization” is a fake. There is no such thing as globalization, there is only virtualization. What is being effectively globalized by instantaneity is time. Everything now happens within the perspective of real time.
Understanding the ways that real-time computational networks now control various elements of our social and cultural infrastructures (such as large amounts of the financial sector) bring Virillio to a discussion of what types of new accident are made possible by the contemporary technological assemblage. Just as there were no car or plane crashes before the respective invention of the automobile and the aeroplane, Virillio ponders the notion of an information bomb which could be unleashed by the collective failure of the computational systems which comprise our contemporary technological environment.
A pivotal element of digital computational systems, and one which arguably distinguishes them from previous technological ensembles, is the fact that these systems feature software; executable code which is capable of making programmed decisions based on real-time information which feeds back through the software. This executable nature of the algorithms within software has been described by Adrian Mackenzie (2006) as a mode of secondary agency, an active agential capability which is distinct from that of a human, but which is also markedly different from what we encounter with other forms of technology.
This focus on the unique properties of software, and how the algorithms of executable code are shaping contemporary (especially urban) space is the focus of a strand of software studies exemplified by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s work around Code/Space, which is a term they apply to contemporary spaces which are not simply mediated by software, but where the space simply could not function without the agential capacities of software. Within their book titled Code/Space, they explore case studies such as the airports, where the volume of human and nonhuman traffic simply could not be functionally dealt with without the specific affordances offered by software systems.
What technologies introduced in the past 50 years have affected the way that New Zealand and New Zealanders relate to the rest of the world?
How does having a device which means you can constantly be contacted, and are usually able to access the Internet , alter the way that you experience time and space?
What would you consider to be the positive and negative outcomes of being always on – being constantly connected to digital networks?
We are frequently exposed to claims that the contemporary media ecology is one in which audiences have been liberated from the passive age of mass media in which media consumption meant sitting down whilst watching and/or listening to material made by professional filmmakers, journalists and television broadcasters. In place of this passive mode of spectatorship, we are told that networked digital media turns audiences into prosumers; a portmanteau of producer and consumer which captures the notion that today’s audiences are allegedly active participants within an interactive digital convergence culture.
Attached to these claims often come arguments that these qualities of interactivity and participation have made contemporary societies more democratic, accountable and open places, that is to say that digital technologies are proclaimed to have a profound effect upon politics. But how do we quantify these claims? What kinds of evidence exists that supports and contradicts these ideas, and what critiques exist which suggest that these claims might be ideologically motivated? This section seeks to introduce some historical and contemporary thought surrounding technology and politics so that we can begin to approach some of these questions.
As we have seen elsewhere in this book, there have been a plethora of ways that media and politics have been historically explored with regards to issues such as Ideology, Discourse, media effects, and the public sphere. Understanding technology’s role in politics also means contemplating technology and agency – considering how and if technology acts as actant capable of setting limits and exerting pressures upon socio-political formation.
In contrast to Jurgen Habermas’s claims that the mass media necessarily entailed the corruption of a public sphere informed by democratic debate, an argument was advanced in various forms at different times by Marxist theorists of media such as Bertold Brecht and Hans Magnus Enzensberger , and which suggested that the issue at hand was the type of technological assemblage available. Brecht explores the notion of political potentials which would be brought forth by a future form of the radio as a two-way mode of communication, which allowed the audience to speak back to the program, and therefore creating a participatory debate rather than a unilateral broadcast. Writing in the 1970s Enzensberger outlines a hypothetical communication network based on reversible circuits rather than centre to periphery broadcasting which would be a minimum precondition (although by no means an ensuring condition) of a socialist rather than a capitalist media structure.
Consequently, when the Internet and the World Wide Web were nascent technologies in the 1980s and 1990s respectively, there was a strand of neo-Frankfurt School media analysis which argued that this new model of many-to-many communication (as opposed to the one-to-many model of broadcast media) would facilitate democratic debate through interactivity and participation, and construct a form of mediated public sphere.
Computers are a potentially democratic technology. While broadcast communication tends to be one-way and unidirectional, computer communication is bi- or omni-directional. Where TV-watching is often passive, computer involvement can be interactive and participatory. Individuals can use computers to send email to communicate with other individuals, or can directly communicate via modems which use the telephone to link individuals with each other in interactive networks. Modems can tap into community bulletin boards, web sites, computer conference sites, or chat rooms, that make possible a new type of interactive public communication. Democracy involves democratic participation and debate as well as voting. In the Big Media Age, most people were kept out of democratic discussion and were rendered by broadcast technologies passive consumers of infotainment. Access to media was controlled by big corporations and a limited range of voices and views were allowed to circulate.
In the Internet Age, everyone with access to a computer, modem, and Internet service can participate in discussion and debate, empowering large numbers of individuals and groups kept out of the democratic dialogue during the Big Media Age. Consequently, a technopolitics can unfold in the new public spheres of cyberspace and provide a supplement, though not a replacement, for intervening in face-to-face public debate and discussion. For instance, many computer bulletin boards and web sites have a political debate conference where individuals can type in their opinions and other individuals can read them and if they wish respond. Other sites have live real-time chat rooms where people can meet and interact. These forms of cyberdemocracy constitute a new form of public dialogue and interaction, and take place in new public spheres, thus expanding our conception of democracy.
Douglas Kellner: Techno-Politics, New Technologies and the New Public Spheres
An early activist attempt to create a communication infrastructure along these principles was Indymedia , [see also Aotearoa Indymedia] a movement which grew alongside the anti-globalisation/alter-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Angered and frustrated by the corporate media’s reporting of large scale protests and political events, whereby the perspectives of governments, police forces and corporations were regularly presented whilst those of the protesters themselves were rarely heard, an international community of media activists worked on creating a system that would allow people to post news to Indymedia websites themselves. Whilst this sounds somewhat mundane and ordinary now, only 15 years ago, the notion that news could be written by regular people rather than professional journalists was seen as a radical political gesture. Within a few years there were Indymedia collectives and websites in over 150 different countries spread across the globe and the idea that news was something which could be produced by citizens as well as journalists had taken off.
Indymedia, as an organisation formed along anarchist/autonomist lines, with an anti-hierarchical series of Principles of Unity, was hugely successful within activist circles. However, the lack of formal organisation often proved a handicap in making the platform more mainstream. As time went by, there were an increasing number of commercial platforms which enabled users to create their own news on sites like Blogger, Livejournal and WordPress. Unlike Indymedia these sites were not overtly political, but allowed users to curate their own sites or blogs on any topic they wished, and allowed users considerable control over the look, feel and function of their site without requiring the knowledge of any HTML or CSS (the languages used to write content and styles for web pages). Consequently, as the 2000s went on, user generated content moved away from being a radical political act, and became increasingly integrated into the ways that news and media are generated. Commercial outlets such as The Guardian or Stuff.co.nz’s Stuff Nation incorporated user generated stories and comments into online platforms. Major UGC platforms such as Youtube and Blogger have been bought by larger corporations such as Google, and other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become multi-billion dollar corporations.
This could be understood as a case of what Brian Winston has described as the law of the suppression of radical potential, whereby the potential to create radically new socio-political relations inherent within new technologies are constrained and suppressed by the range of pre-existing institutions and conventions. These effectively work to re-integrate the technology into an altered but not radically transformed society. Consequently, we can understand that the rise of user generated content and citizen journalism has in numerous cases provided mechanisms for previously marginalised and unheard voices to be heard by millions, in some cases bringing about notable changes.
For example, during the G20 protests in London, Ian Tomlinson, a man unconnected to the protests died whilst walking home from work. The initial police account maintained that there had been no contact between Tomlinson and the riot police, and that an autopsy showed that he died of a heart attack. Four days later, it emerged that a witness had video footage showing Tomlinson suffering an unprovoked assaulted by a police officer, and falling violently to the ground. He walked away, but then later collapsed and died. A subsequent second autopsy revealed that Tomlinson died from internal bleeding. Had there not been the widespread diffusion of video cameras amongst the population, this evidence would not have been captured, and the initial (and factually inaccurate) police account would have stood.
However, whilst this and other examples can demonstrate how the diffusion of media production and publishing tools has made a tangible difference, the dominant modes of UGC and social media are far from the non-hierarchical and non-commercial model that Indymedia sought to introduce. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Pintrest and Instagram are all commercial entities which exist to make a profit through collating user data which is willingly uploaded as content, and using this to sell highly targeted advertising. Whilst they evidence a departure from tradition media corporations, they have the same economic imperative and so the radical potential of the Internet – to provide a decentralised, non-commerical model of community-orientated communication – is suppressed and re-integrated into capitalism. As Jodi Dean powerfully argues, it can instead be considered an expression of neoliberal capitalism, whose emphasis on being an individual consumer (rather than part of a homogenised mass culture) mirrors the activity found within social media.
Dean’s arguments about communicative capitalism (a term she applies to describe contemporary capitalism) are a huge departure from much of the cyber-utopian discourse which is regularly heard from places such as TED, Wired and mainstream media accounts of technology and politics. There we are more likely to hear that interactive technology has made society more open, accountable and democratic. That networked technology has made society a better, more connected and more enjoyable place for people to live in, rather than being used to maintain material inequalities and relations characterised by exploitation, immiseration and unsustainability. Typical of this type of pro-technology argument is Clay Shirky’s work around social media as seen in the video below.
Shirky’s position contrasts sharply with that of Evgeny Morozov, who explores ways that the technologies which Shirky evangelises about are used by governments around the world as tools for surveillance and spying upon their populations and others spread across the world. Indeed, the disclosures in 2013 from Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked a cache of top secret documents to the Guardian newspaper and fled the US as he felt morally compelled to inform the world about the extent of the US National Security Agency’s online surveillance apparatus. There are undoubtedly elements of social media and user generated content which support democracy and allow democratic debate to emerge. However, these positive elements are regularly embellished and over-emphasised, as Morozov demonstrates in this extract which explores the use of social media in the failed Iranian revolution in 2009, which was dubbed the Twitter revolution in the West:
This was globalization at its worst: A simple email based on the premise that Twitter mattered in Iran, sent by an American diplomat in Washington to an American company in San Francisco, triggered a worldwide Internet panic and politicized all online activity, painting it in bright revolutionary colors and threatening to tighten online spaces and opportunities that were previously unregulated. Instead of finding ways to establish long-term relationships with Iranian bloggers and use their work to quietly push for social, cultural, and—at some distant point in the future—maybe even political change, the American foreign policy establishment went on the record and pronounced them to be more dangerous than Lenin and Che Guevara combined. As a result, many of these “dangerous revolutionaries” were jailed, many more were put under secret surveillance, and those poor Iranian activists who happened to be attending Internet trainings funded by the U.S. State Department during the election could not return home and had to apply for asylum.
Consequently, we can see that there are a range of competing discourses surrounding (media) technology and politics. These range from claims that new technologies transform politics in ways that form more participatory, democratic and just societies, to those which see technologies as tools which are employed to continue centuries of exploitation and inequality.
Discussion:
What kinds of technologies can you think of that might enhance democratic participation?
What kinds of technologies can you think of that might inhibit democratic participation?
What relations do you think exist between participatory media and democracy?