WEEK FIVE COMMENTS

Please forgive my late posting. My Internet connection has been down all weekend due to a dead cable modem.

One of Thomas Friedman’s goals as an author is to shock his readers, as his title “The World is Flat” suggests. In my opinion, what he is really talking about is the economic and technological LEVELING, not FLATTENING, of the world, but the word “Flat” makes for a better title, and ever since the Levelers Movement of the 17th century the word “leveling” probably has too much of a socialist flavor for a misty-eyed capitalist like Friedman.

Friedman’s book is certainly thought provoking and so well written as to actually qualify as a “page turner.” I read his first several chapters this summer and chapters nine and ten for this week’s assignment.

Friedman’s “flattening” is evident all around us and I myself have benefited from this phenomenon in the last few years. This past Saturday night I attended an annual black-tie ball in the grand ballroom of the Westin Hotel, where executives from the Pacific Northwest grocery industry gather to raise money for cancer research. For the fourth year in a row, I had produced several short video biographies, to be shown at the ball, about people receiving awards that night. I produce these videos on low budgets, so the sponsors of the event always show their gratitude by inviting me to come and have a free dinner.

Ten years ago I would not have been able to produce video programs slick enough for an event like this unless I owned or worked for a video production house with equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, thanks to small 3-CCD video cameras and software programs like Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, I can produce professional-quality video programs, with plenty of bells and whistles, on my home computer.

After the screening of the first video on Saturday, the chairwoman of the Washington Food Industry Association, who was sitting at my table, leaned over and asked “Where is your studio?” I told her that my “studio” is a closet-sized room in the back of my tiny apartment in Capitol Hill. Later, when it came up in conversation that my other jobs is bussing tables in a restaurant, the CEOs and their wives around me raised their eyebrows as they realized that I was not likely to be a member of their country club. It is Friedman’s “flattening” that brings me to this event each year to work, break bread and sometimes even make friends with people who, not long ago, were way out of my league.

Throughout his book, Friedman presents a picture of a world changing so fast that you have to “run faster and faster just to stay in the same place”. I must be getting old because this image makes me feel tired and a little sad. I must admit, as I look around me, that Friedman’s spirit is the spirit of the age. At the charity ball every year someone always asks me how I plan to “grow” my video business. When I tell them that I’m not ambitious, that I’m happy with things the way they are and don’t really want more clients for now, they always look surprised. Some of them find my attitude novel and amusing; others look slightly disgusted and seem to lose interest in talking to me.

Today, business is all about ambition and growth. One day in my restaurant I heard a businessman say, “the purpose of having a business is to buy out or be bought out.” It’s not enough any more to just stay in business, make a fine product, make a profit; today to be a “player” you need to constantly be growing, growing, growing (like a cancer?). In Friedman’s view, growth, change and moving “to the next level” are essential for the survival not only of companies, but also of nations.

In chapter nine, “THIS IS NOT A TEST,” he issues strong warnings that the United States is falling far behind nations like China and India in education, innovation, research and development. I was struck by a quote from Bill Gates saying that in other nations, he finds that the leaders are often scientists and engineers, while in the United States they are almost all lawyers. My father, who is an engineer, was impressed by this quote when I read it to him. I told him that I am very proud of the fact that my representative in Congress (Jim McDermott) is not a lawyer, but a psychiatrist, as well as being one of the few members of Congress who voted against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.

Friedman gets down to brass tacks with some ideas that I like, including making college education in the United States free or even mandatory. He proposes that corporations need to be constantly educating their employees so that people will be ready to change jobs as technology changes and their old jobs get outsourced overseas. He also suggests that “portable” health insurance and retirement benefits be developed to help ease the difficulties of people moving from job to job. Freidman calls this approach, “compassionate flatism.” This is a noble idea, but I’m not sure how much weight the concept of compassion has in today’s world of freewheeling capitalism.

In chapter ten, THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE,” Friedman applies his sense of urgency about development, education and free-market “flatism” to the whole world. He creates an amusing, provocative metaphor by reducing the world community to the scale of a small city, in which each region is a distinctive neighborhood. In this metaphor, regions like China and India are the bustling neighborhoods, where people “never sleep.” Europeans would not be flattered by Friedman’s characterization of their neighborhood as an “assisted living facility” of geriatrics attended by Turkish nurses. I was very amused by his description of the U.S. as a “gated community, with a metal detector at the front gate and a lot of people sitting in their front yards complaining about how lazy everyone else was.” There is a lot of stereotyping going on here, but it rings pretty true.

Friedman believes that the wealth or poverty of nations today turns on their willingness to open themselves up to trade with other nations. To make this happen, many nations need to do a lot of de-regulation, privatization, union busting and abolishment of protectionist policies and socialist programs. Freidman may be right. In a world of ever-growing population and ever-shrinking resources, constant growth, ambition and fierce competition may be the only ways for a nation, a company or an individual to survive.

Friedman waxes almost poetic about what could be described as hungry, grasping, clawing ambition. His words and his tone make me rather uncomfortable. It all sounds too much like cancer: growth that never stops until it destroys itself by destroying the body on which it grows. Friedman paints globalizing nations and multi-national corporations as being strong, confident realists who just want the best for everyone concerned. He never mentions the word “greed.” He doesn’t talk about factories in China, unhindered by government regulation, dumping toxic waste in rivers and destroying traditional farming villages downstream. He doesn’t talk about the World Bank and the IMF prying their way into the economies of nations with predatory lending programs, getting them hooked on debt until they have to practically sell their souls to get out.

Instead, Friedman’s villains are people who resist globalization and change. In his global village, people on the Arab street “have their curtains closed, their shutters drawn, and signs on their front lawn that say, 'No Trespassing. Beware of Dog.'” Now, I myself enjoy people who are worldly and liberal and open to new things, but I also respect the rights of people who want to be left alone. In fact, I find people and groups and nations that hold onto traditions and obsolete ways to be fascinating, often beautiful and inspiring. And I’m not the only one. Look at the great tourist spots of the world. Many of them are old, perversely unchanged places and cultures. And I think it’s more than just nostalgia or curiosity that draws us to the old parts of Friedman’s global town, where strange, outmoded buildings stand proudly and there are few new shops popping up, flashing neon. I think that in these places we find a sense of enduring values and reassuring feeling (or illusion, perhaps) of permanence.

In Freidman’s world, people and companies and nations who think like me are the laggards, the losers, soon to be left behind, swept aside or taken over by the swift and the sure. Friedman would be one of those people at my banquet table whose lip would curl with slight disgust when he learned that I “like things the way they are.” Well, soon I and those like me will be in an assisted living facility, attended by Turkish nurses, while Friedman’s steamrollers roll on and on and on.

WEEK FOUR COMMENTS

Vannevar Bush was certainly a forward-thinking guy. I am a backward-thinking guy, so I drew this cartoon, showing how cell phones might have looked if they were introduced in the early 1900s. Even in their slickest forms today, cell phones make me giggle, especially when they are so small as to be nearly invisible and people talk into them loudly, making facial expressions and gestures as if standing face to face with the person on the other end of the line. And every time I hear a groovy ring tone I want to do start doing a Pee Wee Herman dance.

Roger Fidler brought up some fascinating stuff in “Mediamorphosis.” It makes perfect sense that computers descended from the weaving trade. A piece of cloth is literally a net-work, and when you look at a big loom or think about what goes into making a Persian carpet, it is clear that a great deal of logic, calculation and, well, programming are involved in bringing a bunch of colored threads together to make a pattern. After thousands of years of weaving technology, Jacquard came along and streamlined it with wooden punch cards. Then Babbage figured out how to turn Jacquard’s punch cards in a whole new direction: how to weave a new kind of cloth from numbers and ideas.

It is amusing to read how often in the history of communications people got things wrong or backwards. For example, Bell and Watson thought the most promising application for the telephone was broadcasting of concerts and lectures, while the “hams” saw radio’s future in two-way communication. And oh how wrong was everyone involved in the early development of television. They thought it would be easy and just take a few years, but it turned out to be a much tougher nut to crack than, say, the telephone, radio or the light bulb. I have been working in video for many years and I can tell you that we are still trying to get it right. HDTV is a big step forward, but video remains a flawed and frustrating medium.

Thoreau was massively wrong when he predicted that Texas and Maine, once connected by telegraph, might not have anything to say to each other. Time has shown that Texas and Maine and practically every other place have a heck of a lot to say to each other all the time. I suppose the real question Thoreau posed was: once we have these fantastic mediums for communication, how much of real value will we communicate? This is a valid question.

When I started teaching high school classes a few years ago I noticed students busily typing away on their computers during class. Sometimes I peeked at their screens and saw that they were sending messages to each other across the room, having conversations like:

“Wasup?”

“Jus chillin”

“Me 2. Wasup with Jose?”

“He chillin 2.”

When I was in high school, kids used to pass stupid notes back and forth when they were bored. Now, thanks to an incredible international network of computers, servers, fiber-optic cables, microwave towers and satellites, kids can still pass stupid notes in class, only now they can attach bouncing pink elephants or rude sound effects to their notes, and all the while look like they are doing something really important.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my computer and I love the Internet. I just think we have to be careful not to get so caught up in communication technology that we forget how to communicate with each other. We should not forget how to spell our language correctly; we should not forget the important differences between written and spoken language; we should remember that a flesh-and-blood person beside us deserves a little more consideration than a distant, virtual person on the other end of a cell phone, instead of the other way around; we must remember that there is no “undo” command in real life; we should remember how to use our natural senses and instincts, rather than relying on data and credit reports, etc. to judge the world and our fellows; we should learn to value what we have, rather than always waiting for the next big thing; we should take care of our physical world and remember one very important thing about cyberspace: it’s a nice place to visit, but you can’t live there.

Marshall McLuhan was deeply prophetic when he said that in a world of instant communication “trends and rumors” become the ‘real world.’ All you have to do is stand in a supermarket line, scanning the magazine displays, to see that McLuhan’s world is here now. “Is Jen pregnant?” “New lo-carb diet trims abs fast!” Etc. etc. And then there is TV news: horror after horror, scandal after scandal, all fascinating for a day or a week, all to be forgotten as the next big story - the next trend - comes along. Call Rove and his pals in the Republican Party understand this all too well. The “fact-based” world can always be trumped by a juicy rumor; a good man or woman can always be tarnished by ugly innuendo; an inconvenient truth can always be pushed aside by a big new story inserted at the proper point in the news cycle. They understand the dark side of the communications revolution and are harnessing it to make sure that the global peace and understanding imagined by the pioneers of this revolution in the last two centuries will not come to pass.

What would Vannevar Bush be predicting today? One would have to be as prophetic as Bush himself to tell you that. I like to think that he would not have unqualified enthusiasm for unlimited extension of all the technologies we are developing today. I like to think he would be calling for technology to help us make sense of the information we have, rather than to create, gather, share and store more and more information all the time.

Bush envisioned a heroic new generation of pioneers, helping us find new and valuable paths through seas of data. This vision is somewhat different from what I see today. I see kids talking passionately about the killing power of weapons in the newest computer game, using words like “cool” and “sweet” to describe virtual horrors. I see business people floating obliviously along the sidewalk, their glassy eyes fixed on numbers in their minds and distant people talking inside their heads. I see people gradually turning into robots as devices grow out of their ears, with blue lights flashing like jet planes cruising through the lonely night sky. Soon these devices may grow out over their eyes, so they can see stock prices and email messages superimposed on the real world before them. Eventually these devices may bore into their brains so that data can enter directly into their thoughts. I am frightened enough by these people today, as I try to greet them as human beings in the restaurant where I work. I hate to think of how distant and difficult to understand they could become in the future.

Let’s develop technologies that help us live life richly, not technologies that turn us into machines. Speaking of which, I have been sitting here at my computer far too long. I am going to turn it off now and play with my cat.

Hypertext Fiction

I just can't resist making a cynical comment about "Hypertext Fiction." After about five minutes of clicking my way through link after link on these sites, I started to get carpal tunnel syndrome and finally cried out loud, "I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS NONSENSE!" And that was the end of that.

Comments for Week Three

In chapters two and three of Media, Technology & Society Winston does a good job of illustrating how much more complex the process of invention is than we tend to assume. I wasn’t sure where he was going with all the technical details, but he certainly gave me an impression of a bumbling, stumbling, confusing process out of which the telephone somehow managed to emerge.

As far as “supervening social necessity,” yes, I can see how the rise of the modern corporation accelerated development of the telephone. But Winston has made no mention so far of rural telephone users, who (I have read elsewhere) outnumbered urbanites as “early adopters” of the telephone for many years. For lonely farmers and ranchers, whose nearest neighbor might be miles away, the rural party line was more of a necessity than the telephone was for city folk, who could easily communicate by walking across the hall or across the street.

I am not quite understanding what Winston means by repression of a technology’s “radical potential.” Perhaps someone could explain to me what “radical potentials” of the telegraph and telephone were not achieved due to repression. Winston says something about the telephone failing to “redress imbalances in information power within society,” but that potential seems a bit far-fetched to me.

How am I going to apply the concept of “supervening social necessity” to my research topic on museum websites? I am not certain I can. As with many computer applications, I see a museum website as a nice thing, a fun thing, but beyond providing basic information, not a profoundly “necessary” thing.

I tried for half an hour to find and the Proquest article “Determining Uses & Gratifications for the Internet” on the library website and finally gave up in frustration. So I cannot comment on it.

I certainly liked Neil Postman’s talk “Informing Ourselves to Death.” Yes, technology has become practically a religion for many people today. I have heard them preach with rapture of the technological paradise to come; I have seen them sitting with eyes transfixed on their glowing shrines; I have felt their withering disdain as they look down on heretics and ignoramuses like myself who do not speak their mystical language of acronyms. I appreciated Postman’s quoting Thoreau. I was afraid we had all “gotten over” Thoreau and his skepticism about “progress” by now.

Yes, the information revolution has created a glut of information that can be overwhelming and confusing. I love having access to all the information that the internet provides, but I am also learning to be wary of it. In the past, people had to go through a lot of hurdles to get things published, so there was a built-in filtering process. Sure, this was restrictive, but it also filtered out a lot of nonsense. Today, there is practically nothing to keep nonsense out of circulation. All you need to do is sign up for a free Blogger account or create a website to start spreading misinformation or ugly opinions to the world. There is a lot of it out there, and I am confident that many corporations and political parties are busy making use of the internet in sneaky ways to misinform and confuse people for their own advantage.

The Vannever Bush article “As We May Think” was listed somewhere on the class website, and I thought it was a reading assignment, but I guess it wasn’t, since no one else is commenting on it. It is an amazing ariticle, written in 1945, in which the author predicts technology to come. You should read it.

Bush is prophetic. I laughed out loud in amazement again and again at how close his ideations of future technology came to the high-tech gadgets around me and the computer on which I was reading his article.

Although he is obviously somewhat stuck in his time period, with all his discussion of film, you can see that he is heading in the right direction when he talks about “dry” photography. If only he knew more about television imaging, his description of future photography would have matched even more completely the “point-and-shoot” digital camera hanging on the wall beside me, with its auto-iris, auto-focus and instant output: all features that Bush predicts.

Similarly, he talks a lot about punch cards for computing, but he clearly has something more advanced in mind when he says “arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature…(and will) make clever use of relay circuits.” When he finally describes his imaginary “Memex” machine, his accuracy is breathtaking. He describes personal, desktop computing devices with slanting screens, keyboards and even “supplemental levers” for scrolling quickly through documents (today’s “mouse”). He even places this “lever” in the correct position: on the user’s right side.

Bush’s most important predictions, however, have to do with how all this technology will be used: not merely for mathematical calculations, but for almost any kind of logical process, by doctors, lawyers, scientists, historians and so on. He also envisions the possibility of pushing computing devices beyond linear processes of logic, making them mimic the “associative” reasoning of the human brain.

I loved his description of “a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” That’s a great way to see yourself as you sit there, surfing the web. For anyone who thinks today’s technologies are limited by their drawbacks, Bush has these wonderful words: “It would be a brave man who would predict that such a process will always remain clumsy, slow and faulty in detail.” If Vannever Bush were alive today, I wonder what he would be predicting now.

COMMENTS ON WEEK-TWO READINGS

Oh my goodness what a rough night I had after starting to read Brian Winston’s introduction to Media, Technology & Society. Like a much-too-rich meal, it gave me feverish dreams of clawing through brambles of elaborate theories, obscure allusions and cryptic diagrams all night. I would definitely not recommend this for cozy bedtime reading.

By the morning light, however, the fog cleared as I moved on to Winston’s first chapter about the telegraph. As soon as he started writing about historical events and actual technology, his abstract theories in the Introduction began to make sense. His model for how communication technologies develop and spread could be applied to a lot of inventions:

1. Scientific basis
2. Ideation
3. Prototypes
4. Supervening Social Necessity
5. Invention
6. Supression by various political, commercial and social concerns
7. Diffusion
8. Spinoffs

One interesting item here is Winston's discussion of the distinction we make between “prototypes” and “inventions.” Only when an innovation has reached a form acceptable to the public, he points out, do we bestow upon it the term “invention.” While many people may contribute to the development of a device, only the person who brings it to its accepted form is remembered by the lofty title of “Inventor.” Indeed, people like Morse and Bell have almost godlike status, while I have never heard of most of the other people Winston mentions who worked separately on the telegraph and telephone and achieved nearly the same results.

I like Winston’s delineation of an “ideation” stage, when people let their imaginations run wild, as we do when we “brainstorm.” I think of Popular Mechanics magazine and Star Trek. So many things we take for granted today started out as science fiction. I remember seeing a drawing from the early years of the 20th century, showing an Edwardian family in a parlor, looking at an ornately-carved piece of furniture, in the middle of which was a screen showing a football game. I seem to remember the father in the picture actually holding a beer mug and yelling at the screen. The artist got just about everything right, except that he imagined the TV screen as tall and narrow.

On the darker side of Ideation, how about that George Orwell? The characters in 1984 have apartments equipped with “viewscreens” through which "Big Brother" not only spews daily propaganda, but also watches the people in the room! We seem to be moving closer to this all the time. I understand that there are police cameras in England equipped with loudspeakers that let police scold passersby who do something wrong. And then there are webcasters who voluntarily create an Orwellian situation by keeping their webcams turned on all the time, so that the public can spy on their lives. I also understand that teleconference developers are working on a way to replace the webcam with pixels on computer screens that display and receive images at the same time. Orwell was right in his “ideation” of viewscreens. Let us hope he was not right about many other things he imagined.

One concept of Winston’s with which I am a little uncomfortable is the term “supervening social necessity,” although he makes a good case for this force with regard to the electric telegraph. Ideas and prototypes for this device were rejected time and time again until the advent of single-track railways created the need for instant communication between distant stations to prevent collisions. In this case, acceptance of the telegraph was definitely a “necessity.”

Looking at other technologies and innovations, however, I am not sure that “necessity” is always the appropriate word. What about video games, for example? Unless you see parents urgently needing a device to get their kids to sit down and shut up, or parking lot attendants desperately needing a means to pass the time by playing computer poker, I am not sure that the acceptance of video games was the result of “supervening social necessity” so much as it was the result of “interest” or simply “demand.”

And what about the way CDs replaced phonograph records in the early 1990s? Was that driven by “supervening social necessity”, or simply by business decisions by the music industry?

This conveniently leads me to the “Uses and Gratifications” and “Diffusion” theories presented in the article Social Aspects of New Media Technologies. I liked the fact that this article offers several distinct ways of looking at communication and media. Kathy Gill told us that our term papers need to be based on some kind of communications theory, and here is a grab bag full of them:

1. Uses and Gratificiation
2. Ritual vs. Instrumental Use
3. Critical Mass
4. Diffusion Theory
5. Media System Dependency
6. Social Information Processing

In the brief overview this article provides, the Diffusion Theory strikes me as the most sophisticated, while the Media System Dependency theory promises all kinds of fascinating revelations on the interdependency of government, media and society. Think of people who make themselves dependent on Fox News for information, while Fox depends on the Bush administration for access and the administration depends on Fox for propaganda. There’s a thorny patch of brambles we could get into.

The article about “free” internet phone service was interesting and made a lot of sense. I spend a great deal of time sitting here at my computer talking to my father on the telephone in between sending him emails. Why not be talking to him on the computer instead, perhaps even face-to-face through an Orwellian “viewscreen?” Other than that ideation, however, I am not much of a forward thinker about telephones. I don’t know if I will ever get a cell phone. For Christmas I really want to get myself a working reproduction of a 1920s candlestick phone, made out of wood: you know, the kind where you hold one part up to your mouth and the other part to your ear.

Finally, I discovered that I was not the only person who had a rough time with Brian Winston’s Introduction. In Dr. Lau’s class a Chinese student turned to me, pointing to Winston's book, and asked with a perplexed expression, “is this English?” I told him not to worry and just keep reading. It gets better.

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