Electrified Monks, New Media, & The Victorian Internet
This morning I read Jill Walker's blog entry containing notes about her most recent class, which I found inspiring as I am in the second week of my graduate reading seminar. What follows is a brief summary.
Our discussion was initially inspired by Stella's question "What is the disaster that the Internet will bring about?," which was motivated by her recent exposure to Paul Virilio's ideas about disaster. It led us to consider some pros and cons of networked technology.Stella spoke from a position of having lived among farmers who dedicate themselves to a completely unplugged lifestyle. I started out by reminding the group that discussions about the pros and cons of the Internet need to be based on specific examples, as they get otherwise lost in unhelpful generalizations.
Today, I read this article, re-enforcing my weariness of screen addiction.
"A recent survey conducted by Kelton Research discovered that a majority of Americans (52-percent) said their "most recent experience with a computer problem provoked emotions such as anger, sadness or alienation," yet a whopping 65-percent of these same folks spend more time with their beloved computer than their own spouse."
What is our response to continuous partial attention and the constantly networked environment? Technology will be miniaturized, step into the background, be omni-present and hardly noticeable while at the same time we will be in a constant "conversation" with networked devices. The connectivity that our technology-embedded environment ensues will change our behavior in public spaces. Data about us may, for example, determine if we can enter a certain space or not: situated technologies. Last semester I co-organized a conference on this topic (see http://situatedtechnologies.net).
The always-on lifestyle is linked to the notion of continuous partial attention (cpa), a term, coined by Linda Stone, a Microsoft/Macintosh executive. Listen to what Stone has to say about cpa, here, or check out this one-page parody of Second Life: “Go outside”, “Find out where you really live”, “Fornicate using your own genitals” and the other pleasures of First Life.
Adam entered the discussion pointing out that humanity has not shown great skill in dealing with technology. The number of people in the US watching TV for five or more hours a day is just one example. While my argument is that a skill set (with "skill" understood in a broadest sense as coping mechanism) needs to be taught, Adam leaned perhaps more toward an escalation of the ongoing crisis leading to the inevitable breakdown that is, in his opinion, necessary for people to come to terms with technologies.
Lonnell grounded the discussion by commenting that most of the people he knows would be happy to have these problems. Apart from video games, his friends are not immersed in technology. This was an important response that reminded us of the existing participation gap, the technology have and have-nots.
We touched on Tom Standage's book "The Victorian Internet," which was meant to be the anchor of the seminar. Standage says about his own book that "it points out the features common to the telegraph networks of the nineteenth century and the internet of today: hype, skepticism, hackers, on-line romances and weddings, chat-rooms, flame wars, information overload, predictions of imminent world peace, and so on."
The book starts out with the 16th century rumor that the French cardinal Richelieu, a major power broker of his days who always seemed to be better informed than others, used “sympathetic” needles, some proto-optical telegraph, to get his information. In 1746 the French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet lined up 200 monks and made them hold a metal cable, which he then connected to an electrical battery. If these electrified monks did not show that electricity can be transmitted through a cable- what would? In 1797 optical telegraphy was introduced and we know most of the rest of the story leading up to Morse and beyond. While Standage does not really add new knowledge to this discourse, he does a fabulous job in comparing early phenomena that occurred in the context of the adaptation of the telegraph to the integration of the Internet. There were the earliest "online" dates with telegraph operators hooking up after hours. Couples got married long distance (bride and broom being in different cities), a practice that is illegal in today's United States. But perhaps most fascinating are the wild projections of world peace that were linked to the possibility to communicate in real time across the Atlantic via the telegraph. Also remarkable was the monopoly that one company in the US was able to uphold for implementing the telegraph across the country. In Europe there was no such monopoly and the competition among many smaller companies led to better coverage, reaching into smaller villages, etc.
Reading "The Victorian Internet" is particularly useful for thinking about the paradigm of "new media." There are, of course, countless competing definitions of that term. But for me, the study of "New Media" is about the exploration of social change associated with the evolution and cultural adoption of new forms of media. Somebody at a conference I went to recently defined new media as "putting things on top other things." I interpret that to mean to that the Internet, and its World Wide Web, are media with their own characteristics. The Internet is not a newspaper, it is not a TV, and it is also not radio. However, the Internet offers a convergence of all these media.
[Last names of students are withheld to protect their privacy.]
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