CRDM 701
Week 5 - Nick
"...a material object itself, lying bare on the ground, is of no interest." (Fischer, p 7)
This random, obscure quote (because those are the best kind, naturally) by Fischer seems to sum up not just this week's readings, but the entire thrust of this course. A technology, as Fischer works to define it, is not even a technology proper unless it is put to use...let alone is it a communication technology. However, it seems to apply to this week in a special way considering the odd and interesting approaches to technology that people apparently took when the 'old technologies were new'.
If you go with Peters, then captured images rendered immortality to their subjects. Hell, we don't even have to mourn them any more because they are still there, albeit fleshless beings flickering on a screen in front of us. (This is the one part of Peters train of thought that I happen to take issue with, but more on that in the discussion on Thursday. Because I can do that since I'm one of the presenters. See, lurker to this blog? A lot of important work still goes on through orality.) Still, it is an interesting thought process and he does some really intriguing work with the death metaphor. You know, as I read this I happened to think of something I heard about Native American cultures. I believe that some Native American cultures believed that the camera stole your soul, which was why it was able to produce such a nice replication of you. (My source here is not the greatest in the world. You don't want to know it. ...Okay okay. It was a Goosebumps book from when I was a kid. But I'm pretty sure I validated it later, and also...what does it say that some of our scary stories still center around such conceptions of technology? Or did as of a decade ago?) Interesting how different peoples reacted to new technologies that were more mindblowing than ours are today, no?
Carey's discussion of the telegraph was also illuminating. The most important tidbit I gleaned from there was this: "[The Telegraph] permitted for the first time the effective seperation of communication and transportation" (Carey, 203) That really struck me as interesting when I first heart it in Com 250, and it is no less interesting now. Think of it. Until that point, it was always some guy on foot, or on pony. Now some bum in a chair could send messages at his or her leisure, assuming the line was clear. They played chess, for crying out loud! And according to Marvin, the telegraph and the telephone contributed to a class crisis as people had amorous proceedings with those that society said they ought not to. It wasn't all fun and games, apparently. Also, relating back to my opening quote, it had everything to do with how people approached it. A telegraph and a telephone were meaningless outside of the culturally ascribed meaning. People had to learn how to embrace the technology, and this meant learning an altogether different feel for communicating. New rules, new norms, and new ways of judging a person's character without their face had to be come up with.
So really, I find that I agree with Fischer. What is a technology, really? And what makes a technology a communication technology? In every case, the human element is essential.
Posted at 12:46AM Sep 19, 2007 by nmtemple in Week 5 | Comments[0]
Week 5 - Kathy
"What is the meaning of the letter burned in the Dead Letter Office whose writer does not know it is lost and whose recipient does not know it was ever sent?" (Peters, 1999, p.171)
Imagine AOL certified mail (to you) being sent to the Virtual Dead Letter Office (of your ISP). What is the meaning of that? In this case, the meaning is that your ISP wants to maintain power over the distribution of messages (by sabotaging another ISP?s paid email service). This level of control over mail distribution sounds like something Comstock would have been into. A system such as this might have us begin to think about email in the context of hermeneutics, or ?the art of literary correspondence where no reply is possible? (Peters, 1999, p.150).
I find the relationship between this week?s readings very interesting in the context of my research topic. I intend to focus on the emerging conversation surrounding "tiered Internet service" and "net neutrality", and discussions of ideology will play a major role. This leads me into Carey?s (1989) argument that with the telegraph and afterward, technological developments originated from "professional engineering societies, universities, and research laboratories" (p. 209), and that these same groups developed the justifying ideologies for the technologies. This is similar to the debate surrounding tiered Internet service, where broadband providers (including AT&T) are trying to establish ideologies that support their interest in a tiered model.
Carey's discussion on the effect of the telegraph on ordinary ideas also resonates with the level and extent of changes brought on by Internet, though where I truly see the connection is in "the domain of empire" (p.212). Carey briefly discusses how the telegraph enabled empires to control far flung colonies and secure financial investments, demonstrating enhancements in the ability to wield disciplinary power. How does the Internet extend power? Is it disciplinary power, or something different?
Marvin (1988) explains that in the Bell Telephone monopoly days, the company preferred to keep prices high and have a small number of users rather than serve everyone (p. 107). The desire to keep subscribers limited and prices high demonstrates the desire to maintain use of the system to ?the elite,? which can also be seen in the company?s anger at public use of subscribers phones (such as in the drug store). In such a monopoly, Fischer notes, users must ?choose within the constraints imposed by the distribution system of a technology? distributors can force people to use a new technology by eliminating other options? (p. 18).
Again, this argument, though in regard to the telephone, can be seen in terms of broadband Internet. While AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner provide Internet access, they can force new levels of service (aka tiered service) by eliminating traditional options. Fischer later asserts that technologies, once aggregated, can ?become a structure that constrains the individual? (p.19), and I would argue that the Internet has become a constraining structure. Further, the need for access taken together with issues of monopoly and control of information that would accompany a tiered service model (with justifying ideologies provided by said service providers) imply an even more constraining system.
I?m interested to hear thoughts on this, as I?m still working through exactly how I am going to approach this topic for my final paper. See you all Thursday!
Posted at 11:56PM Sep 18, 2007 by kfoswald in Week 5 | Comments[0]
Week 5 - Jon
I could not help but think of Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat as I explored the impact of early electronic communications. Although Friedman's focus is on trends that are flattening global economies, I think his metaphor is useful.
Carey recalls the world prior to early electronic communication, a time when geography was a major obstacle to long distance messaging. In order to communicate over a geographic distance or barrier, the obstacle had to be overcome and signaled from, a "beacon hill." Messages were passed from line of sight to line of sight. Barriers were climbed and dealt with, not squashed or flattened. Carey sums up the geographic impact of electronic communication poignantly: "The simplest and most important point about the telegraph is that is marked the decisive separation of "transportation" and "communication" (213). Communication had been, literally, redefined.
Mountains flattened. Distances shrank.
However, the separation of message from sender removed another type of physical space or "geography," if you will: the human body. Peters illuminates this transition with particular creativity: "The capturing and dispersion of signals meant that the visual and auditory signs of human personality were no longer tightly tied to the presence of a person's body" (140). Removal of the body, the flattening of an individual's voice and physical self over a wire into a "phantasm," was surely a shock to early users of electronic communication. Peters describes how telephone companies "sought to reassure their customers by reconnecting the mechanically reproduced representations to an originating body" (142). We may marvel at this need to situate the auditory back with the person. But, do we not strive to accomplish the same task in online communications environments. Individuals adorn their online self with images, colors, typographies, quotes, etc. that attempt to recreate their physical self and move toward some reflection of face to face contact. We strive to detach online identities from the computer screen and make them "real."
The separation of the voice from the body allowed social barriers to be attacked: "New forms of communication created unprecedented opportunities not only for courting and infidelity, but for romancing unacceptable persons outside one's own class, and even one's own race, in circumstances that went unobserved by the regular community" (Marvin 70). Removal of the body facilitated such exchanges by making them "secret"; in addition, ideologies and systems, such a person's class, were not transmitted over electronic communication lines. Interestingly, the flattening of these barriers, "did not radically alter American ways of life; rather, Americans used [the telephone] to more vigorously pursue their characteristic ways of life" (Fischer 5). Thus, through electronic communication, suppressed ideas and desires could be acted upon.
But, what of the ultimate barrier, namely, the barrier bridging the living and the dead? Peters examines this issue: "As communicators the dead are a particularly enigmatic bunch. They tend not to respond to our entreaties. . . Certainly we can read the traces of the dead, but we cannot interact directly with them" (149). In the "Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar," Edgar Allan Poe describes an experiment in which a man who is dying of tuberculosis is hypnotized. As the man goes under, he proclaims that he is, in fact, dead. However, even after the passage of seven months, the body remains undecayed, seemingly trapped in a hypnotic state between life and death. What happens when the man's physical self is finally communicated with and awoken from the trance? To be sure, his condition is no better. In fact, his body immediately liquifies. Further proof that communication with the past, even when the physical body is present, is restricted to "traces." Even within the wonders of the electronic world, some barriers remain.
Posted at 11:25PM Sep 18, 2007 by jtburr in Week 5 | Comments[0]
dawn--week 5 blog
I've had an interest in public and private for some time, and the idea of privacy has been present in my mind since our Peters reading on dialogue and dissemination, in which he develops the idea of "personal inaccessibility." Specifically, I am interested in personal privacy, the ability to be apart from others, in a heavily mediated culture. Advantageously (with the immediacy of the topic proposal due date), much of this week's reading addressed fears regarding the complex relationship (a phrase I find myself using a lot on this blog) between technology and privacy.
Fischer (1992) writes of a fear related to anticipated increase in the private associated with the telephone. There was speculation that, as telephone use spread and people retreated from public life, individuals would be able to hide things, like relationships that fell outside social norms, that would typically be subject to public scrutiny. On the other hand, Marvin (1988) points to a concern that the telephone would actually intrude on privacy, with "its potential to expose private family secrets" (p. 68). Marvin cites a "London writer" who warned, in 1897, "'We shall soon be nothing but transparent jelly to each other'" (p. 68). As Peters (1999) demonstrates in his discussion of Comstock and dissemination, the fear both of intrusion and of potential for deviance had already been voiced in reference to mail, and specifically the private post. He goes on to make the point that "privacy, quite explicitly, emerges as a concern once it is threatened by new media" and reminds us "privacy is a distinctly modern notion resting on the new individualizations of self" (175).
As we saw in earlier weeks, it was the technology of writing that first allowed us to isolate the self (Ong, 1985, p. 54) and then created the "valuation placed upon the personal and private" (Havelock, 1986, p. 20). As we develop new communication technologies, this relationship will probably become increasingly complex and problematic. Or perhaps, in the context of Ong's concept of secondary orality, the private self will become less important, returning to a collective identity (marked by what and collected with whom I have no idea).
Posted at 11:09PM Sep 18, 2007 by drshephe in Week 5 | Comments[45]
Week 5 - Christin
There were a lot of really great theories and concepts brought up this week (which we?ll be discussing in class), my favorite of which being space and time. Carey summarizes this discussion well with regards to the telegraph on page 213 when he says, "The simplest and most important point about the telegraph is that it marked the decisive separation of "transportation" and "communication"." This idea just fascinates me, as Carey says on 228, "the penetration of time, the use of time as a mechanism of control, the opening of time to commerce and politics has been radically extended by advances in computer technology."
I haven?t really thought of the connection between space, time, and communication. As someone who?s constantly checking my watch (or, actually, the clock on my cell phone ? the replacement of watch by cell phone being an entirely different but equally interesting conversation in and of itself as well) and a strong advocate of time management, it never really occurred to me to step back and ask why I have such a strong connection and reliance upon time, but a lot of it, as the readings this week, stem from the technologies I use in my daily life.
For example, I think part of my subconscious is cognizant of the immediacy of connection to other human beings that technology provides us. Fischer, in describing the effects of the telephone, says that "?at some point people with telephones began to assume that others would be instantly reachable" (26). I think that cell phones and the Internet only exacerbate this feeling that the standard land-line telephone started. If I email someone, I have this assumption now that if they don?t respond within a certain amount of time that something?s wrong. More than likely, they?re just busy, but this notion that communication is now no longer reliant upon space, i.e. that we don?t have to wait for a return message to travel across town, I think is being extended and magnified by the computer. The term "snail mail" that refers to physical mail sent through the Post Office, UPS, or other similar means is a good example of how modern society equates physical letters now with slow movement.
All in all, I?d have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the readings this week, but that may be because I?m a major technophile.
Posted at 09:45PM Sep 18, 2007 by caphelps in Week 5 | Comments[0]