Week Eight: 19th-20th Century Technologies
Let?s start with Marvin?s article ?Dazzling the multitude.? I was somewhat surprised at the following comment: ?The power of new electrical technologies to effect effortless intimacy between friends was perhaps the commonest of all prophetic themes about communication? (155). I would have thought that new electrical technologies might have prompted visions of people engaging in trade/commerce or visions of people using the technology to advance warfare. But I was wrong. So what does the focus on interpersonal relationships mean, if anything? Well, this early emphasis on the potential of technology to advance personal intimacy between friends might highlight the individualism, as opposed to communalism, of American culture at that time as well as express the compulsion in the culture to spread news, to connect and enact intimacy but to retain anonymity/privacy. I will return to this American desire for anonymity/privacy in a few paragraphs when I try to discuss the loss of privacy as directly connected to the movement of spectacle from the public sphere to the private sphere.
Marvin?s article also made me consider how our interpretation of what good communication looks like has changed over the last hundred years. I was struck by the story about the Vice-President of AT&T, who, in 1889, stated that face-to-face communication was the best mode of communication since it used expression, voice, and gesture. He said, ?It is perhaps fair to say that we obtain our impressions from all three of those things in equal proportions? (157). I wonder if any Vice-President today would be able to make the same comment. Today, I don?t think we organize modes of communication in a strict hierarchy; rather, we organize modes of communication by their rhetorical effectiveness for the given situation. A phone might be most useful for calling Mom. Email might be most useful for conversing with a teacher or a boss. In short, if we contrast our attitude to that expressed by the VP at AT&T, then we might discover that we have become a rhetorical culture, rhetorically in-tune with our surroundings. The advent of numerous communication options, each with its own benefits and drawbacks, have made us radically self-aware.
Speaking of being self-aware, I?d like to comment on Marvin?s discussion of the spectacle of television, because I think it demonstrates the extent to which we have, as a culture, become self-aware of our own obsession with spectacle as spectacles moved from the public sphere to the private sphere. On page 160, Marvin states, ?Television?was a ringside seat at the grand but impersonal spectacles of the world stage. In modem television, the element of the spectacle recalls the electric light show, the most dramatic tradition of electrical experimentation in the late nineteenth century, itself an enhanced version of earlier public spectacles? (160). Marvin allows us to see how spectacle has moved increasingly inward?from the light shows at baseball fields to the light shows of network TV that flash in our homes every night. As he notes, even electric light started in public and was ?not well known as an illuminator of private space? (162). So to go back to the discussion of the American public?s desire for privacy: spectacle has overtaken privacy. Privacy has been increasingly narrowed, and for some Americans, those who film their own houses and put their lives on the internet, privacy does not any longer have any meaning. This shift from a desire for privacy to a desire for exposure can be seen through considering the changing spectacles on television over time?On TV, there has been a move from showing a falsified TV world to showing the ?real world,? which is a need to increasingly ?push the boundaries? of the acceptable. And since capitalism requires increasing amounts of novelty in order for products to be able to distinguish themselves, the only ?new? and ?novel? territory for spectacle was the home, the family, and the individual?s own personal habits. These were the fresh places for exploitation, for ?spectacle.? And now, the internet, our newest technology, by making the person the producer, allows for all imaginable novelties to be expressed. Sex-on-demand, violent crimes?these are all readily available spectacles, and by becoming readily available, internet culture has embraced the spectacle, and culture itself has become a production of spectacle-- the spectacle is no longer unique but commonplace. I hope to touch on this topic next week when we discuss Adorno.
Interestingly, as spectacles became necessary for TV shows to bring in a new audience every week, spectacles increasingly, I think, moved away from an expression of excitement about progress and enterprise and moved more toward an expression of avant-garde capitalism?which is the new for the sake of being new/ the new for the sake of drawing attention in order to gather publicity. So when Marvin asserts that previous ?spectacles [in the mid-1800s] were an opportunity for popular audiences to display enthusiasm for electrical science and entrepreneurship and for public officials and electrical experts to make common cause? (158), I wonder what could be said of the purpose of spectacles today? Nothing so admirable, nothing so innocent, I imagine.
In ?Panoramic Travel,? Schilvelbusch (awesome name) begins the article by citing a letter of a stagecoach traveler. Schilvelbusch states, ?[these landscape] impressions? demonstrate how intense was the experience of traversed space. Not only the villages and towns? not only the formations of the terrain, but even details of the material consistency of the pavement of the highway are incorporated into his perceptions? (52). This opening caused me to consider, not what we have gained from new technologies, but what we have lost. Considering what has been lost is not meant to be some nostalgic attempt to hold onto the past or some angry attempt to condemn the future; it is, rather, a fair critique, one which looks at what has been left behind and wonders if re-claiming whatever it is might be worth some effort. And I will suggest in this next paragraph that effort exerted toward reclaiming is only needed when 1) we have not gained a new element to replace that which has been lost or when 2) we still value what we have lost. Often, we do regain what was lost (in some new way) or we lose certain things exactly because we have stopped valuing them.
Let me explain: Just as we lost a sense of the particular geographical landscape as stagecoach and rail travel became popular, so have we lost our attention to the particulars of the geographical space in which we walk. In short, if we are not traveling with speed (by rail or by car or by plane), then we are walking; however, since the cell phone and the laptop now have mobility, our attention is focused not on the place in which we walk, but on the pure navigation of the space so that we can continue to interact with our machines. But here is the point: things that are lost can be regained as new technologies enter into use, and this natural way that we re-gain (although we may not re-claim) is what I want to assert here. Even though the nineteenth century experienced ?a loss of continuity? (53) because the landscape was ignored (or as we slept on trains), we have now regained a sense of continuity as we travel since our computers and phones provide a new sense of continuity! The continuity of the landscape has been replaced by the continuity of the machine. As a sense of place became less important than a sense of one?s traversing space or of one?s final destination, the loss of continuity for a geographical place diminished in value. In light of our new continuity and our shift in our perception of what is valuable to us, how can we grieve the loss of the landscape?
In Stubbs article, we once again see the importance of previous technologies in aiding our understanding of new technologies. Stubbs draws connections between the telegraph and the internet and specifically explores how the telegraph was conceived of ?as a tool of masquerade? (93). Stubbs states, ?On the telegraph circuit, it was theoretically possible to misrepresent oneself, to engage in a covert form of masquerade, trying on a new body and a new social identity? (92). However, as I read about the telegraph literature produced in the 1800s, I wondered if Stubbs over-emphasized the connection between the literature?s fascination with multiple selves (?masquerade,? deceit, etc.) and the technology. In other words, even though the telegraph was obviously the tool by which the characters in these stories pretended to be other people, the fascination with being other people was not at all unique to the 1800s. In fact, the stories (like ?Wives for Two; or Joe?s Little Joke?) sound extremely similar to Shakespearian dramas. The point is: given any opportunity, such stories would have been written, so the fact that these stories were written is nothing especially noteworthy in regard to the telegraph, other than the fact that the telegraph opened up another opportunity for writers to concoct stories (which are themselves a way of masquerading). Stubbs seems to believe that these telegraph stories have a lot to say about technologies old and new, but I?d say these types of stories probably would have been written in that time period anyway (in every time period)?so they don?t deserve as much attention as they?re given.
This next paragraph is a response to Jordan?s post on Briggs and Burke: Jordan implies that US power is on the decline precisely because the US no longer produces new technologies or because the US is not producing as fast as other countries. Jordan?s overall claim that US is losing superpower status is probably correct, but not exactly for the reasons that he stated. In short, since a large number of countries readily adopt new technologies today and use them to make profits for themselves, I?m not entirely sure it is so important who invents the new technologies; what may be more important today is who adopts them, because technologies tend to level the playing field. In the past, it took years for countries to adopt new technologies, so the inventor held the power of that technology longer. Today, that power of singular use is lost, since countries adopt technologies quickly. The point being: when Europe adopted the railroad system, they experienced travel (and hence the world) at the same rate as Americans. They were, at that point, caught up. Today, others catch up faster; so when the country of Indian adopted the internet in the late 1990s, did it matter who invented it? In short, the US is losing superpower status because the world is becoming more lateral, more technologically unified, more technologically equal. Although there are obvious financial benefits to inventing new tech, I?m not sure that inventing new tech is as important as it once was or as important as adopting the new tech with speed. Anyone care to differ?