The final paper

Nitin Gumaste
MSTU4016 - History of Communication
Instructors: Frank Moretti & Robbie McClintock
December 16, 2009

Who owns the voice of the people?

Shifts in the modes of communication have defined how societies have evolved. The reverberations of these shifts can be seen in today’s world as well, even though it may not be obvious at first glance. Deibert accurately suggested that a change in the mode of communication would favor some social forces and ideas more than others. The ones that are compatible with the environments that they are implemented in flourish and thrive, while others wither and die over time, either because they become dated and irrelevant to the times or because they did not get the necessary support from those in power in those eras. Through the centuries, different groups found themselves being in the right place and time to organize information in ways that the technologies they used became the gold standard and helped societies excel overall. As people progressed, they have felt the need for technology to keep up with them.

Plato used his poetry to influence the minds of his readings, perhaps because he saw the power that words could have on his audience. He believed that members of society should think about what they see and hear around and analyze it rather than merely accepting it as prima facie fact. The people who are able to do this well can then graduate to the membership of a guardian class that is responsible for protecting the general citizenry.

Then came the phase of etching messages into architecture. Temples and churches with sculptures and carvings of gods, goddesses and saints were erected all around the world and became the souls of the towns that they were built in. These structures built at the behest of powerful rulers (the Catholic Church in Europe, kings in India) and imposing in their design and size, were created with the intention of imbibing absolute beliefs in the minds of the people who viewed and worshipped. And because of the permanence of the structures, they became the dominant technology of the time to indoctrinate and put unquestionable fear of church or state (as the case may be) into the hearts of millions simultaneously. It sure beats a megaphone.

The invention of the printing press made the most inimitable difference in how mankind started to view itself. Plato’s dream of personal and social reflection seem to come true with this turn of events because not only were books spreading far and wide about subjects that touched the hearts and minds of people in their native languages, but also, society did not have to rely on the ever-changing and effectively far-from-true nature of oral tradition and the notion of embedding social messages in architecture (which was probably an expensive undertaking even back in the day). Instead of focusing on regurgitation for the next generation and manually writing entire books time and again, one could actually find the time to ponder what was written because the grunt work was already done. More notably, the fact that millions of people were reading the same books meant that people were waking up to their own curiosity and were hungry to learn more in the hopes of improve themselves and becoming significant contributors to their community.

The Catholic Church stood to lose the most as a result of this development. Until the press came along, its word was absolute and the contents of the Bible, also the press’ first product, was limited to the domain of a few scholars. But now, the dominion of a select handful threatened to melt away and become the property of the common man. Suddenly, the latter felt a sense of ownership over his own faith, viewing it as something that was no longer distant. With the eventual understanding of Latin, they could even assimilate and incorporate the book's teachings into their own lives on their own terms.

Two consequences became evident as books became increasingly popular. A new power dynamic was being created, i.e., the entity that controlled the presses was in a dangerously powerful position to shape the minds of readers and profess one or more ideologies that in turn lead people to be critical of everything they already knew (Plato would be thrilled). Secondly, as the production and dissemination of mass-produced books spiked exponentially, the means of communication among people, i.e., languages also became uniform. This became one of the unifying factors (including ideological) that led people to revolt the church and find better lives for themselves outside of the religious establishment. But, the factors also caused the people of those times to come together under a different and more powerful community-based umbrella, which ultimately forged the creation of the nation-state. As a reflection of Plato’s “guardian class”, governments were created to administer and look after the members of these nation-states.

The mass production of books combined with the industrial revolution allowed for things to be produced and sold cheaply. As production of goods gradually increased, it meant that new markets had to be created where they could be marketed. Therefore, new technologies had to be created that would connect places far away with the centers of production. The new industrialists who were looking to expand their profits and by extension, their power, influenced the creation of the railroad to deliver their goods and connected buyers and sellers, who until that point had no way of communicating with each other. Railroads later led to standardization of time zones because the transportation of goods required that a centralized system of time be devised to ensure the safe passage of goods.

Around the same time, the invention of the telegraph also played a major role in bringing the entire nation under one set of uniform rules and expectations. Goods and services could now be delivered from coast to coast. The telephone and telegraph services came to be under the control of a single bureaucracy, i.e., the government, thus consolidating Beniger’s vision of an Information Society under one powerful entity. To this day, the United States government controls the transportation and communication system that connects New York to San Francisco and Washington, DC to Wellington, New Zealand. The telecommunications system of the time also helped create and consolidate the stock market activities in New York, regardless of where the traders themselves were based.

As companies grew and profits increased through the 19th and into the 20th century, they went overseas to expand. The continual need to grow dictated the demand for new technologies like the telephone and later, the Internet, as well as better transportation options such as refined, safe modern airplanes and ships that could carry goods and services to the far-flung corners of the world. Thus, these technologies came about as a direct consequence of free market capitalism. Ever-growing companies leveraged these modes of communication to create new markets and peddle their goods there.

As Steger has pointed out, the spread of American conglomerates and consumerism has affected other countries at a rapid rate. He refers to this phenomenon as “McDonaldization” (Steger, p. 89), where the whole world starts to look the same because of the proliferation of the same goods and services everywhere. Much of this activity progressively grew as neoliberal governments created trans-governing bodies like the UN and the WTO to conduct business and political activities beyond their own borders. Following World War II and the segregation of nations during the Cold War, governments removed restrictions on the movement of capital particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, which as Steger points out, led computer technology to evolve for the purposes of capitalist expansion. The Internet and its popularity have grown rampantly because of this investment made by companies to thrive without being constricted by national boundaries. As a consequence, global information and commerce were put in the hands of every individual, thus making them a potential customer. Steger calls this market globalization.

The computer and the Internet has also become the first technologies that show the promise of going beyond the scope of their original intent. As a growing number of people the world over come online, they are creating unprecedented quantities of online communication, making their voices heard in the form of popular personal blogs, wikis and community-based discussion forums. In doing so, they bringing attention to places, events and opinions that the traditional media like newspapers and television would have otherwise ignored. The idea that the Internet is a medium of both giving and receiving information simultaneously is empowering to its participants because it is a far cry from capitalism driven traditional 24-hour news media that wield power by driving the news agenda by showing millions the same selected news stories. It has also driven and propagated the use of English as a global language that people use to create and describe shared experiences. (Steger, 97).

A mitigating factor in the success of the Internet was also that companies and governments started storing on computers to drive the next generation of communications technologies. “Because most modern computers process digital information, the progressive digitization of mass media and telecommunications content begins to blur earlier distinctions between the communication of information and its processing … as well as between people and machines. Digitization makes communication from persons to machines, between machines, and even from machines to persons as easy as it is between persons.” (Beniger, 25).

History has shown that technology that is best able to aggregate, organize and reflect the current state of society becomes the most influential and the entity that controls the technology becomes the most powerful. This is a theme that is consistently repeated through the ages, though perhaps the Internet, with its unique ability to put the voices of big companies and the common man on the same pedestal, will succeed in giving an equal amount of attention and respect necessary to form a just and peaceful world in the long term.

Week XIII: McLuhan

My first thought in reading McLuhan's description of radio as a hot medium, because it did not involve a lot in the way of participation or sensory activity, was...would he still call it hot if the TV never came along? There was a time when everyone sitting around the radio, paying attention to everything that was said (e.g., in a radio play), interpreting the content and deriving entertainment from it, was a family tradition for years (in remote parts of the world and many a war zone, it still is).

The interpretation aspect meant that people had to actively participate in what was being said, even though the transmission of content was only one way. The same can be said about television at the time he wrote the article. This of course was LONG before the days of texting in your choice for the next American idol. In fact, I am almost inclined to think that radio is cooler than television because the latter presents all the information in a visual form, leaving very little to the imagination.

And certainly today's television, given the plethora of content that caters from the most educated and sophisticated to the lowest common denominator of audiences ('The Sopranos' to 'Jersey Shore' and everything in between) would disillusion McLuhan, given how grandiose and sexy he seemed to think it was.

Perhaps, he was just a boy who loved his toys.

Week XII: Beniger

"Because modern computers process digital information, the progressive digitalization of mass media and telecommunications content begins to blur earlier distinctions between the communication of information and its processing (as implied by the term compunications), as well as between people and machines.....In this way digitalization promises to transform currently diverse forms of information into a generalized medium for processing and exchange by the social system, much as, centuries ago, the institution of common currencies and exchange rates began to transform local markets into a single world economy," (p. 25+26)

I spent most of today thinking about digitization and the effect it has on societies in different places around the world. This morning, I was listening to a BBC documentary about citizen journalism and the effects it has in places like Burma, Iraq and Egypt, which is in sharp contrast to the impact that we see in Western media. (I recommend listening to it. Very interesting and relevant to this week's reading).

In the places I mentioned, which have recently experienced significant turmoil, bloggers have reported or provided opinion and perspective about issues that the popular media does not report. E.g., the documentary cited three Iraqi bloggers who wrote about the effects of the American occupation on their daily lives that people mostly in the West mostly didn't hear about. The Burmese blogger, for instance, talked about how he reported seeing about 100 people dead at the hands of the government, which the latter later confirmed (100000 killings) after the foreign media picked up the blog. In this case, the blogs proved necessary and the informed society was able to create change and a new order despite the powerful authorities (media, governments, etc.) who did everything in their power to stifle these stories.

In the US, the newspaper culture has a long and distinguished culture of being the beacons of a democracy, where all people have a voice, though it is carefully vetted by the papers owners...rich, powerful and well-educated people who, in essence, become the guardians of society and create a carefully constructed mirror of society to see itself. these folks provided order by creating a mini-bureaucracy in their own right for the paper, complete with distribution channels consumption and feedback channels.

But when blogs, which cost virtually nothing to produce and run, appeared, and started gaining attention, following and credibility, it pretty much created chaos in the media, not only because of the added influx of information and voices into the popular consciousness, but also individuals could state opinions as facts without necessary providing accurate context or doing any fact-checking.

Thinking about this made me think...sure, technology has converted all information in any form into 0s and 1s. But information is more fragmented than it has ever been. How is all this helping to create a single world economy with the cacophony of opinions we deal with everyday?

Week XI: Carey

I have to wonder whether the media like the telegraph or Facebook would ever entirely be able to remove context. They both make it a point to you that a message is coming from somewhere else.

I don't know how things worked in America, but telegrams, for instance, (which are still used widely in India to get urgent messages to not-so-well-connected places) are delivered by the postal service, which usually tells me that the message is coming from a fair distance and is obviously not being sent to me by someone I would see everyday (I remember reading that Western Union discontinued the service three years ago...though only *three* years ago!).

The same is true (at least somewhat) with Facebook. It does still categorize people into 'networks'. Also, when I read status updates, I am always cognizant that they are somewhere else (even if they happen to be in the same building), so I need to understand they updates in the context of their lives and the places they live in.

But the telegraph and Facebook give the illusion of the lack of distance because I know what's going on with my friends in San Francisco every day. But I still do find myself exclaiming "It's been so long!" every time I see them. And, while that may seem like an exclamation about the time (and there is a little bit of that), most of it is about distance because they lead very different lives in very different places.

I realize that the points I am making probably apply more to personal relationships than business. This is an important distinction because business relationship are about money (the universal love!) than showing your fellow stock broker in Chicago or Florida branch manager some affection.

Week X: Anderson

For the most part, I think that the notion of community is an assumption rather than a realization for most people on most days. I am skeptical of saying 'for all people on all days' because there are folks out there (one group I can think of is international students when they first move to another country because they are facing new and unknown challenges in life that can often challenge their very definition of self and society). I think that the identity they are trying to hold on to is cultural, which is deeply intertwined with their national identity. At a minimum, it gives their cultural identity a name (e.g., an American identity is more than just red+white+blue or the Star-Spangled Banner).

The Internet brings up some interesting new frontiers. Relating back to what I wrote before, I think that the Internet is great to establish and maintain contact with people from other places when their sense of identity, which is tied into the physical location of where they live, is not being threatened. If it were, everyone would be concerned about restoring order to their own lives and identities over trying to make contact with people in Madagascar. E.g., when people were being oppressed in Burma (during the military oppression) and Iran (during their election), they were crying out for help (on Twitter) for order, dignity and democracy to be restored to their *countries*, because they *needed* order restored in their own lives more than they *wanted* to make contact with somebody somewhere else.

They do not care who heard them...they just needed to be heard.

Also, I think the Internet brings forth the idea of geographic borders into a new space. By geographic borders, I don't only only mean national borders (though it does definitely apply there since it is a space where, for example, I can congregate with other Indians from India and those living in the US and celebrate both the culture and national identity in a single "place"). It could just as easily apply to a virtual location where an imagined community of aficionados of Wafels and Dinges (the truck that parks around NY selling waffles) can stand, sit, chat and probably even order extra dinges from an...imagined...truck.

Yummy.

Week VIII: Hugo

I wonder what would have happened if the printing press had not been invented. I have no doubt that our lives would be different (here I feel like channeling any teen drama ever..."our lives will never the same...ever...again...ever...). But how? It is tempting to think that the evolution of mankind might have come to a standstill, but I seriously doubt that would have been the case because if we had the intelligence to carve messages into buildings, we would surely have found other (equally?) convenient ways of getting the point across.

I'll admit that I do get nostalgic about old media...making a mix tape, listening to my grandfather's crisp-sounding vinyl records, programming the VCR (I aced that pretty early), the 5.25" floppy, writing class notes or homework in a notebook rather than typing on the computer. But to me, these were a means to an end. They were meant to be tools for me to learn something (e.g., programming the VCR was a lesson in patience).

I also think that the Internet has not replaced or outdated any of the technologies that preceded so much as it updated those technologies and made them accessible to a wider audience (e.g., I heard a CD for the first time in 1994 in India, though the technology in general had been commonplace since several years prior. But I did start listening to and creating MP3s around the same time that they were becoming commonplace the world over). Keep in mind, if the Internet ran on principles vastly different from what we already knew (like alien technology), we as a society would have dumped it in its infancy (bad choice of words...still).

Week VII: Aeneid of Virgil

Boy, did I pick a bad time to leave town! I wondered about the place of this week's reading in the context of everything we have read so far and wished that the discussion would help me make sense of it. My takeaway from it was the notion of Romans bringing peace and culture to the conquered people and protect otherwise the weak and oppressed citizens of the land that the Romans are conquering, while the real intention is the expansion of the Roman empire.

History does have a funny of repeating itself. In reading this part, the only words popping in my head (mostly to the tune of The O'Jays 'Money Money Money' were....America...."message of democracy".....Saddam....cruel regime....OIL!

Also, very interesting descriptions of heaven and hell...somewhat similar and somewhat different from the Hindu mythological definitions that I am accustomed to of heaven (place where the Gods live and mortal's soul goes after they are freed from the cycle of rebirth) and hell (a place where the mortal experiences a multiplied dose of the pain and suffering that s/he inflicted on others so that s/he realizes the horror behind the deed(s)).