Phobias and Philias

Exploring the rather alarmist, negative views of Postman and Gitlin this last week has been an excellent exercise for me. Because I hold a quite different view of technology and its role in society than either of these authors, I have to admit to having previously relegated such attitudes and understandings of the effect of technology to a realm defined by crackpots who attack knowledge with little, if any, familiarity with that which they are trying to argue against. For the most part, those I have heretofore heard criticizing, not just the content, but also the mere existence of the media we currently enjoy have been elderly folk determined to avoid “newfangled” ideas or the unabombers of the world, who are very easily dismissed as mentally ill. Postman and Gitlin, however, present clear and cogent arguments sounding the alarm about the dangers and ills of a society anchored in technology.

Postman rather strongly suggests that more is lost than gained in what he sees as the progression of society from tool-using to technocracy to technopoly, (which he calls “totalitarian technocracy”) (Postman, p.48). Gitlin bemoans the proliferation of media driven by a “cost-demand-technology” loop that is bombarding the senses and distracting our citizens (Gitlin, pp. 30-31). Both of these authors seem, in effect, to anthropomorphize at our current communication media as if the technology has a power and intent of its own, beyond that of its users.

According to Santana (1997, ¶ 9),

[s]tudies dealing with the relationship between technology and society tend to fall into two extreme positions: technophilia or technophobia. The latter sees technology as an evil element which is taking society to a process of dehumanization, not recognizing any benefit that it might bring to human life. The former takes the opposite position, placing on technological advances the solution and the means to improve performance in different kinds of activities.

Santana poses Microsoft’s Bill Gates as a technophile based on his book, The road ahead, wherein he extols the virtues and possibilities of, computers and their attendant software and networks (Santana, ¶¶ 11-24). Santana names Berkeley’s Clifford Stoll as a technophobe, based on his book, Silicon snake oil salesman: Second thoughts on the information highway, in which he argues that real experiences are superior to computer mediated experiences (Santana, ¶¶ 25-39). Santana’s own bias appears to lie on the technophile side of the equation but include a nod to the thought of “critical analysis of what it takes to make them useful tools, and how to best use information technology to enhance the educational process and democratization” (Santana, ¶¶ 40-48).

Applying the technophile/technophobe differentiation to Postman and Gitlin, while their arguments are admittedly lucid and well-posed, I would put both clearly and cleanly within the ranks (or perhaps even in leadership positions) of the technophobic. While Postman give some amount of lip service to the possible advantages provided by technology, he makes clear that the sacrifices made in adopting technology are greater than any possible gains. Gitlin, on the other hand, appears to see only the negative effects of technology.

For my part, I rank myself among the technophiles, though perhaps not quite as far along the continuum as Bill Gates, as I also think we are well-advised to try to keep computer-mediated communication within our control rather than letting it control us. Our current tools are just that – tools and nothing more unless we cede our control to some amorphously defined other. I have great faith in the ability of human beings to maintain control of the technology in a manner that ensures that it remains a good and valuable tool for human development. Although at times we see a mass focus of attention on a brand new technology, when the “new” wears off, we tend to come back to a more balanced perspective.

Consider, for example, that when MTV first appeared on the scene in 1981, teen-agers and young adults quickly became enchanted and for a while MTV was the craze. Young people nationwide were watching MTV to the exclusion of everything else. These days, however, although MTV is still an important voice speaking to and about its target demographic, its influence has waned somewhat as its format has morphed from the 24/7 music video format to include news and pop culture shows targeted at adolescents and young adults as well as programming promoting social, political, and environmental activism (Wikipedia, n.d). In essence, the pendulum has swung and MTV has become but one of many tools for dispersal of information in our society.

Perhaps because I am an avowed Taoist, I tend to believe that balance ultimately prevails. Although we may become enamored of the next newest, greatest technology, in the end, the balance of the universe will reassert itself and the new “thing” will become once again just a tool that we use to make our lives better.

Resources

Gitlin, T. (2002). Media unlimited: How the torrent of images and sounds overwhelms our lives. Henry Holt and Company. New York

Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage Books, New York.

Santana, B. (1997). Introducing the technophobia/technophilia debate: Some comments on the information age. Retrieved on December 8, 2008 from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/beatriz.htm.

Wikipedia (n.d.) MTV. Retrieved on December 8, 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV.

Music and Orality

Though I have long understood oral communication to be different from written communication, I have never before considered what that difference might be beyond the obvious method of transmission. After some thought, I have decided to comment on orality, community, and traditional folk music.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica Online, folk music is a type of traditional music (often concerning rural subject matter) that originally was passed down through families and other small social groups . . . learned through hearing rather than reading (folk music, 2008). With that in mind, when I speak of folk music I mean the traditional music addressing easily accessible subjects passed down through an oral tradition and generally known by all community members (Ruehl, n.d.).

While folk music might seem at first glance to be only loosely related by the nature of its receiver to the strictly verbal orality spoken to by Ong, “[o]ral communication unites people in groups” (Ong, p. 69), and for part of my family, folk music surely did that as well. Moreover, folk music usually deals with an oral narrative in the same way that a recited story does. My mother’s family had a rich tradition of family/community music. Some of my earliest memories are of huge extended family gatherings where everyone seemed to bring a musical instrument and we all gathered to listen to, sing, and play favorite songs, all of which told stories.

No written music ever graced those sessions (indeed, I was one of the few who could even read music) and lyrics were always learned “on the fly” as the songs were sung over and over. Those old folk songs bound us together as surely as any other factor. These song fests were shared experiences that marked all of our experiences together. Even today, I share closeness with my cousins of all degrees on this side of my family despite the fact that we lived scattered across the United States and that the majority of us have met only a handful of times in our lives. Those songs built a closeness and community among us that I have found in few other places in my life.

On the other hand, as I was growing up I lived near most of my father’s family, which gathered much more often than my mother’s family. The difference in the activities involved in these gatherings was marked, however. When my father’s family met, while the women cooked and cleaned, everyone else watched a football or baseball game or engaged in some other solitary pursuit. There was really no oral communication to speak of and I was not the only one of my generation who spent these hours immersed in comic books, looking up at those around me only when directly addressed. We exchanged nothing that could create or even resemble a coherent spoken narrative.

Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. . . . Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence. This centering effect of sound is what high-fidelity sound reproduction exploits with intense sophistication. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.

By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness. . . . The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together. (Ong, p. 72)

Because folk music, like most folk lore, is passed orally and aurally, there can be great variety in regional renditions of the same song. However, that does not negate the unifying effect of a familiar song. Looking back, I can now see that the oral tradition that came with the folk music of my mother’s family instilled relationships and a sense of community in my maternal relatives that never existed among my paternal relatives. Without the close associations with the sense of hearing that my mother’s family had, and the associated interiority that Ong credits with binding people into close-knit groups (Ong, p. 74), my father’s family has drifted apart since my grandmother’s death.

“Oral communication unites people in groups” (Ong, p. 69). This begs the question whether a close-knit community can form in a so-called literate culture. The answer would seem to be that it depends on whether orality and literacy can co-exist. It might be tempting to suggest that, as we drift into literacy, there could only be a decline in the sense of community because the technology allows more and more isolation and less and less orality. However, Ong’s suggestion is that a newly oral culture or secondary orality is developing that uses machine-made and/or enhanced sound that has developed with the aid of writing (e.g., television, radio, online meetings, instant messaging, voice over Internet protocols, chat rooms, discussion boards, etc.) (SLCCAS, ¶ 16).

I personally believe that human beings crave association with others. The need for community is hard-wired into us by evolution, because membership in a community enhances survival chances. I choose to believe that, no matter what technology these marvelous human brains of ours can come up with, we will always find ways to bind ourselves into communities and to have multiple human relationships.

Resources

Folk music. (2008). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved November 22, 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/212168/folk-music

Ong, W.J. (1982). Orality and literacy:The technologizing of the word. Metheun. Retrieved November 22, 2008 from http://jesuitnet.blackboard.com/courses/1/COML509_B1_11775_FA08/content/_82073_1/embedded/ong1.pdf?bsession=2213597&bsession_str=session_id=2213597,user_id_pk1=707,user_id_sos_id_pk2=1,one_time_token=328109B8BBC7F349E9250C5734A9D068 .

Ruehl, K. (n.d.). The history of American folk music: An introduction to folk music in America.. Retrieved November 21, 2008 from http://folkmusic.about.com/od/historyoffolk/a/Folk_History.htm .

St. Louis University College of Arts and Sciences (SLCCAS). (n.d.). The life and scholarship of Walter J. Ong, S.J. retrieved November 22, 2008 from http://www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/ENG/ong/influence.html .

Grassroots Go Viral

Barack Obama’s clear victory in the 2008 election cycle was history-making, not only in its end, but also in its means. The Obama campaign itself was a vital, engaged, focused, and disciplined grass-roots movement that very effectively steered millions of participants to concerted action and understanding. Moved to energized excitement by a charismatic and inspiring leader, the campaign embodied unprecedented lines of communication and concomitant fundraising success. Although the campaign’s computer mediated communication (CMC) has been a matter of public record and was occasionally mentioned by the media during the campaign, its presence has necessarily taken a back seat to the issues. However, now that the campaign dust is beginning to settle and the Obama team is gearing up for its enormous new responsibilities, there is time to consider the expanded role of CMC in the political arena.

While past political candidates have fairly successfully used websites to market their positions and candidacies and to raise funds (e.g., Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign), none has been more successful at mobilizing supporters than the new president-elect. The campaign relied on an organizing model developed by Harvard University Marshall Ganz, a public policy lecturer at Harvard (Stirland, 2008, ¶ 5). Obama’s own background as a community organizer as well as his own inspired oratory and ideas undoubtedly laid the framework for the use of this model in his very successful campaign. However, there is little doubt that the integration of technology with field organizing efforts also had a deep impact.

The campaign website not only provided “organizing tools” designed to make it easier for individuals to feel personally committed to the campaign, but also offered social networking with other Obama supporters in both virtual and real world situations, as well as blogging and links into other social networking sites such as My Space and Face Book (http://www.barackobama.com/index.php). The payoff for this CMC-enhanced organizing was the participation of an estimated 1.5 million volunteers (Stirland, 2008, ¶ 8) as well as financial contributions totaling and unprecedented $639 million (Zibreg 1, 2008, p. 1).

Thurlow (2004) calls the “fact that we no longer find a technology remarkable or realize just how dependent on it we really are” invisibility -- a sign of a mature technology (p. 37). I have only recently begun to take conscious stock of my own reliance on CMC and to realize that personal computer/Internet technology has become so incredibly intertwined with my everyday life that it is almost invisible. Without a second thought, I work, attend school, communicate with family and friends, write, read books, magazines, and newspapers, watch television programs and movies, make political and charitable contributions, and research papers and issues of interest on my personal computer. I keep my computer in my living room near my sofa because I frequently want quickly look up something that catches my interest on television.

I am not alone in the integration of CMC into my daily life. My 72-year-old mother is at least as proficient with computers and the Internet as I (more proficient with photo editing and publishing programs). I have an 82-year-old friend who fearlessly uses emails and blogs to communicate with her children who are scattered across the world. My own children could type before their penmanship had even fully formed and do not know a world without a computer and Internet access. Connection is now the rule rather than the exception.

There is really no doubt that CMC is a mature technology that has, indeed become invisible in many ways or that the maturity of the technology has moved it nearly seamlessly into the political realm. For the most part we have just accepted the fact that the Obama campaign took full advantage of the fact of most Americans’ dependence on CMC in their every day lives in bringing this new leader to power. We are not surprised that, within 48 hours of his victory, President-elect Obama’s team set up a website (http://change.gov/) wherein citizens are invited to tell their own stories, state a vision for the country, and apply for employment (Miller, 2008, ¶ 8). It went almost unnoticed that Obama appointed technology experts to his transition team (Hill, 2008, ¶ 1), suggesting that CMC will continue to be an integrated part of his administration and the manner in which he communicates with the electorate. Few people other that real technophiles made note of the fact that Obama made campaign promises concerning net neutrality, broadband penetration, wireless spectrum usage, H-1B non-immigrant visas needed to recruit foreign guest workers in technical fields, and Internet privacy issues (Zibreg 2, 2008, pp. 1-2), but fewer still are surprised that he might consider the issues important enough to speak to.

There is no escaping the fact that this incoming President has adapted and adopted CMC as a part of the political toolbox to use in both campaigning and governing. The Obama campaign was morphed from a strong and inspired political campaign into a behemoth by the strategic use of CMC. As great success breeds imitation, there is likewise no escaping the fact that CMC will play a continuing integral role in our modern political lives.

References

Hill, J.S. (2008) Technology execs join Obama’s transition team. Retrieved on November 7, 2008 from http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/40077/118/.

Miller, J.L. (2008) Obama’s change.gov goes live. Retrieved on November 7, 2008 from http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/06/obamas-changegov-goes-live.

Stirland, S.L. (2008) Obama's secret weapons: Internet, databases and psychology. Retrieved on November 7, 2008 from http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/obamas-secret-w.html.

Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., & Tomic, A. (2004). Computer mediated communication: Social interaction and the Internet. London: SAGE.

Zibreg, C. (Zibreg 2) (2008) Barack Obama’s top 5 technology promises. Retrieved on November 7, 2008 from http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-40085-128.html.