Writing

Communication and the History of Technology

Human use of tools is often  seen as one of the characteristics that distinguishes us as a species. The historical study of technology and culture involves questions about the creation, diffusion and social impacts of tools and techniques to extend human power for agriculture, communication, energy, transportation, warfare, and other fields.

Which of these techniques and fields have had more influence over civilization is a source of ongoing debate and exploration over the centuries. Technological progress was the primary factor driving civilization, according to some early anthropologists, while others have seen the use of energy or the accumulation of information as central to cultural development.

Mass media technology has had a special influence, according to many historians. We need to ask how this influence has been evident in the past and what is its likely path in the future.

Two mid-twentieth-century historians most concerned with media technologies and their place in history were Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.

Harold Innis (1894–1952) was an economic historian who said that Western civilization has been profoundly influenced by communication technologies, while Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) was a media critic who was strongly influenced by Innis and also put communication at the center of history and social life.

Innis had the idea that civilizations using durable media tended to be oriented toward time and religious orthodoxy (Babylon), while, on the other hand, cultures with flexible media (Rome, Greece, modern) were oriented toward control of space and a secular approach to life.

The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media that emphasize time are those durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade. 

What this implies is both obvious and far-reaching. Clearly, detailed instructions and correspondence over a distance can take place only if medium is light and flexible enough to carry the message. A dozen letters of credit on parchment are far easier to carry than a dozen clay tablets. But rather less obviously, the qualities of media flexibility and durability may be important elements in the way a civilization is organized. The fact that you can have letters of credit means you can have a banking system with branches across large distances.

McLuhan extended Innis’s ideas, which he summed up in the statement, “The medium is the message.” By that, McLuhan meant that the kind of communication media—print, imaging, broadcasting, or computing—has a strong influence not only on the message itself, but also on the type of thinking and the development of the culture creating the messages. A literate print culture is very different from a visual or radio or television culture, McLuhan said.

Many people thought literate culture would be weakened by television and radio, just as generations before thought that religious oral cultures would be weakened by printing. McLuhan was relatively optimistic, although not utopian, about media technology. Digitally controlled international broadcast media were connecting print and imaging and radio and television through satellites in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was active, and the convergence of media cultures to extend human perceptions would expand exponentially, leading us into a twenty-first-century “global village.” This would not lead to universal peace and happiness, he believed, but it would allow humanity to approach a greater degree of cultural maturity.

Determinism versus social construction of media technology

When historians consider how a technology is developed, there are often two basic schools of thought at work: determinism and social construction. Determinists see technologies as path-dependent, with inevitable changes and consequently predictable impacts on society. Social constructionists see a stronger influence for economics, politics, and culture that controls technological development. Neither is right or wrong, and both perspectives are often applied to the study of media technology.

Marshall McLuhan took this deterministic view when he said we need to anticipate the process of social change that communication technologies generate. But whether or not we anticipate the change, there will still be an impact. He said in a 1969 interview:

Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us—and thus win back control of our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us.

Technological determinism was probably best articulated by historian Charles Beard, who said, “Technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity” (Beard 1927). It was simplified into the grim motto of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

To a large extent,  media technologies have been seen as less deterministic than (for example) technologies in energy or transportation. Still, it’s important to realize that many experts see unavoidable impacts in media technologies.

For example, fiber optics, satellites, and digital networks have “flattened” the world, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. They have made it just as easy to process information or do business in India as it is in Europe or North America, he notes in his 2005 book, The World is Flat. While social institutions might buffer some of the impacts, the global sharing of semi-skilled information work has brought the world closer but has also destabilized employment in banking, news, entertainment, and other areas.

For example, Eastman Kodak, the film and camera company, once employed 140,000 people, but went bankrupt in 2012 after widespread adoption of digital cameras. Where did all that economic value go, asks Jaron Lanier in a 2014 book, Who Owns the Future? Digital networks tend to centralize wealth and limit overall economic growth, enriching only a few in the process, he says.

According to Google founder Larry Page, the acceleration of digital technologies might eventually eliminate nine of out ten jobs, but may also make basic living costs much cheaper. “When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away” (Walters 2014). This is classic determinism, of course, since “wishing” is certainly not the only possible social constraint on technology.

The possibility that technology could accelerate to a point where no social process could exert any control whatsoever is considered to be a technological “singularity” beyond which any future is opaque. For example, futurist Raymond Kurzweil asks what would happen if the global network of computers acquired intelligence. That would be a “singularity,” because after that, no one could predict what might happen. The network could even make decisions about ending all human existence (Kurzweil 2005).

The counter-thesis to technological determinism is social construction of technology, which is the idea that social processes (including politics, economics, and culture) have more influence on the development of a technology or on its impacts than the technology’s own characteristics.

For example, in most countries during the early to mid-twentieth century, nearly all communication media—from post offices to telegraph companies, to telephone and radio television systems—were socially constructed through national and international telecommunications regulatory agencies, such as the International Telecommunications Union (part of the United Nations) and, on the national level, agencies like the US Federal Communications Commission. Only print media achieved a relatively high degree of freedom, through the First Amendment in the US and similar traditions in Europe and other countries.

The relatively negative experience with over-regulation of electronic media in the US during the mid-twentieth century had a strong influence on the way the world wide web was socially constructed in the 1990s, when innovators successfully argued that the Web should be relatively unregulated, like print media.

Another perspective on the social construction of technology is that inventors themselves tend to infuse their own values into technology. For example, Steve Jobs of Apple computers wanted to make personal computing possible and then tried to control it when he was successful; Thomas Edison also tried to retain control of the motion picture industry. Sometimes an inventor’s values come into conflict with powerful industrial or social forces. Brian Winston, for example, describes the emergence of some media technologies as influ- enced by what he calls the law of the suppression of radical potential (Winston 2008).

Similarly, values may also be infused in the broad inventive process as people come to believe that things could be done better. Historian Robert Friedel calls these “cultures of improvement,” as key technologies are “captured” and become part of a sustained series of changes. The jockeying for power surrounding these technologies is the process by which a technology is controlled (Friedel 2007).

So, is the medium is the message? Or, perhaps we should ask, to what extent is the medium the message? If the dark side of printing was empire, colonialism, capitalism, and the rise of the nation state, what was the dark side of electronic and digital commu- nication? Would the new technology just intensify the same trends? Or would it, as McLuhan believed in the 1960s, produce a qualitative change in society and cultural life, liberating users from the limitations of the past (Blondheim 2007)?

There’s no question that, in comparison to McLuhan’s era, we are seeing rapid, deep qualitative changes in the media and in society. Old media empires have disintegrated and new kinds of media functions are animating an emerging global culture. Rather suddenly in human history, we have instant language translation, free international encyclopedias, and free media exchanges in text, audio, and video between individuals and groups from anywhere in the world. None of these things were widely available before the 21st century. We also have unusual public encounters between very different cultures that have never much been in contact before, and as a result, conflicts over closely held values and an increasing drift towards international speech restrictions.

 Utopians and Luddites

When people embrace technology in an extremely optimistic way, they are said to be technological utopians. For example, much of the rhetoric surrounding the development of the telegraph, the early years of radio, and the early years of the internet tended to be influenced by this sort of enthusiasm. The telegraph will make “one neighborhood of the whole country,” Samuel Morse wrote about 125 years before McLuhan’s idea of the “global village.” Similarly, H. G. Wells envisioned the morning television report as a staple of a utopian communal village of the future (Wells 1898).

When people reject technology in an extreme and pessimistic way, they are sometimes called Luddites. The term goes back to 1811, when thousands of British textile workers lost their jobs following the introduction of steam-powered machinery. Mobs of starving workers broke the textile machinery and blamed it on a mythical figure named Ned Ludd, who, according to legend, was a simple-minded boy who accidentally broke textile machinery. Apparently, the Luddites only intended to destroy property, but there were accident deaths of mill owners, and as a result, about two dozen were executed and more were exiled to Australia. French workers with a similar idea of resisting unfair working conditions by breaking machinery with wooden shoes (sabots) led to the term sabotage.

The Luddite movement was very much on the mind of London Times owner John Walter II when he promised workers that they would keep their jobs even after steam printing presses were introduced in 1814. Walter’s enlightened response didn’t work 150 years later, when printing technology triggered a wave of “new Luddite” labor disputes, including the very damaging four-month New York newspaper strike of 1962–3 (Kempton 1962).

Enthusiasm for new technologies has been more the rule than the exception, but skepticism about virtually every technology is not difficult to find in history. One of the chief critics of technology in the nineteenth century was Henry David Thoreau (1817−62), the transcendentalist writer and author of “Walden.” He was especially skeptical about the telegraph, which he considered merely “an improved means to an unimproved end.”

Another technological skeptic was writer and diplomat Henry Adams (1838−18). He worried that civilization had left behind an old world concerned with religion and had entered a new one, a world concerned with science and technology but morally and philo- sophically adrift. His point of comparison of the two ages of civilization was between the Virgin, a symbol of old Europe, and the Dynamo, a symbol of new Europe (Adams 1917). This idea has been often repeated in discussions about technology.

Fallacies and anachronisms

Sometimes predictions for technological directions that do not occur are called techno- logical fallacies. The fallacy that computers would lead to a police state is important to consider in the history of computing because, in the 1970s, it led to a preference for individual, non-networked personal computers.

It was also a partial fallacy for Alexander Graham Bell and other inventors of the late nineteenth century to predict that the telephone would be used more or less as a medium for music and news broadcasting, in the way that eventually occurred with radio in the 1920s. It was a complete fallacy for Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the radio, to predict that radio waves could stimulate plants and act as a new kind of fertilizer. In the 1950s and 1960s, comic book detectives carried “wrist televisions” like wrist watches to communicate with each other—again, something of a partial fallacy, in that such devices are possible. Following the introduction of the Apple watch, which doubles as a cell phone and personal information assistant, we may now have the return of the comic book detective.

Envisioning the future has always been an interesting and sometimes productive pastime, but the future isn’t what it used to be, as many authors have noted. The atomic- powered airplane, the personal helicopter, the robot valet—all have been chalked up by now as technological fallacies (Barbrook 2007; Dregni 2006).

Anachronisms (which means “contrary to time”) often confuse two or more time periods. For instance, medieval paintings and Renaissance-era woodcuts often portray biblical figures with fashions or weapons typical of the era when the paintings or woodcuts were made.

Interestingly, the usual portrait of Johannes Gutenberg is an anachronism, since it was created to illustrate a different person 100 years after Gutenberg’s death and totally misses the typical fashions and style of Gutenberg’s era in Mainz, Germany.