The Soft Edge, Paul Levinson
§xi All life, indeed, operates on information. What characterizes human life is that we presumable are aware of information and its various modes of conveyance - yet so ubiquitous is this information, like the very air around us, that we often take no notice of its most profound consequences, the ones that arise when the currents of conveyance change.
§003 To the extent that an information system has an inevitable, irresistible social effect, media theorists refer to that relationship as "hard" media determinism. The relationship of abstract language to humanity comes closest to that extreme or ideal; the fact that it does not fully achieve it highlights a very profound point about information technologies and their impact of human beings, to wit, that media rarely, if ever, have absolute, unavoidable social consequences. Rather, they make events possible - events whose shape and impact are the result of factors other than the information technology at hand. Media theorists refer to this type of determinism as "soft."
§007 A fundamental tenet of Darwinian theory is that the generation of organic characteristics and organisms occurs independently of environmental influences - that is, the environment exerts its influence, makes its selection, after the organic characteristics have been generated.
§012 Literacy probably constitutes the most significant monopoly of knowledge in human history. Our public education system is in effect predicated on breaking that monopoly of knowledge, or making sure it does not arise in the first place.
§025 … a key characteristic of oral/aural cultures is the magical, mystical, mythical quality of its most important communications. What is spoken and heard, but unseen, acquires larger-than-life qualities in the re-telling. In contrast, writing fixes its information in discrete, reliably accessible - and, with print, reproducible - units.
§028 We could capture the crux of science by saying that it demarcates ideas that any human individual may have, however brilliant they may or may not be, from ideas that in some way have survived a test with the external reality beyond any individual.
§031 New media create new information, which in turn requires new modes of acquisition.
§034 Knowledge has always been power, as witness the role that monopolies of knowledge among priests and others have played throughout the millennia. But knowledge first became a commodity in mass culture, to be bought, sold, traded, and otherwise exchanged, in the aftermath of the printing press. Today, computers have quickened, expanded, and otherwise amplified this process into the "information society" that we now inhabit.
§037 With the notable exception of the telegraph - at once the first electronic medium, the first industrial use of electricity, and the most abstract of any communication mode before or since (Morse Code is an abstraction of writing, itself and abstraction of speech, in turn an abstraction of what it describes) - all the major communication inventions of the last century worked by capturing or reflecting a literal energy configuration from the real world.
§045 There is a lesson here for the criticism, often heard, that artificial media tend to dehumanize us, separating us from the real world, our emotions, our deeper selves. The truth is that we invest our deeper selves, as Kant saw, in whatever aspects of external reality we encounter - whether mediated by photochemical plates or traveling more directly to our live optical nerves. The photograph of a pleasing meadow need be no less a recipient of this cognitive and emotional investment that the meadow itself.
§055 When speech was as new as digital communication is today, poised to launch hominids on the path to full Homo sapiens sapiens, those who were entrusted or self-appointed guardians of traditional hominid culture would no doubt have assessed the new medium - had they had such power of assessment, absent spoken language - to be undermining and ultimately destructive of their way of life. And they would have been right.
§063 But the high expense of transmitting carrier waves, in contrast to the relatively low cost of receiving them, frustrated the use of Marconi's invention as a telephone without wires for the populace which he also hoped it would be. Instead, David Sarnoff's vision of a radio music box transformed the wireless into radio as we now know ita oneway mass medium that brought into being, as its most important consequence, the instantaneous, the simultaneous mass audience.
§065 The phone not only has informational access to our homes, but extraordinary purchase on our attention. No other medium has such power.
§066 ...the mistake of most critics of electronic media is not their connection of rationality and literacy; the error lies rather in their view that electricity and its applications are mortal competitors of books, magazines, and newspapers, and therein of literacy. On the contrary, at the very origin of electronic communication, we have the telegraph, which not only spread the written word faster and farther than any medium before, but was an enormous benefit to newspapers and the reporting of news. And at the current, temporary terminus of electronic communication, we have the liberation of text via personal computer and modem, generating a rising tide lifting all vehicles of literacy.
§078 One of the early consequences of hearing's appeal to the many is that democracy in ancient Greece was defined by the extent to which an audience could hear a speaker's voice rendering democracy, in media terms, an acoustocracy. In this chapter, we explore what happened in the twentieth century when this natural mass-mode was literally amplified to national levels. One of the surprising, though in retrospect predictable, consequences of this broadcasting of acoustocracy was that it strengthened the operation of all forms of government, totalitarian as well as democratic.
§083 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking for the unanimous Court, delivered the judgement as follows: The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater, and causing a panic. . . . The question ... is whether the words . . . are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. (Tedford, 1985, pp. 72-73)
§089 The important lesson for media determinism, again, is that although information technologies can and do decisively influence events and make them possible ,they are not irresistible in their impact, and indeed any medium can be overridden by other media and other factors.
§095 Kuleshov had shown, and Sergei Eisenstein went on to further demonstrate and explicate, that the story of a film comes not in its individual images but their interaction.
§099 Thus, radio survived by (a) capitalizing on the consonance of its sightless communication with the human need to sometimes hear and see different things, (b) playing rock 'n' roll records as the main new sounds to be so heard, and (c) thereby moving out of the living room, where it had been a medium of central attention, into automobiles, kitchens, bathrooms, and via transistors, days on the beach.
§102 All of this suggests not only the difficulty of predicting any outcome in the information revolution, but of injecting human intention, control, into a process governed by our mainly unconscious expectations and requirements of specific human performance in technologies often brought into being for other purposes and reliant on other technologies for their full operation. But difficulty is not the same as impossibility, and does not mean that our conscious capacity to identify media problems and deliberately create new media that do a better job is somehow foreclosed or even incidental to media evolution.
§111 The window shade is a classic example of a remedial medium.
§126 ... text communicated via wires from homes is unique in that the telegraph transmits text via wires originating and ending outside of the home, and the phone transmits speech not writing. The telecommunication of text via computers is thus a revolution in writing or authorship, furthered by the fact that the initial instrument of authorship, the personal computer as word processor, is the same computer used for telecommunication.
§137 Hypertext can be considered an active programmed implementation of words, phrases, and their links, crystal clear or slightly implied, to other words and phrases: a map, constantly under revision, of their meanings and associations.
§146 ... the Web as a whole is, rather, like the book of nature itself, a book without apparent author . Indeed, unlike the natural world whose ultimate origins are to some degree unknown, we know full well just where the online, digital world came from. And having thus witnessed its emergence, we say with more assurance than we can about the natural world that this Web has no author.
§172 There is no doubt that media compete with one another for the very finite amount of time and attention we can give them. But just as the addition of a new medium to an information environment is, as we have seen, transformative not additive, so too is the subtraction of time profoundly transformative not just simply reductive in our lives.
§182 Online education has likely survived, and will likely continue, because going to one's computer, whether on a desk or on one's lap, is almost always more convenient than going to a physical classroom. Other advantages of online education include the permanent record of all discussions, the capacity to take part in the class any time day or night, etc. But the key reason for its success no doubt resides in the fact that its convenience outweighs the disadvantages of online students and faculty not being in close physical proximity.
§211 We do not yet know enough about life - or intelligence - to even know much more than that the second emerged from the first. But how? And we do not yet understand enough about technology, even though it is our creation, to be clear that our technologies may not already have some of the properties of life.
§227 It is not that we design our technological extensions to be deliberately in need of human involvement to work. It is rather that in creating technologies to extend our perception and thinking, we cannot help but make them dependent upon us to operate.