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The
Long View: Enlightenment Ideologies of Science and Technology
and the Internet Debate
Remarks
presented to the 1st International Summit on Electronic
Communication & Culture
Popular
Culture Association National Conference
Electronic Communication Area
San Antonio, Texas
March 26-29, 1997
Samuel R. Smith
Center for Mass Media Research
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
University of Colorado
Over
the past few years the Internet has become one of the most
talked-about innovations in our lifetimes, leading one prominent
commentator to assert that "we are in the middle of the
most transforming technological event since the capture of
fire" (Harper's 1995). The Net's growth has been dramatic,
to be sure, and is arguably surpassed only by the magnitude
of the hype surrounding it. To give you an idea of just how
much the online world has been discussed, a Lexis/Nexis search
for the word "Internet" in the 1990 database reveals
a total of 1624 stories. Two years later that number had more
than doubled - in 1992, a search for "Internet"
yields 3806 hits. Last year, the word was used in 322,285
articles, constituting an increase of over 8400% in just five
years. In the first 84 days of this year alone, "Internet"
has been used in 74,929 stories. That adds up to 892 per day,
37 per hour, and - if we can assume that disproportionately
more stories are published during the daytime - at least one
or two since I started talking. And that's just in the comparatively
few publications catalogued in the Lexis/Nexis News Library.
I'm
not here today to talk about the Internet, though - I'm here
to talk about all the talk about the Internet. I'm sure we
all realize that, as is all too often the case in our media-saturated
culture, there's a notable gap between the rhetoric of the
Internet and the actual reality of the thing. However, what
is perhaps less obvious, especially to those in our culture
who get most or all of their information from "infotainment"
sources such as television and mass circulation periodicals,
there is also a significant gap between competing rhetorics
of the Internet.
We're
all familiar with the utopian line that the Net is going to
solve our problems, make us smarter, richer, and healthier,
and I think it safe to say that, within popular media, this
is the dominant strain of discourse. However, as I hope to
demonstrate in the next few minutes, there is a competing
dystopian anxiety over the potential of the Internet. I would
further suggest that this dialectic between the utopian/messianic
view of the Internet and its dystopian/demonic alter-ego is
reflective of a much older debate within Western society,
a debate whose history and character are potentially of great
use to those among us who are trying desperately to understand
our various emerging new media.
It's
hard to imagine a better statement of the utopian rhetoric
of the Internet than we have from Vice President Al Gore,
who in a 1994 address to the International Telecommunications
Union in Buenos Aires had this to say about the Administration's
vision of the Information Superhighway:
These
highways - or, more accurately, networks of distributed
intelligence - will allow us to share information, to connect,
and to communicate as a global community. From these connections
we will derive robust and sustainable economic progress,
strong democracies, better solutions to global and local
environmental challenges, improved health care - and, ultimately
- a greater sense of shared stewardship of our small planet.
The
Global Information Infrastructure will help educate our
children and allow us to exchange ideas within a community
and among nations. It will be a means by which families
and friends will transcend the barriers of time and distance.
It will make possible a global information marketplace,
where consumers can buy or sell products.
And
the distributed intelligence of the GII will spread participatory
democracy... I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged
in the fora the GII will create (Gore 2).
According
to Gore and the National Information Infrastructure Task Force
(NIITF):
1)
all students will have access to the best teachers regardless
of geography, distance, resources or disabilities; the NIITF
estimates this will result in 30% more learning in 40% less
time at 30% of the cost;
2)
in excess of 300,000 jobs will be created, 80% of which will
be in information-intense sectors of the economy; these are
high status, well-paying jobs;
3)
the quality of health care will be greatly improved, while
expenditures will be lowered by $36-100 billion per year;
4)
electronic benefits transfers will save $1 billion over five
years in food stamp payments alone;
5)
participatory democracy will be enhanced through the design
of a customer-driven electronic government - perhaps more
significantly, even, the decentralized, self-determining Internet
becomes the perfect metaphor for democracy (Gore 1994, NIITF
1993).
These
are only a few of the remarkable claims made for the Net by
the Clinton Administration, and scores of other commentators
have offered enthusiastic support for this vision. Some see
the Net narrowing the troublesome discourse gap between the
public and academia; aiding scientists battling the extinction
of species around the globe (Hafrey 1994); helping law enforcement
agencies better fight crime (Crawley 1994); eliminating geographical
boundaries between nations (Brody 1994); and fostering the
establishment and growth of community (Hafrey 1994, Schrage
1993). In this last case, the Net is even seen as reformulating
our most basic notions about what and where information is.
In the eyes of one commentator, we are approaching the time
when information and community will become inextricably linked
concepts (Brody 1994). Universal access must and will
exist, we are assured (Gore 1994, NIITF 1993, Brody 1994).
While
Gore and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Mitch Kapor
carry the flag for profits and participatory democracy, virtual
communitarians like Howard Rheingold weep openly at the alleged
rebirth via the Internet of America's long lost sense of pastoral
community. I won't say much on the subject here - my colleague,
Jan Fernback, will be addressing some of these issues in her
paper tomorrow - but I will note that the communitarians see
new technological innovation as offering a potential cure
for particular symptoms of the human condition.
Perhaps
the most remarkable claim yet, though, issues from a 1995
roundtable published in Harper's. This discussion featured
EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow and WiReD Magazine's
Kevin Kelly on the utopian side of the question, and they
were opposed by Sven Birkerts, whom John Lawrence discussed
in this morning's panel, and author Mark Slouka, who fancies
himself something of a critical thinker. In response to Birkerts'
assertion that "soul-data doesn't travel through the
wires," Kelly has this to say:
I
have experienced soul-data through silicon. You might be
surprised at the amount of soul-data we'll have in this
new space... What we're talking about now is not a computer
revolution, it's a communications revolution. And communication
is, of course, the basis of culture itself.... At one point,
in an essay on the experience of reading, you ask the question,
"Where am I when I am involved in a book?" Well,
here's the real answer: you're in cyberspace... You're in
the same place you are when you're in a movie theater, you're
in the same place you are when you're on the phone, you're
in the same place you are when you're on-line (Harper's
39).
In
other words, cyberspace - the consensual hallucination that
Gibson first described in Neuromancer - is more than
a telecommunications medium. It's a conduit to the very soul.
One does more than communicate there, although communication
is certainly critical to the Net's culture-building function.
One experiences soul-data, and all of a sudden cyberspace,
heretofore envisioned as a computer-mediated environment,
becomes this thing that has always existed. It becomes the
domain of thought and reflection, the landscape of the sublime.
The
demonic view of technology is well represented in the Harper's
Forum, though. In our cultural migration into the Internet
and assorted virtual environments - what Slouka calls "alternative
worlds" - the dystopians see a harmful, if not pathological,
rejection of or abdication of the "real" world.
Slouka calls it a
culture-wide
cop-out. Why bother fighting for those last stands of old
growth in the Pacific Northwest when you can live on the
new electronic frontier? I think the real answer has to
be in the physical world. The only choice we have is to
resuscitate our failed communities, to bring back Pinedale
and Putnam Lake - to align ourselves with physical reality
now, before it's too late (Harper's 1995, 17).
Birkerts
offers a brief and succinct solution: "refuse it."
For him, the productive possibilities of life reside in focused
physical interactions with other people, and the online media
have the effect of compromising that focus. Instead of fostering
community in a Rheingoldesque sense, Birkerts suggests that
the Internet serves to impede the very sorts of activities
necessary to engender real community.
Illustrative
examples supporting the dystopians aren't hard to come by.
Sherry Turkle (1995) chronicles the case of Stewart, a man
whose entire social existence seems to depend upon the virtual
worlds of MUDs and MOOs. In real life he is physically unappealing
and socially inept, but in the Net he takes on the persona
of a courtly noble. There he meets and woos a fair lady, strong
and intelligent and beautiful, and before all assembled in
cyberspace he declares his love and proposes marriage. Virtual
marriage, that is. All the grandeur and pomp and romance of
the virtual wedding are attended in real space by, as best
we can tell, a lot of people sitting around typing at their
keyboards.
There
are other charges leveled at electronic media, as well. Oscar
Gandy's essay, "It's Discrimination, Stupid!" catalogues
the ways in which electronic commerce creates demographic
profiles of people which result in their being denied opportunities
solely on the basis of their perceived buying power. This
is the dark side of Gore's Global Information Marketplace
- to be sure, these technologies can create markets and profits
and entrepreneurial opportunities, but in doing so they almost
necessarily mark off those who can purchase from those who
can not. Furthermore, much of Gore's financial prognostication
is sleight-of-hand of the most cynical sort. Those 300,000
jobs, 80% of which are in the information sector, are not
necessarily the high-tech high-paying jobs he claims they
are, because they classify all employees in a software start-up
as information sector jobs. Sadly, a poorly-paid janitor at
Microsoft is more or less the same as a poorly-paid janitor
at US Steel.
Judy
Wajcman, Arnold Pacey, and Donna Haraway, among others, have
also noted how technology tends to be the product of specific
social, economic, political and cultural dynamics, and is
often employed in the maintenance of existing power structures.
If we examine last year's Communication Act closely, we readily
see the ways in which this seems to be true vis a vis
emerging telecommunications policy. We are never allowed to
lose sight of the fact that the Internet is to be privately
owned and operated, and public policy seems to be most interested
in staying out of the way of commerce.
So,
is the Internet messiah or demon? In truth, it's probably
some of both and a lot of neither. What is most instructive
is the way in which this debate reflects Western culture's
historical split personality regarding the fruits of technology.
In 1626 Francis Bacon published New Atlantis, a tract
which detailed a fictional shipwreck upon the shores of Bensalem,
a lost utopia (Bacon 1942). This highly influential essay
offers one of the earliest testaments to the potential of
applied science (Outhwaite & Bottomore 1994). The Bensalemites
are well-versed in all manner of advanced technology: refrigeration
and preservation, mining, agriculture, astronomy, meteorology,
genetics, animal husbandry, desalination, medicine, musicology,
mechanics, air flight, and mathematics are literally only
a few of the society's advanced technological arts, and taken
together these endeavors provide the citizenry with a quality
of life unimaginable to the denizens of contemporary 1st
World economies, let alone those trapped in 17th
Century Europe. Poverty, disease, hunger, ignorance - all
these have been conquered by science. "The end of our
foundation is the knowledge of causes," he is told, "
and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds
of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible"
(Bacon 1942, 288).
But
just as the contemporary Internet debate has a dark side,
so too does the long view of Western culture and its technology.
In 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, the Modern
Prometheus, a novel generally seen as the first work of
true science fiction. Writing within the context of the excesses
of the Industrial Revolution, Shelley sets out to construct
a new kind of horror story - one based in technological plausibility.
By this point in history the messianic/utopian view of science
had attained almost unquestioned acceptance, but the horror
of the Industrial Revolution was impossible for anybody to
ignore. Science and technology had promised much since New
Atlantis, but the fact of European life in the early 19th
Century bore little or no resemblance to Bacon's utopia, a
fact which could not have been lost on a writer of Shelley's
insight. After hearing a lecture by Erasmus Darwin, she set
about asking a "what if?" question that the West
still grapples with. In many respects, Victor Frankenstein's
monster is the archetypal icon for modern-day angst over science,
and in his formulation Shelley isolated a dark crisis in the
Euro-American spirit which, more than 175 years later, remains
unresolved. Kranzler argues that "the problematics of
technological development and application, initially codified
in Shelley's work, correspond directly to modern society,
imaged in the hydrogen bomb, the nuclear reactor, and the
laboratory test-tube" (1988-89, 42).
And,
we should add, in the Internet. Slouka and Birkerts and Stoll
and a host of others don't imagine about the Internet anything
as dramatic as Frankenstein's monster run amok, but they do
see a technology which won't serve its masters the way they
intend to be served. Further, they see a technology which
poses a danger to those masters, those creator-gods, a danger
the masters themselves are too enraptured to see.
In
a presentation this brief I can't begin to do this topic justice.
In fact, the sorts of claims we see being made about the Internet
have been made before - about television, about cable, about
radio, the telegraph, the steam engine, even electricity itself.
And while much has changed in the last couple hundred years,
much has also remained the same. Technology has not delivered
us unto Bensalem or the shining technotopia on the hill, and
neither has it annihilated us completely or chased us back
into the caves whence we came.
Technology
has, however, served those who understand it, who understand
that it constitutes power and particular sets of social relations.
For every tyrant it has overthrown, it has seated another
in his place. The Internet is a remarkable tool, but it is
a technology situated within a long history of technologies,
and our popular pundits on both ends of the utopia/dystopia
spectrum would do well to remember this the next time the
microphones are turned on them.
Sources
Cited
Aronowitz,
S. (1988). Science as power: discourse and ideology in
modern society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bacon,
F. (1942). Essays and new Atlantis. New York: Walter
J. Black. (Originally published in 1626.) (http://www.eskimo.com/~masonw/gwwc.htm)
Brody,
H. (1994). Seven thinkers in search of an information highway:
interview. Technology Review, 97 (6), 42-+.
Crawley,
J. (1994). You can interface with city via Internet Mayor.
San Diego Union-Tribune, August 2, pp. 8-+.
Fernback,
J. (1997). Personal conversations.
Gore,
A. (1994). The global information infrastructure - forging
a new Athenian age of democracy. Remarks before the International
Telecommunications Union, Buenos Aires, March 21. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OVP/html/telunion.html)
Hafrey, L. (1994). University presses: at cyberspace university
press, paperless publishing looks good. New York Times,
October 30, pp. 32-+.
Harper's
(1995). Harper's forum: what are we doing online? Harper's,
August, pp. 35-46.
Kranzler,
L. (1988-89). Frankenstein and the technological future. Foundation
44, Winter, pp. 42-49.
National
Information Infrastructure Task Force (1993). The national
information infrastructure: agenda for action. Daily Report
for Executives, September 16, pp. 178-+.
Outhwaite,
W., Bottomore, T., et al (Eds.) (1994). The Blackwell
dictionary of twentieth-century social thought.
Oxford, England & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Reference. (Original
hardcover version published in 1993.)
Rheingold,
H. (1993). The virtual community. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Schrage,
M. (1993). The internet - this year's virtual favorite for
"Man of the Year." Los Angeles Times,
December 23, pp. D1-+.
Shelley,
M. W. (c1932). Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus.
Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Company. (Originally published
in 1818.)
Turkle,
S. (1995). Life on the screen: identity in the age of the
internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Ziolkowski,
T. (1981). Science, Frankenstein, and myth. Sewanee Review
89 (1), Winter, pp. 34-56.
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