One. Claims of cultural revolutions based on information technology have been the subject of social theory and commentary before, from the Greek enlightenment (5th-4th Century BCE; Schiappa, 1993), to the modern enlightenment (16-19th Centuries), to the hermeneutic and postmodern (19th Century of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schleiermacher, & Dilthey), to their current supercension (Poster, 1989; Smart, 1992; Malachowski, 1990). Does the Internet and associated CMC yield new flavors of these revolutions, and new problems to be solved? Or is this simply another round of vapor-revolutions - a virtual hula-hoop for the nineties?
Two. Among the foremost of these problems is that of how pressures toward conformity and opportunities for freedom or creativity and choice might be served by these technologies. Many have ventured that the process of individuation may be profoundly altered by the presence of the many variants in the EMC of today (Poster, 1989). What kind of mix of these tendencies might occur? What kind of strategies might be deployed to insure the nurturance of rights to individuality, freedom of expression, and the fruits of the marketplace? What kinds of cognitive and cultural bifurcations will appear on this cascade? With forces of cultural convergence and divergence at play, we can certainly expect strange attractors to emerge. Can we guess?
Evidence is plentiful on issue one; we've included a link to a separate page for those so inclined to examine it. Others may wish to forge ahead. For those inclined; go to examples and flavors of the CMC process (still under construction!)
"In short there is a need to understand that the new electronic technologies, new media of communication, new patterns of information and associated novelties of automation not only transform the spheres of work and production, and social or community life, but in addition have far reaching consequences for perception and action." (Smart, 1992, p. 114)
"...electronically mediated communications intensifies the distance writing introduced between interacting individuals" (Poster, 1989, pg. 128).
McLuhan especially focused on the pace of communication and what it means for transformations of cognition and consciousness as well as social institutions, which is, in part, what he meant by another of his famous phrases, "the medium is the message". The linear, reductionistic and isolationistic elements of the mechanical age are replaced by an EMC which are both integrative, interactive, and decentralizing: "conditions of extreme interdependence on a global scale, we move swiftly again into an auditory world of simultaneous events and overall awareness" (McLuhan, 1967, pp. 28-29). Today we would have to expand the concept 'auditory' to include audio/visual (primarily television) and the computer screen and keyboard, and emphasize that the pace of these developments has far outstripped what he could envisage then:
"The new electronic technologies transform the scale, structure, and pattern of human activities and relationships, through an extension and amplification of sense and capacity, which brings (Smart, 1992, p 116) "all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion" (McLuhan, 1973, p. 13). "With the advent of [EMC] and its associated extensions of our senses, a dynamic is set up (Smart ibid) "by which all previous technologies . . . will be translated into information systems" (McLuhan, 1973, p. 68). "energy and production . . . fuse with information and learning" (op cit, p. 373).
We are especially interested in the implications of the `implosion' on conformity, diversity, control, and independence. Here are some more Smart quotes with nested McLuhan quotes which frame this issue:
"Where 'the typographic extension of man brought in rationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education' (McLuhan, 1973, p. 184), the implosion of the electronic age is eroding national boundaries and precipitating an 'organic structuring of the global economy'; and in turn is rendering the 'uniformly trained and homogenized citizenry . . . a burden and problem to an automated society' (McLuhan, 1973, p. 377). Implicit here is the idea of a transformation in education, away from conceptions of uniformity, excessive specialization and training, and towards a conception of a form of liberal education as mandatory. It is suggested that there is now no need to continue with social organizations, practices and institutions designed for an age of servile toil and mechanical production, for what 'we had previously achieved mechanically by great exertion and coordination now can be done electronically without effort' (McLuhan, 1973, pp. 380-1). This too is a familiar theme reiterated in somewhat different ways in the respective works of Bell, Toffler, and Stonier on the implications of the emergence of a post industrial society.
"Ironically the way in which education appears to be changing, in the short term at least, as governments attempt to come to terms with the impact of the micro electronic revolution and associated restructuring of the international capitalist economy, is away from the liberal conception recommended by McLuhan and towards a more vocational training-oriented model." (Smart, 1992, p. 119)
"The influence of unexamined assumptions derived from technology leads quite unnecessarily to maximal determinism in human life. Emancipation from that trap is the goal of all education". (McLuhan, 1967, p. 247)
What might the dynamics of 'cybernetic capitalism' be? We see the simultaneous acceleration of convergent forces of social control for large monopolistic business, and the divergent forces of cooperatives liberating people from such control. The example of the explosion of paramilitary/hate politics (Stern, 1995) activity is an insidious example that we tolerate in the sustenance of free speech. Both of these, along with the recent furor over international pornography, also bring up the issue of privacy and individual rights as affected by the availability of the net to snooping, censoring, and resultant legal activity. These implosions-explosions provide a point of nonlinear dynamical metaphorical correspondence. For example, Otto Rössler (one of the few maestros of dynamical chaos who can be as brilliantly cryptic as any postmodern author, although as here quoted is not so cryptic) recently said:
"the most surprising feature . . . is the presence of an 'internal explosion' an exponential separation of neighboring positions as one follows up two [trajectories] that originally lie on two closely adjacent spiral paths. The explosion, however, stays 'bounded' due to the repetitive back- folding. No loss of efficiency ever occurs (as would be unavoidable with an ordinary explosion). One therefore suddenly wonders: is this the essence of chaos -- a never stopping internal explosion." (Rössler, 1995, p. 7)
Property 1: Social and psychological behavior is usually dynamically chaotic with features of patterned complex order and some uncertainty.
The chaotic attractor, you will note, is a conservative (stable) form of organization; the forces of convergence exceed the forces of divergence. According to dynamical systems theory, change (bifurcations) can come about when some critical feature (control parameter) is changed. There are two varieties, exogenous, an external agent controls the parameter (e.g., totalitarianism), or endogenous (self-organization, self-control, feedback), when the system affects its own control parameter, either directly or indirectly though a complex network of interacting system elements. In practice these become indistinguishable because almost always self-organizational features are present.
While many have recently taken note of the overall tendency of electronically mediated forms to create such forces, it is still up in the air as to the extent of control/implosion/explosion that such forms might generally take.
Jean Baudrillard recognizes this conservatism. He counters the optimism/democratizing potential of Information Technology with a pessimistic evaluation in which he sees that it 'inexorably connects them with the system in power' (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 173). Does that mean that Baudrillard does not see the change? Not at all. In fact he identifies three major bifurcations in the use of information/simulation (simulacra) since the Renaissance: (1) value based on the counterfeit (as in copying art, music, writing); (2) value based on commercial serial production; and (3) value based on structure (information) -- cybernetic capitalism. Within each of these, and preserved while crossing through the bifurcations, is the contribution to the stable attractor of social organization that maximizes social convergence, conformity, and control, and minimizes minimizes divergence. Despite the control and profit making on the Internet that seemingly favors the large corporation (whether old like Big Blue, or middlin like Microsoft, or emerging like Netscape), there is an enormous arena of small enterprises -- and individuals -- also taking advantage of the Internet and it's increasingly multi-media nature that may rival the high cost advertising firms, publishing houses, and mail-order sales houses, with companies like 2Market trying to hegemonize this attempt at capitalistic decentralization and small entrepreneur opportunity.
And such efforts are not lost on the non commercial. A nearly fractal resurrection of the 1800's Worlds Fair has appeared on the World Wide Web that promises to be the "World's Fair for the Information Age" (http://park.org). Such 'virtual' events may arguably be either a hearkening back to the days of yesteryear as argued by Jameson, or a real transformation of the ways of perception and cognition for the citizens of the 'Net. That they play out a distinctly non-commercial script in this community seems apparent; that such events are as much a part of the bifurcation that we see is quite clear.
Poster, in commenting on Baudrillard's three stages and their bifurcations going from
"a universe of natural laws to one of forces and tensions, and finally, today, to a universe of structures and binary oppositions. After the metaphysics of being and appearance, after that of energy and determination, we have the metaphysics of indeterminacy and the code. Cybernetic control, generation by models, differential modulation, feed-back, questionnaires (question/response?): such is the new operational configuration . . . Digitality is its metaphysical principal . . . and DNA its prophet." (Poster, 1988, p. 139)
According to Baudrillard, the medium, and for the purposes of our present exploration, EMC, "controls the process of meaning" (Smart, 1992, p. 124). Does the fact that the president and many political leaders, and the mass media now collect and disseminate information over the Internet mean the individual has more power in our society? When politicians and the media can say different things from day to day with instantaneous reading of citizen responses, does this mean that political discourse and individual's cognitive progress on social issues becomes more complex, more productive, more individualized, more diversified with a resulting political process that maximizes human and ecological potential? We think not, despite the potential to do so. This potential might be realized if the tribes of the Internet can evolve a strategy that bypasses the relevance of government. Evidence for such tribal strategies exists, whether for evil as with the paramilitary groups, or for good, as with the Stern investigation of them. Baudrillard posits that the medium has taken over and the message; the informational content of the media is secondary. "The medium and the real are now a single nebulous state whose truth is undecipherable" (Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 103). But he admits its subversive potential (the Paxil example, the Oklahoma bombing example).
There is a tension here. The Hermeneutic approach would look at the mediated social and cognitive attractors -- EMC often being a particularly strong basin of attraction -- as a new reality whose meaning lies in the attractors themselves. The post-structuralists would deconstruct the attractors into lost meaning, a reality of homogenized cognitive-cultural meaninglessness. This is not existentialist angst, so much as a plea to struggle, to nurture, arenas of public discourse that would counteract these convergent implosive forces. Suggestions for these routes to liberation are seen as well in the Frankfurt school of critical theory despite their dark overtones (wait, make that tones, not overtones). (Habermas, 1984; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972).
Smart continues his commentary on Baudrillard's idea of the extinction of truth, reference, and objective causes (Baudrillard, 1983a):
"In so far as the conventional conceptions of causality and determination, and distinctions between cause/effect, active/passive, subject/object and means/ends are called into question, critical analysis is made difficult, if not of necessity fundamentally transformed.
"In Baudrillard's view we encounter a paradox: 'there is more and more information, and less and less meaning' (Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 95)." (Smart, 1992, p. 127)
"Following a line of analysis that may be traced back, albeit tenuously, to the theorists at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Baudrillard analyses the interrelationship between the media, communications and information, and those subjects constituted as the silent terminals of the process - the silent majority or the masses. The latter are not portrayed as cultural dopes, but rather as the bearers of a positive counter-strategy, as positively expressing an indifference to the exhortations to be better informed, as silent in the face of the noise and interference of 'information', and as opposing 'their refusal of meaning and their will to spectacle to the ultimatum of meaning' (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 10). In opposition the familiar argument that the masses are manipulated by the media, a different view is proposed, namely that the mass and the media constitute one single process, that," (Smart, 1992, p. 128)
"Instead of transforming the mass into energy information produces even more mass. Instead of informing as it claims, instead of giving form and structure, information neutralizes even further the 'social field'; more and more it creates an inert mass impermeable to the classical institutions of the social, and to the very contents of information." (Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 25)
This process of implosion/explosion and its affinity to the convergent/divergent forces in dynamical theory are also evident in Baudrillard's description of this process:
"The process accelerates and reaches its maximal extent with mass media and information. Media, all media, information, all information, act in two directions: outwardly they produce more of the social, inwardly they neutralize social relations and the social itself." (Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 66).
"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a certain Chinese encyclopedia 'in which it is written that animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the false, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."
To the extent that it is possible, an understanding of the "reality" that is the Internet asks that we attempt to 'excavate' the knowledge so shared. This archaeology is not meant to be fully representational of this system of shared signs and meanings; it is merely a small scattering of shards that might convey these cognitive styles a bit better.
Fragment 1: from electronic messaging exchanges of one of the authors.
Subj: Re: Arctic Wilderness Area
Date: 95-11-15 03:13:06 EST
From: autoresponder@WhiteHouse
To: Abrahamfd@AOL.com
Thank you for writing to President Clinton via electronic mail. Since June 1993, whitehouse.gov has received over 685,000 messages from people all across the country and the world.
Because so many of you write, the President cannot personally review each message. The mail is first read by White House Correspondence staff. Your concerns, ideas, and suggestions are carefully recorded and communicated to the President weekly with a representative sampling of the mail.
All of us at the White House are excited about the progress of this historic project (be sure to check out the Web page as described below!), and we look forward to future developments (such as using email to respond to the content of your messages). Your continued interest and participation are very important to us.
Sincerely,
Stephen K. Horn Director, Presidential Email The Office of Correspondence
Fragment 2
[from author's article parked on World-Wide-Web for development]
XHAOS AT THE XROSSROADS: A Virtual Panel Discussion
Frederick David Abraham (Moderator)
Panel: Dick Bird, Richard Bond, Sally Goerner, Lillian Greeley, Robin Robertson, Frank Mosca, Sander Rubin, & Rika Abraham with the influence of other electronic participants
PANEL DISCUSSION
FRED: Would it be fair to say that most of us are drawn enthusiastically into the promise of dynamics (chaos theory) that our enchantment with nature and our ability to understand nature is given renewed hope? Do we feel further that developments in (a) nonlinear metamodelling and analytic tools, (b) cosmological viewpoints of interaction, complexity, and change, and (c) metaphoric embellishments to existing conceptual insights place us in the midst of a major bifurcation, or paradigm shift, not just in science, but in the history of consciousness as well?
[end fragment 2]
The preceding fragment is stored at the URL http://www.pacweb.com/blueberry/ for development by the authors, and submitted for publication to a hardcopy journal. This serves to illustrate the struggle between electronic and traditional publication, and we expect a hybrid result, with a hard copy version, pointing to a Web page that hyperlinks to short expansions of ideas of each author on the WWW.
While these fragments in and of themselves do not necessarily constitute a radical change in social or psychological make-up, their treatment in the discourse of the Internet may be an indicator of a radical bifurcation in progress. It is interesting to consider how similar exchanges would be delivered and perceived/understood by the participants in such an exchange outside of the processes of electronically mediated communications.
I. There is a coherence on the postmodern view that includes its own changeability self organizationally, and the metalanguage and metamodelling strategy of nonlinear dynamics might be appropriate to summarize the mixed forces of convergence and divergence, and the resulting self organized bifurcations that take place in society.
II. EMC, particularly the computerized, accelerates the information implosion/explosion that results in a change in the human psyche and cognition, and foments further changes -- often disruptive -- within social institutions and relationships.
III. This acceleration of the use of EMC, particularly of the Internet, may intensify the decline of the social and the political, but it also has the potential to support strategies to increase human creativity, diversity, individuality, cooperation, and challenges to the forces of inertia, and result in increase of information and complexity and the liberation of the human spirit.
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