Old New Media

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Acknowledgments

The process of writing this book may be best described as “peripatetic”—the word derives from Aristotle walking about while he was teaching. To properly acknowledge those who assisted this walkabout retraces many of these paths. A genesis of sorts occurred when Lance Strate invited me to a Marshall McLuhan Symposium at Fordham University in 1998, and I was introduced to the media ecology family. Among members of the media ecology family I particularly wish to acknowledge are Lance Strate, who presided over that genesis and much since; Joshua Meyrowitz, who has generously promoted my work in his own writing; Donna Flayhan, who shares a radical interpretation of media ecology; Ray Gozzi, who provided a framework for reading Jacques Ellul; Corey Anton, whose provocative ideas I can sometimes partially fathom; Casey Lum, who brought media ecology to China and Taiwan; Yoni Van Den Eede, who assures me that the body is a medium and who introduced me to McLuhan scholars in Europe; Thom Gencarelli, whose talk about the heavy materiality of the “cloud” inspired me to look into the global village dump for a new project; Fred Wasser, who helped me understand Carey’s life as a teacher; and Janet Sternberg, who encouraged me to serve on the Media Ecology Association board. ← vii | viii →

Tracing my media ecology “peripatetic” to Canada, I also am grateful to Ellen Rose, co-coordinator of the 2010 Media Ecology Convention in Maine who led me to write about how writing made us stupid; Cathy Adams, whose wisdom about curling up with a good book makes an excellent media ecology point; Phil Rose, who carries Innis’s ideas to new depths in an accessible way; and Liss Jeffrey, whose ebullience and energy promoting Canadian media ecology never flagged and always inspires, even though she is no longer with us.

Three leaders of media ecology also deserve my deepest thanks, although they, too, have died: Neil Postman, the patriarch who graciously welcomed a non-New York University outsider; Christine Nystrom, who described my writing as “meta-theory”; and James Carey, who mesmerized, amazed and humbled me with his intellectual breadth and depth, and his generosity and humanity.

Many of these pages originated in written and spoken presentations to academic associations to which I am grateful: the Media Ecology Association, where literally all of these ideas have been spoken; the Canadian Communication Association, which has always been receptive to McLuhan research; the New York State Communication Association, which formed an early nucleus of media ecology interest; and the National Communication Association, which offered me homes in the Freedom of Expression Division and the Spiritual Communication Division. Without these opportunities, much would have withered on the vine, unspoken and unwritten. The Fulbright Scholar Program also granted me a senior scholar position in communication and journalism at Wuhan University in China, where my interest in freedom of expression and Taoism flourished and converged.

In my local community, I owe a debt to the Unitarian Universalist Society of Bangor, where I started learning tai chi, and whose liberal tradition helped me endure the trauma of the flag-burning discussion aftermath. Among my colleagues at the University of Maine, I am grateful to Michael Grillo, who introduced me to Anthony Trollope, and whose conversations have kept the spark of scholarship alive; Tim Cole, who helps keep a sense of humor alive through morning runs; and Mike Socolow, who shared many media research interests and academic life experiences.

The staff at Peter Lang has artfully managed the electronic media environment of the book. Acquisitions editor Mary Savigar shepherded this ← viii | ix → project from initial conversations, through the proposal and manuscript external review process, and manuscript revisions. Production managers Sarah Stack and Jackie Pavlovic presided over copy-editing, proofreading, and formatting. The Florida Center for Instructional Technology website at the University of South Florida was the source for the Bowen knot image at the beginning of each section. I chose this heraldic symbol for its similarity to illustrations of McLuhan’s four laws of media—extension, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal. It also is the symbol used on the Macintosh computer command key. I owe special thanks to my sister, Joyce Grosswiler, a graphic artist for a Danish publisher, Klim, who did her brother the honor of designing the book cover. She endured my suggestions, doubts and second thoughts, making our first working relationship one that I hope to repeat.

My family has endured with alternating applause and exasperation throughout the “peripatetic” journey. My daughter, Simone, offers a case study of living in a more balanced way between the physical and virtual media environments; she will happily engage in making origami creatures or a similar activity if denied her computer and video game screens. My son, Leif, offers a case study of thriving in the new digital media environment through a strategy of knowledge and mastery; he leads us into the virtual world in which he is comfortably immersed as a subject of study, balancing its allure with swimming and math. Both are a Phaedra and Phaedrus who offer the wisdom of adjustment, and whom I watch with fascination and love as they grow. My wife, Marie, simultaneously supports and tolerates all the activities and digressions that have taken my time to continue as a “peripatetic.” Without them, this would not have been possible.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: The Phaedrus Effect

Patterns of Changing
Media Environments

“New technologies is a historically relative term,” Carolyn Marvin (1988) observed in her classic When Old Technologies Were New (p. 3). The introduction of the telegraph in the 1840s marked the first generation with the “modern” worry about the dramatic changes wrought in people’s lives by new media. The telegraph, which was the first electronic medium, broke with a past dominated by printing. “The computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory,” Marvin wrote, on the latest in a long string of electronic media that “have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work” (p. 3). Marvin only mentioned the printing press briefly, referring to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s (1979) seminal research showing that printing had unintended consequences for religion—instead of definitively settling questions about the Bible, that new fifteenth-century medium gave rise to deep divisions in religion (p. 202).

On the other hand, Marvin (2013) argued that new mobile devices of the “digital revolution” are a “game-changer” on an “epochal scale” (p. 154). In this recent article, Marvin described the “fears and opportunities that are now rising . . . from the shattered foundations of pre-digital social distance” (p. 154). Marvin identified her earlier work’s recounting of ← 1 | 2 → the impact of late nineteenth-century electronic media as part of the “old story” of new media’s transformation of social distance. In the twentieth century, radio and television shrank social distance, bringing outside social forces into the home (p. 155). In response to mobile media today, Marvin called for a revival of “deeper democratic politics” to restore “social trust” as “old boundaries of public and private wither” (p. 157).

Marvin’s study of the “digital transformation” and “mobility turn” (pp. 154-155), however, does not negate her earlier message that the computer is a telegraph with a memory. That message still makes the critical points that all electronic media since the telegraph are part of a historical media environment spanning more than a century, and that today we live in that same media environment. Her claim that this new media environment since the telegraph is qualitatively different than the print media environment that preceded it, on the other hand, contributes to the false sense that our shift to a new media environment is unique, in comparison with the shift from orality to literacy or from literacy to typography.

Equating the computer with the telegraph should be kept in mind when we feel overwhelmed by new media changes, to help us remember that what appears to be new is in reality a recurrence and repetition of patterns that have been established at least since the introduction of the telegraph, a media environment that I suggest calling the Morse Millennium, in honor of the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse. From a media ecology perspective, though, that time frame would be expanded historically to include the transition from the oral media environment to the chirographic, or literate, media environment, and then again to the print media environment. These patterns of response to changing media environments, then, could be extended back to at least the introduction of alphabetic writing in ancient Greece. In honor of the youth Phaedrus, whom Socrates advised about adjusting to the new media environment of writing, this complex of patterns could be called the Phaedrus Effect.

Technological Horror, Technological Sublime

Media ecology perspectives on technology and culture, which this book adopts as its theoretical framework, study patterns of change accompanying the introduction of any new medium. One predictable pattern is responding to a new medium with technological horror; the flip side is ← 2 | 3 → responding with the technological sublime. As Marshall McLuhan (1967) noted in an early example of technological horror, Socrates predicted in Plato’s Phaedrus that the introduction of alphabetic writing in ancient Greece would create “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls,” destroying their memory, and replacing truth with the “semblance of truth” (p. 113). Other examples from media history show the same response of fear that a new medium will have deleterious psychological and social effects.

This book examines how the introduction of a new medium threatens those accustomed to the old media environment, and urges the need for adjustment. As McLuhan (1964) wrote 50 years ago, “electronic technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed” (p. 32). Today, that old electronic global village seems comfortable and quaint, while Google, the Internet, and digital technologies are “within the gates.” We need strategies to help us to adjust in order to survive today’s equivalent of writing in Socrates’ day, rather than condemning the new media environment as the cause of all of our problems, or wildly celebrating it as the cure of all our social ills.

This book will argue against current thinking about the “newness” of each new medium, which we associate with the dizzying speed and alarming rates of technological change. Unlike print media culture, which was relatively stable as the printing press remained unchanged from the mid-1400s until the early 1800s, when technological advances culminating in steam power and the iron press accelerated the speed and scope of printing, the electronic media era has heralded countless changes since the telegraph first sent news from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, and, in the words of newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett, annihilated space (Folkerts & Teeter, 2002, p. 129). We can easily mark advances in electronic media since the telegraph, from the telephone to radio, film, television, satellites, and computers, capped off by the digital communication “revolution.” The telegraph itself went silent in 2006 (Freierman, 2006), and Morse code is truly a dead language, yet its media environment lives on in the latest smart phone and social medium.

In agreement with Marvin, the argument to be made in this book is that the patterns of change identified with electronic media, starting with the telegraph, are the patterns of change in human perception and social affairs that we can still identify with electronic media up to and ← 3 | 4 → including the Apple iPhone 4, which in 2011 was the fourth model since 2007, with the addition of an interactive voice named “Siri” inside the phone, each creating a frenzy of consumer interest and being released in ever shorter intervals.

Resisting “Newness” of New Media

Perhaps because of this constant innovation, the seductiveness of the newness of Siri and similar media is seldom resisted, and history is given short shrift. This is the case in Paul Levinson’s New New Media (2009), the title of which inspired the present book’s title. For Levinson, himself a trained media ecologist and acquaintance of McLuhan, “new new media” are newer than “new media.” These “new new media” are as unlike the “classic” new media of e-mail and the Web as the earlier new media are from old media, i.e., newspapers and television. In the four years or so before the book was published, the “new new media” did not exist, and now were ubiquitous. The “new new media” at the time included blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and podcasts. The defining principles of the “new new media” included: anyone can produce them; most producers are amateurs; and the media are free, among others. Why not call them social media, or Web 2.0 or 3.0? Levinson argued that these are not distinguishing characteristics between new media and new new media. The historical lens provided reaches only as far back as the history of electronic writing and Second Life. This view is so myopic that New New Media is already outdated and a new edition is being planned for 2013. The problem of what to call the next wave of innovation remains unresolved, although the logic suggests “new new new media,” followed by “new new new new media,” and so on, every few years.

Other new media texts do make an effort to be historical, the most successful being similar to Marvin’s sense of the nineteenth century as the brackets of history. Lev Manovich’s (2002) classic Language of New Media claimed a “new media revolution” is happening, as all culture is moving to computer-mediated forms, “much as the printing press in the fourteenth century [sic] century and photography in the nineteenth century had a revolutionary impact” (p. 19). He linked today’s new media to the beginning of computing and the daguerreotype in the 1830s. Martin Lister and his co-authors (2003) promised a historical dimension to their ← 4 | 5 → work on new media—from which they excluded photography and film. They paid lip service to engage with the media histories because “‘old’ media technologies were themselves once new and held enormous significance,” reminding us “that we have been here before. Even printed books were once new” (p. 4). Beyond that, there is no sustained history of new media.

At the beginning of another text bearing a similar title to this one, The New Media Environment, Andrea Press and Bruce Williams (2010) had a media ecology moment as they briefly chronicled the changes between oral culture and print culture, and between print and electronic culture, citing McLuhan and Neil Postman. They then devoted the rest of the book to changes in the media environment in the past 25 years. They defined “media environment” as the specific media being used, and the social, political, and economic environments in which the media are used, including ownership, media use, government regulations, and the like (p. 8). McLuhan is quoted as saying that “[C]hanges in broader communication cultures alter the very structure of human consciousness” (p. 10, citing McLuhan, 1964). The authors also noted the difficulty of being aware of changes in the media environment in which we are living, much like McLuhan quipped that fish are not aware of water. Eric Havelock’s argument is brought to bear with other evidence that alphabetic writing altered human thinking in ancient Greece and later. Plato’s Phaedrus is also mentioned as an example of distrust of the impact of writing. “In order to understand the implications of a new media environment, we need to analyze the ways it structures our own reality,” they argued (p. 12).

Press and Williams (2010) assessed the transformative impact of the telegraph, which severed the tie between communication and transportation (Carey, 1989), and the telegraph’s remarkable ability to send messages without physical form (Peters, 2001). Moving forward in time, the authors detailed Postman’s (1985) critique of television in Amusing Ourselves to Death, contrasting the image-based experiential quality of television with the word-based rationality of Postman’s preferred typographic era of the book.

On the other hand, Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree (2003), in their edited New Media, 1740–1915, proceeded “from the truism that all media were once new media” to explore the emergence of media in the time period noted in the title. The editors contended that studying what ← 5 | 6 → it meant for old media to be new is a “timely and important cultural task” in order to “seek out the past on its own passed terms” (p. xi). Their goal was to understand “how interpretive communities are built or destroyed, how normative epistemologies emerge” (p. xv). They found that emergent media offer both positive and negative possibilities, as their studies of the zograscope and telephone in Amish communities found, and are rife with “unforeseen consequences” (p. xviii).

Poe’s Maelstrom and Narcissus’s Extended Self