Communication and Technology
Communication Studies 454
Department of Communication Studies
College of Arts, Media, and Communication
California State University, Northridge

Introduction to Communication and Technology

Lecture Notes

08 July 1997
(links updated 09 September 1999)

Lecture Index:
Introduction

Welcome to Speech Communication 454, Communication and Technology. This course is designed as an investigation into the meaning and significance of the "information age." Politicians, corporate media spokespersons, and scholars alike have joined in the chorus pronouncing the information age the final revolution in human social, political, and economic institutions. As we enter the twenty-first century, we are bombarded with the discourse of "cyberspace," "virtual reality," the "information superhighway," "electronic communities," etc., but the media offer little in the way of a frame of reference from which to evaluate the various claims being made about these developments in communication technology. One of the goals of this course will be to provide one such frame of reference.

This course will examine not the details of particular technologies, but rather the social and cultural implications of such technologies as understood from the perspectives of communication studies. Today's lecture will introduce these perspectives, as well as providing a brief historical overview of the problem areas under consideration.

What is Communication?

I'd like to begin with a basic introduction to the discipline of communication studies. First, however, a definition:

communicate: 1. To make another or others partake of; impart; transmit, as news, a disease, or an idea. 2. To administer the communion to. 3. To make or hold communication. 4. To be connected, as rooms. 5. To partake in communion.
This definition introduces the three basic models of communication that will inform our discussion in this course. These three models are three different -- and not necessarily exclusive -- ways of understanding and analyzing what takes place in human communication:

  1. To make another or others partake of:

    This definition stresses the view of communication as a primarily social interaction with other human beings. Communication is, first and foremost, an interaction between or among human beings. The issue of exchange is introduced in this first definition of communication.

    Kenneth Burke defined "man" as "the symbol-using animal." Burke saw the use of symbols as the primary factor differentiating the human world from the animal world. He saw identity and difference as two contradictory impulses of the human character, and for him it was the tension between these two impulses that drove the human need to communicate.

    Burke defined rhetoric as follows: "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." This understanding of rhetoric sees communication as a means of persuasion; as a way of manipulating the social world by influencing the beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors of audiences.

    This avenue for understanding communication introduces the rhetorical or dramatistic model of communication, in which communication is understood as a way of exercising power over the social world.

    Further Reading:

  2. Impart, transmit, as news, disease, idea:

    This definition stresses a notion of communication as a means of transmission or transportation. We should recall here that one of the dominant metaphors used for the Internet today is the "information superhighway." This term, originally introduced into American public discourse in 1970, was embraced by Vice President Al Gore as publicity stunt in order to capitalize on his father's reputation as the founder of America's automotive highway system. Senator Al Gore, Sr. introduced to Congress the $25 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. In fact, the bill was not the result of the senior Gore's genius, but the end result of General Motors' 30-year attempt to dominate the transportation market in America by systematically destroying the nation's railways and streetcars.

    In any case, the understanding of communication as a means of transporting a message from one place to another is at the root of what James Carey has called the "transmission model" of communication. Carey identifies the religious roots of this understanding of communication, and shows how the telegraph was first conceived according to this model. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, engineers working for Bell Labs, utilized a similar notion of communication when they developed an information theory of communication.

    Each of these models sees communication as something that takes place when a sender sends a message to a receiver through a medium in a particular situation:

    Note the static nature of this model of communication: communication is portrayed as a mechanical process of transmission. The "receiver" is passive, and the "message" is seen as the most important part of the model. In a sense the "sender" and "receiver" are dehumanized; in the pure transmission model, "sender" and "receiver" need not be human beings -- e.g. a TV remote control could "send" a "message" to the TV set to change the channel.

    Note also that this view of communication assumes a spatial metaphor for the communication process. In other words, communication is understood geographically as the transportation of something (a message) across space. The term "cyberspace," which will be unpacked further later in the course, quite obviously assumes such a communication model.

    Thomas Sebeok has defined communication according to this model in a semiotic view of communication. According to the semiotic understanding of communication, which concentrates on language as a system of signs. In semiotics, a sign links the signifier, signified, and referent.

    Further Reading:

  3. To administer the communion to ... to partake of communion:

    This definition of communication both underlines the religious history of the term communication and points us in the direction of what James Carey has called the ritual view of communication. Carey contrasted this view to the transmission model outlined above:

    "A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs ... the archetypal case under a ritual view is the sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality"

    -- Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 18.

    For Carey, one of the functions of communication is similar to that of religious and magical ritual -- it alters reality by bringing communities together, solidifying the social bond. He accentuates the time bias of ritual communication as opposed to the space bias of the transmission model.

    As you know from reading the selection from the Phaedrus assigned for today, Socrates saw rhetoric as the "verbal enchantress of the soul," and denigrated those who studied the art of rhetoric as oratorical hucksters. The classical view of rhetoric defended by Gorgias, the preSocratic rhetorician, was that rhetoric was the art of producing belief -- with "belief" understood not as an abstract adherence to a particular philosophy or opinion but rather an a religious sense as a state of mystical ecstasy. Rhetoric, in Gorgias' view, was the art of magical incantation, of using speech to produce what amounted to a religious experience. At stake in this view of rhetoric is a notion of symbol-usage as a performative practice which instantiates a particular social reality.

    Further Reading:

What is Technology?

The term "technology" comes from the Greek word techne, meaning a human art or skill. "Technology" is generally is understood as the study of tools and human tool-making and tool-using behavior.

For Kenneth Burke, one of the necessary conditions of humanity is that the human being is "separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making." The use of technology (in its most general sense, language and symbols are technologies used by human beings) to gain power over the human environment was for Burke an essential feature of the human condition.

Rene Descartes, in his "Treatise on Man," asks us to understand the human being in the way that we understand the clock. This view of the human being as a mechanical entity -- the human being conceived as a "machine" without "any vegetative or sensitive soul or other principle of movement and life, apart from its blood and its spirits, which are agitated by the heat of the fire burning continuously in its heart" -- has animated the history of biology and left its mark indelibly on the institution of modern medicine. In this 1664 essay, Descartes raises a theme that is especially significant in our study of technology, information, and "cyberspace": the blurring of boundaries between human and machine; the thinking of the human being through the metaphor of the machine.

Further Reading:

The Media of Communication

The term "medium" in communication studies is generally understood to refer to the channel through which a message passes. The medium is the environment in which communication takes place. It helps here to keep in mind the spiritual/religious notion of "medium" as a backdrop to McLuhan: In the spiritual sense, a "medium" is the vessel through which messages from the spirit world are channelled. A magical transformation of the speaking subject and of reality occurs when a medium brings news from another world.

For Marshall McLuhan, technology should be understood as a means of extending the human sensory apparatus. McLuhan's plangent aphorism, "the medium is the message," has earned McLuhan the ultimate intellectual compliment of being one of the most cited but least read scholars in recent north American history. His argument stems from an extensive analysis of the relationships between historical developments in mass media technology and accompanying developments in American cultural practices. The importance of understanding media, for McLuhan, is a political project essential to any attempt at social and cultural change. The sentence, "the medium is the message," clearly suggests that a sublation of form and content occurs in mediated communication. McLuhan gives this argument a tactile twist, suggesting that the effects of media are so pervasive that "All media work us over completely ä they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments." (26)

For McLuhan, technology extends the human senses individually rather than collectively. McLuhan observes with Edward Hall that "all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body," but notes that these changes are always piecemeal, extending one sense and not others, thus affecting the ratio between the senses and disrupting entire worldviews. This crucial assumption is often missed in the rush to canonize McLuhan as a media prophet. By reading technology as an expansion of the human sensory apparatus, what McLuhan asks us to do is to read media as sensory components of our environment. A television set, for example, is seen less as a communication device and more as a piece of furniture or a rose garden. In Counter-Blast he writes that "environment is process, not container." A television is not a container for information any more than a rose garden is a container for roses. The rose garden, as part of the sensory environment, pleases the sense of sight, excites the sense of smell, and both delights and threatens the sense of touch. The television offers a barrage of imagery, sound, and idea to excite, enthrall, admonish, thrill, and even terrify the senses. The disruption in the total sensory environment by the privileging of one or two senses produces an overall sensory experience. This overall experience--this sensory environment--is as spatiotemporally real as a rose garden, a beach, or any other environment.

McLuhan once pointed out that the one thing a fish isn't aware of is water -- it is so ever-present in the fish's life that it is invisible to the fish. The environment that makes up the fish's entire living reality is never questioned by the fish. Never mind that McLuhan is no expert in marine psychology; his point as it applies to human beings is that we are virtually unaware of the media that make up our everyday sensory environment. His work attempts, through a strange but endearing combination of logical elaboration and perseverant hyperbole, to make human beings more aware of that environment.

A History of Communication and Technology

McLuhan is following, in many ways, the work of Harold Adams Innis, who argued that new inventions in communication technology have always had cataclysmic effects on history in terms of social change and disruption. McLuhan and Innis are sometimes considered "technological determinists" because of their assumption that technology almost autonomously produces cataclysmic social effects.

Further Reading:

In order to more rigorously historicize the effects of technology on human communication and culture, I offer the following schematic of McLuhan and Innis' history of communication technology. (This history is also heavily influenced by Father Walter J. Ong).

  1. The Spoken Word (medium of the tribe)

    Before the invention of the alphabet, people communicated orally in face-to-face settings. Such communication was mediated through the spoken word. The spoken word permitted human beings to become social creatures through communication. Oral cultures, according to scholars, tended to reflect the patterns of communication prevalent in oral speech.

    Characteristics of orality:

    Further Reading:

  2. The Written Word (medium of the individual)

    The written alphabet was an individualizing medium, and the cultural consequences of this medium included the birth of the "individual" as such. Socrates foresaw this as the death of oral culture and predicted as much in the Phaedrus passage we read for today:

    [Writing] will create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it; they will not exercise their memories, but, trusting in external, foreign marks [graphes], they will not bring things to remembrance from within themselves. You have discovered a remedy [pharmakon] not for memory, but for reminding. You offer your students the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
    Writing for Socrates was a drug that threatened to destroy the body politic. It is an illusory drug, that offers the appearance of true wisdom but not the reality of culture offered through orality.

    Characteristics of literate (writing) societies:

    Further Reading:

  3. The Printed Word (medium of hierarchy)

    The printed word brought uniformity to the written medium, standardizing characters and giving birth to mass production of texts. Literacy dramatically increased and the shift to visual domination of Western culture was complete. "Ocularcentrism" arises as the need for subvocalization of words disappeared in reading. McLuhan wrote of print culture that "by the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we have built the shape and meaning of Western man."

    Characteristics of Print Culture:

    Further Reading:

  4. The Electronic Word (medium of the neo-tribe)

    Electronic culture began in 1844 with the invention of the telegraph. The telegraph itself changed our understanding of communication and allowed the "transmission model" to take precedence over other religious understandings of communication. The telegraph's impact on the economy and on Western culture has been discussed by James Carey; business relations, he points out, no longer depended on face to face interactions. Also, a "cultureless communication" develops with the establishment of news wire services -- these services sought a cultureless language that could be translated from culture to culture and language to language and context to context without appearing "biased." Hence newspapers printed "news-from-nowhere (or everywhere) addressed to noone in particular." Also, the telegraph moved us from colonialism to imperialism when orders could be transmitted directly to colonial governments from colonizing powers.

    Morse described an "electrical sublime" that could be achieved through the transcendence of space and time implied by the instantaneous communication of the telegraph.

    Enter photography (literally "writing with light"). Daniel Boorstin calls the 19th century the "graphic revolution" because of the explosion of photographs into the symbolic environment. Implicit in the metaphor of "light-writing" is the notion that photography is like a language ("every picture tells a story"). This is true in the sense that a photo conveys meaning and alters the communication environment in which it is viewed. Keep in min, however, as Neil Postman has warned:

    One peculiar result of photography is that even as "seeing is believing" was becoming an accepted test of reality, photography undermined traditional notions of information and reality. Yet photographs gave the illusion of concrete reality that was the perfect complement to the "news from nowhere" provided by the telegraph. This provided the illusion that "news" was connected to our immediate sensory experience.

    Enter Radio and Telephone: extensions of the voice. Ong's phrase, "secondary orality" hilights the renewed importance of sound and voice in the electronic age with radio, television, and telephones. Radio gave voice the power to collapse space and time; this characteristic is seen by many historians as a crucial element in Hitler's rise to power in Europe.

    Television gave the epistemological biases of radio, telegraphy, and photography their "most potent expression." (Postman).

    Characteristics of televisual culture:

    Further Reading:

  5. The Virtual Word (medium of the virtual tribe)

    There is some disagreement over whether the invention of computer communication and the rapid growth of the Internet constitutes a separate transition in the history of communication and technology or whether it is simply subsumed under the electronic word. For Postman for example, television is still the dominant mode of understanding the world, and even the new medium of computers is most frequently understood as it is represented to us through television (the AT&T commercials come to mind -- "Have you ever sent a FAX from the beach? you will.").

    "Virtual", others have noted, essentially means "not." The not-word as the medium of the not-tribe: a new age indeed. Much of our work this semester will be devoted to unpacking the implications of this new age. Some of the questions raised in today's reading on MOOs -- "Rape in Cyberspace" -- bring to mind many of the problems discussed above. Consider the following passage from Dibbell:

    Let me assure you, though, that I am not presenting these thoughts as arguments. I offer them, rather, as a picture of the sort of mind-set that deep immersion in a virtual world has inspired in me. I offer them also, therefore, as a kind of prophecy. For whatever else these thoughts tell me, I have come to believe that they announce the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era's definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn't so much communicate as _make_things_happen_, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment--from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA--knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.
    We will begin our discussion of the Virtual Word with this passage.

    Further Reading:

Conclusion

The information technology explosion has created both excitement and optimism about the future. As multinational corporations rush in to profit off of this excitement without understanding it, it pays to keep in mind the historical nature of all human phenomena and to carefully examine the implications of the new technologies from practical historical perspectives rather than rushing headlong into an information age we do not understand.

The politicians and corporate pundits who are buying and selling the "information superhighway" do not even know how a refrigerator works. While this course is not designed to create complete technological literacy, it does proceed from the assumption that we cannot understand the social and cultural implications of new technologies without understanding something about the new technologies themselves.

The abbreviated history of technology outlined above should provide a jumping-off point for your research. Much of it is influenced by "technological determinism," a perspective which we will critique severely as the course progresses. In particular, the technological determinist perspective can be interpreted as covering over the economic, historical, and cultural determinants of cultural change, which often play a bigger role than technological progress. Nevertheless, the technological changes we have experienced over the past millenia have profoundly altered the world in which we live. The new technologies we find ourselves surrounded by -- computers, FAX machines, and video conferencing systems -- must be examined closely to understand the ways in which they both limit and enable certain views of the world and patterns of thought and behavior.


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