The last re-incarnation of “new:†Long live the new!
Many themes resonate and intersect from the readings and in our discussion this week- and several find echo in the words of my son, who, eternally fascinated by the fact that it takes me a year to find my question and then another to propose an answer, never tires of asking: so how will you make technology help people? My answers range from the predictable: “well, if grandma lived far away and had trouble reaching a doctor, technology can help her doctor see her and take care of her from her house itself!†to the lame “in the future….†But pragmatic as these answers are, they never quite make my son happy about the usefulness of my research endeavors, who has emphatically declared that he will not leave it to technology to take care of us when we are old! I believe at this point it would be incomplete, and a little naïve to assume he is simply rejecting the technological for the human. Perhaps it’s the overwhelming sense of technological determinism, the lack of human agency, which creeps into my over-simplistic answers. There is also an implicit irony here; one that is brought out by Carey’s (2005) critique of “autonomous technology;†the technology of “I, Robot†that takes on a mind of its own in its quest for assisting humans through the chores of their daily lives. While our way of life may arguably anticipate such a future as shown in “I, Robot,†almost to the point of annihilating the human from the techno-social, it may be precisely questions as the above that might help us keep the social centerstage. That in its turn might creatively channelize the independent technological will to envisage a very different future. It helps to question the kind of future our technological advances generatively constitute and how critical work in this area may guide such changes.
The concept of reincarnations, of evolutionary cyclical spirals, ever new forms of the same intelligibility guides much of the debate on “new†new media also. Just how much of what is new is really new? Is new just a relative stage of “old;†or is it, in the sense of the diffusion theorists, innovation at its simplest? If so, to what extent would the advent of electricity been an innovation for the Hill Country residents? After all, to some extent the fundamental paradigms of daily life remained the same; but some efforts were more creatively and efficiently enabled by electrical appliances. Adopting a historical perspective allows us to frame critiques of newness creatively. For example, it allows us to interrogate how much has life really changed in many ways since the turn of the first millennium, despite all the technological innovations and locate the place of each technological innovation within these cycles. To some extent, if a network then was at the level of the tribe, or the village, then today it is the global village, and people finding community in like-minded groups online. However, technology has not eliminated the need for community; or replaced it with anything radically unrecognizable and innovative. Although it redefined many familiar ways of doing things by allowing work to be done in the night, to take an example, the fundamental parameters of our lives remain unchanged. Thus Carey (1998) was quite right in arguing that new changes were not as much revolutionary as they were evolutionary. The concept of cyclical evolution, or, to be more inclusive of Carey’s (1998) argument, cyclical re-incarnative evolution, one that assumes different garbs in different cycles, is quite interesting of itself. In its a priori privileging of the cyclical nature of things, the reincarnation itself becomes quite secondary, thus taking away a little of the “trickster†nature of technological innovation and change. In its new incarnation, the technology is not merely donning a new garb, but fundamentally living a new life. Thus historians have the task of unraveling the cyclical nature of evolution in order to grasp the contextual nature of reincarnative manifestations of technology. In our understanding of the “new†then, the cycle takes precedence. If all changes are iterative, then perceptions of “new†must be merely illusory, the work of a mischievous trickster. In that case, we only have to work backwards, to trace the lines back to their origin, in order to fully contemplate the fundamentally evolutionary character of change and “newness.â€
What does change, though, is our ability, as Highfield (2005) points out, to re-order information, and relatedly, our spaces, time; content; habitat; the structures of our lives. Digital TV allows its audiences to personalize information, to reorder content, and to interact with their media. By envisaging a different way of doing things than existed before, such evolutionary changes can be described as innovations. The changes related with the digital TV innovation allowed scholars to theorize the notion of a fragmented individuated mass audience and has led to a whole new genre of programming content tailored around the needs and desires of this audience. To take another example, adaptive intelligence games, as for example Nintendogs, permit users, some as young as my seven year old son, to have their own pets, train and discipline them, and treat them as real dogs with individually identifiable traits blending technology and personality. Yet these may substitute, but clearly will not quite replace the urge to have a real pet dog in the house. Similarly, you can buy a house with a view in outerspace and pay mortgage on it, train your dog to sleep at a certain time, and discipline it if it does not. However, for all this technological capability, all of which is a far cry from my own doll house and tea cup childhood, his childhood is remarkably similar to that of a seven year old boy thirty years ago at least. Simulation allows us to experience more information than ever before, and to use the results of such experiences to exponentially increase certain kinds of our knowledge. Watching science programs that show the interiors of volcanoes, tornadoes, and the changing forces within is a very different kind of education than one in which imagination and mathematical equations take the place of vivid images. Tangible, experiential knowledge of such phenomena engender a very acute sense of awareness of being in the world. It would be interesting to see (especially if research has been done on this already) the consequences of such exposure to the creative problem solving ability of children today. The immersive nature of such experiences also leads to a kind of obsessive dependence on the experiences themselves, an addiction to a kind of hyper-reality that is both obsessive and ubiquitous. It follows, therefore, that the kind of experiment with electricity we carried out in class is emblematic of the issues of ubiquitous technology facing us, and particularly the younger generation, today.
The argument has been persuasively made to show how, for instance, today media is often a substitute for community (Highfield, 2005), or Nintendogs a substitute for the real thing (and we would be absolutely fine with that given how much our son wants a real pet!). As Eriksson (2005) points out, networks of personalized media, as well as those of collaborative, sharing processes and the processes of identity negotiation engendered by the internet are indeed many, and are at least partly constitutive of a new order following the logic of networks some of whose characteristics were the liberatory, extremist, radical openness of the net. On the other hand, other research has shown how such networks still embody the familiar organizational principles of inclusion and exclusion, boundary management, and governance. Within the cyclical reincarnations of the new and the not-so-new, then, the critical historian’s challenge remains to continually define the process, if not the actual presence, of evolution. Given that such evolution presages changes co-constituted with the technological form they presented, such challenges are not limited to a study of the past, but must continually do so from the point of view of a future co-constituted by the emergent techno-social changes.
References
Cato, R. A. (1982). The years of Lyndon Johnson: The path to power. Alfred A. Knopf: New York.
Eriksson, K. (2005). On the ontology of networks. In Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2(4): 305- 323.
Game. J. A. (1998). Communication, culture, and technology: An internet interview with James W. Carey. In Journal of Communication Inquiry, 22(2): 117- 130.
Highfield, A. (2005). TV’s tipping point: Why the digital revolution is only just beginning. In paidContentorg: The economics of content, accessed online from http://www.paidcontent.org/stories/ashleyrts.shtml on January 17, 2006.
As usual, Vinita, you’ve managed to pack your writing chock-full of ideas, critiques and insights. I’m particularly taken by your very last sentence, and I’d like to have you “unpack” it and say more about what you mean by “a future co-constituted by the emergent techno-social changes,” mainly in regard to what you mean by “co-constitution.”
Hmm.. so unpacking the last sentence a little more, to start with, it is inspired, firstly, by the sentiment of a historian who does not remain a dispassionate, critical observer of past cycles, but someone who actively “joins the dance” of the ebb and flow of evolution and change. As Carey (1998) has noted, as we locate each innovation in an existing practice, each instance of newness, each technological garb is embedded in a previously existing logic of the time. In this regard, I was saying that the social historian is then equally a part of the past he/ she examines, the present which is a manifestation of past logics, and, as importantly, the future, where the dance is headed. For example, historically, space-time have had a certain relationship with technological advances in transportation and communication. Elaborating Castells’ argument here a bit, distances today have different implications for cultures, personal relationships, trade, individual and national identity today than a hundred years ago, simply because the technologies of communication and transportation expand our range of imagined possibilities of how we redefine those concepts in our personal lives and global cultures, from telepresence, international finance, and intellectual collaborations. So maybe, as the historian contemplates the past, he/ or she is also necessarily contemplating the future, because a part of the task has to include imagining how nascent, emergent changes in the present presage the history of tomorrow as technology and the social, as an example, go through the dance of evolutionary cycles….
Thanks for adding this, it helps me understand your earlier post much more easily. It also echoes some of what Innis wrote, I think. And what you say is true not only for the historian but also for the technologist. Every technology is designed in anticipation of its uses, and in attention to past technologies.