Comments for Week Three
In chapters two and three of Media, Technology & Society Winston does a good job of illustrating how much more complex the process of invention is than we tend to assume. I wasn’t sure where he was going with all the technical details, but he certainly gave me an impression of a bumbling, stumbling, confusing process out of which the telephone somehow managed to emerge.
As far as “supervening social necessity,” yes, I can see how the rise of the modern corporation accelerated development of the telephone. But Winston has made no mention so far of rural telephone users, who (I have read elsewhere) outnumbered urbanites as “early adopters” of the telephone for many years. For lonely farmers and ranchers, whose nearest neighbor might be miles away, the rural party line was more of a necessity than the telephone was for city folk, who could easily communicate by walking across the hall or across the street.
I am not quite understanding what Winston means by repression of a technology’s “radical potential.” Perhaps someone could explain to me what “radical potentials” of the telegraph and telephone were not achieved due to repression. Winston says something about the telephone failing to “redress imbalances in information power within society,” but that potential seems a bit far-fetched to me.
How am I going to apply the concept of “supervening social necessity” to my research topic on museum websites? I am not certain I can. As with many computer applications, I see a museum website as a nice thing, a fun thing, but beyond providing basic information, not a profoundly “necessary” thing.
I tried for half an hour to find and the Proquest article “Determining Uses & Gratifications for the Internet” on the library website and finally gave up in frustration. So I cannot comment on it.
I certainly liked Neil Postman’s talk “Informing Ourselves to Death.” Yes, technology has become practically a religion for many people today. I have heard them preach with rapture of the technological paradise to come; I have seen them sitting with eyes transfixed on their glowing shrines; I have felt their withering disdain as they look down on heretics and ignoramuses like myself who do not speak their mystical language of acronyms. I appreciated Postman’s quoting Thoreau. I was afraid we had all “gotten over” Thoreau and his skepticism about “progress” by now.
Yes, the information revolution has created a glut of information that can be overwhelming and confusing. I love having access to all the information that the internet provides, but I am also learning to be wary of it. In the past, people had to go through a lot of hurdles to get things published, so there was a built-in filtering process. Sure, this was restrictive, but it also filtered out a lot of nonsense. Today, there is practically nothing to keep nonsense out of circulation. All you need to do is sign up for a free Blogger account or create a website to start spreading misinformation or ugly opinions to the world. There is a lot of it out there, and I am confident that many corporations and political parties are busy making use of the internet in sneaky ways to misinform and confuse people for their own advantage.
The Vannever Bush article “As We May Think” was listed somewhere on the class website, and I thought it was a reading assignment, but I guess it wasn’t, since no one else is commenting on it. It is an amazing ariticle, written in 1945, in which the author predicts technology to come. You should read it.
Bush is prophetic. I laughed out loud in amazement again and again at how close his ideations of future technology came to the high-tech gadgets around me and the computer on which I was reading his article.
Although he is obviously somewhat stuck in his time period, with all his discussion of film, you can see that he is heading in the right direction when he talks about “dry” photography. If only he knew more about television imaging, his description of future photography would have matched even more completely the “point-and-shoot” digital camera hanging on the wall beside me, with its auto-iris, auto-focus and instant output: all features that Bush predicts.
Similarly, he talks a lot about punch cards for computing, but he clearly has something more advanced in mind when he says “arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature…(and will) make clever use of relay circuits.” When he finally describes his imaginary “Memex” machine, his accuracy is breathtaking. He describes personal, desktop computing devices with slanting screens, keyboards and even “supplemental levers” for scrolling quickly through documents (today’s “mouse”). He even places this “lever” in the correct position: on the user’s right side.
Bush’s most important predictions, however, have to do with how all this technology will be used: not merely for mathematical calculations, but for almost any kind of logical process, by doctors, lawyers, scientists, historians and so on. He also envisions the possibility of pushing computing devices beyond linear processes of logic, making them mimic the “associative” reasoning of the human brain.
I loved his description of “a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” That’s a great way to see yourself as you sit there, surfing the web. For anyone who thinks today’s technologies are limited by their drawbacks, Bush has these wonderful words: “It would be a brave man who would predict that such a process will always remain clumsy, slow and faulty in detail.” If Vannever Bush were alive today, I wonder what he would be predicting now.
As far as “supervening social necessity,” yes, I can see how the rise of the modern corporation accelerated development of the telephone. But Winston has made no mention so far of rural telephone users, who (I have read elsewhere) outnumbered urbanites as “early adopters” of the telephone for many years. For lonely farmers and ranchers, whose nearest neighbor might be miles away, the rural party line was more of a necessity than the telephone was for city folk, who could easily communicate by walking across the hall or across the street.
I am not quite understanding what Winston means by repression of a technology’s “radical potential.” Perhaps someone could explain to me what “radical potentials” of the telegraph and telephone were not achieved due to repression. Winston says something about the telephone failing to “redress imbalances in information power within society,” but that potential seems a bit far-fetched to me.
How am I going to apply the concept of “supervening social necessity” to my research topic on museum websites? I am not certain I can. As with many computer applications, I see a museum website as a nice thing, a fun thing, but beyond providing basic information, not a profoundly “necessary” thing.
I tried for half an hour to find and the Proquest article “Determining Uses & Gratifications for the Internet” on the library website and finally gave up in frustration. So I cannot comment on it.
I certainly liked Neil Postman’s talk “Informing Ourselves to Death.” Yes, technology has become practically a religion for many people today. I have heard them preach with rapture of the technological paradise to come; I have seen them sitting with eyes transfixed on their glowing shrines; I have felt their withering disdain as they look down on heretics and ignoramuses like myself who do not speak their mystical language of acronyms. I appreciated Postman’s quoting Thoreau. I was afraid we had all “gotten over” Thoreau and his skepticism about “progress” by now.
Yes, the information revolution has created a glut of information that can be overwhelming and confusing. I love having access to all the information that the internet provides, but I am also learning to be wary of it. In the past, people had to go through a lot of hurdles to get things published, so there was a built-in filtering process. Sure, this was restrictive, but it also filtered out a lot of nonsense. Today, there is practically nothing to keep nonsense out of circulation. All you need to do is sign up for a free Blogger account or create a website to start spreading misinformation or ugly opinions to the world. There is a lot of it out there, and I am confident that many corporations and political parties are busy making use of the internet in sneaky ways to misinform and confuse people for their own advantage.
The Vannever Bush article “As We May Think” was listed somewhere on the class website, and I thought it was a reading assignment, but I guess it wasn’t, since no one else is commenting on it. It is an amazing ariticle, written in 1945, in which the author predicts technology to come. You should read it.
Bush is prophetic. I laughed out loud in amazement again and again at how close his ideations of future technology came to the high-tech gadgets around me and the computer on which I was reading his article.
Although he is obviously somewhat stuck in his time period, with all his discussion of film, you can see that he is heading in the right direction when he talks about “dry” photography. If only he knew more about television imaging, his description of future photography would have matched even more completely the “point-and-shoot” digital camera hanging on the wall beside me, with its auto-iris, auto-focus and instant output: all features that Bush predicts.
Similarly, he talks a lot about punch cards for computing, but he clearly has something more advanced in mind when he says “arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature…(and will) make clever use of relay circuits.” When he finally describes his imaginary “Memex” machine, his accuracy is breathtaking. He describes personal, desktop computing devices with slanting screens, keyboards and even “supplemental levers” for scrolling quickly through documents (today’s “mouse”). He even places this “lever” in the correct position: on the user’s right side.
Bush’s most important predictions, however, have to do with how all this technology will be used: not merely for mathematical calculations, but for almost any kind of logical process, by doctors, lawyers, scientists, historians and so on. He also envisions the possibility of pushing computing devices beyond linear processes of logic, making them mimic the “associative” reasoning of the human brain.
I loved his description of “a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” That’s a great way to see yourself as you sit there, surfing the web. For anyone who thinks today’s technologies are limited by their drawbacks, Bush has these wonderful words: “It would be a brave man who would predict that such a process will always remain clumsy, slow and faulty in detail.” If Vannever Bush were alive today, I wonder what he would be predicting now.
posted by Vaun Raymond at 12:26 AM
2 Comments:
I read it. It was on the reading list, just not on the comment list (I hope). I was confused at first, as I dove into reading the content with out reading the citation. So, at first it sounded current, then it dawned on me that the termonology didn't quite match or I would find myself saying "do we have that?". I was delighted when I figured out it was written in 1945. We can file that one with Orwell on foresight.
I like your honesty, Vaun, about the how "supervening social necessity" may be a tough connection to make in regards to museum sites. I've read his description several times, and am still not quite sure I can get it through my thick head.
Many of our communications tools seem indispensable (can we even remember life before internet & cell phone?). But really, we used to manage without them, and I think our collective blood pressure was lower because we weren't constantly barraged by information noise and the frustration of technology that was difficult to learn/use/troubleshoot. So just how "superveningly socially necessary" are these tools?
Last summer, when we spent two hours in the Verizon store under their forced upgrade plan (and waited interminably because their computer system wouldn't recognize our account no matter how they tried to cajole, override, and outsmart it), I listened as customer after customer walked in and said some version of the following to the salesman: "I don't want to take pictures with it, I don't want to surf the net with it, I don't want to play videos. I just want to make a damn phone call."
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