COMMENTS ON WEEK-TWO READINGS
Oh my goodness what a rough night I had after starting to read Brian Winston’s introduction to Media, Technology & Society. Like a much-too-rich meal, it gave me feverish dreams of clawing through brambles of elaborate theories, obscure allusions and cryptic diagrams all night. I would definitely not recommend this for cozy bedtime reading.
By the morning light, however, the fog cleared as I moved on to Winston’s first chapter about the telegraph. As soon as he started writing about historical events and actual technology, his abstract theories in the Introduction began to make sense. His model for how communication technologies develop and spread could be applied to a lot of inventions:
1. Scientific basis
2. Ideation
3. Prototypes
4. Supervening Social Necessity
5. Invention
6. Supression by various political, commercial and social concerns
7. Diffusion
8. Spinoffs
One interesting item here is Winston's discussion of the distinction we make between “prototypes” and “inventions.” Only when an innovation has reached a form acceptable to the public, he points out, do we bestow upon it the term “invention.” While many people may contribute to the development of a device, only the person who brings it to its accepted form is remembered by the lofty title of “Inventor.” Indeed, people like Morse and Bell have almost godlike status, while I have never heard of most of the other people Winston mentions who worked separately on the telegraph and telephone and achieved nearly the same results.
I like Winston’s delineation of an “ideation” stage, when people let their imaginations run wild, as we do when we “brainstorm.” I think of Popular Mechanics magazine and Star Trek. So many things we take for granted today started out as science fiction. I remember seeing a drawing from the early years of the 20th century, showing an Edwardian family in a parlor, looking at an ornately-carved piece of furniture, in the middle of which was a screen showing a football game. I seem to remember the father in the picture actually holding a beer mug and yelling at the screen. The artist got just about everything right, except that he imagined the TV screen as tall and narrow.
On the darker side of Ideation, how about that George Orwell? The characters in 1984 have apartments equipped with “viewscreens” through which "Big Brother" not only spews daily propaganda, but also watches the people in the room! We seem to be moving closer to this all the time. I understand that there are police cameras in England equipped with loudspeakers that let police scold passersby who do something wrong. And then there are webcasters who voluntarily create an Orwellian situation by keeping their webcams turned on all the time, so that the public can spy on their lives. I also understand that teleconference developers are working on a way to replace the webcam with pixels on computer screens that display and receive images at the same time. Orwell was right in his “ideation” of viewscreens. Let us hope he was not right about many other things he imagined.
One concept of Winston’s with which I am a little uncomfortable is the term “supervening social necessity,” although he makes a good case for this force with regard to the electric telegraph. Ideas and prototypes for this device were rejected time and time again until the advent of single-track railways created the need for instant communication between distant stations to prevent collisions. In this case, acceptance of the telegraph was definitely a “necessity.”
Looking at other technologies and innovations, however, I am not sure that “necessity” is always the appropriate word. What about video games, for example? Unless you see parents urgently needing a device to get their kids to sit down and shut up, or parking lot attendants desperately needing a means to pass the time by playing computer poker, I am not sure that the acceptance of video games was the result of “supervening social necessity” so much as it was the result of “interest” or simply “demand.”
And what about the way CDs replaced phonograph records in the early 1990s? Was that driven by “supervening social necessity”, or simply by business decisions by the music industry?
This conveniently leads me to the “Uses and Gratifications” and “Diffusion” theories presented in the article Social Aspects of New Media Technologies. I liked the fact that this article offers several distinct ways of looking at communication and media. Kathy Gill told us that our term papers need to be based on some kind of communications theory, and here is a grab bag full of them:
1. Uses and Gratificiation
2. Ritual vs. Instrumental Use
3. Critical Mass
4. Diffusion Theory
5. Media System Dependency
6. Social Information Processing
In the brief overview this article provides, the Diffusion Theory strikes me as the most sophisticated, while the Media System Dependency theory promises all kinds of fascinating revelations on the interdependency of government, media and society. Think of people who make themselves dependent on Fox News for information, while Fox depends on the Bush administration for access and the administration depends on Fox for propaganda. There’s a thorny patch of brambles we could get into.
The article about “free” internet phone service was interesting and made a lot of sense. I spend a great deal of time sitting here at my computer talking to my father on the telephone in between sending him emails. Why not be talking to him on the computer instead, perhaps even face-to-face through an Orwellian “viewscreen?” Other than that ideation, however, I am not much of a forward thinker about telephones. I don’t know if I will ever get a cell phone. For Christmas I really want to get myself a working reproduction of a 1920s candlestick phone, made out of wood: you know, the kind where you hold one part up to your mouth and the other part to your ear.
Finally, I discovered that I was not the only person who had a rough time with Brian Winston’s Introduction. In Dr. Lau’s class a Chinese student turned to me, pointing to Winston's book, and asked with a perplexed expression, “is this English?” I told him not to worry and just keep reading. It gets better.
Oh my goodness what a rough night I had after starting to read Brian Winston’s introduction to Media, Technology & Society. Like a much-too-rich meal, it gave me feverish dreams of clawing through brambles of elaborate theories, obscure allusions and cryptic diagrams all night. I would definitely not recommend this for cozy bedtime reading.
By the morning light, however, the fog cleared as I moved on to Winston’s first chapter about the telegraph. As soon as he started writing about historical events and actual technology, his abstract theories in the Introduction began to make sense. His model for how communication technologies develop and spread could be applied to a lot of inventions:
1. Scientific basis
2. Ideation
3. Prototypes
4. Supervening Social Necessity
5. Invention
6. Supression by various political, commercial and social concerns
7. Diffusion
8. Spinoffs
One interesting item here is Winston's discussion of the distinction we make between “prototypes” and “inventions.” Only when an innovation has reached a form acceptable to the public, he points out, do we bestow upon it the term “invention.” While many people may contribute to the development of a device, only the person who brings it to its accepted form is remembered by the lofty title of “Inventor.” Indeed, people like Morse and Bell have almost godlike status, while I have never heard of most of the other people Winston mentions who worked separately on the telegraph and telephone and achieved nearly the same results.
I like Winston’s delineation of an “ideation” stage, when people let their imaginations run wild, as we do when we “brainstorm.” I think of Popular Mechanics magazine and Star Trek. So many things we take for granted today started out as science fiction. I remember seeing a drawing from the early years of the 20th century, showing an Edwardian family in a parlor, looking at an ornately-carved piece of furniture, in the middle of which was a screen showing a football game. I seem to remember the father in the picture actually holding a beer mug and yelling at the screen. The artist got just about everything right, except that he imagined the TV screen as tall and narrow.
On the darker side of Ideation, how about that George Orwell? The characters in 1984 have apartments equipped with “viewscreens” through which "Big Brother" not only spews daily propaganda, but also watches the people in the room! We seem to be moving closer to this all the time. I understand that there are police cameras in England equipped with loudspeakers that let police scold passersby who do something wrong. And then there are webcasters who voluntarily create an Orwellian situation by keeping their webcams turned on all the time, so that the public can spy on their lives. I also understand that teleconference developers are working on a way to replace the webcam with pixels on computer screens that display and receive images at the same time. Orwell was right in his “ideation” of viewscreens. Let us hope he was not right about many other things he imagined.
One concept of Winston’s with which I am a little uncomfortable is the term “supervening social necessity,” although he makes a good case for this force with regard to the electric telegraph. Ideas and prototypes for this device were rejected time and time again until the advent of single-track railways created the need for instant communication between distant stations to prevent collisions. In this case, acceptance of the telegraph was definitely a “necessity.”
Looking at other technologies and innovations, however, I am not sure that “necessity” is always the appropriate word. What about video games, for example? Unless you see parents urgently needing a device to get their kids to sit down and shut up, or parking lot attendants desperately needing a means to pass the time by playing computer poker, I am not sure that the acceptance of video games was the result of “supervening social necessity” so much as it was the result of “interest” or simply “demand.”
And what about the way CDs replaced phonograph records in the early 1990s? Was that driven by “supervening social necessity”, or simply by business decisions by the music industry?
This conveniently leads me to the “Uses and Gratifications” and “Diffusion” theories presented in the article Social Aspects of New Media Technologies. I liked the fact that this article offers several distinct ways of looking at communication and media. Kathy Gill told us that our term papers need to be based on some kind of communications theory, and here is a grab bag full of them:
1. Uses and Gratificiation
2. Ritual vs. Instrumental Use
3. Critical Mass
4. Diffusion Theory
5. Media System Dependency
6. Social Information Processing
In the brief overview this article provides, the Diffusion Theory strikes me as the most sophisticated, while the Media System Dependency theory promises all kinds of fascinating revelations on the interdependency of government, media and society. Think of people who make themselves dependent on Fox News for information, while Fox depends on the Bush administration for access and the administration depends on Fox for propaganda. There’s a thorny patch of brambles we could get into.
The article about “free” internet phone service was interesting and made a lot of sense. I spend a great deal of time sitting here at my computer talking to my father on the telephone in between sending him emails. Why not be talking to him on the computer instead, perhaps even face-to-face through an Orwellian “viewscreen?” Other than that ideation, however, I am not much of a forward thinker about telephones. I don’t know if I will ever get a cell phone. For Christmas I really want to get myself a working reproduction of a 1920s candlestick phone, made out of wood: you know, the kind where you hold one part up to your mouth and the other part to your ear.
Finally, I discovered that I was not the only person who had a rough time with Brian Winston’s Introduction. In Dr. Lau’s class a Chinese student turned to me, pointing to Winston's book, and asked with a perplexed expression, “is this English?” I told him not to worry and just keep reading. It gets better.
posted by Vaun Raymond at 10:43 PM
4 Comments:
In those old social anthropology courses I took the first time around, they said humans had to work to eat first. As more people shared in the duties (roots of civilization), humankind found time for leisure activity, like decorating their water carrying clay pots. I wonder if human kind, as we get further and further away from killing for dinner simply has the white board space in our craniums to contemplate new solutions on how to do things better. Think on it, that same white space that my ancestors had to plot and plan how to take down a herbivore for din-din now can contemplate how to build a better business model, in order to survive, in order to BUY dinner. Then, add that we now have the time to communicate in groups and have the vehicle to do so (computers) at great distances and we have more of a chance to find like interested individuals to contemplate how to do something better. Maybe a better argument for how some technology came to be is it is more of a convergence of two or more ideas having the roots of their development at the same time? In Dungeons and Dreamers, The Rise of the Computer Game Culture From Geek to Chic by Brian King and John Borland, it looks like convergance or social overlap of two interests housing the same people. Of the young people who were into computer programing, many were also into reading sci-fi fantasy and playing role-games like Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). A lot of minds were being creatively and mathmatically stimulated from the same resources at the same time. They also had the opportunity to kibitz on the subject while socializing during both games and work.
Oh who knows? I agree with you though Winston doesn’t seem to have it exactly right, he has definitely stimulated the neurons into making some interesting connections.
Oh and they have visual phone opportunities now. One way is can install a camera above your computer and your father could see you while you messaged him. I expect sound maybe available as well. A friend of mine installed a camera on her puppie room so she could watch them from work. None of this stuff seems to be cheap yet though. That is what I miss about the mid-90's when there was a lot of freeware. Oh, read that Flat book. That is one of the flatteners. Maybe we can figure out how to get it back in this class?
I also read the "flat" book, and while I found it helped me tie together some disparate elements of my personal & professional life, I kept getting annoyed with Friedman for being too optimistic about the future, especially for Americans. In my job, I see too many international students who leave our American students in the dust in terms of math & science foundation. Makes me worried for how my own kids and their peers will compete in the New Global Economy.
Sorry if i posted the flat comment twice! Still learning the blogger.com interface.
Vaun, I'm glad you commented on the density of the Winston reading. I found it handy to have my trusty laptop nearby as I read the introduction so I could look up unfamiliar words. Will complete reading chap. 1 tonight. Hope it doesn't give me bad dreams. Am having a hard time reading this book because of the font it's set in. . . more about that on my blog tomorrow!
I'm still trying to really get to the heart of some of Winston's terms, such as "supervening social necessity." It seems to be some sort of amorphous unmet need, or unintended consequence of an existing technology, hanging around in the cultural atmosphere until someone figures out a solution to a problem we didn't know we had. Or is it something entirely different? Are downloadable ringtones an example? We didn't know we needed them until market penetration reached critical mass and everybody reached for their phone each time one rang.
Is that a supervening social necessity?
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