Post tag: electronic communications
Retreat from the Future

Retreat from the FutureThe Marlowsphere Blog (#133)

There we were in the second half of the 20th century, having experienced the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan that ended WWII, and watched in the late 1970s a pivot towards the west by Communist China following the 1976 demise of dictator Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), and in 1989 even as we watched the horror of Tiananmen Square, we also watched the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We saw the creation of the European Union, the death of South African Apartheid, the shrinkage of nuclear weapons on a worldwide scale, the expansion of democracies, the diminution of illiteracy to about 15% of the world’s population, and the increase of global trade, so-called globalism.

We also saw a further exploration of space and the rise of a few non-governmental organizations investing in the exploration of space. The Higgs Boson, the so-called “god particle” was confirmed and the “repaired” Hubble Telescope peered closer and closer into the origins of this universe. The future of generations to come appeared to be bright.

But here we are in 2016 and the reverse appears to be true. In 2001, on 9/11, Al Qaeda terrorists took over two commercial airplanes and destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City (this wasn’t their first attempt). There are now terrorist groups in BREXITAfrica, e.g., Boko Haram, and in Russia, and in the Philippines, and in France, and in Belgium, among others. It has taken over eight years for the United States and other contingent countries to recover from the “mortgage crisis of 2008.” Britain has just voted to leave the European Union, the so-called “Brexit,” and in the United States the upcoming national election pits a politician, Hillary Clinton, with decades of regional, national and international experience, against an entertainer, real estate magnate Donald Trump, who has decades of experience on reality television. His vision of the future is to retreat from it by building walls between the United States and Mexico, to undo our trade agreements with other countries, and to (possibly) use nuclear weapons against our enemies (whomever they might be).

Elsewhere in the world, terrorists’ attacks have governments and peoples nervous about open borders and immigration issues resulting in the loss of jobs in one place only to turn up for less pay in other places. Local and regional wars have made millions of people homeless. The disparity between the so-called 1% (the haves) and the rest of the world (the have nots) grows deeper with every year. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is getting screwed.

Further, the Internet is not creating a level playing field. It is allowing those with the technical know-how and marketing imagination to create platforms wherein users create content for free and the owners of the servers housing the platform very rich.

It is a gross irony that while some countries, like the United States, parts of the European Union, Japan, and China are exploring space both within and without our solar system, several tribal cultures, such ISIS and the Taliban, are more concerned with what women should wear in public, women’s subservient role in their society, and a strict adherence to the word of Allah. Also, in the Middle East extremist Jews and extremist Palestinians are at war over who should own what territory. In Saudi Arabia, despite their ostensible acceptance of western trade, there is an adherence to an anachronistic extreme form of Islam, so-called Wahhabism. The so-called Kingdom funds this form of Islam with millions of dollars and proselytize their point of view wherever possible.

Headline: Civil Rights Bill Becomes LawAnd in the United States, the chasm between predominantly white police forces and young mostly unarmed African-Americans appears to have exploded into the headlines and into television and radio news broadcasts in the last several years. The Civil Rights Acts were passed decades ago, but the blatant racism expressed by the shooting of unarmed black males by white police officers appears to have become a common occurrence, even in the historical context of an African-American president in the White House.

Q: Is America, is the world retreating from what seemed to be a        brighter future a generation ago?
A: Yes, it is. Or that’s the way it seems.

My view is that the world is experiencing a period of retreat from the future into a period of tribalism. And it is not recent. It has been building for some time, perhaps ever since the commercial introduction of the telegraph in 1844. This was the world’s first electronic communications medium that could transmit information from one point to another at the speed of light. In the mid-20thcentury photonic technologies were introduced (these are technologies based on photons as opposed to electrons). These combined technologies have bumped up the speed of communication and transport of goods and services and with them cultural values on a global basis. Cultures around the world where the literacy rate is lower and much lower than it is in more developed nations are repulsed by this invasion of outside cultural values. It is anathema to their entrenched cultural values. And, in turn, we are repulsed by their reactions, such as when we hear about honor killings in remote parts of India, and the mutilation of female genitalia in parts of Africa.

Even in places that are so-called developed nations there is a retreat into tribalism. The Brexit vote is one example, the rise of neo-fascism in Germany, and the increasing rejection of Islamic leaning peoples in France are other examples. It is a retreat borne out of deep fear—a fear that one’s family and community values are being tested, challenged, upended, and revealed as untrue or unfounded.

People don’t want change even when it is beneficial in the long-run to the greater whole. The speed of light technologies that now are increasingly circling the planet have thrown opposing cultural values into the same economic pot and have created such fear among the members of opposing tribes that it is engendering violence.

Global DiversityAnd this phase of planetary cultural evolution will not go away quickly. It will be with us for a while, perhaps a generation of two. Until peoples of different cultural stripes begin to accept that the future is about the integration of cultural values, even the loss and rejection of some values—such as religious and political beliefs—there will be a retreat from the future. Accepting that change is the constant, that change is the way of the universe, a universe we are just beginning to learn about, is a deeply painful process.

This view parallels the structure of scientific revolutions. First, there is rejection of facts that contravene the prevailing view, then there is anger and battles over what is true and what is not true, then ultimate acceptance of the new factual context. We are looking at a generation or two of battles over what is true and what is not true. If world history is any arbiter, progress will prevail, but only after many more have died for their antiquated beliefs and many more have died defending the values of the future.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 5, 2016

© Eugene Marlow 2016

Back to Top


The Four Communications Stages of Man

The Shape of Society © Eugene Marlow 2005The Marlowsphere Blog (#107)

Mankind’s communications technology history can be divided into four mega stages: oral communications; written, then printed communications; electronic communications; and most recently communications based on photonic technologies.

Oral Communications

The initial stage of man’s evolution as a communicating species is the age of oral communications. This age has lasted, of course, until the present day. All of our electronic and photonic devices notwithstanding, we still use orality to communicate. But it should not be taken for granted that orality has been extant since man’s antecedents walked out of Africa and began to populate the world. As Robbins Burling, author of The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved (Oxford University Press, 2005), points out, man’s development of language as a means of communication beyond body language and cries and calls probably took a period of a couple of million years to evolve, beginning with physiological changes to the position of the voicebox in relation to the tongue and mouth. In effect, language is a success story that did not happen overnight.

This age can be symbolized by a circle. Why? Because in the age of oral communication it all took place in a face-to-face context. In a tribal context, imagine the old man of the tribe sitting around the campfire in a circle telling the stories, the news of tribe. Everyone in earshot was at that moment part of the tribe. The record or history of the tribe was verbal. It radiated from the speaker. Everyone who was around to hear the speaker received the message directly from the storyteller. Hence the circular symbol. 
 
The Age of Writing and Print
 
Inca Quipu currently in Larco Museum CollectionTribal history and record keeping moved from the ear to the eyes with the development of visual symbols, for example, primeval Chinese ku-wan–gesture pictures. These pictures preceded pictographs, the picture symbols that first appeared in Western Asia. Native American tribes notched or painted sticks to convey messages. In South America, Incas knotted colored quipu cords to keep complex records.  Notice that all these last approaches have an element of portability.

About 10,000 years ago, in 8,000 BC in Sumer in the so-called Fertile Crescent, particularly Mesopotamia, small clay triangles, spheres, cones and other tokens were molded to represent sheep, measures of grain, jars of oil and other trading goods. Around 3,100 BC the Sumerians invented numerals, thus separating the symbols for sheep from the number of sheep. This was perhaps the first digital (as opposed to analogic, as in orality) technology.

Fast forward a few millennia to somewhere between 1,100 and 800 B.C. when the Greeks added vowel sounds and both expanded and contracted the antecedent Phoenician alphabet to create the unique alphabet we use today. This alphabet became the standard for writing in the Western world. I use the word standard advisedly: standardization along with portability are the two central prerequisites for the ubiquitous adoption of a new technology.
 
Before there was printing, there was copying by hand. Before copying by hand, there was paper. The invention of paper in China is credited to a eunuch, Ts’ai Lun, the emperor’s minister of public works, in 105 A.D. .

In the eleventh century, one Pi Sheng, a [Chinese] blacksmith and alchemist, invented movable type, molding characters out of baked clay–pottery type that he placed in an iron frame. He made several copies of each word character and 20 or more of the most common words so he could print a whole page at once. Unfortunately, success eluded Pi Sheng. No ink behaved well with pottery type and the sheer volume of Chinese word characters (today there are about 40,000) worked against his medium of poetry type, so it was easier just to engrave wooden blocks.

It was printer Johnannes Gutenberg, in the mid-1400s, in Mainz, Germany, who produced a printing system using movable type. Most obvious among its elements wereGutenberg Press controlled, exact dimensions of alphabet type cast from metal punches made of hardened steel. These were not unlike the dies, stamps, and punches that were well known to European leather workers, metal-smiths, and pewter makers.

In 1451 Gutenberg used a press to print an old German poem. In 1453 he prints a 42-line per page Bible. By 1490 the printing of books on paper (rather than parchment) becomes more common in Europe. By 1500 approximately 35,000 books have been printed, some 10 million copies.

Note again that fundamental to the success of the printing press is the characteristic of standardization. The portability factor comes into play with respect to the product–the thousands of books that contained history, records, and ideas that could be easily transported from one place to another.

Writing and printing: lines on paper, read from left to right in Western cultures, right to left in Middle Eastern cultures, and down and up in Far Eastern cultures, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. Linear and orderly. From a communications model point of view, writing and printing evolved what has become known as a militaristic or bureaucratic model symbolized by a triangle, or, if you prefer, a pyramid.

Writing and printing evolved hierarchical societies: the top of the hierarchy (primarily those who could read and write) told the folks in the middle of the hierarchy what to do. They, in turn, told the rest of the society (primarily those who could not read and write) what to do.

This form of societal organization–militaristic, bureaucratic, industrial and manufacturing oriented–existed intact from the time of the great Pharaohs to the middle of the 20th century. The symbol of this kind of society–the pyramid–can be viewed as imposed on the circular symbol that represents the antecedent oral society.

The Electronic Age

The more recent communications technology stage is the electronic age, symbolized by an amoeba-like pyramid. Imagine this symbol superimposed on the top of the pyramid, on top of the circle. All three co-exist today.

Samuel B. MorseThe electronic age was born in 1838–a mere 176 years ago. Early in that year Samuel Finley Breese Morseartist, daguerrotypist, a so-called “American Leonardo”–gave a series of public demonstrations of the first practical electromagnetic telegraph. In 1844, after receiving a thirty-thousand dollar grant to construct a telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C. the year before, Morse finally opened the nation’s first commercial telegraph line on May 24 with the now famous query “What hath God wrought?”  On that day the electronic communications age was born. On that day, the message was separated from the messenger at the speed of light.

Then came Thomas Edison, himself a master telegrapher, also inventor of the electronic light bulb and many other electrical devices that have contributed to our speed of light culture. About the same time, the telephone was invented.

The basis for modern network broadcasting was created in the United States by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). In 1922, AT&T opened radio station WEAF in New York. Soon thereafter broadcast radio became a dominant mass medium in the United States with many people and families listening to the radio in groups to electronic reporters.

In 1939 at the World’s Fair in New York, broadcast television was introduced to the American public. At the time it was called “Radio with Pictures.” Soon broadcast television became the dominant mass medium, especially for news. In time, network television became the medium of choice for primetime.

But in the 1950s came cable television. And today several local and regional cable outlets have developed news channels, such as NY1 in New York City.  Broadcast news channels have become just another number on the cable box.

In between these developments in radio and broadcast and cable television, "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarksatellites were developed. Actually it was in the mid-1940s that Arthur C. Clark, the author of 2001 A Space Odyssey first proposed the idea. Satellites not only expanded the broadcast television world, and helped launch the pay cable network business, it also gave birth to business teleconferencing, which lead, in turn, to the advent of satellite media tours.

Computers, of course, and computer networks are the communications media of the 1990s-present. Even though the first mainframes were developed in the mid-1940s, today computers in the form of personal computers give new meaning to the phrase “information access.”

All of these electronic technologies are merging into what we call today the Internet and the World Wide Web.

In sum, between 1838 and now a cornucopia of electronic media have been created to reach a variety of audiences on a local, regional, national, and now global scale.

The Photonic Age

It should be obvious that the electronic age is not the end all, be all of man’s communication technology evolution. I propose we have already entered the next stage in the history of communications technology: the age of photonics, or the age of light.

What is photonics? Photonics is “The technology of generating and harnessing light and other forms of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon. Photon WavesThe range of applications of photonic extends from energy generation to detection to communications and information processing.”

You are already familiar with some photonic devices: fiber optics for telecommunications, supermarket checkout scanners, CD-ROMs, lasers in medicine, lasers in military weaponry. Of course, in science fiction there are many more photonic applications: phasers and non-invasive surgery tools.
 
Apart from the fact that more and more technologies are increasingly using photonic applications, there are other clues that we are at the early stages of a new communications technology era.

It can be said that the work of artists are precursors to emerging trends. For me, the clue to the emergence of the age of light comes from Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” When you watch this film one of the things that should become apparent is that it is all about light: shades of light, use and misuse of light, shedding light on the truth, lighting up the sky, reaching for the light, and the light within.  |

It has become an accepted truth that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Yet some films presage just the opposite. And keep in mind that one of the first movies ever made at the turn of the 20th century presaged a trip to the moon, almost 70 years before it actually happened!

All in all, it needs to be pointed out that while it took a couple of million years for man to communicate via spoken language, it has only taken about 12,000 years for the species to move from an agricultural-dominant culture, to writing, then printing, to electronic media, and now photonic communications media.

More on this subject in the next blog.

Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 15, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

Back to Top