Post tag: George Basalla
The Shape of Society*

The Shape of Society © Eugene Marlow 2005The Marlowsphere Blog #88

In my opinion, every phase of our communications evolution has resulted in a particular shape that defines the characteristics of that society.

For example, it can be posited that early man—relying primarily on body language and orality to communicate—evolved a round-shaped, circular society. Those in the circle were part of the tribe; those outside, were not. Much of their architecture was round. Much in their environment was round: the sun, the moon, the eyes, the mouth, a woman’s breasts, a pregnant woman’s belly, it is nature overall—there are no straight lines in nature.

Early writing societies evolved a hierarchical, pyramid-like shape with those at the top in charge with everyone else beholden to the elite who could read and write. A strong part of the root cause is that effective and efficient writing requires delivery of letters and words in a straight line. Straight lines create structure. Structure creates division. Division creates hierarchy.

It could be argued that writing dissolved the relative equanimity of tribal life and the rule of nature and created the possibility of dictatorships and the rule of man. Writing created the dominance of the straight line found in many aspects of human life. It is not until after the introduction of the early printing press in the mid-15th century do we begin to see the wider application of the rule of law—a process that took several hundred years to evolve and continues to evolve.

The electronic age inaugurated with the commercial introduction of the telegraph and the concomitant acceleration of information dissemination to close to the speed of light ushered in a re-shaping of the hierarchical structure. The edges of societies’ structure became more malleable and the direction of information flows in many directions, not merely from top to bottom.

And now that we are in the photonic age (see my blog #87: “Beyond Electronics—A Speculation on a New Media Age”) with information moving even closer to the speed of light, societies have  reached back to the earlier tribal circular shape while at the same time incorporating the capacity for communication in all directions, 360 degrees, 24/7—essentially on a global scale. To paraphrase a saying from the Cold War of the second half of the 20th century, today, when someone in Beijing, China sneezes, someone in Washington, D.C. says “gezuntheit.”

Marshall McLuhanSo-called media guru Marshall McLuhan prophetically coined the phrase “the global village.” Whether he looked into a crystal ball or not, like Nostradamus is alleged to have done a few centuries earlier, it is evident the world has moved headlong into globalism with a vengeance as the flow of information has reached “instant” proportions. It is also true many communities have been created along ethnic lines. The desire for “cultural specialness” and the desire to express in many ways as possible that specialness—essentially the antithesis of the “melting pot” concept of the early part of the 20th century—has become even more present in the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century.

The “artifactual” evidence that technologies based on photonics in many aspects of human life are now present is inexorable. And there will be more of it. But what other evidence can we point to that gives support to the contention that the age of photonics is upon us and its global effect on the shape of society is observable?

The first piece of evidence is the explosion of international organizations: political, professional, and personal. Strobe Talbott, head of the Brookings Institute in a speech at the Aspen Institute in the summer of 2008, pointed out that there are close to 8,000 international organizations operating on the planet. The expansion of the United Nations (U.N.) alone is further evidence of the growth of internationalism. At its birth in 1945 following World War II 51 countries were signatories to the U.N. charter. Today there are 192 countries. Many of the new counties admitted to the U.N. are built on ethnic or deep cultural heritage grounds. And there are several ethnic groups pressing their desire to create new countries based on their ethnic and cultural heritage: the Kurds in Northern Iraq; the French-Canadians in Quebec, Canada; the Basques in Spain; rebel groups in Georgia (of the former Soviet Union); and Chechens in Russia.

It has also become increasingly apparent that with each passing day nations are peering into and overtly commenting on the actions of other nations. An example of this is the multi-year long issue with the development of nuclear materials in Iran and North Korea. While Russia and the United States (and several other nuclear nations) attempt to reduce their respective nuclear arsenals, these two countries, in particular, are moving in the opposite direction, apparently in an ostensible attempt to sit at the table “with the big boys.”

The World is Flat by Thomas FriedmanEnvironmental issues have certainly taken on global proportions. And last, but definitely not least, the globalization of the world’s economy (no redundancy intended) is “in your face” evidence that economically we are all inter-dependent. The economic crisis of the last several years, its roots notwithstanding, is clear evidence that everyone on the planet is in the global village together. Is multi-Pulitzer-prize winning author Thomas Friedman’s contention that we don’t go to war with those we do business with (in his book The World Is Flat) correct?

The history of the first half of the 20th century includes two world wars, the last of which ended with a big bang, atomic bomb explosion. But since then, the world has not gone to war on a global scale. Yes, there have been numerous local, even regional conflicts (such as the first Iraq war over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait). And there have been several conflicts of a genocidal nature (Rwanda, Bosnia), but no multi-theatre war, i.e., in Europe, the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Far East. Yes, there is a war on terrorism—a war that does not share the characteristics of previous world conflicts, i.e., suicide bombings as a military tactic. If there is a conflict on a global scale it is in the economic arena, with China, India, Russia, and Brazil the leading aggressors.

Is the 360 degree, 24/7 shape of our planet in the early 21st century —politically, economically, culturally, and socially—a result of the photonic technology developments of 60 years ago? We are perhaps a little too close to the effects to state a definitive yes. But is it merely coincidental that the political, economic, cultural, and social developments of the last 60 years parallel the output of photonic technologies? I do not think so. A colleague, Dr. Eugene Secunda, and I wrote a book, Shifting Time and Space (Praeger 1991), on the evolution of videotape technology. From our research one conclusion was that as the technology evolved so did the applications. And as the technology became increasingly standardized and portable, so did the rapid deployment of the applications. Moreover, videotape evolved into the interactive videodisc, then the CD, then the DVD, and so on (underscoring again scholar George Basalla’s observation that a current technology product may not look the same as its antecedents, but they sure are in the lineage of the antecedents).

In other words, it is not mere coincidence that the electronic age that has evolved into the photonic age has also shaped in a short 180 years a globally evolving society.

Last, it stands to reason that what I have called the photonic age is not the end of the line. As I stated earlier, Homo sapiens have evolved through several communications stages of which photonics is the latest. It would be against the evolution of the universe to contend that “this is it.”

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.
December 2, 2013

*A version of this essay by Eugene Marlow originally appeared in Etc: A Review of General Semantics, Volume 66, Number 4, October 2009.

© Eugene Marlow 2013

 

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Beyond Electronics—A Speculation on a New Media Age*

Photon WavesThe Marlowsphere Blog #87

It is the general perception and concomitant consensus that on this planet we live in the so-called “electronic age.” In print and electronic media the era we live in is also referred to as the “age of information.”

The first definition of the age is not quite accurate. Certainly, there are all the appearances of “electronics” in our environment—gadgets of all of kinds, and communications and information technologies. But this is also appearance. As it has been said, the fish cannot tell it is in the fishbowl.

The second moniker is, of course, not entirely accurate either. It feels like the “age of information” because an avalanche of information surrounds us and inundates us. The truth is, and even a cursory review of history will show, people in nomadic tribes, agriculturally-based villages, city-states, nations, regions, and now international societies have always relied on “information” in one way or another for survival, sustenance, and strength. The processing of information is in our DNA. After all, even DNA is about information.

To take a long view of the human species’ communications evolution, Homo sapiens and all his predecessors have moved through several stages. The first is body language. Then about 1.8 million years ago nature saw fit to move the voicebox further down the throat thereby creating a more efficient physical relationship among the voicebox, the tongue, and the mouth. This physiological adjustment allowed for the development of emitted sounds of greater complexity, and, thus, spoken language. Hence, the beginning of the age of orality. About 5,000 years ago as a way to keep track of economic transactions, early antecedents of the present accounting profession evolved “tokens” that eventually evolved into early writing systems. Then in the mid-15th century Gutenberg introduced the movable type printing press and the age of efficient printing was born, accelerating the European Renaissance and eventually the Industrial Revolution. And in 1844 A.D. Samuel F.B. Morse commercially introduces the telegraph and the so-called “electronic age” was launched.

It is my contention that a little more than a 100 years after the birth of the electronic age shortly after World War II we entered yet another “age”fiber optic in Homo Sapiens’ communications evolution, this one based not on electrons, but on photons. To put it another way, we have already entered the age of “light” or what I am calling “the photonic age.”

The use of “light” technology has spread “silently” into various aspects of society. And as Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill 1964), has stated: “Once a new technology comes into a social milieu, it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.” This is true of orality, early writing, typography, electronics, and now photonics.

The evidence that we are now living in an age of photonics is all around us, even though it is not readily apparent. One can find photonic technologies in medicine and science, the military, education, finance, live and electronic entertainment, and consumer electronics. And many of these photonic technologies are not only becoming more present, they are also replacing older, more familiar technologies.

As the National Academy of Engineering has pointed out, “From surgical instruments and precision guides in construction to barcode scanners and compact disc readers, lasers are integral to many aspects of modern life and work. But perhaps the farthest-flung contribution of the 20th century’s combination of optics and electronics has been in telecommunications. With the advent of highly transparent fiber-optic cable in the 1970s, very high-frequency laser signals now carry phenomenal loads of telephone conversations and data across the country and around the world.”

As George Basalla, professor of the history of technology at the University of Delaware, cogently points out in his book The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge History of Science Series, 1988), all technologies have antecedents. In other words, they do not just appear, like mice via spontaneous generation in straw as those in the Middle Ages surmised.

Photonic or laser technologies did not just appear in the mid-1950s. In 1917 Albert Einstein proposed the theory of stimulated emission—that is, if an atom in a high-energy state is stimulated by a photon of the right wavelength, another photon of the same wavelength and direction of travel will be created. Stimulated emission forms the basis for research into harnessing photons to amplify the energy of light.

FLAG MapLeaping forward over 90 years, in 1997 The Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) became the longest single-cable network in the world and provides infrastructure for the next generation of Internet applications. The 17,500-mile cable begins in England and runs through the Strait of Gibraltar to Palermo, Sicily, before crossing the Mediterranean to Egypt. It then goes overland to the FLAG operations center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, before crossing the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and Andaman Sea; through Thailand; and across the South China Sea to Hong Kong and Japan. (Copyright © 2009 by National Academy of Engineering).

And today lasers have found applications almost beyond number. In manufacturing, infrared carbon dioxide lasers cut and heat-treat metal, trim computer chips, drill tiny holes in tough ceramics, silently slice through textiles, and pierce the openings in baby bottle nipples. In construction the narrow, straight beams of lasers guide the laying of pipelines, drilling of tunnels, grading of land, and alignment of buildings. In medicine, detached retinas are spot-welded back in place with an argon laser’s green light, which passes harmlessly through the central part of the eye but is absorbed by the blood-rich tissue at the back. Medical lasers are also used to make surgical incisions while simultaneously cauterizing blood vessels to minimize bleeding, and they allow doctors to perform exquisitely precise surgery on the brain and inner ear.

Many everyday devices have lasers at their hearts. A CD or DVD player, for example, reads the digital contents of a rapidly spinning disc by bouncing laser light off minuscule irregularities stamped onto the bar code readerdisc’s surface. Barcode scanners in supermarkets play a laser beam over a printed pattern of lines and spaces to extract price information and keep track of inventory.

Pulsed lasers are no less versatile than their continuous-beam brethren. They can function like optical radar, picking up reflections from objects as small as air molecules, enabling meteorologists to detect wind direction or measure air density. The reflections can also be timed to measure distances—in some cases, very great indeed. A high-powered pulsed laser, aimed at mirrors that astronauts placed on the lunar surface, was used to determine the distance from earth to the moon to within 2 inches. The pulses of some lasers are so brief—a few quadrillionths of a second—that they can visually freeze the lightning-fast movements of molecules in a chemical reaction. And super-powerful laser pulses may someday serve as the trigger for controlled fusion, the long-sought thermonuclear process that could provide humankind with almost boundless energy.

When early writing systems appeared in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago I’m quite sure the inhabitants there did not all of a sudden observe “Hmmm, we’re not just an oral-only society anymore. We’ve entered the age of early writing.” In the early 21st century, however, with global literacy at an all-time high of around 85%, we have the benefit of much hindsight. We have also had the benefit of such media scholars as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, et al. Their collective scholarship has provided the intellectual foundation for looking at the world with a wide view. It is from this perspective that I have come to the conclusion that we have entered a new “communications” age—the age of photonics.

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.
November 25, 2013

*A version of this essay by Eugene Marlow, Ph.D. originally appeared in Etc: A Review of General Semantics, Volume 66, Number 4, October 2009.

© Eugene Marlow 2013

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