Post tag: Marshall McLuhan
Photonics, Globalism, and Tribalism

Marlow's "invisible affect" paradigmThe Marlowsphere Blog (#130)

[Over time] Man’s communications technologies . . . have moved from the verbal, to the alphabetic, to the typographic, to the filmic, and to the electronic . . . , [I]t would be absurd to presume that “electronic” is the end of the. . .technology chain. . . .The next significant [and dominant] medium will be based in some form of light.

"Shifting Time & Space: The Story of Video Tape" by Eugene Marlow, PhD & Eugene Secunda, PhDI wrote the above in 1990. They appear on page 155 of Shifting Time and Space: The Story of Videotape published by Praeger in 1991 (Eugene Secunda, Ph.D., was co-author).

Since the publication of this book, I have evolved a paradigm of the invisible affect of dominant media that posits, in part, that photonic technologies—first developed in the 1960s—have emerged as the dominant technology in the latter half of the 20thcentury and the early part of the 21st century and are slowly but surely combining with or supplanting electronic based technologies. In turn, I posit that in no small measure this emergence accelerated the advent of “globalism,” and this has resulted in the re-emergence of “tribalism,” this time on a planetary scale with several attendant challenges.

“Globalism” is defined as:

  1. A national geopolitical policy in which the entire world is regarded as the appropriate sphere for a state’s influence.
  2. The development of social, cultural, technological, or economic networks that transcend national boundaries.

A “Tribe” can be defined as:

  1. A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.

“Tribalism” is defined as:

  1.  the organization, culture, or beliefs of a tribe.
  2. a strong feeling of identity with and loyalty to one’s tribe or group

Clearly, globalism is in sharp contrast to tribalism. The former takes on the whole world contextually, whereas, the latter refers to a much smaller grouping.

In 1844 A.D. Samuel F.B. Morse commercially introduced the telegraph, launching the so-called “electronic age.” It is my contention that a little more than a 100 years after the birth of the electronic age and shortly after World War II we entered yet another “age” in Homo Sapiens’ technological 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.”

Photon WavesPhotonics is the science of light (photon) generation, detection, and manipulation through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and detection/sensing. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.

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. One can find photonic technologies in a broad spectrum of human activity: 

  • Consumer equipment: barcode scanner, printer, CD/DVD/Blu-ray devices, remote control devices
  • Telecommunications: optical fiber communications, optical down converter to microwave
  • Medicine: correction of poor eyesight, laser surgery, surgical endoscopy, tattoo removal
  • Industrial manufacturing: the use of lasers for welding, drilling, cutting, and various methods of surface modification
  • Construction: laser leveling, laser range-finding, smart structures
  • Aviation: photonic gyroscopes lacking mobile parts
  • Military: IR sensors, command and control, navigation, search and rescue, mine laying and detection
  • Entertainment: laser shows, beam effects, holographic art
  • Metrology: time and frequency measurements, range-finding
  • Photonic computing: clock distribution and communication between computers, printed circuit boards, or within optoelectronic integrated circuits; in the future: quantum computing

And many of these photonic technologies are not only becoming more present, they are also replacing older, more familiar technologies.

The National Academy of Engineering has pointed out:

“From surgical instruments and precision guides in construction to bar code 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.”

"The Evolution of Technology" by George BasallaGeorge 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.

Similarly, 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.

Leaping 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).

What are the effects?

To quote Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration (Huffpost, “The Blog,” 5/26/2014):

Robert RiechWe are witnessing a reversion to tribalism around the world, away from nation states. The same pattern can be seen even in America–especially in American politics. . . .

Over the last several decades, though, technology has whittled away the underpinnings of the nation state. National economies have become so intertwined that economic security depends less on national armies than on financial transactions around the world. . . .

News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker’s garage.

The nation state, meanwhile, is coming apart. A single Europe–which seemed within reach a few years ago — is now succumbing to the centrifugal forces of its different languages and cultures. The Soviet Union is gone, replaced by nations split along tribal lines. Vladimir Putin can’t easily annex the whole of Ukraine, only the Russian-speaking part. The Balkans have been Balkanized.

Separatist movements have broken out all over—Czechs separating from Slovaks; Kurds wanting to separate from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; even the Scots seeking separation from England.

The turmoil now consuming much of the Middle East stems less from democratic movements trying to topple dictatorships than from ancient tribal conflicts between the two major denominations of Islam—Sunni and Shia.

To this list we can add: the Catalonians have long wanted to separate from Spain.

When early writing systems appeared in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago 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, Eric Havelock, et al. Their collective scholarship provides the intellectual foundation for looking at the world with a wide view.

It is from this perspective that I conclude we have entered a new “technological” age—the age of photonics. Photonics have accelerated the evolution of “globalism” and has resulted in an equal and opposite response: “tribalism.” As the speed of information has accelerated, and corporate entities have fostered homogeneity on a global scale, people have retreated into their tribal cultures to regain some semblance of unique identity.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
October 12, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

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The Global Village At War

The Global VillageThe Marlowsphere Blog (#106)

My last blog posited that we are moving in the direction of humanizing technology. That is, increasingly our communications systems in particular—the Internet, World Wide Web, telecommunications—are morphing into very human-like sensory characteristics, for example, increasing voice characteristics, increasing use of motion video on the Internet. In homes, businesses, and public spaces video screens have become flat (some are curved), and large.

I also posited that our communications systems have created a global marketplace for information and communications. We have inexorably become what Dr. Marshall McLuhan   described in1964 as a “global village.” His use of those two words is correct. The planet has become global with respect to all manner of human activities. In one sense we have moved from villages, to city-states, to countries, and in the last century to regional economic entities, e.g., the Pacific Rim, the European Union, OPEC, the Organization of American States, the BRICS, and so on.

But the phrase also reflects the characteristics of a village of the past: people in the village are an entity unto themselves, sometimes dealing with outsiders, sometimes not, where men are dominant, and women are secondary. In today’s world the concept of a “village” is reflected in the fact that most if not all the new countries that have been admitted to the United Nations are based on “ethnic centers,” never mind geographic considerations. Further, current conflicts in the world are ethnically-based—that is, there are groups at war with each other based on perceived cultural differences. It is not about territory, especially, or even economic gain. It’s an extremist view—“we perceive who we are and if you’re not one of us, you must be killed.”

Technology used for good or evilIt is ironic that for all the technological advances in communications and the collaboration it fosters, there seems to be more groups coming into existence who are insular, exclusive and extremist.

Examples abound. The current Israel-Palestinian conflict in Gaza is about Hamas wanting to destroy Israel; it refuses to recognize Israel as a legitimate state.  On the other hand, Israel exacerbates the perceptions by continuing to build settlements on land the Palestinians regard as theirs. They also perceive that the entire region is theirs, but the United Nations   in 1948 voted otherwise. There has been conflict ever since. The conflict is exacerbated by Iran that is apparently supplying rockets to Hamas. Iran seems also bent on finding a way to destroy Israel.

In Iraq ISIS believes its Sharia interpretation of Islam is the only interpretation of the Koran and in that context feels no constraint in executing people who do not believe as they do and blowing things up—such as the resting place of the biblical Joseph.

In Syria newly elected (for the third time) President Assad thinks nothing of killing his own people who disagree with his self-centered, elitist policies. In Egypt the former, now deposed President Morsi thought nothing of inculcating his Brotherhood of Islam’s narrow-focused perception of the world. An ex-military general is now the new president. We’ll see how that works out.

Abubakar Shekau Boko HaramIn Africa, the Boko Haram, led by a man who was once interred in a mental institution, believe that everything in the west is bad. It thinks nothing of killing and kidnapping in the name of Islam.

In eastern Ukraine recently, Russian President Putin thought nothing of seizing the Crimean Peninsula and annexing it to Russia. He also supports the “Ukrainian militants” who similar to the abovementioned extremists think nothing of seizing buildings and killing those who do not feel the way they do about Russia.

In Chechnya rebels there continue to blow things up—including people—because they want a separate state based on their cultural heritage. The war in Bosnia at the end of the last century was also ethnically-based. Many died because each side saw their cultural heritage as the culture to follow. Ethnic cleansing followed.

Adolf Hitler used his Nazi propaganda machine to manipulate much of the German populace into perceiving that the Jews were at the root of their problems and that Jews were less than human. Starting with Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938, the Third Reich succeeded in exterminating six million Jews.

In China towards the end of Mao Zedong’s rule, the Cultural Revolution purged a generation of intellectuals and artists who were perceived as out of step with Mao’s dictates. Millions perished.

The CrusadesIn the 16th century the Spanish Armada attacked England. Why? Because Spain was Catholic and Elizabeth I wasn’t.  The Armada famously perished in the English Channel from a storm that came up just at the right moment.

Go back a millennia and you have the Crusades that pitted the righteousness of Christians against the righteousness of Muslim-based cultures. Go back another thousand years and you have the righteousness of the Roman Empire against the emergent righteous Christians, and so on.

Conclusion: toleration of other people’s cultural values and views is not a prominent human characteristic. To bring us back to the present, former Secretary of State Madelaine Albright recently said: “In a sentence, the world is a mess.” The problem in the early part of the 21st century is that the world means the world. Two thousand years ago the world was much smaller, but larger than the world of early agricultural communities of 10-12,000 years ago, and certainly much larger than the villages of pre-literate tribes before that.

The problem is conflicting cultural ethnic values and views are now supported and accelerated by contemporary transportation, information, and communications technologies. Information (whether factual or not) moves at the speed of light and this only expands its impact.

So, why hasn’t contemporary transportation, information, and communication technologies made the world a better place for all of us to enjoy? Why haven’t these technologies made us different? Why are human beings bent on pursuing conflict rather than peaceful co-existence?

Perhaps part of the answer is that human evolution takes a lot longer than technological development. After all, it took a couple of million years for homo sapiens to develop the Living on Mars by 2033capacity for language, but only a few thousand years to move from an agricultural world, to a world with accounting, then writing, then printing, then electronics, and now photonic and nano technologies.

We’ll probably have men and women living on planet Mars sooner than men and women will learn that cooperation and collaboration is more fruitful than armed conflict.

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 1, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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A Technologically Human Future

android-germinoids with their creatorsThe Internet and the World Wide Web are confirming examples that homo sapiens, as a tool-making species, is slowly but inexorably in the process of replicating themselves—that is, externalizing their senses to the point–perhaps some two hundred years down the road–where the highly sophisticated Star Trek, The Next Generation character D.A.T.A. may actually become a reality.

Moreover, every step man takes technologically he further extends his senses—into the microcosmic, across the planet, into space. In effect, over the eons we have taken quantum leaps from the non-literate old man sitting around the campfire telling the stories of the tribe face-to-face with the members of the tribe, to the current manifestation of technology where the tribe is global (Marshal McLuhan’s so-called “global village”) and the community of man is global.

Yet, we are going in two directions simultaneously. In the face of global communications, time and time again marketing, advertising and organizational communications subject experts I have interviewed talk about one-on-one marketing, one-on-one customer contact, a one-on-one relationship with an individual anywhere on the planet with access to a computer, a modem, and an Internet hookup. This expression of the Internet experience reflects the steps in technology we have taken which bring us that much closer to the full externalization of human characteristics and behavior. Everything about the Internet and the World Wide Web is taking us further in the direction of a replication of the human, face-to-face experience.

Our current electronic/photonic technologies began with the development of the first speed of light technology—the telegraph—in 1838. Since then we have been moving towards the Digital Communityexternalization of our senses on a global scale. The Internet and the World Wide Web are a confluence of previous electronic technologies: the telephone, television, telecommunications, video, audio, radio, text, computer graphics, film, computers, and micro-processors. But the Internet and the World Wide Web are not de-humanizing media. On the contrary, they enhance humanity’s ability to communicate. We are in the process of creating new communities around the world on a macrocosmic scale and on a microcosmic scale in regional and local communities.

Internet developments support the view that this technology is pushing the “humanization” of media. In other words, the Internet will increasingly act like a person. For example, the Internet will take on more of a “voice,” such as “You’ve got mail.” A study several years ago by Killen & Associates, Internet Voice: Opportunities and Threats forecast that global voice/Internet services revenues will top $63 billion by the year 2002 from $741 million in 1997. Further, approximately 48% of the 2002 revenues will be generated in North America while 33% will come from Europe. The bad news for carriers is that the revenues generated by voice/Internet traffic will mostly supplant old telephone service revenues, according to the study. Today, increasing numbers of households have given up the old landline technology in favor of the moble phone.

From the user’s perspective, the Net will become more alive, more interactive, more conversational, more personal, more individualized, more human-like.

Many technological antecedents to the humanization continuum are already in place: robotics, miniaturization, mechanical hearts, man-made materials to replace bones and skin, limb prosthetics, faster, smaller, smarter computers.

Take a look at your computer. If you have stereo speakers, imagine the speakers as ears, the computer monitor a face, the keyboard a mouth, the CPU a brain (although in this case it is separate from the face). Imagine, then, that this crude head is mounted on top of a highly sophisticated robotic device with the ability to move.

Computer = BrainTechnological mobility is an eventuality. Two central factors pervade the adoption of a new technology: standardization and mobility. Examples abound. When the Greeks standardized the alphabet it also became de facto mobile. Same is true of printing, photography, radio, television, video, telecommunications. All these technologies are mobile. And now—with laptops and smartphones of all types—so are computers. A laptop is just several steps away from evolving into a mobile, robotic brain.

In 1997 researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), in Oak Ridge, Tennessee developed a half living, half silicon chip dubbed “Critters on a Chip.” This integrated circuit consists of living sensors—such as bioluminescent bacteria placed on a standard integrated circuit, or chip. Officials at ORNL have boasted that the chip is small, inexpensive and provides information quickly: “This new development using an integrated chip‑based approach with living organisms could dramatically advance the ability to sense a variety of chemical agents in the environment, such as chemical warfare agents or other toxic substances and things like environmental estrogens that could have detrimental effects on living systems. . . .If it is indeed possible to manufacture these part-electronic and part-biological systems as a small, inexpensive chip, it would dramatically improve the ability to monitor many different types of environments.” (from Michael McPherson, Editor & Publisher, SCCM e‑zine, Social & Charitable Cause Marketing, sccm@netrax.net, PRFORUM LISTSERV, April 18, 1997).

It is possible. Materials scientist John Rogers and his team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed materials for use inside the human body that are called “tran-science.” This is technology that is born to die, such as sensors that track blood pressure in the aorta after heart surgery, then dissolve once a patient is out of the woods. They have also made eyeball-shaped cameras that mimic human and insect sight, and soft threads of tiny LEDs that can be injected right into the brain. (See Smithsonian Magazine, December 2013).

In parallel to these technological developments, the Internet and other electronic media are actually fostering more human, face-to-face contact. These media do not separate people. Futurist John NaisbittThey bring them together. If this were not so, why then has travel around the world expanded? It is not just growth in business travel, it is also people visiting other people on a global scale. I concur with John Naisbitt’s “High tech, high touch” postulate—that as we increase our level of high technology, there is a similar response in the human realm; that as we use more high technology to communicate, as human beings we develop an increased need to “press the flesh,” even if that flesh is at a distance.

In Global Paradox (Avon Books, New York, 1994) Naisbitt made the case that travel is one of the world’s biggest industries, not energy, manufacturing, electronics, or agriculture. As of a couple of years ago, tourism and travel employed 98 million+ people.

As we continue to expand our ability to reach individuals and mass audiences at great distances, we are also becoming more consumed with local and regional issues, sometimes to the detriment of national and global concerns. Simultaneously, there has been an explosion of human interaction on a global scale, as the trends in travel indicate. There are also more arts and sports events. And observe the greater interest in special events, conferences, and conventions. While some social critics might observe that gathering at a sports event is not socializing, it does indicate man’s drive to commune in some form.

This gathering of tribes on a global scale has caused other ramifications as well as clashes. First, English has become the de facto English Dictionarylanguage of business in the world. In the last several dacades alone, approximately half of the world’s languages have simply vanished. Meanwhile, English becomes more and more the global language of commerce, not just because the United States remains one of the world’s economic superpowers, but because, as the most hybrid of all major languages, English has the greatest capacity to absorb and fuse the useful remnants of dying tongues. Thus, if you’re going into any kind of business, your strategic use of the English language—both written and oral—needs to be very strong.

"Beyond Culture" Edward T. HallSecond, very generally speaking, according to Edward T. Hall, author of Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Publishing, 1976) there are two kinds of cultures in the world with variations in between: low context and high context. High context cultures are more sensitive to the surrounding circumstances or context of an event. This is apparent in communication in which non-verbal cues play a significant role in the interaction. Although no culture exists exclusively at either end of the context scale, some cultures, such as the Asian, Hispanic, and African-American are high-context; others, such as Northern European and American, are low-context. When east meets west, the communication can be a challenge, whether on foreign or domestic soil.

For professionals in all fields the evolving media environment requires both media studies and human studies. It is qualitative and quantitative. It requires strong written and oral communications skills. It requires technological skills and people skills. It requires a broad view of the world, but with an eye on the details in one’s own backyard.

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.
August 11, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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The Rich, the Poor, and the Internet

"The 85 Richest People in the World Have as Much Wealth as the 3.5 Billion Poorest"The Marlowsphere Blog (#97)

There’s been a lot of press recently about the disparity between the rich and the poor on the planet. To wit, the headline reads, “The richest 85 people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion on the planet.”  

The gap between rich and poor story is not new. History relates there has always been a disparity between those at the top of the wealth pyramid and those at the bottom, especially since the development and evolution of writing. In tribal times, where orality was the dominant form of human communication, there is the appearance of more equal distribution of perceived assets, except of course, when it came to the tribal chief whose status demanded greater access to so-called “wealth,” perhaps in the form of more wives or livestock than everyone else.

Regardless, wealth disparity on this planet has been an economic fact of life for thousands of years. But now there seems to be a change. In a recent Q&A on AOL.com, the authors posit:

Q. Hasn’t there always been a wide gulf between the richest people and the poorest?

A. Yes. What’s new is the widening gap between the wealthiest and everyone else. Three decades ago, Americans’ income tended to grow at roughly similar rates, no matter how much you made. But since roughly 1980, income has grown most for the top earners. For the poorest 20 percent of families, it’s dropped. Incomes for the highest-earning 1 percent of Americans soared 31 percent from 2009 through 2012, after adjusting for inflation, according to data compiled by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at University of California, Berkeley. For the rest of us, it inched up an average of 0.4 percent. In 17 of 22 developed countries, income disparity widened in the past two decades, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Enter the Internet

Sir Timothy Berners-LeeWhen we talk about the Internet we must be careful to define our terms. The Internet of 1968 as developed by DARPANET (the Department of Defense) is quite a different Internet from the one that followed Sir Timothy Berners-Lee invention of the World Wide Web in 1989. The World Wide Web allowed for the integration of text, graphics, motion film and video, and sound. Many, including myself, envisioned that the Internet of the 1990s would provide a level playing field between the large mercantile organizations and startups and small businesses.

In a very real way, the technological evolution of the Internet and the ability to access software programs and hardware networks (for a modest fee) allowed non-established and non-traditional entrepreneurs to get into the money-making game without the need for large sums of start-up capital. The result is 634 million web sites as of December 2012 according to Yahoo.com. Now anyone on the planet with access to the right software, hardware, and telecommunications network, can set up a web site and be in business.

Yet what has happened since the advent of the Internet as we understand it, post 1989? Media guru Dr. Marshall McLuhan,  who wrote Understanding Media: The Extensions Marshall McLuhanof Man (McGraw-Hill 1964), would not have been surprised to learn that several professions, especially those requiring creative talent and expertise have been devastated by the advent of the Internet, and as a result have made it extremely difficult for those in these professions to make a living, putting them behind the proverbial financial eight-ball. These professions are: musicians, journalists, and photographers.

When a new technology comes along—such as the Internet—that provides characteristics that heretofore did not exist, or if they did exist weren’t very effective or efficient, that new technology tends to push the older technology out of the way, or at best, the older technology finds a new purpose in life. Two examples: When the telegraph was installed in the western states of the United States, the Pony Express vanished almost overnight. When the Internet came along, while it did not happen overnight, classified advertising pages in virtually every newspaper shrank to almost nothing. It is just easier and cheaper to advertise online than it is to advertise in print.

The Internet has devastated the music, journalism and photography professions. The ability to file share, inaugurated by Netscape, made the principle of intellectual copyright almost obsolete overnight. For musicians, especially, the value of one’s music monetarily speaking has been greatly diminished. CDs sales and radio play used to garner significant income—no longer. Physical CD sales have given way to streaming and downloading. What was once thousands of dollars has devolved into pennies. With the Internet, journalists, cum bloggers, can now create their own publishing space, resulting, in part, in too many would-be journalists saying too many things about everything devolving the value of experienced, professional reporting. Photographers are in the same boat as musicians. Their visual work, if online, is now prey to anyone who can download it. The same is true of written work of any kind if it is online. The potential for plagiarism is rampant. The value of the output of musicians, journalists, and photographers has been diminished in one technological stroke.

Yes, the Internet has leveled the playing field. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the Internet has leveled the players on the playing field. Further, the Internet has provided yet another opportunity for the savvy to accumulate wealth, contributing, perhaps greatly, to the growing income disparity referenced earlier.

Siren Servers
 
Jaron Lanier author "Who Owns the Future?"Jaron Lanier in his 2013 book Who Owns The Future? (Simon & Schuster) makes the point that the Internet, rather than providing opportunity for all, has actually created a technological context of “winner take all.” Sound familiar? It is a parallel observation to the fact that in the last thirty years or so fewer and fewer people have accumulated more and more of the planet’s wealth.

Here are a few quotes from his book:

At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography is Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. (p. 2)

Ordinary people will be unvalued by the new [information] economy, while those closest to the top computers will become hypervaluable. (p. 15)

There’s an old cliché that goes, “If you want to make money in gambling, own a casino.” The new version is “If you want to make money on a network, own the most meta server.” If you own the fastest computers with the most access to everyone’s information, you can just search for money and it will appear. (p. 31)

These quotes are just the tip of the iceberg in a volume full of valid observations. Lanier should know. He is a computer scientist and musician, best known for his work in virtual reality research. Time Magazine named him as one of the “Time 100” in 2010. Lanier and his friends co-created start-ups that are now part of Oracle, Adobe, and Google.

One of his most telling observations is about “siren servers” (or “head end” to use a cable term) and content. And it relates to very recent articles discussing the value of news and information “aggregators”—i.e., web sites that draw content from other sources and “aggregate” them in one Siren Serversplace. And this is the point: some of the most successful web sites on the planet do not create one wit of content; they merely provide an effective and efficient platform for others to provide content that can be shared with other people FOR A FEE, either from the users or from advertisers, or both!

It should not take much thinking to identify these web sites: Facebook, Paypal, Google, Yahoo, e-bay, Twitter, Linked In, as well as the myriad number of crowd funding and fundraising sites, et al. None of these web sites creates one wit of content, yet millions have flocked to these sites with personal and professional information, or product and services for exchange. Regardless of the outcome of the exchange, the web site makes money—lots of it. And those closest to the “siren server” benefit the most.

It cannot be mere coincidence that since the advent of 24/7 cable news in 1980 followed swiftly by interactive cable, then the world wide web in 1989 (the same year as Tiananmen Square), and, in turn, the exponential growth of the Internet that is still in motion to this day, that there has been a staggering, growing disparity between the rich and poor on this planet. Even last week President Obama pointed out that while those at the very top of the economic pyramid have experienced growth in their collective net worths, the middle class has become economically stagnant, and the lower classes have fallen deeper into poverty.

Internet values information over peopleThe Internet has not leveled the playing field. It has diminished the value of people and elevated the value of information. It has stunted the mobility of the middle class and pushed the lower classes deeper into an economic black hole. These are the facts. The Internet is the new kid of the technological block and it should come as no surprise that it has created major economic shifts that will play out for some time. When the printing press came along in mid-15th century Europe, enabling the creation of Bibles in the vernacular, it ultimately disrupted the long-held power of the Roman Catholic Church, an effect that is playing out today. There are fewer people attending church services on a regular basis and fewer men and women are seeking the church as a calling.

The Internet’s force is as powerful as the crushing power of the mile thick sheets of ice during the last ice age. It is inexorable and no government regulation or censorship will stop its inevitable effect. It is much too late to attempt to put the Internet genie back in the bottle. From here on out, the mission is to find ways to use this technology for the larger economic benefit of the population.

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.
February 3, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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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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