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The Great Arsenal of Democracy. A brief genealogy of Radio as propaganda medium
Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967
Abstract
When Reichskanzler Wilhelm Marx accosted the Weimar Germans for the first time via Radio as a mass medium on December 23, 1926, his advisors must have had a certain understanding of the potency of the medium in terms of ‘informing’ the citizens, in those days also referred to as propaganda, not having the current more negative connotation. Since the early days of deploying the medium as a mass medium of information, it rapidly developed into a medium of manipulation and even intimidation, propagating diverse social utopic experiments. Barely seven years after the occurrence, the German National Socialists with Joseph Goebbels as their communications mastermind and herald, understood the potency and relevance of ‘owning’ this medium and letting it work to their advantage. But not just the Nazis understood the power of mass media as a political instrument. It was President Roosevelt who prepared the American people gently for war with his so called fireside radio talks, claiming the United States of America to be ‘The Great Arsenal of Democracy’. Radio had, by then, become the true medium of ß. What has become of that ever since? This paper focuses on the topoi and developments of radio from the early days of mass medial propaganda to contemporary new digital media.
Discourse analysis of primary and secondary sources from the past and the present lead to the conclusion that not only traditional radio but also contemporary social media like Twitter and Facebook all carry the same fundamental agency through the topoi to turn a media into a propaganda tools with fundamentals such as envisioning utopia, mass manipulation, fear of isolation and adjacent, as the thread that runs through it, wanting to belong to a group.
Key words: Radio, Propaganda, Mass Media, Twitter, Social Media.
Introduction
“It’s always earlier than you think. Whenever you go looking for the origins of any significant technological development you find that the more you learn about it, the deeper its roots seem to tunnel into the past” (Naughton, p.49). Naughton not only refers to Radio, his puppy love that turned into an obsession he shared with his father, and sprouted from sheer fascination for reasons that seem more universal than applicable only to Radio: “I think the immediacy and scope of the medium [Radio] were the key attractions. It put you in touch with what was happening – right now – on the other side of the world. And (if you had that magic license) it put you in charge of the connection process” (Naughton p. 10). Naughton wrote his reminiscence in 1999. That was seventy-three years after the Weimar Republic’s kanzler Wilhelm Marx[1] for the first time in German history addressed his citizens with Christmas wishes, in an attempt to boost German morale and fragile sense of democracy just five years after the people’s perceived humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles. It was an act of which the wily Nazi propaganda State Minister Goebbels commented ten years later in a speech on the occasion of opening the 10th German Radio Exhibition on 18 August 1933: “The November Regime[2] was not able to understand the full significance of the radio. Even those who claimed to have awakened the people and gotten them involved in practical politics were without exception almost blind to the possibilities of this modern method of influencing the masses” (Goebbels, 1933). It remains to be seen whether the democratic leaders of the Weimar Republic by the Nazi’s referred leaders as ‘November regime’, did not understand the potency of the medium. Obviously, the medium Radio had evolved to great extent over those ten years as it had become mainstream technology. But the fact remained that Radio was deployed, thus understood, as mass medium, as early as the early twenties of the twentieth century.
Radio may be regarded as a medium with different agencies. It can be a one-to-one communication instrument or a one-to-many medium. It may serve the purpose of entertaining people, informing or instructing them. Radio may also be a political instrument, a medium that holds a crucial characteristic to serve political objectives: the agency to inform and manipulate people about the envisioning of the accomplishment of a certain utopian imaginary of society. Obviously, this is not its only medium specific characteristic. In fact, if we take a closer look at the specific medium, we may conclude that Radio is unique because of certain characteristics that are ‘owned’ exclusively by the medium; no other media possess them, at least, not in the tenets of the medium; as a concept Radio is sound, always on and ubiquitous; it is there. There is also a lot of Radio around, different stations delivering different content for different groups.
Propaganda, on the other hand, as such is about public sentiment or better, influencing public sentiment in such a sense that those who want the public to be in a specific sentimental mood mold the audiences accordingly. Radio can thus become a tool of propaganda as any other given medium can serve the same purpose.
If the audiences for doing propaganda focus on large groups of people, say the citizens of an entire nation like Germany or the United Kingdom in the prewar days, it is an obvious choice to deploy those media that reach most of the group members; mass media.
The genealogy of Radio and Propaganda goes back a long way and deals with issues like technology, Zeitgeist and also the more universal building blocks, Topoi as Erkki Huhtamo has coined these ‘topics’, applying to the field of media studies the ideas that Ernst Robert Curtius used in his massive study Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948) to explain the internal life of literary traditions” (Huhtamo, p. 6)[3].
“As of June 21, 1943 the Dutch were forced to turn in their radio receivers including all accessories and spare parts as dispositioned by the Höheren S.S. und Polizeiführer in The Netherlands[4]. Officially, this disposition was issued to ‘protect the Dutch population against erroneous messages as an article in a newspaper headed.
The Great Arsenal of Democracy[5]. The utopian roots of Radio
“At least in the USA, by the end of the decade, radio was firmly committed to the twin ideological projects identified by a scomful Bertolt Brecht in 1932 as that of ‘prettifying public life’ and ‘bringing back coziness to the home and making family life bearable again” (Boddy p. 114). Bearability of family life must have been quiet an issue during the Interbellum. Europe, just like The United States and other regions in the world, was heading towards a massive socio-economical depression. It was a slow and structural movement of a downward spiral in which visionaries of different believe thought the time right to set up political experiments. Germany in those days was trying to recover from the pains entailed from loosing the First World War. Now, democracy was thought to bring comfort, at least, this was thought by the instigators of the Weimar Republic. But both on the left and right wings of the political spectrum, more rigorous experiments were conceived.
On the national socialist side, the populist leaders of the Nazi’s took power in 1933, annihilating all other political projects. The Nazi’s knew understood the role of mass communication very well, organizing mass rallies, and pondering simple mantra-like messages through mass media and the Volksempfäger, Nazi Germany’s radio receiver with limited possibility to receive subversive words from what they called terrorists. Radio played a crucial role in the strongly manipulative campaigns of the brown shirts when Goebbels remarked, “The November Regime was not able to understand the full significance of the radio. Even those who claimed to have awakened the people and gotten them involved in practical politics were without exception almost blind to the possibilities of this modern method of influencing the masses” (Goebbels, 1933).
But not all residents of the Great Arian Reich had a Volksempfäger and Public Radio transmission had not been abolished fully yet and owning a Radio Receiver had not been incommoded since Radio Receivers were confiscated by the Nazi’s to the yet. That happened only as late as early summer 1943 in The Netherlands as the occupational German forces cuckolded that the Dutch citizens (and for all that matter all concurred regions) should not be ‘misinformed’ (in the Dutch case by the free Dutch who operated Radio Vrij Nederland from London). However, Radio technology proofed to be very simple and not much equipment was required to receive signals from the free world so many carried on listening to the invigorating messages through their improvised set ups and head sets.
Only a couple of years before Goebbels shared his observation with the rest of the world, other experiments with as much utopian titer were conducted. People actually had become aware of the potency of Radio as a means to throw off the yoke and emancipate. “[N]ow, anyone with a radio set could enter an all-accessible communication space, where radio would spread mutual understanding to all sections of the country, unifying our thoughts, ideals, and purposes, making us a strong and well-knit people (Frost 1922: 18, quoted in De Vries p.114). And, in fact, Radio was regarded as a true Utopia-builder as “the popular idea took hold that radio could be a tool to establish social cohesion and world peace, bringing direct democracy and global harmony to the people” (De Vries p. 114). De Vries refers to a fundamental idea of what radio could establish. It may well be a topos of mass media as such; accrediting emancipatory powers to mass media as Bertolt Brecht did in his 1932 brief article ‘The radio as an apparatus of Communication’ in which he paved the way for Radio as a means of emancipation and self-education of the people.
In Brecht’s view, Radio could comment and enrich theater thus molding new forms of propaganda. And also a direct cooperation between the theater and broadcaster could be organized. If this would be the case, the broadcaster could then serve the purpose of being an apparatus of communication in public life through which the audiences could enable change in both theater and broadcaster in order to have the mighty institutions work to their advantage[6]. Please note that in the original German text Brecht used the word Rundfunk that has been translated as Radio. We must understand that Brecht meant (radio) Broadcaster as an analogy of theater. Also the use of the word Apparat, apparatus refers to a complexity more than a machine that simply does things, as Brecht elaborates that „Durch immer fortgesetzte, nie aufhörende Vorschläge zur besseren Verwendung der Apparate im Interesse der Allgemeinheit haben wir die gesellschaftliche Basis dieser Apparate zu erschüttern, ihre Verwendung im Interesse der wenigen zu diskreditieren“ (Brecht 1932). Brecht actually had visioned Radio to be the tool to defeat the Nazi’s by democratizing the apparatus. And that was directly opposite to what Goebbels had in mind of making use of the same instrument.
Not much later, only months before the USA saw themselves forced to openly enter the early maul in the Pacific region and not much later hopped across the Atlantic to empower the Allies against the Ax, President Roosevelt sat down comfortably for one of his famous fireside Radio talks. The USA had only barely recovered from the Great Depression and prosperity had indeed been just around the corner as the President gently massaged American public opinion into a modus of epic democratism, political greatness and mass heroism. Roosevelt knew, as many of his secretaries and generals that fulfilling an active role in the war of the World was inevitable to protect “The Great Arsenal of Democracy” (Roosevelt, 1940), namely the United States of America.
In the US, Radio had fairly much evolved to a distributed network of Public and Commercial Radio. In those pre-war days, soap opera’s were broadcasted from legendary venues like Radio City at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It were the days when the connotation for ‘propaganda’ resembled what we may call PR in our times; propaganda was not necessarily associated with mass manipulation but rather with colored information. We must realize that current understanding of historic eras is of an analytic titer. We now understand the complexity of the political systems, utopian dreams of statesmen and interests and power in hemispheres as most likely archeologists and historical annalists will do in their time when construing our present days.
All in all, “The properties of radio seemed to perfectly encapsulate the recurrent dream of universal and direct communication, which had already been intensified by the improved point-to-point communication of the telegraph and telephone. Moreover, whereas those latter two technologies predominantly provided individual mediated closeness, radio added a new, more public communicative dimension” (De Vries, p.114) and because of these media specific properties, Radio became the medium to pursue whatever Utopia was dreamt in those chaotic years between the two main atrocities in the first half of the twentieth century.
At this point, we may question why or how Radio actually fits so neatly into the idea of propagating specific socio-economic dreamlands; what made (traditional) Radio into a propaganda medium?
Propaganda machines as we know them, seem to focus the core of their strategies on calling upon the emotions of groups (the people) by blackening the opposition and addressing the people to vivaciously adjuring the ‘foe’. At the heydays of propaganda between the 1920s and 1950s, extremist (pre-war) organizations such as the Bolsheviks, the Nazi’s, the Italian Fascists and later on WWll participants like the British, The Americans, The Germans, the Italians, the Japanese, to mention the most relevant actors and even more later on post WWll actors such as all Cold War players, the McCarthy ‘Communists hunt’, and even later, Chavez’s campaigning, and North Korea’s rhetorics, all bare the same basic principles: the opposites are always wrong, they should be treated as foe and be exterminated; they do evil. Propaganda uses many different techniques, all boiling down to the notion that the propagating doctrine is superior over the rest of the world, or at least groups with different mindsets.
Radio was seen as a very potent medium to propagate the Holy Doctrine, as the medium possessed all properties needed. Radio was addressing the masses and it had a sense of directness, acuteness, of here and now. Radio, by means of its natural phenomenon of radio waves was ubiquitous; it was all around and everywhere and always (a typical topos for the effectiveness of mass media). And he who owns the Radio station was in possession of the mighty weapon of ‘informing’ the audiences what was thought needed to be known by the masses. And, apart from the virtues received by owning the media, other mechanisms in society also have relevant influence in accepting the propagated doctrine. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has coined one of those influencing mechanisms as the Spiral of Silence.
Radio and Group Behavior
The Spiral of Silence is an often contested media theory, developed by German Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann who studied Political Sciences in prewar Germany and was a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung until the Nazi’s banned the newspaper in 1943 and after the war immigrated to the US. Eventually, Noelle-Neumann published her theory in 1991. The essence of the theory is that public opinion influences personal opinion. The theory is based on three foundations (Noelle-Neumann, 1991).
The first is that people tend to have a sixth-sense to prevail the public opinion. This idea is rather disputable as it has never been proven and is therefore certainly not an acknowledged human property. The sixth-sense idea however does have a record in popular discourse and is alleged to sprout from the human property of being social, a vague Conditio Humana perhaps? In any case it appears to be a phenomenon for instance addressed by socialists from the perspective of human species as a social entity yet the topic has a rather high je ne sais pas value.
Secondly the theory focuses on fear for isolation; people are said to be afraid to be excluded or disqualified from the group they live with. For this reason people conform to the general opinion within their drove.
Thirdly, Noelle-Neumann states that people restrain from expressing the views of minorities for reasons of being excluded. In one sentence, people fear to be excluded from the group thus they confirm to the average – mediocre – and popular believes; people confirm to public sentiment. Perhaps this thought is a fundamental topos as it bears a strong visibility and agelessness. But we may wonder if it is true?
When media are only being available in walled environments (say, the Third Reich, North Korea, Cuba or former Soviet Union), one may assume that public opinion may indeed be strongly influenced by the ‘official’ broadcasters. Noelle-Neumann’s theory states that the individual prefers to adapt to the dominant opinion. The spiral effect is that the more people yield to these believes, the stronger the effect becomes, especially in societies where other believes are regarded as subversive and punishable. Or as Marshal McLuhan said: “Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world” (McLuhan, 1967).
How to become a medium of Propaganda
There are a number of factors that determine whether a technology will be adapted, embraced perhaps, by the audiences. Obviously, adaptation of technology by the audiences is a prerequisite for viability, at least, if the technology concerns a medium or media. Radio took quite a long time to become mainstream. Early adaptation appeared in certain cells in society as an object of hobby, amateurs rather, and only grew slightly and took long to reach a tipping point to become mainstream. In this sense, a comparison with Internet-related media is at place.
In the earliest days of Radio, parts out of which Radio receivers were built, were expensive, not widely available (yet) and one had to have a dedicated room – often called the ‘shack’ – and, last but not least, a permit to broadcast. And then, one had to have knowledge of the language system used, Morse coding.
If we bear these necessities for operating Radio senders and receivers in mind and compare them with the rise of, say, the Internet, there is absolute analogy, comparison. The Internet actually took a long time to evolve in what is today in terms of private use. We will elaborate on this further on.
Radio, as we know it today was not an invention as such and had a long path to follow before the application, as we now know it appeared on stage. Robert Maxwell, a British scientist in the early 1800’s is said to have accounted for electromagnetic fields by means of mathematical definition. A few years later, German scientist Heinrich Herz developed a proof of this theory[7]. Herz built an electromagnetic wave generator and managed to send these waves a few feet across a room; “He showed that the nature of their reflection and refraction was the same as those of light, confirming that light waves are electromagnetic radiation obeying the Maxwell equations” (Spark Museum).
This sending of waves may be regarded as the first deliberate broadcast ever. As such, Maxwell and Herz had no vision of their invention becoming a specific medium (Radio) and it were other people who picked up the principles of radio waves in order to utilize the phenomenon. In the earliest days of this episode in the maturing of radio, suggestion was to replace the already existing wired telegraph as Radio was imagined to have benefits due to its wirelessness. Both British as US Navies, were particularly interested in the idea of what was then called ‘wireless telegraphy’. In fact, “the U.S. Navy was so interested in the wireless telegraph that it lobbied the government to give it a complete monopoly on the technology; it was too important to let businesses use it, the Navy thought, much less ordinary folks” (UVM.edu. undated).
A comparison with the earliest days of the Internet is stunningly similar. Perhaps inspired by Vannevar Bush’s ideas about organizing the immense and ever growing mountain of information and its amounting problem of information management and unlocking and dissimilation, but in any case, the invention of Packet-switching is regarded as a typical comparison to the invention of Radio.
In the early 1960s, computer scientists were looking for ways to decentralize communication. It was early Cold War and the United States of America and its allies were preparing for the worst. Up to that moment in time, and apart from radio communication, phone communication was arranged through a centralized network using switchboards to connect to receivers. Centralized networks are quite vulnerable because communication depends on the activeness of switchboards between the networks. In comparison to Herz’s discovery of the spark gap in 1888 as the earliest radio transmitter in which pulses of electronics were sent from one diode to another, producing sound, packets of information were pulsed into an distributed network, easily finding the receiver. In fact, the way radio waves are distributed can be compared with distributed networks. Or, as The Rand Corporation’s Paul Baran stated in his memorandum RM-3420-PR which he prepared for the United States Air force Project Rand in 1964, which delivered the ARPA net as one outcome, “a key attribute to the new media is that it permits formation of new routes cheaply, yet allows transmission on the order of a million or so bits per second, high enough to be economic, but yet low enough to be inexpensively processed with existing digital computer techniques at the relay station nodes” (Baran, p.17).
It wasn’t until 1906 that the crystal detector appears on the market, making Radio broadcasting for amateurs cheaper and thus more available. Before the introduction of the crystal detector, only small groups of amateurs focused on Radio, apart from professional use, mainly by navies and armies and postal authorities throughout the world. The example of the introduction of the crystal detector can easily be compared with the introduction of the microcomputers in the early 1980s. Before their introduction, computer communications was done by a relatively small group of amateurs, people who as a matter of hobby, enjoyed experimenting with computers.
There are in fact many more comparisons to be made between the rise of Radio and the Internet. In 1912, radio amateurs organized in the Radio Relay League, just as in 1984 ARPAnet was split into a military part and an ‘experimental’ part, specifically made available to all who wanted to experiment with computer communications. In both cases, technology became cheaper and thus more could invest in required apparatus. Another relevant comparison is the that both Radio evolution and Internet took a while to grow and gain critical mass to eventually turn into a mainstream technology, available and adapted by fast groups of people, not just experimenting amateurs but people commonly referred to as the ‘late majority’, in opposition to groups labeled as ‘innovators (experimenters)’ and ‘early adopters’. Exemplary for this type of evolution is that
At first corporate executives do not pick up the evolution towards mainstream of certain technology. This did not happen right after World War l as communications corporations tried to hold on to wired Telegraphy and Telephony and made hardly any effort to adapt to Radio as was the similar case in 1993 when “U.S. News & World Report interviewed seven major executives about the future of computer communications, including Bill Gates, and the heads of AT&T, IBM and Motorola, and no one mentioned the internet” (www.uvm.edu).
On the other hand, there have always been people who sensed the potency of the medium and its technology, envisioning future developments. In terms of Radio, one of the great visionaries was the Austrian born US immigrant H. Gernsbach, editor of the magazine Radio News who may be regarded as one of the great promoters of Radio. In his book ‘Radio for All’, Gernsbach unfolds the sheer magic of Radio to a large audience, “not acquainted as yet with radio art” but as “the keynote of the book has been simplicity in language, and simplicity in radio” most likely all readers would have thought to be able to understand, especially as “the vacuum tube […] has been touched upon very lightly and only where it was absolutely necessary” (Gernsbach, p.5).
Even before having explained the more technological aspects of Radio to the layman, Gernsbach starts of with a depiction of the Future Of Radio in a frontispiece by the famous artist Frank Paul[8].
Frank Paul, http://www.frankwu.com/Paul-listing5.html
The drawing is astonishing. Taken from left to right, we observe a radio heater (remote operation of domotronics?), radio controlled airplanes (a discussion only currently becoming more public), crewless ships (id.), radio power distributor (again an current evolution of power technology transferring kinetic energy into electric energy through Bluetooth which is radio), a radio clock (which has been around since WWll). Then there is something Paul refers to as ‘correspondence by radio’, an arrow pointing to what may be interpreted as a fax machine, Television and automatic radiophone and, to finish off our circle of radio-related futurology, a radio business controller, resembling an interactive screen for buying and selling stock. There is one rather strange part, an umbilical cord connecting the radiophone with the world, depicted as a globe.
Grensbach’s book, although emphasizing that technology is only dealt with when necessary, is really about how Radio is being made, what the natural phenomenon of waves are (which he explains in an enlightening fashion in chapter two, ‘Wave analogies’, p.15)) and appears to be rather gendered which we may interpret as a sign of the time as it is 1922 when the book was published. All in all, Grensbach’s book serves as an example of a topos in media archeology; it are ‘innovators’, evangelists even, who promote certain technology as they forecast the potency of such technology. It happened with radio as it happened with contemporary digital media. And it are the media theorists who experiment with the powers of media, as the leaders in the Interbellum did and our contemporary utopia-seeking frontrunners from every fractal of the socio-economical spectrum still do and most likely will remain doing so, using media technology not pondered by us yet. And whatever the contemporary media are in a certain Zeitgeist: “In the name of ‘progress’ our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old” (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, quoted in Lister et al. p. 60).
History repeating: are contemporary media analogies of Radio?
The question now rises if there are analogies between (traditional) Radio and our contemporary mainstream digital media with Facebook and Twitter as leading examples. Are we allowed to compare these media? For sure the digital media of our days resemble certain aspects of traditional Radio; we can listen to Spotify if want to hear our favorite music, we can actually listen to any radio station broadcasting entertainment content, journalism or information.
We can approach the question of analogies from different angles. Questions then occur like: do we listen to Radio when listening through the Internet or, are we listening to Internet remediating Radio or, what makes Radio differ from new digital media that have the same (intrinsic) agency namely mass medial qualities, including manipulation of the public opinion and even sentiment, enhancing the process of the Spiral of Silence?
According to Bonini, the analogy lies in the perceived active presence of the producer: “The most successful Facebook and Twitter pages analyzed so far all share a specific and clearly recognizable dramaturgic structure: frequent, cyclical and regular updates, every day. Facebook and Twitter provide a flood of data, and posts and tweets will quickly flow off followers’ screens. Tweeting frequently will build a bigger following. Radio producers have to show listeners that they are always alive; always present, and they have to convince them to visit their page more often during the day. They have to build expectations among their followers. Posting 15 tweets a day, but all in the same half hour, will not do, as most of the followers will not even see them. Radio producers have to educate the public, making them feel that their page is constantly updated with valuable contents” (Bonini, 2012).
So, proper programming and offering ‘valuable’ content are essential for any given medium to stay ‘on air’, be they new digital media or traditional Radio which leads us to the question what the status of propaganda is today in comparison with the what it used to be and whether our contemporary media landscape allows or distorts the purposes of the those who propagate.
Is the phenomenon of propaganda still around and if so, does Radio still play a role? To answer that question, one must understand or at least scope the spectrum of impact. The field of force of question and demand determine the modern Western world and it is said that there is a market for everything, every thought as well. Propaganda aims at influencing the sentiment of a groups of people toward a certain cause, be it massive like Nazi’s wanting to build the Third Reich, Hutus wanting to break away from Tutsis (or vice versa) or Dutch Prime Ministers wanting to get general acceptance for their policies like Mr. Colijn and his mythical Radio speech in which he soothed prewar Netherlands by saying that ‘nothing is wrong; go to sleep’. This inveterate myth lets us believe that Prime Minister Colijn uttered these words at the eve of the audacious invasion of the Germans on May 10, 1940 but that is not true. AS, amongst other sources, the Nederlands Dagblad of December 9, 1980 states, Colijn spoke his famous words in a Radio speech on March 11, 1936 when explaining that the invasion of the Germans of the Rhine land had led to the decision to keep the current militias a couple of months more under arms until the situation had stabilized (Nederlands Dagblad, 1980).
“He who molds the public sentiment makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make”, Abraham Lincoln speeched. In Lincoln’s view, public sentiment was everything and public sentiment, at least the molding of it to one’s satisfaction, is exactly what propaganda implies. From that perspective, media are relevant to the propagators thus instigating that owning the media is crucial in achieving one’s objectives. No wonder we saw urban camouflaged citizen-warriors in Libyan cities trying to occupy the broadcast and telecommunication towers from Moammar al-Qadhafi’s forces. By the time the citizens enforced themselves, Kaddafi’s propaganda had failed its purpose; all Libyans knew that the great Colonel had impertinently lied to his flock.
It is said that Facebook took over the role of Radio in those chaotic days of what now is referred to as the Arab Spring. People organized their rallies, other gathering and protest marches by making use of social media, Facebook in particular, as their tool for communication. And along with the directives of where and when to meet to face the tiran’s troops, insinuative messages as a matter of stimulation, motivating the crowds to participate in the quest for freedom, must have intertwined. There may not be such a thing as neutrality when using media for a purpose.
Epilogue
While preparing this text for constitution, the United Kingdom entombs the ‘Iron Lady’, former conservative Prime Minister baroness Thatcher. The date is April 17, 2013, forty odd years after – may I phrase rhetorically – the posturing epics of the War of the Falklands. This paper is not into political yes-or-no’s as its designation is to manifest the uncanny qualities of mass media, deployed for political reasons, focusing severally on Radio and, for all that matter, radio-like media in later eras of our contemporary digital culture with its proper mass medium.
A mastodon of British power and politics of the eighties of last century as she was Thatcher truly understood the potency of mass media. Rumor has it that she was the first politician to purposely stare into the camera’s lens thus bypassing the interviewer and addressing the viewers directly. Obviously that is a media myth as many other ‘great’ leaders before her days of government (from Churchill via Hitler to Stalin) already knew the trick. Still, I would like to dedicate this text to Thatcher and in her wake all politicians who attempt or have attempted to make clear their thoughts about society and ruling in particular and how to make use of media and even further, propagate their thoughts; do propaganda.
Fact is that when Thatcher entered Downing Street 10 for the first time (and the first female Prime Minister of the UK) as Prime Minister, The Times did not report on it due to ceased publication because of an industrial dispute. And, at the end of 1979, there were more rumors around media and politics. Thatcher not only understood the potency of mass media as a tool for her own gratification, she also understood the political advantage of ‘owning’ the media. Therefore she helped her friend Rupert Murdoch break the powers of the print unions, broke the TV duopoly of ITV and the BBC in the UK and unleashed the British advertising sector, mainly by supporting Saatchi & Saatchi in becoming one of the most influential advertising chains globally[9]. Thatcher often crossed cutlasses with the BBC and other (public) broadcasters in their attempt to maintain an independent journalistic discipline.
Perhaps this appurtenance of the media by politicians is the greatest of all topoi when discussing Radio and other media s tools of propaganda as today’s actuality shows, be it Berlusconi’s Italy or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea.
In any case, as I am finishing this text, I put on BBC Radio to experience today’s memorable event the way people have done for as long as a century, listening, not seeing but imagining. Perhaps, Radio is the apparatus of imagination and in that sense, Noelle-Neumann’s theory may proof its righteousness; people are influenced by imaginative content and deliberate prejudice of those who own the media. Has it ever been otherwise? Meanwhile, I listen.
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Roosevelt, F. D. (1940, December 29). The great arsenal of democracy . 1940: American Rhetoric.com.
Straus, S. (2007). What is the relationship between hate radio and violence? rethinking rwanda's 'radio machete'. Politics & Society, 35, 609-637. doi:10.1177/0032329207308181
Van der Beek, A. (December 9, 1980). Ga maar rustig slapen (lV slot). Nederlands Dagblad, pp. 6.
Welles, O. (1938). War of the worlds
Windrich, E. (2000). The laboratory of hate. the rol of clandestine radio in the angolan war. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 3(2), 206-218. doi:10.1177/136787790000300209
[2] The November Regime was the common Nazi denominator for the Weimar Republic’s government.
[3] To be more specific, Topoi are about “What matters in history is not whether certain chance discoveries take place, but whether they take effect”, as Huhtamo cites C.W. Ceram in his ‘Archaeology of Cinema C.W. Ceram: Archaeology of Cinema, translated by Richard Winston, London: Thames & Hudson, 1965, p.17, taken from Huhtamo’s text as referred to’.
[4] In fact, the citizens of Amsterdam were instructed to turn 1 their radio receivers according to their family names: http://www.annefrank.org/nl/Subsites/Amsterdam/Tijdlijn/Oorlog/1943/1943/Radio-inleveren/#!/nl/Subsites/Amsterdam/Tijdlijn/Oorlog/1943/1943/Radio-inleveren/
[5] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thirty-second president of the United States of America entitled his December 29, 1940 ‘fireside chat’, a series of ‘The Great Arsenal of War’. In the best tradition of the art of pep talking, Roosevelt speeched alternating formal and less formal radio talks that served as updates on the president’s views, in this case the president’s contemplation of entering the Second World War as ally against the Axis powers “to meet the threat to our democratic faith” as he states towards the end of his speech, broadcasted on national radio. A couple of months later, the US entered the war in an active way. A transcript and audio recording is available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html.
[6] “Würde der Rundfunk zu einem Kommunikationsapparat öffentlichen Lebens umfunktioniert, könnte das Publikum sowohl beim Theater als auch beim Rundfunk für Neuerungen sorgen, um die mächtigen Institute „zur Aufgabe ihrer Basis zu bewegen’ Taken from Brecht’s article Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat.
[7] Based on http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/Courses/Soc43/pages/lecture_radio.html, visited March, 13, 2013
[8] Susan J. Douglas has used the very same future depiction in her article ‘Amateur Operators and American Broadcasting: Shaping the future of Radio. (1986).
[9] Facts taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22120480, visited April 17, 2013.
About technology and the human species or, are we afraid of the Future? Hawking versus Haraway?
This is an extended version of a post I did recently. In the future I hope to add some pictures.
Stephan Hawking and Donna Haraway are two scientists who have outspoken ideas about what the merge of technology and humans actually means to us. Hawking, who has recently joined a Cambridge University think tank that deals with issues of possible take-overs of the human species by apparatus (computers) with sufficient artificial intelligence, is concerned about the evolution of our species. For him, the Darwinian phase of evolution has ended as the human species is nearly done from a natural selection perspective. New evolution comes from incorporating technology and, more important to him, genetic manipulation (brain manipulation) with the purpose of being more intelligent and smarter than our computers that become more and more intelligent, resulting in self-learning and for humans unmanageable apparatus. Haraway on the other hand is not afraid of this kind of aberrant relationships as she poses in her ‘Companion Species Manifesto’; she sees the development of protean relationships with other species as a natural, nearly biological evolution. In this perspective, the merge of human organism and cybernetics, say technology, is a natural process that eventually creates a new species, with its own genetic coding; it is like the ooloi from Octavia Butler’s novel ‘Lilith’s Brood’. In this paper I elaborate on the two apparently different approaches towards the evolution of the human species without alluding to any science fiction-like depiction of a dreamt new universe; no extraterrestrial creatures captivating our planet, no amorphous powers slandering aggravated humans. In this paper I make no emotional choice of future approach, I merely question to pertain the debate of how to cope with the perhaps inevitable absorbance of technology that is in fact becoming more and more sophisticated.
A Fastcompany.com article on January 8, 2013 announced that the Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking had joined the board of the international think tank called ‘The Cambridge Project for Existential Risk’ that is devoted to “defending humanity from futuristic threats” (Ungerleider, 2013). The Cambridge Project for Existential Risk was founded in 2002, and, to cite its website text, is “concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole. Such dangers have been suggested from progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), from developments in biotechnology and artificial life, from nanotechnology, and from possible extreme effects of anthropogenic climate change. The seriousness of these risks is difficult to assess but that in itself seems a cause for concern, given how much is at stake” (Price et al., 2012). This rather dystopically phrased prognosis of human’s not-so-far-away future refers to a broad global debate, not only fueled by academics but also popularized by interested laypersons and, so be it, politicians and public policy makers.
Stephen Hawking’s coupling with the think tank founders Dr. Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge, Dr. Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, Cambridge and Mr. Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, is somewhat a dazzle as he shared his ideas of the evolution of the human species with David Stonehouse by stating that he (Hawking) believed that the cyborg evolution was inevitable and vital for the survival of the human species. That was in the year 2003. Hawking claimed in that year that: “In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months”, Hawking told the German news magazine Focus in 2001. “So the danger is real that they [computers] could develop intelligence and take over the world. We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it” (Stonehouse, 2003).
According to Hawking, the evolution of Homo sapiens has taken millions of years so far and our DNA, the useful information, has only changed a few million bits. According to the scientist, human species has entered a new phase of evolution. Human evolution started out in a darwinistic sense, eliminating deficiencies, generation after generation, engendering the human species by natural selection. According to Hawking, language was developed as a means to communicate and exchange information. And furthermore, the distinction with earlier species of the human kind is that evolution has not been a matter of natural selection but has included externally transmitted information. Hawking calls this phenomenon “an external transmission phase” (Kazan, 2010). In this current phase of human development, human DNA has not changed significantly over generations. Externally transmitted information has grown to fast extents. Books, broadcasting (radio and television) and other media have all transmitted information that has been absorbed by humans. Hawking speaks of a ‘self designed evolution’, a non-Darwinian evolution in which humans will change their own DNA in their own way; change that does not derive from repairing genetic ’inconvenience’, defects that will be filtered out over generations to come, absorbing thousands of years. Hawking visions that biological defects of the human body can be corrected rapidly in the near future as they only involve single genes. Other human qualities like intelligence are most likely affected by complex structures of genes that make the process of finding the defects more complex as well. Hawking though is confident in the future development of DNA generation and human evolution in the external transmission phase: “I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression” (Kazan, 2010).
Hawking’s idea of genetic engineering seems an obvious strategy. Computers are evolving fast, it is said that computers double their performance per month. Yet the human species cannot keep up with the digital tempo of its own inventions. Hawking warns that humans must change their DNA rapidly or stay behind the development of computers and actually be left behind in this progress. According to him, the danger is real that computer intelligence will develop and as a fact will take over the world.
In this sense, Hawking claims that mankind must alter its genetic information in order to be able to rule the ever-evolving Artificial Intelligence of computers. “He also advocates cyber-technology – direct links between human brains and computers. ‘We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it” (Walsh, 2001). The idea is interesting but also meets critique, for instance from Sue Mayer, former director of policy research group Genewatch[i] who states that Hawkin’s ideas are straight forward naïve. In a biography about Hawking, Kristine Larsen recalls Mayer’s citation about Hawking’s alleged naivety. Unlike Hawking, Mayer believes that genetically engineering the human brain, as Hawking advocates, will not pay off in staying ahead of the, one may suggest, species of developing and self-learning computers.
There appears to be a certain discrepancy in the thinking of Hawking. On the one hand the scientist advocates cyber-technology as he spoke of developing direct links between computers and the human brain in order to have the artificial (computer) brains “contribute to human intelligence rather than oppose it.” (Walsh, 2001). Twelve years later Hawking then joins the Cambridge think tank with the mission to develop insights and ways of how to control existential risk; risk for the human species caused ever-evolving computers.
Other scientists also stress the idea that computers may eventually take over human existence. One of them is Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics professor at Reading University, involved in experiments in which ‘Man & Machine’ are merged. Warwick believes in the cyborg evolution that, according to him, is inevitable and even ‘vital’ to the advancement of the human species through cybernetics of the brain, through, as Sidney Morning Herald reporter David Stonehouse cites Warwick, “brain implants connecting them to the vastly superior intellectual powers of computers. If we don’t, the alternative is to have intelligent machines running everything. I don’t really fancy that, the scientist says in a phone interview from his home near London. But this alternative, I see as quite a positive alternative: humans staying in control of what is going on, even though we have to become cyborgs to do it” (Stonehouse, 2003).
According to Anne Balsamo however, “Cyborgs are alternately labeled ‘androids,’ ‘replicants,’ or ‘bionic humans.’ Whatever label they attract, the cyborg serves not only as the focal figure of the mass-mediated popular culture of American techno-science, but also as the figuration of posthuman/identity in postmodernity. From children’s plastic action figures to cyberpunk mirror shades, cyborgian artifacts will endure as relics of an age obsessed with the limits of human mortality and the possibilities of technological replication” (Balsamo 1996).
This citation shows that ‘Cyborgism’ is not just a matter of redefining the ethical issue regarding the manipulation of the human brain by humans themselves, as part of a human-designed alteration program, a survival scheme if one whishes, to conquer an alleged rise of supremacy of artificially intelligent apparatus (a propos designed, developed and produced by humans) as Hawking suggests. In Balsamo’s opinion Cyborg is an artifact of today. It is depiction such as Max Headroom, Elektra, or Fritz Lang’s Maria. It may even be Octavia Butler’s Lilith helping an alien people to reinvent a non-gendered species with no background, no common DNA that, as Hawking suggests, is still part of human heritage on a genetic level; we have a past and remain to keep it.
Before we focus on Donna Haraway’s approach of the evolution of the human species, let us question whether we should or should not be afraid of the future as depicted by academics like Hawking, Price, Russell and Reese. If Balsamo states that Cyborg is already in our lives, then can we learn from how people deal with it currently? And should we not look at historical developments in the acceptance and usage of technology intertwining with human life? Can we, for instance, conclude lessons learned from the incubation phase of the mobile telephone that has taken an odd thirty years from the day that the first commercial ‘mobile’ was brought to market? That was in 1969. The incubation phase, the time it takes to become mainstream artifact showed a progressive curve of acceptance and the evolution of functionality of the device and marketed services rocketed sky high when mobile telephony technology merged with another massive technology, the Internet. Obviously the emergence of mobile Internet may be regarded to operate on a different level or in a different sphere of incorporation in every day’s life yet there is resemblance in the way different discourses read regarding Cyborgism and human brain engineering.
The issue of the merge of technology and (human) organism has a scope from fully accepted to future development that, as I believe, has through the ages been colored by popular mass cultural distribution of science fictional depiction.
On the accepted side of the scope there is for instance the pacemaker that helps millions of people lead a fairly normal and regular life. The pacemaker and its virtues has been accepted long before the word Cyborg was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960 in their article ‘Cyborgs and Space[ii]’. The pacemaker is not the only technology people put in their bodies in order to improve their lives. The list of life-improving technology dates back to the first signs of registration by humans. Even in Mythology, the gods used prosthetic devices, i.e. the Irish god New Hah hand a silver hand replacing his missing left hand[iii].
On the opposite side of the scope, there are doomsday scenario’s prognosticating coupes d’état by ogre creatures that may even have human look and feel but are in fact striving to overpower if not destroy Homo sapiens. Perhaps the 1982 film ‘Blade Runner’ may be regarded as a typical example of ‘Dystopia A Priori’; advanced and sophisticated self-learning AI will lead to slavery and even worse, destruction of the human kind. That is not a promising thought. In the film four so-called ‘replicants’ have hijacked a spaceship to return to earth. Main character Rick Deckard has been commissioned to detect the devilish replicants who seek to do the world evil[iv]. Is the given fact of this film representative for the Cambridge academics?
With Hawking as an advocate, the engineering of the human brain appears to be argued as relevant to develop into a super human species serving the mere purpose of staying ahead of our own inventions. Brain engineering at this moment, is a complicated field of science and experiences skepticism and critique, focuses on assumed typical human issues like identity, empathy and environments as prerequisites for ‘remaining human’. Illustrative for this trend is an article in the Dutch magazine ‘De Groene Amsterdammer’, journalist and writer Sanne Bloemink explores the current state of affair in the world of what she described as the ‘Brain culture’. Bloemink focuses on the Cartesian enigma of brain and soul and attempts to unravel the obstinate myths and misbelieves about the human brain. One of the prominent neuro-criticasters Bloemink cites is Paul Verhaege, professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the university of Gent who states that new insights in epigenetics[v] show that “human identity is integrally tied to our environment” (Bloemink, 2013). Bloemink attempts to landscape the complexities that blur more or less objective thinking about the human brain, its capacities and the role of technology.
How differently then does biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway approach the sheer inevitable development of the merger of human beings with their own inventions of technology? Before we will discuss more on Hawking’s public exclamation of fear for, as put rather naively, robots, meaning the envisioned take-over of human life by artificially intelligent apparatus, the computer, we will focus on Donna Haraway’s approach over the years, from her Cyborg Manifesto to her more recent Companion Species Manifesto.
In December 2012, Helen Stuhr-Rommerein and Meagan Day, editors with Full-Stop.net, interviewed biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway on issues she is concerned with. As the writer of the Cyborg Manifesto, published in 1985, Haraway has taken the issue of ‘symbiogenesis’ as one of her (current) concerns. In symbiogenesis, ‘competition is the key word. Competition is an idea, a blueprint perhaps straight from Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’. Darwin’s doctrine explains the phenomenon as the ‘utter fight for survival’ and any form of biological hierarchy is a result of this struggle for existence. But Donna Haraway (and with her other writers such as Lynn Margulis who wrote ‘Acquiring Genomes: A theory of the Origins of Species’, criticize the cooperative role in evolution. Symbiogenesis is really about organisms teaming up and enduring threats. As Meagen Day puts it: “it becomes untenable to track the progress of an individual species the way Darwinian evolution does. Seen in the light of infection, evolution is always co-evolution” (Stuhr-Rommerein & Day, 2012).
This co-evolution appears to be somewhat of a vague conception. Is it that evolutionary objects such as human species, trees, monkey, birds or Labrador Retrievers needed other evolutionary developments to evolve? And, taken from a rather deterministic or better, teleological point of view, evolve to what? According to Haraway in her second manifesto, ‘The Companion Species Manifesto’, the world is a knot; it is, as she calls it, ‘prehensions’ in which both biological and cultural determinism is ‘misplaced’ concreteness. And this appears to be the most relevant revelation from Mrs. Haraway: “a bestiary of agencies, kinds of relatings, and scores of time trump the imaginings of even the most baroque cosmologists. For me, that is what ‘companion species’ signifies” (Haraway, 2003).
How should we understand the routing of our species into the future? Do we really believe that our existence is, or will be, influenced by our technological advancements? Personally, I do not consider the humane species evolution a matter of abstract debate; we live in a world that changes so rapidly that it is hard to construe where we, as a species are heading. On the other hand, Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto has stirred up dust. Was it not Mrs. Haraway’s illuminated vision that technology would certainly merge with biology; ‘Man & Machine’ or rather and better ‘Cyborg’
Sherry Turkle wrote that today’s computers are what beasts were to Darwin and dreams were to Freud. Turkle believes they are ‘test objects’ (Turkle, 1997), they challenge people, the views they have and they force to gain new insights, new perspectives. Computers challenge people to think about what human life is. The issue is not strictly reserved for philosophers and scientists; everybody is involved in the dynamics of this change. Turkle observes young children who have adopted the computer as a natural extension to their senses, as Marshall McLuhan would have said. When Turkle published ‘Life on the Screen’ in 1997, there were no tablets or smartphones yet – at least adopted as mainstream consumer technology – still penetration of the (desk top) computer, game consoles and other digital apparatus had become common property to a certain extend. Young people, children specifically, show that they have different distinctions between subject and object, between human and things than older people. A specific anecdote in Turkle’s book is about an electronic toy that can be shaped in different objects, robot, tank, and human-like puppet. The toy can also be the three at the same time. A boy tells his playmates that they should play with only one configuration, the tank, the puppet or the robot. The friends however ignore the owner of the hybrid and don’t follow his orders. Then, eight-year-old girl advices him to take it easy as the toy is nothing more than a ‘yucky computer cy-dough-plasm’.
There is a truth in the words of that young girl; the toy is but a mere thing, nothing to be afraid of. But on the other hand, the boy had a totally different perception of the ‘thing’. In the anecdote to the boy the toy appears to have a life of its own, a paradox of believe, a perceived reality. But then, is there e truth, a common reality of what this phenomenon is about? In ‘Civilization and its discontents’, Sigmund Freud sketches the process of ruling and regulating the world, in what we may call civilization, leads to a certain discontent of that same civilized world; discontent arrays as a constant feeling. And this ‘peculiar feeling, which never leaves him [human beings] personally, which he finds shared by many others, and which he may suppose millions more also experience. It is a feeling that he would like to call a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded, something ‘oceanic’ (Freud, 1929). Perhaps that is why man invented religion as religion tends to sooth man’s mind and inexplicable experiences.
Let us now contemplate on Haraway’s ‘Companion Species Manifesto’ and attempt to understand what the meaning of this particular text is in the context of the basic question of this paper: ‘Should we be afraid of the future’ and also question whether Haraway’s vision is really different from Hawkin’s?
Haraway states: “The Companion Species Manifesto is, thus, about the implosion of nature and culture in the relentlessly historically specific, joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in significant otherness” (Haraway, 2003). To Haraway, Cyborgs are part of a greater family of different species, all being unique species and all being each other’s companion. The human species is, thus, one of the companion species.
This thought bears a certain democratic approach to the world’s population and opposes the idea that the human species is the Über-species as it is, contrary to other companion species like dogs, a projection, the realization of intention, the “telos of anything” as Haraway states. According to Hawking, the human species is uniquely the leader of a bio-hierarchy because of its competence to use the abstractness of language to communicate. For Haraway, this is not relevant as companion species are about relationships between different, at lest two, companion species.
This relationship does not necessarily need to be a friendly one or have historical bonds. Companion species form universes and act in the same sphere, place and space. Cyborgs as such, fit within the taxon of companion species as they actually raise the same issues of relationships than, say, dogs. To Haraway, not just her 2003 manifesto but actually life as it is, is about ‘significant otherness’; understanding the uniqueness of the other species and accepting them as partners.
Now this idea may cause certain resistance, even dissent perhaps, with people. After all, generations of people in the western cultural hemisphere were educated in the Darwinian and Christian doctrines in which Homo sapiens is the sole leader in a strict hierarchy of species. To these people, a dog can be a respecting ‘buddy’, in that sense, a friend, but never on the same level as ‘the boss’, the owner of the dog. Not to mention granting any form of equality to ‘lower’ species and resulting in what not even is considered to be a species: a computer.
Haraway elaborates on this issue by explaining the role of the dog the way humanist techno-philiacs explain: the dog was domesticated from the free wolf to being servant, making civilization possible. Let us understand that this is not Haraway’s believe but the thought fits seamlessly in the believe that the human species is the world’s leading species, the ‘boss’.
Following the same logics of arguing, all other species can be regarded to be a serving partner of humans, including man-made species like cyborgs, robots and computers. For Haraway however, there are no boundaries in terms of skin or other organics therefor species that incorporate organics and technology, culture and nature, are as much companions as are dogs.
Being a biologist, Haraway refers to animal species, dogs in particular but not necessarily, as she speaks of companion species. In her 2003 manifesto she thus elaborates her thoughts on relationships between people and their dogs. To her, the two species bond lives in ‘significant otherness’, a conception that needs thinking: how different am I from my dog or, how the same am I? Being a dog owner, I take care of my four-footed friend. I take him to the doctor to spend a fortune on his health, drive to special shops for special food, walk with him three times a day, every day of the year, play with him, talk to him, hug him and stroke him, all in gentle and admiring passion of his grandeur. This may sound somewhat over the edge but for many people, including Haraway, this is the reality of having a relationship with a dog. Could this also be the case in relationships with a cat, a horse, an indoor rabbit or any given domesticated mammal species? One would presume. But would the protean relationship also apply to crocodiles, frogs, jellyfish or sharks? Is there a distinction between types of species? To mention yet a third relationship-plausible category: cars, smartphones and other ‘objets des désire’.
But let us return to the basic question if we should be afraid of the future or more precise, the question whether we should be afraid of the increasing number and role of robots and their increasing ability of evaluating through self-learning.
Hawking has joined the Cambridge think tank for reasons of fear. He truly believes that if we keep on the pace of producing robots – robotics that have artificial intelligence and competence of learning that evolves in self-coding – these apparatus will ‘take over’ the world, sooner or later. As a contradiction, one may argue however that it is precisely the human species that produces these apparatus as we both have the necessary technology and the purpose for inventing things. Already in 1991, Haraway had foreseen the consequences of the merger of biological organisms and technology; the merger of cybernetics and organisms: Cyborg.
Obviously Hawking has joined the think tank to develop and deliver ideas on how to make proper use of what we have in terms of bio-merging technology. Suffering from ALS, a debilitating illness that affects the muscle system of a person, he may very well be a Cyborg himself. He strongly depends on technology to be mobile and to express himself. Not being able to produce sound anymore the natural way, Hawking uses a voice-computer to speak and he uses an electronic wheelchair to move around. Making good use of these technologies, Hawking surely understands and appreciates the virtues of technology. But the technology he uses is not very (artificially) intelligent; it does not code itself in order to evolve as it is meant only to do what it was created for in the first place: move a body and produce sound. Hawking himself believes to be in full control of his axillary technology; he is telling it what to do, when to do it and how to do it. Haraway on her turn, even back in the early nineties of last century, described – envisioned – a new species, not human nor machine, an ‘ooloi’ perhaps, to use Octavia Butler’s depiction of the ‘third gender’. Haraway has “come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species, in which reproductive biotechnopolitics are generally a surprise” (Haraway, 2003).
Companionship of other species is not exactly Hawking’s idea of what happens when electronic technology becomes intelligent. Hawking’s ideas about technology are strictly limited to social constructive aids, most likely replaceable machines with not even the tiniest bit of affection to offer, let alone emotion, of any sort; the machines are objects to be disposed of when done with or broken. To Haraway thoughts like these are out of the question. To her, cyborgs are companion species like her beloved dogs: different but meaningful, having ‘obligatory, constitutive, protean relationships with human beings’. For Hawking, there is no relationship with technology other than that it has the purpose of serving human beings, not even as slaves as that would imply a rather negative protean relationship (slaves are human or cyborg).
Perhaps it is as Jean Baudrillard states in his ‘Clone Story’: “Human cutting ad infinitum, each individual cell of an organism capable of again becoming the matrix of an identical individual” (Baudrillard, 1994). But cloning has not been in the limelight since Dolly became a singlet in journals of agriculture. But then, according to Baudrillard, cloning does not retain anything; it is useless, according to him. There is no live and death in cloning: ‘none of this occurs in cloning. No more medium, no more image – any more than an industrial object is the mirror of the identical one that succeeds it in the series. One is never the ideal or mortal mirage of the other, they can only be added to each other, and if they can only be added, it means that they are not sexually engendered and know nothing of death” (Baudrillard, 1994). If this is the case, than there is no need to be afraid of the future as human species will not be cloned, thus eliminating the grand questions of live and death.
So, if at all we are afraid of the future then what is it? Baudrillard suggests we revisit Walter Benjamin’s ‘Art in the age of reproducibility’. If we are capable of reproducing life, Benjamin sees “an ineluctable destiny of reproduction, a political form” (Baudrillard, 1994). And this political form, intangible as it seems to me currently, may well guide the human species into an era of currently unforeseen change. The question rises whether it is politics that must be directive in these dynamics yet a political form of the dynamics, to my concern not the processes, appears to be a sensible thing to do; at the end it is about protocol, accordance over what we not know now what will be not far from now.
Thus remains the question whether we, the people who shape the future for our siblings through acting today, are truly capable of anticipating our future. Is there sufficient and adequate protocol to shape society in such way that all people live in harmony with each other and with their environment?
Thinking about how to construct the future remains operating on thin ice, as there are many paradoxes, many different opinions, believes, even radicalized dogmas evangelized by imposing preachers or forced upon by ‘divine warriors’. It has always been like this and there is a fair chance that it will always remain; nothing really changes.
Technology is truly an object to think with, an imaginary. For some it is utopia, a brave new world where people are served by forms of technology to be invented, perhaps depicted in a sheer endless stream of science fiction displays. To others it is dystopia, a worst nightmare scenario in which machines have reached such levels of intelligence that they overrule all people, invert the roles in hierarchy and slave them. It is just like H.A.L.9000’s intention in Kubrick’s[vi] 1968 classic epos ‘2001, a space odyssey’; had astronauts Bowman and Poole only known that Hal could read lips, the universe might have been a better place.
Let us return to the basic question one more time: Are we afraid of the future? One may answer with a firm yes or no and any answer in between will be a ‘maybe’ in some connotation of strength. It is obvious that there are technological developments on which people have lost grip and in which only a small group of developers and funders are involved. In fact, one may argue that getting ideas and conceptualizing them is nearly always limited to a small group. Let us call them the ‘initiators’. And let us, for the sake of argument polarize Hawking in relative dystopic mode and Haraway in a utopic mode. Apart from answering the question whether this segregation can be justified, we also must ask ourselves whether we do right by it.
Perhaps that such deliberate segregation causes fundamental disruption and, undoubtedly reduction to nothing else than oversimplified popular discourse. Perhaps it is not about what everybody thinks. One may ask if there is wisdom of the crowds. Perhaps Hawking and Haraway as two – most likely unwillingly forced into a role they would not accredit themselves – opponents in technological imaginary have more in common than against each other. In any case, I now believe that the question if we should be afraid of the future in by all means not relevant. What is relevant is the question how we imagine the future and what role Homo sapiens will act. Therefor I propose to question what the human role will be in the future. The answer will perhaps lie somewhere between a human and a humanoid. Perhaps.
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Kazan, C.: Stephen Hawking: “The Human Species Has Entered a New Stage of Evolution” – The Daily Galaxy Top Story of 2009 in: The Daily Galaxy, http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/01/stephen-hawking-the-human-species-has-entered-a-new-stage-of-evolution-the-daily-galaxy-top-story-of.html
Manuela Rossini: “To the Dogs: Companion Speciesism and the New Feminist Materialism”, in: Kritikos: An International and Interdisciplinarity Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sounds, Text and Image 3, September 2006. (http://intertheory.org/rossini)
McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q.: The Medium is the Massage. Penguin Books, London, 1996
Price, H., et al. The Cambridge Project for Existential Risk. http://cser.org/index.html. 2012. Visited January 13, 2013
Rosi Braidotti: “Meta(l)morphoses: The Becoming-Machine”, in: Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, UK: Blackwell, 2002, pp. 212-263.
Sacks, O. The Island of the Colorblind. Random House, New York, 1996
Stonehouse, D., The Cyborg evolution. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/21/ 1047749931869.html, 2003.
Stuhr-Rommereim, H. & Day, M. Intellectual Infection: A Conversation About Donna Haraway. http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/06/features/meaganhelen/ intellectual-infection-a-conversation-between-helen-stuhr-rommereim-and-meagan-day-with-donna-haraway-in-absentia/Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Touchstone, New York, 1995
Turkle, S., Life on the Screen. Touchstone, New York, 1997
Ungerleider, N. Stephen Hawking Joins Anti-Robot Apocalypse Think Tank. http://www.fastcompany.com/3004599/stephen-hawking-joins-anti-robot-apocalypse-think-tank. Visited January 18, 2013
Walsh, N.P. Alter our DNA or robots will take over, warns Hawking in The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/sep/02/medicalscience.genetics September 2, 2011,
Endnotes
[ii] ‘Cyborgs and Space’ in Astronautics (September 1960), by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline.
Worshipping Technology
olivetti.png (1200×900). http://wshiell.net/vintage_ads2/original/olivetti.png
A rather technological deterministic and highly gendered approach to glorify the virtues of technology; worshipping an Olivetti typewriter as in a Roman Catholic In Memoriam Card. Halleluja.
The other day I was challenged to do a pitcha kuchi, twenty slide, each slide on for twenty seconds; the entire presentation taking exactly 6 minutes and forty seconds. Taking Wellman, Marin, Wilson and Ronald Burt as my main resources (with a tiny bit of Sloterdijk), I tried to explain what SNA, Social Network Analysis, is all about. Here are the pictures and the texts.
1. Marin and Wellman say that the starting point of social network analysis is that social life is created by relationship and patterns formed in these relations in which a social network is a set of nodes – say members – that are tied by relations.
2. Network analysts take these networks as the primary building blocks of the social world, they not only collect unique types of data, they begin their analyses from a fundamentally different perspective than that adopted by individualist or attribute-based social science.
3. A social network is a set of socially-relevant nodes connected by one or more relations. Nodes, or network members, are the units that are connected by the relations. It is the patterns of these relations we study.
4. Behavior of network members creates particular outcomes. We are all different but share similar behavior when we act in certain groups. So by studying networks we can explain these macro-level behavioral patterns.
5. Remember the recent discussion? What is a group, a community, a social network? Michelle Wilson has her own educated thoughts that deal with the positioning of nodes, individuals, their networks and agency, the ability to do.
6. Do what? I would say, relate. Social network analysts study patterns of relations, not just relations between pairs of nodes. It is really about the effects of the interaction between nodes, clusters and beyond. I see it as constructions of foam bubbles; amorphous unity.
7. Social network analysis has become an interdisciplinary area of study and is a thriving research area. Network analysts mainly use two perspective to develop theory: Formalism and Structuralism.
8. Formalist theories are primarily concerned with describing the mathematical form of social networks. These theories study the effects of forms, insofar as they are effects on the form itself, and the causes of these forms, insofar as they are structural.
9. Structuralist theories are concerned with how patterns of relations can shed light on substantive topics within their disciplines. Interpretation is like analyzing a football match: from a to b to c to a to d to e etcetera; it is a fluid structure.
10. In any case, the question is whether SNA provides answers to questions like: should relations within and between classes matter, should relations between organizations matter, and do health-related and -influencing relations matter?
11. Some researchers ask what kinds of social networks lead to particular outcomes. These outcomes may include finding a job, a promotion, catching a cold, or what have we. They are Looking at network causes of phenomenon of interest.
12. Others study the effects of particular network properties and positions and the causes of networks and positions like how social interaction shapes social networks, for instance within-neighborhood relations are more likely to form between neighbors who have access to electronic means of communicating with each other.
13. Okay. After collection, network data are used to calculate properties of network positions. Properties are things like the number of relations a node has and how clusters of nodes in a network are bridged. This is what for instance network researcher Ronald Burt calls network anatomy.
14. The social network anatomy is a way to explain networks. If you delineate a network, connectors and nodes have meaning that can be explained. Connected nodes are groups of networked individuals who relate; have relationships with other members.
15. Closure is about developing strong ties, trust, reputation and community within clusters. Trust-builders are able to understand the deep connections that bond people and give the cluster members a common identity.
16. Betweenness indicates the degree to which a node forms a bridge or critical link between other nodes. For instance, some people – nodes – serve as gatekeeper to others or, some serve as gateway to dissimilate information to others: hubs.
17. Closeness is a measure of how easily a node can connect with other nodes. You may approach some people in your network, say at the university, very easily but others may be hard to reach perhaps because of betweenness problems. The question rises if interaction is easier with nodes that are directly linked to you or those further away.
18. Degree is the number of connections a node has to other nodes. For example, the number of people in your family, or on your team at work or the number of friends you have on Facebook.
19. Brokerage is about developing weak ties: building bridges and relationships between clusters of nodes. Brokers are in a position to see the differences between groups, cross-pollinate ideas and develop the differences into new ideas and opportunities.
20. To wrap up. Marin & Wellman say that social network analysis is a paradigm that starts off with the premise that social life is created primarily by relations and the patterns they form. What do you say? Check out this website: http://www.insna.org
Notes on Sloterdijk’s Philosophy of Plural Spherology in the Context of Technological Politics Studies.
In 2009 Boom Publishers published the long-waited-for Dutch translation of Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphären lll. Schäume – Plurale Sphärologie. I was anxious to read it. Spheres lll, as I would call the book in English is the third book of the ‘Foam trilogy’, Sloterdijk’s opus magnum and treat to our understanding of humanity, communities and ‘being there’. For me, Sloterdijk’s writings have become and object to think with in terms of media, technology and culture. The trilogy has a straight forward set up Book l, micro spheres named Blasen (bubbles), book ll, macro spheres named Globen and book lll Plural Spherology named Schaum (Foam). That is the conceptual set up of the trilogy in which we must understand that the three levels of spheres cannot do without each other.
Spheres, or better Spherology is about people and space. It is, as Peter Sloterdijk (whom I shall refer to in this text as PS) calls it a ‘Chronolatery in Space’, a border-transcendent movement, say traffic, in which capital (value creation such as economical, social, democratic and cultural values) is generated. PS wrote “If you are in the world, you are always in a sphere”. And this is exactly the issue when trying to understand what and how new media is effecting our lives and consequently, the regulation of it. Regulation not necessarily means formal law-prescription and enforcement. It may also refer to functional operating systems in which people can participate and feel part of the group, protocol perhaps. Regulation in that sense can be regarded as a projection of security – belonging – and PS’s words lead us, as the projection of security, to the feeling of Immunity, as an individual but also as a group and even further, grander communities (cities, countries, the world). It is, as PS calls it, a creational attempt of the System, the sphere that holds groups together. Immunity systems (foam bubbles) can be regarded as a projection of security. Way back in time, the tribe was the sphere of immunity and togetherness was the metaphysical unity to guard us. Once Christian theology appeared, the human factor disappeared in favor of the appearance of God who now symbolized immunity through unity. Along with fascism and communism, religion is an attempt to create macro systems, in terms of Spherology called Globen (globes). In line with this logic, PS now coins capitalism as the most important macro sphere or Globe.
Apart from eruditely feeding the reader with a sheer endless list of coherent examples of his spherological realism, PS uses the metaphor of foam to illustrate the pluralism and varieties of communal behaviour when peoples live close to each other and the closer we live together, the more and the smaller the bubbles become; a multi-room society, from Globen; foam bubbles on a macro scale like countries or cities to the level of intimate tiny bubbles as representation of our smallest immunity, our room.
In all cases there are communities (clubs, schools, friends) that all form these bubbles and provide resilience thus offering possibilities of resistance to totalization of society. According to PS, this is positive human behavior. But, imperative signals from outside our modern intimate spheres influence us. They do so through media. Ideas, thoughts, whishes can all be misused in macro spheres and may, eventually trickle down to the micro spheres of our individual existence. This is for instance exactly what happens in advertising. On the other hand, there is dynamics in the foam and according to PS this is because we are non-conformists; we do not want to be as the whole, the group, community. We want to be unique. Yet in the strictest fashion of philosophy Sloterdijk states that, on the other hand again, we do imitate each other at the same time; an interesting behavior with the core that we conform not to conform, we show resistance to the community we (want to) belong to yet we are part of that community. PS calls this the romanticizing of the resistance. It is Kynism, the critique of cynical reasoning and most likely the distinctive characteristic of a system period. It is resistance to strange elements that want to inhibit our bubbles. That is why we must be fit in our immune system; a fit system will respond openly and properly, an immune system that is not fit will respond in a xenophobic sense. Fully in line with his metaphor, PS states that too much hygiene and security in a community – please allow yourself a good look at our contemporary state of the union – causes group-autism only to dissolve itself when getting in contact with fearful foes; the system (community) will turn against itself for as people cannot distinguish real threats from false, they cannot distinguish their own misfits. The mogul of the community will fight itself. Originally religious immune systems offered comfort to such an extent that even death was not a real threat (Heaven as the ultimate and ever-lasting Utopia).
But technology became religion’s opponent and more and more people de-slaved themselves from poverty. Perhaps PS uses this in advocacy of social constructivism; Technological Imaginary as an immune system against totalization of communities? In any case, because of technology the wanting, being able and execution are now closer related than ever. It makes us as mighty as God.
To conclude, let me quote Sloterdijk from the Dutch translation on page 598 (translation by me) as he attempts to relativize his self-alleged pomposity of thought and theory: “Let me not arouse false expectations. I would not dare assert that I have understood what the so-called spheres eventually mean. I doubt if I will work with such expressions in the future. It has not become fully clear to me what dyads or multipolar surrealistic spaces are, let alone be able to reproduce how peoples under their canopies, how city cultures behind their immunificating walls and how the liberal populations in their pampering greenhouses live. Anyway, historians are known for not being feeble with abstract ideas. In any case, I am convinced that these vague and grandiloquent theories, with the thoroughness in which I, to be honest, cannot believe to the full, one way or the other fall back on the [mentioned] phase construction I, after long but never disputed trial, hold for grounded”.
Personally I do believe that Sloterdijk’s philosophy of Plural Spherology bears elucidation and metaphor in understanding communities in their habitat and the role of technology and media. But then, I am not a historian.
My rating: ★★★★★ Very good and readable.
Book read: Peter Sloterdijk (2009) Sferen. Schuim. (Dutch translation) Boom Amsterdam. 693 pages, hard cover. Translated in Dutch by Hans Driessen. ISBN 978 90 8506 6750 / NUR 730. Original title: Sphären lll. Schäume – Plurale Sphärologie. Originally published at Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004.
Kees Winkel
