by Kevin Walker
University of California, Berkeley
1991
In looking at any technology in an evolutionary context, it is easy to fall prey to technological determinism. Any study of human-created technology or institutions must take into account social forces, and these include both human intentions and the unintended results of human action. The latter -- "the result of human action, but not the execution of human design" in Adam Ferguson's words (in Hayek 1967:96) -- may be further subdivided into two components: the unintended results of individual human action, and the results of two or more individuals separated by time or space. If such results do not serve the intentions of the actor or actors, then whose intention do they serve? The answer lies in evolutionary theory: the intentions serve the institution -- even the technology -- under consideration, and beyond that, they serve the entire human species. Hence my hypothesis is that communications technologies evolve (guided by human action) in such a way to unite all humans. That is to say, it is to humans' adaptive advantage to have such a communications structure so that any human anywhere on the planet can communicate with any one or more other humans anywhere else.
This communications system, which is constantly being assembled, and which includes written, oral, visual and "ideological" communication, is intricately linked to the simultaneous globalization of economic, political and cultural forces. A brief look at the communication process will help make this clearer. Then, I will turn to the evolution of communications technologies to date, the structure of the media, their unintended consequences, and the trend toward globalization. Finally, I will look at what the future might hold. Note that this formulation is purely theoretical and partly speculative; and in practice, human actions (intentional or not) have confounded expectations. Also note that this paper only affords a brief overview.
Theories of the communication process tend to include the same elements; I follow Joseph Dominick's (1983) version. A source (one or more persons) initiates the process by encoding a message which is transmitted to a receiver (or receivers) who decode the message. The receiver(s) then may send coded feedback in return. "Noise" or interference may delay, change or stop the message. Coding may involve anything from forming gestures or words to the use of sophisticated computers. The sender and receiver must share the same coding equipment, (whether a common language or similar electronic gadgetry), in order for the process to be completed. Still, this doesn't guarantee that the sender's message is recieved as intended. The meaning of the message is formed both by the sender and the receiver: it is based on the subjective interpretation of the sender's message by the recipient. Different individuals may interpret a given message differently based on their knowledge and experience (Leiss, Kline and Jhally 1990:199-205).
Looking at communication in an evolutionary context, one can see that there has been a multiplication of both code systems and of "noise". Where once there may have been only oral or gestural codes, now there are written codes, intricate visual/symbolic codes and an array of mechanical encoding and decoding equipment. More and more communication is mediated: it passes through "filters" of technology and institutions which affect the message.
Human-engineered technologies are usually invented to fill some need, and serve to help humans adapt in some way to their physical and social environment. Communications technologies allow people separated by space or time to communicate, and this may involve one-to-one or mass communication. Natural selection may be applied to both the technologies and messages, or "memes" (Dawkins 1989). First let us look at how the technology has evolved; the focus is more on mass media rather than point-to-point communication, though the former is gradually moving toward the latter, as will be seen.
It is not known whether humans first used oral or visual communication; perhaps both evolved simultaneously. Anthropologists generally agree that the genus Homo had oral language capability. The earliest signs of graphically recorded ideas come from the caves in southwestern Europe, some 35,000 years ago. Pictographic writing is thought to have emerged in the Near East around 4,000 B.C.
For communicating over long distances, humans carried messages of whatever form, utilizing transportation technologies to carry them further and faster. Social factors increasingly required communicating a message to a number of people, and this was first accomplished by either gathering the "receivers" in one place or sending the message out to them via one or more carriers. Writing proved enormously helpful in this regard, and it also allowed for ideas -- memories -- to be preserved. Agricultural societies with written language outmatched those with only oral-based communication, economically and otherwise. "Even the thought processes of individuals themselves (and hence their values and behavior) have been modified by the depersonalized, decontextualized, linear, analytical, logical, objective qualities of print which oral communication alone makes difficult if not impossible" (Dator 1989:363).
The invention of the printing press greatly facilitated mass communication, since it allowed for a message to be easily and cheaply replicated. Communication now became a commodity. Industrial societies -- those with the mechanically-produced word -- outpaced agrarian ones, economically and technologically. After all, to inform is to educate, and to paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, no literate society in the world is poor, and no society with high illiteracy is particularly well-off.
The handiness of the printing press soon became well known, for about a century or so later, the newspaper appeared. The newspaper, summarizing a broad range of information and goings-on daily or weekly, was in fact the first mass-produced commodity, and the first disposable commodity. And it was widely disseminated: William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer helped "democratize" information by introducing the "penny press" in the 1830s. In the same century came the telegraph, telephone and radio, freeing the flow of information from being carried by humans. Film and television weren't far behind.
We might look back to see a series of "great men" who invented all these gadgets, most of them working in their own self-interest. But we necessarily view these accomplishments from our own frames of reference and with the benefit of hindsight. It must be remembered that each invention was the result of years of accumulating knowledge and technology, and the inventors' intentions weren't necessarily grand in scale, with an eye toward betterment of the human race.
Take the case of Guglielmo Marconi, renowned as the inventor of wireless communications. He simply built on the work of Heinrich Hertz, who had built on James C. Maxwell's work, and so on. No genes passed between these men, only "memes". Yet genes may well have played a part in Marconi's fortune, albeit indirectly. For it was Marconi's mother who took him off to England, and later America, to sell her 23-year-old son's invention. Should she perhaps be given evolutionary credit? Also, Marconi originally intended radio to be used only for point-to-point communication; it took some enterprising individuals at General Electric to see the commercial applications of the medium.
The evolution of communications, like that of any science, is a successive layering of knowledge, application and mutation. Yet the layers are not distinct. There is a "dialogue of forms" between media: Newspapers borrowed the writing style of personal letters; magazines combined the styles of newspapers and books; radio took on the characteristics of theater (it was originally billed as "theater of the air"); and television has cannibalized aspects of all previous visual and audio media (Leiss et al 1990:96).
In each case, aspects of the previous medium have lived on in the next. Further, the previous medium has either adapted or become extinct. Television has monopolized so much of people's time that radio adapted by making itself useful where TV could not go -- into cars. Both radio and magazines have been forced to take on adaptive strategies which have involved specialization. Behind these changes are human forces: advertisers chose to shift to TV because it gave them greater reach and hence greater profits; they acted in their own self-interests and had no intention to bankrupt the magazine or radio industries.
An important facet of the development of media is their ability to store memories. Cave walls in France and Spain hold memories of thousands of years ago, which we cannot fully understand because we lack the "decoding system" of the painters. From the time of the cave paintings, communicators have become increasingly skilled in visual representations. With pictographic writing, visual signs took on an additional symbolic quality, and required more sophisticated coding abilities.
Preservation of ideas and realities progressed through photography (literal visual representation), and sound recording (literal audio representation) to film (literal representation of movement and sound). In each case, the preceding medium has adapted into another form. Visual art, instead of attempting true-to-life replication, now mainly tries to portray what photography cannot. Sound recording is now mostly used for preserving music. Yet each continues to stretch its range of representation. Soon after the invention of photography for instance, it was discovered that pictures didn't have to be "taken"; they could be "made". The memories preserved on the "literal" media, we have discovered, are not necessarily "real" after all.
This is tied to the social relations behind each medium, and that generally means power relations, which usually involves manipulation of some sort. As Todd Gitlin says, "Technology opens doors, and oligopoly marches in just behind, slamming them" (1985:332). Every medium is inevitably linked to economic factors. Advertising supports most media in the U.S., and increasingly the world over. But behind ads are companies full of individuals who make and sell products for the individuals who watch the ads (and also the content that exists to attract them to the ads); so viewers indirectly support the media and ad agencies as well as consumer-product firms.
Due to the primacy of the economy, advertising is a "priviledged discourse": individuals define themselves mainly through goods, or rather, through consumption of goods (Leiss et al 1990:1). Advertising fulfilled companies' need for repetitive, compelling communication with large numbers of potential customers. There is a trade off: Because advertisers pay for the media, it comes relatively cheap to the general public (provided they continue consuming goods), so in a way this system provides for a "democratic" flow of messages. The messages in magazines, newspapers, on the radio and TV are overwhelmingly related to consumption, since this is what drives the economy. Because people in free-market economies consume so much, the commercial media have received enough revenue to steadily expand to all parts of the globe.
Advertising itself may be regarded as a communications innovation. In America, it greeted the waves of immigrants who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Deprived of their respective cultural traditions, immigrants could look to the world of consumption to find a common identity here. Commercial communication spawned several innovations: for instance the skillful condensation of ideas, language and imagery; and an unprecedented breadth of thematic and social references. A simple slogan like "See the USA in your Chevrolet" combines notions of freedom, country and car in a few words, provided one consciously or unconsciously "decodes" it properly. Other such slogans continue in the culture as folk sayings.
Advertising unites people. The Sears catalog, beginning in the 1890s, became farmers' vital link to the urban centers, and they eagerly awaited its arrival, often reading most every word (Leiss et al 1990:71-79). Advertising blends art and science in the name of commerce; like magic or religion in other societies, it promises intangible effects and operates in society's most important sphere, in this case the sphere of commerce.
Let us turn now to the messages which travel over advertising-supported media. First it should be noted that the "codes" used on them include not only verbal language, but also visual and ideological (memic) codes. It is increasingly recognized that verbal communication is inadequate for full expression, and in fact this has been supported by legal sanctions of "symbolic speech" to include advertising and acts such as flag burning.
Visual codes dominate television and magazines, and it is possible for one to be "functionally" illiterate yet be able to decode sophisticated visual imagery, that is, to be "visually literate". Ideologically, memes take on a life of their own over the media. Because of the scarcity of time and space available, there ensues competition. Memes that garner more "air time" or space in the print media will have a better chance of having social effects. In addition, memes (as cultural elements) are continually recombined, which accounts for much of the repetition of formats and styles on television (see Gitlin 1985:63-85).
Scarcity is not the only determinant of memic competition in the media. Because communication is mediated through technology and institutions which are intimately linked to the economy, messages pass through "filters" which admit some memes and not others. These filters are linked to social, cultural, economic and ideological factors. Fortunately, there are a sufficient number of media outlets that there is some diversity. But in the case of television, the search for profits may stifle this: The advent of cable TV brought promises of tens, even hundreds, of diverse channels, but many new networks have simply repeated the practices of the "big three" broadcast networks, or have taken one element (like sports, old movies, news or soap operas) and extended it to 24 hours a day. This has speeded the fragmentation of "audiences" already underway, and now a fan of sports, for example, can gorge himself on it and watch nothing else (See Gitlin 1985:325-335). Individuals, with their own scarce time, can choose between sources of information. Here I can offer a personal example: I subscribe to several magazines, but in order to devote more time to my studies, I'm forced to abandon one or two. I'm contemplating a choice between The Economist, a fairly conservative British weekly, and The New Republic, a slightly left-wing American weekly. My choice will affect the information -- the memes -- I receive, and potentially could affect the shape of my views.
The trend toward fragmentation, which comes with the spread of media, has already had profound effects. It has been both a symptom and a cause of the parallel trend toward "tribalism" or "multiculturalism", a strategy of diversity and separation more profound than sheer individualism. "If in the schools, the American consensus is now contested by battling ethnic tribes, the consumer consensus has broken into the agendas of lifestyle tribes, each with its own totems and taboos" (Goldman 1991:27). The driving forces behind this are the economy and the collective public: Researchers measure the public's needs and desires, communicate them to corporate sponsors, who bend to the public's will for the sake of garnering profits; the circle of influence goes from the public back to the public, helped along be economic forces.
The most profound effects of the media, however, come from globalization, and especially noteworthy are the unintended effects. For example, an event occurs in Location A, is carried via television to Location B, where a reaction ensues. The reaction was the result of collective human action: that of the actors in Event A, the camera crew filming the event, the network executives who decided to carry it, the Location B TV station executives who decide to air it, and the reactants.
To take the hypothesis to the extreme, one could implicate the inventor of the video camera, the inventor of the satellite which carried the picture, and all the genes and memes which led to their respective achievements. Suffice it to say that the diffusion of information has reached a high level. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, 68% of the U.S. population knew about it within 30 minutes (Defleur and Dennis 1988:480). In the recent coup in the USSR, it is evident that this diffusion was much broader and much faster. The key invention in this case was the Cable News Network (CNN). The flow of information around the world continues to increase exponentially.
But the concept of diffusion presupposes that there is a center where messages originate (see Trigger 1990:194, 255). In the case of CNN, it picks up messages from around the world. Other messages originate where the media's economic center is, in the U.S. "Mass mediated culture" (Real 1971) originates in America, which is evident in the fact that this country's second largest export is entertainment.
Predictably, such a culture is tied to consumption. Theodore Levitt (1983) makes a distinction between "multinational" corporations and "global" ones: Multinationals conform to the idiosyncracies of individual countries to sell their good there; global firms project a single message everywhere. To transcend language barriers, this message must be visual and ideological in character. So global advertising, for example, stresses the "lifestyles" of certain demographic groups (which tend to be similar across all industrialized nations), and appeals to underlying, "universal" motivations.
This also meshes with fragmentation, as demographic groups are more narrowly defined. The effects of globalizing marketing strategies are profound: they can alter consumption patterns (including food and health practices), affect economic and political development, and can spread desires faster than reality allows satisfaction. Eastern Europe provides a case study. It is well-recognized that television played a key role in the democracy movement there. Take the case of an Albanian trying to flee to Italy. He said he had seen on TV a house cat eating from a silver bowl, and he assumed that all cats in the West must do so, and so humans must have commensurately better lives. What he saw, of course, was an ad. But his unfamiliarity with the rhetorical excesses of advertising prevented him from accurately "decoding" the message: he lacked a "visual literacy".
What, then, might the future hold? What will be the effects of a "global culture" united by communications? Technology today promises that the effects will be truly unfathomable. Computers now combine video, audio, text and illustration on a screen. They have merged with telephone lines to link the world in a powerful web of data. Fiber optics, (or perhaps some as yet unknown technology) will allow transimission of more sophisticated data. New "virtual reality" technologies allow one to become immersed in an entirely computer-generated environment.
Some scholars predict a new species of humans, or even a "post-human" species. Jim Dator (1989) predicts that "global culture" will supercede "every existing national, regional, linguistic/religious/ideological culture". The new global culture, he says, will eliminate the "pathologies" of "normality", "correct" ways of behavior, national identities, the concept of "ancient" culture, and ethnocentric ignorance in general.
Also, he says, "gerontocratic" cultures of the West will be superceded by global (especially Third World) youth culture which has no real past: "As 12- to 15-year-old children continue to have children of their own, each youth cohort is rapidly replaced by still more and younger persons each creating cultures which diverge from those of their 'elders'" (Dator 1989:362). The U.S. will be "saved" by the continuing influx of young immigrants from the Third World, he says. "Media literate" or "post-literate" societies will outpace writing-based ones, just as writing-based ones outpaced oral-based ones before.
Theorists such as Yoneji Masuda (1985) go further to suggest computer production of intelligence, and cultures of robots, cyborgs and "prosthetically/genetically engineered" humans -- a new species which he names Homo intelligens. Communications will flow on autonomous data networks. The new life will be post-human, but originally human-generated, Masuda says. "Computers won't think like humans but will think." Dator counters that some humans will resist, and choose to remain Homo sapiens (Dator 1989:364). Who will be "selected"?
Such speculation is tempting given the rapid and parallel evolution of communications and computer technologies, but ultimately the confounding factor is human will. I will venture an observation of an emerging trend, that of the "democratization" of communications. A symptom of this is the spread of video "camcorders" which are allowing "literal" views of slices of life rarely or never seen. Linked to this is a trend toward openness in communications. This is evident in the post-Cold War trials of the CIA: open communications have become more "adaptive" than covert "spying" (Ignatius 1991). Witness also the rise of CNN, which is now used for spying, diplomacy and propaganda, before the eyes of millions around the world.
The underlying theme is that access to information for all means that more people can potentially solve problems of humanity. This involves universal literacy of both the written, visual and ideological kinds. Whether a global net of communications will aid the human race in living longer, or adapting to a world which is increasingly of its own creation, is unknown. Again, the confounding factor is human action, intentional or not, individual or collective. Will machines ever have a "mind" of their own? In an adaptive sense, they already do. But thus far, their "minds" are linked to humans'.
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