“Amusing Ourselves To Death” by Neil Postman: How The Values Inherent In The Tools We Use Affect Us

By Messan Bokor

In his introduction for Beyond The Valley, Ramesh Srinivasan emphasizes a point central to the following exploration we will conduct of the arguments regarding the nature of our communicative tools and technological inventions Neil Postman makes in Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business. The point he emphasizes is that we need to:

“...do away with the myth that technologies are value-neutral, or somehow inherently positive, and instead demand greater transparency around the values that drive the design, engineering, and business choices companies make...” (4)

What Srinivasan is saying here is that we currently operate under the false assumption that we are the drivers of technology and that the tools we use are just that—tools---rather than what they actually are which is the manifested embodiment of the ideologies, values, and aims of the ones who create and operate said technology. These ideas, values, and aims dictate not only how we use these tools, but also how they use us, or---in other words---the effect they have on their users. Under this false assumption, we have enabled the mass adoption of technology that generally produces negative externalities among its users and within our overall society. Fixing this requires a change in not just the way we view technology but also in how we design, build, operate, and use these tools.

This is very much the central premise of Postman's book as well and, through it, he demonstrates how these inherent ideas, values, and aims manifest in practice and the collective cost we incur when we allow perverse values to shape the technologies we use. Or, as he puts it, the mediums through which we communicate through. Essentially, the basis of the following discussion is an analysis of how we have built and operated our Information and Communications (ICTs), using Postman's book as a point of reference in addition to Srinivasan's book, Whose Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World---which explores the roots of the ICTs we use today and how we can adapt them to better serve our collective global community. Through these two lenses, we can analyze the seeds that birthed the ICTs we use today, the values/intentions that influenced their designed, and the aims that direct their current modes of operation. From this, we can begin to understand the effects they have had on ourselves and our overall society. As Postmans points out:

"...no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are..." (1).

Central Passage

“…that the alphabet introduced a new form of conversation between man and man is by now a commonplace among scholars. To be able to see one's utterances rather than only to hear them is no small matter, though our education, once again, has had little to say about this. Nonetheless, it is clear that phonetic writing created a new conception of knowledge, as well as a new sense of intelligence, of audience and of posterity, all of which Plato recognized at an early stage in the development of texts…philosophy cannot exist without criticism, and writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny…the great literary critic Northrop Frye has remarked, ‘the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination’...

…our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics…the introduction into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock is not merely an extension of man's power to bind time but a transformation of his way of thinking—and, of course, of the content of his culture. And that is what I mean to say by calling a medium a metaphor. We are told in school, quite correctly, that a metaphor suggests what a thing is like by comparing it to something else. And by the power of its suggestion, it so fixes a conception in our minds that we cannot imagine the one thing without the other: Light is a wave; language, a tree; God, a wise and venerable man; the mind, a dark cavern illuminated by knowledge...but our media-metaphors are not so explicit or so vivid as these, and they are far more complex. In understanding their metaphorical function, we must take into account the symbolic forms of their information, the source of their information, the quantity and speed of their information, and the context in which their information is experienced. Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock re-creates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph re-creates news as a commodity. And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself. It has been pointed out, for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not only made it possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belief that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improvable. I do not think it goes too far to say that there is a link between the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century and gene-splitting research in the twentieth.

Even such an instrument as the microscope, hardly a tool of everyday use, had embedded within it a quite astonishing idea, not about biology but about psychology. By revealing a world hitherto hidden from view, the microscope suggested a possibility about the structure of the mind. If things are not what they seem, if microbes lurk, unseen, on and under our skin, if the invisible controls the visible, then is it not possible that ids and egos and superegos also lurk somewhere unseen? What else is psychoanalysis but a microscope of the mind? Where do our notions of mind come from if not from metaphors generated by our tools? What does it mean to say that someone has an IQ of 126? There are no numbers in people's heads. Intelligence does not have quantity or magnitude, except as we believe that it does. And why do we believe that it does? Because we have tools that imply that this is what the mind is like. Indeed, our tools for thought suggest to us what our bodies are like, as when someone refers to her "biological clock," or when we talk of our "genetic codes," or when we read someone's face like a book, or when our facial expressions telegraph our intentions. When Galileo remarked that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he meant it only as a metaphor. Nature itself does not speak. Neither do our minds or our bodies or, more to the point of this book, our bodies politic. Our conversations about nature and about ourselves are conducted in whatever "languages" we find it possible and convenient to employ. We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as "it" is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture…”

Throughout the rest of the book, Postman uses this sociotechnical lens to make the following argument:

“…to say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television…the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation...[there exists] a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture… the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations...

…for although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility…it is my intention in this book to show that a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With this in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now-generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd…” (1)

Breakdown of The Passage

From the excerpts included above, we can draw out three main points that are central to the main argument Postman makes in the book regarding our society and its use of its electronic tools, specifically the medium of television. The first point concerns the nature of tools themselves and the underlying psychological effects tools have on the people and societies that use them. The second point revolves around the nature of information and knowledge, specifically how information and knowledge are shaped by the mediums or “languages” through which we communicate them through. The third point is predicated on the synthesis of the first two points to show that the underlying ‘ideas’ embodied by and conveyed through our tools and mediums affect the cultural fabric of our society and its overall psyche.

To explore the first point Postman makes regarding the nature of inventions we must first recognize that before any invention is brought into this world, there existed a seed from which it stemmed. This seed can take many forms, ranging from aspirations and hopes to pain, desire, and desperation. Whatever form it may take, this seed represents an inherent hope or wish that the creator strives to bring into actuality. The scale of this hope varies in relation to the seed from which it stemmed from. In some cases, this hope is a personal or individualistic hope like a crafter creating a toy to bring his children happiness. Sometimes it’s more of an existential hope like the repair or enhancement of our bodies. In other cases, it’s more of a civilizational hope like the unity and collaboration of all the members of our civilization. Regardless of the scale and nature of this hope at its inception, it will almost always grow and change over time just as the applications for the invention(s) derived from it will grow and change over time. This hope doesn’t just reflect the seed of the invention or the desires of the creator, it also represents an “idea”, as Postman refers to it, that embeds itself and alters the minds of all those it comes into contact with---specifically in the way they perceive and interact with the world.

The example that Postman’s uses in the passage above is the invention of the eyeglasses. While the hope that birthed the eyeglasses centered on fixing a singular aspect of the human condition which is our struggles with vision---it grew to become much more than that---becoming an idea that shifted our perspectives of our entire body by refuting the belief that “anatomy is destiny” (1). This shift in perspective became the roots that grew into various deviations and threads that sowed the seeds for further breakthroughs and inventions in the realm of the improvement of the human body. The shifts in perspective that are produced from the hopes embedded within and the use of an invention are critical to understanding the true nature of a tool and the impact it has on its users and our civilization overall. As mentioned before, the hopes that produce these ideas or shifts in perspectives grow and change over time in accordance with the use of the tool and the various iterations it adopts throughout its lifetime. These changes can often produce completely different shifts in perspectives than the original hope or use. In the passage above, Postman mentions how the microscope revealed to us “a world hitherto hidden from view…[in which] microbes lurk, unseen, on and under our skin…[and showed us that] the invisible controls the visible…” (1). In contrast, a different variation of the magnifying glass tool at the heart of the microscope---the telescope---shifted our perspectives from being that larger world peering into that smaller world to being those microbes lurking, unseen, on and under the skin of Earth peering into the larger world of the universe. While both ideas stem from the same inherent hope of using a magnifying tool to see what can otherwise not be seen, each brings to light different perspectives, or reflections, about the nature of ourselves and our world which led to different impacts on our civilization and its people. This is an example of the profound effect our inventions can have on the individual and overall psyche of our society and its members.

The second point Postman makes that we’ll discuss is an expansion of his first point but specifically in regard to tools and inventions that operate in the realm of information sharing, knowledge synthesis, and communication---tools which he refers to as “languages” or “form[s] of conversation between man and man”. Essentially what Postman points out here is that the “ideas” inherent within the tools or “mediums” through which we communicate with each other, share information, and synthesize knowledge---manifested through their design, construction, and the context/modes of their operation---affect the information/messages that are conveyed with it, the interactions of those that communicate through it, the thinking/behaviors of those that use it, and the psyche of the overall society they exist in. This is because each medium we use to communicate or share ideas comes equipped with preprogrammed ideas, values, and intentions that alter the way information flows through it---no medium operates objectively or independently of the world around it. It is shaped by many factors including the subconscious aims/beliefs of its creator and the context/design of its construction---making it, what Postman refers to as ‘a unique mode of discourse’. As he explains:

“…from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility…” (1).

Postman’s use of the world “orientation” is especially important here because it aptly captures the capacity of our communicative mediums to frame the information that passes through it in accordance with the underlying values and intentions that guided its design and directs it operation. This framing or “orientation” thus affects not only how the user communicates within the medium but also how they receive information through the medium which in turn affects how they digest that information and the changes in their perspectives that develop as a result of that.

To truly understand this connection between the mediums we use to communicate and the psyche of those that use it, we must first analyze the way information flows between said medium, or as Postman states:

"…we must take into account the symbolic forms of their information, the source of their information, the quantity and speed of their information, and the context in which their information is experienced...What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the relation between information and reason? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts, and forms of information require? Does television, for example, give a new meaning to "piety," to "patriotism," to "privacy"? Does television give a new meaning to "judgment" or to "understanding"? How do different forms of information persuade? Is a newspaper's "public" different from television's "public"? How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed?” (1).

To do this requires analyzing the root or seed from which the medium was birthed, the context of its creation, the design of its operation, the modes of its operation, and the hopes, ideas, or subconscious aims that its use embody. To illustrate this point, let’s explore Postman’s analysis of the central focus of his argument: the medium of television.

In outlining how we should approach the analysis of the tools and inventions we are presented with, Postman lays out three essential questions one should ask:

“…when confronted with a new technology whether it’s a cellular phone, or high-definition television, or cyberspace, or the internet, one question should be: what is the problem to which this technology is the solution? And the second question would be: whose problem is it actually? And the third question would be: if there is a legitimate problem here that is solved by the technology, what other problems will be created by me using this technology…” (3).

Let’s start with the first question: what is the problem to which this technology is a solution? In regard to the technological innovation of the television, we often assume that the problem that birthed this tool was related to the spread of information and the propagation of ideas through televised broadcasting. And while this was certainly one of the hopes from which the television stemmed, the reality of the problem that ended up shaping its intended purpose is far more complicated and rooted in the context of its early years. As Postman outlines in his argument, while the original intent of it was the societal problem surrounding the facilitation of the spread of information, the medium of television has been co-opted and distorted by the industry surrounding it in order to address the corporate problem of generating profits through advertising. As he puts it:

“…the [primary] function of television in America is to gather an audience which can be sold to advertisers---that is its fundamental purpose…everyone goes on with this charade that television is informing the public when television, I would argue, is not---it’s amusing the public…this is not a legitimate form of public discourse but is taken right from the values of show business…television is interested mostly in gathering an audience and it does it by keeping people amused…it may even be that television is not a suitable medium for the communication of serious ideas…” (2)

It is critical, when analyzing the operation and use of the medium of television, to understand the distinction between the original problem or aim of finding ways to facilitate the spread of information and the actualized aim of finding ways to mass target advertising in order to generate corporate profits. One makes television a solution to a problem of society, the other adapts television to be a solution to the problems of the corporate forces operating within the industry surrounding television. This change is an important factor behind the television’s transition from being constructed and used as a tool to inform to being constructed and used as a tool to captivate and amuse. As Postman argues in his book, this shift to place corporate interests as the central “hope” behind the medium of television, has distorted that mode of consumption into something that is more conducive for triviality that it is for meaningful discussion/expression. The importance and control of view count and advertising on that industry/medium has shaped how information flows and is presented within it through determining what can flourish through it and what cannot.

Through the prior analysis focusing on the conception of the medium of television and the forces guiding its design, we were able to answer the first and second questions Postman poses. In order to answer the third question though, we must shift our focus to its construction and the modes of its operation; specifically, the format of its programs as well as the way information is presented and consumed through it. The example we will focus on here is the use of commercial breaks within serious programming broadcasted through television.

In short, the use of advertising through commercial breaks within televised broadcasting has had a degrading effect on the flow of information through the tool. The prevalence and importance placed on commercial breaks within the medium has fragmented and corroded the presentation and digestion of information relayed through what would otherwise be deep and serious broadcasts that deserve the public’s undivided attention. This element of television breaks the focus of the viewers and--combined with the fleeting nature of our memory---causes them to forget much outside of the main points of what was discussed before the commercial break. In a comparison with reading in which postman’s describes what this would do to a reader trying to digest a book riddled with advertisements every few pages, he notes:

“…what would happen is that you’d probably throw the book away…or you’d say..’if he wants to engage me in a serious argument then he has to have continuity in tone and in content. He can’t expect a serious reader to read along for five pages and then shift gears to think about Chase Manhattan Bank’…[television viewers] have just accepted that discontinuity is a feature of this medium…the audience is conditioned to this sort of discontinuity…” (2). The past story or bit of information that was relayed to you is instantly “…driven from your mind by the commercial break...making the news stories trivial” (2).

In other words, it disrupts the digestion and synthesis of information by not allowing the time and continuity of thought for this process to take place. Adding to this issue is the fact that some programs like daily news shows are often already quite fragmented due to the fact that they are attempting to fit in large amounts of information within short time frames that are further shortened and broken up by commercials. The end result is that we are left with no sense of continuity regarding the progression of the world and the events occurring in it, hallowing our understanding of the state of our world and its history to this point. Repeated exposure to this leads to desensitization and a detachment from the events happening in the world altogether. Where informational overload paired with disrupted digestion and synthesis of information results in us no longer holding any empathetic connection to the stories we hear and no longer conducting any deep reflection on them. The overall impact of this is that, while the viewers know the general gist of an event, they hold no real understanding of it nor any real attachment to it. This also degrades our ability to learn from these events/stories through introspection and synthesis of new information with prior understandings of our lives and the greater world we live in. Instead, we are nudged to simply move on to the next commercial or story listed on the docket. This is just one example of the problems that have stemmed from the modes of operation and use of the tool or medium of television. There are many other important issues that stem from various other aspects/uses of this medium such as the length of time dedicated to a show or program, or the placement of programs within specific time slots, the emphasis on visuals as opposed to language, the formatting of specific programs like political debates, and so on and so forth. Each of these create their own problems for the viewers like how the constraint of time in regard to serious programs like documentaries or topic discussion shows such as “60 Minutes” leaves little room for deep analysis of issues including background, context, and nuance; which, as a result, leads to an audience that, as Postman puts it, “…[although] knows of many things, it knows about very little…”(1). All of these issues coalesce together to distort the medium that television was envisioned to be at its onset into something that, one can argue, goes against that initial aim of facilitating the spread of information, at least in a healthy manner. I believe Postman frames this well when he states “…I concede that television is a window to the world…but it’s a curious kind of window with interesting distortions and refractions. It presents a fragmented world…” (2). To put it another way, the world that is presented through the medium of television is a caricature of our real world that has been shaped and distorted by the inherent aims and ideas that guided its constructions and directs its operation/use.

In the previous sections, we analyzed the first two central points of Postman’s argument in order to establish that tools and inventions come equipped with preprogrammed hopes, ideas, or values that affect the way they are used and that shape the effect they have on their users. We also established that this is especially true of tools that operate as mediums or “languages” of conversation between members of a society---otherwise known as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)---by shaping the way messages are communicated and received by those that use the medium. We left off our discussion on the topic of how this can affect the psyche of the user through analyzing how the medium of television---specifically the aims that informed its design and modes of operation---affects the kind of messages that can flourish through it as well as the way its viewers digest and synthesize the information they receive. In this section we will expand this focus from just the effects television has had on its viewers to the effects this medium has had on our overall society---namely in the way we view our public discourse and the manners through which we conduct it.

To quickly summarize Postman’s argument concerning this, the television---through its mass adoption and use by the members of our society---has come to be the main form of public discourse that our society uses to communicate and share information. In becoming this, it has come to define the very nature of the public discourse by dictating the forms through which our conversations take place and filtering the types of conversations that can and cannot flourish, or even exist, within it. As he explains:

“…the new media, with television at its center… [has] altered, changed, all the forms of public discourse into the forms of entertainment…now its not just politics and political campaigns, but its news, its religion, its commerce, its education---as this is filtered through television…[it is distorted in order] to change what we mean by politics, to change what we mean by debate, to change what we mean by information---that’s serious…we have a new definition, as a result of television, not only of what a debate is but also what a discussion is…television very subtly alters our definition of discourse…” (2)

By changing and conditioning us to new forms of public discourse, television has also subtly changed our views---and very definition---of the topics that this public discourse covers. One example of this that Postman uses to highlight his point is what the television has done to politics through altering our definition of political discourse and debate. He points out that prior to the television, political debates were conducted differently with less restrictions on the time given to a candidate to explore the issues of the time and more emphasis on the contents of their responses rather than how they looked or came off to the audience. A good example of this that Postman points to is the Lincoln-Douglas debates which lasted about 7 hours in some instances. Compare this to the debates of today which give a quarter of that time to candidates to address the biggest issues of our time. Just this alone diminishes the complexity of thought and nuance a candidate is able to put into their response and greatly deteriorates what the viewers or audience can gain from watching such discourse. This is seen even more clearly when you fast forward to today where our presidential debates seem to be almost entirely centered on sensationalism and commanding the spotlight rather than the effective communication of ideas. Just this subtle change to the form of the public discourse concerning political issues can result in drastic changes within our society like determining the outcome of a presidential election. This also effects how our society views politics in of itself by injecting the values of show businesses into how we view and approach political issues which can manifest in either consciously or subconsciously like finding a nuance discussion of an issue boring or paying attention to how a candidate looks as he or she is speaking. If our true aim was to use this medium to enhance the quality of these debates and facilitate the spread of the information/messages conveyed through them, we would not place time restrictions on such important discourse nor would we riddle such an important discussion with ad breaks that break the continuity and flow of the speakers. We would even make televised broadcasting a free service for candidates running for office---a free medium to address citizens and share what one has to offer to this country. Unfortunately, however, this is not the way we operate this medium. This highlights the third central point Postman makes in the excerpts above through exemplifying how the underlying ‘ideas’ embodied by and conveyed through the design and operation of the tools and mediums we use affect the cultural fabric of our society and its overall psyche;

“…for although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—the forms of our media…the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation...[there exists] a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture… the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations…I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter. Their warnings have customarily been directed against those consciously formulated ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies in human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology…It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion, and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years. For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?...” (1)

I mentioned earlier that, one can argue, the current realization of the television goes against its initial intended purpose of facilitating the spread of information because of the manners through which it conveys messages. Rather than informing the public, this medium actually hurts our ability to be actually informed by giving us a false sense of reality through distorting and caricaturizing the messages/information it conveys in ways that hinder the audience’s ability to digest and synthesize information. It also fails to adequately and accurately present the information it attempts to relay to its viewers because, as Postman puts it, television "…is not a very good medium for providing people with context or background, or even implication...”. To further make his point concerning the effect this medium has had on our society, Postman compares the state of discourse within America before and after the introduction of the television:

“…under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now-generally coherent, serious and rational...[now] under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd…” (1)

All this results in the tool of television---and the forms of media stemming from it----creating an adverse effect on the overall health and psyche of our society as opposed to the original goal of uplifting it and becoming the bedrock for what many referred to as the “ideal information society” based around the ubiquitous access and spread of information. While we did end up creating an information society, it was not one that predicated on the mass distribution and integration of information but one that predicated on the mass use and manipulation of information for the purposes of harvesting attention and data which can be used for financial gain.

Relating This To The Digital Technological Revolution & The Mediums Of Today

Now that we have outlined the process of analyzing and understanding the underlying nature of, the inherent messages/ideas contained within, and the resulting individual/societal impact of our tools, we can continue with our discussion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). With our understanding of the impact of the television in mind, let us move on to the next progression of ICTs: digital technology---specifically, the computer and the Internet. The Internet is an extremely complex tool with innumerable aspects to examine---a number which is still growing today as we continuously find new applications for this tool. It would be nearly impossible to analyze the impact of the Internet as a whole so, instead, we will focus on just the mediums of communication that were created for the Internet. The specific set of tools we are referring to here are the mediums birthed through the Digital Technological Revolution, namely digital platforms. Before we dive into digital platforms, however, let us explore the context of their conception and creation by analyzing the ideas and values that birthed and fueled the Digital Technological Revolution (DTR).

In the past section, we left off discussing the hope of the television being the initial bedrock for what was envisioned to be an “ideal information society”, where the expansion of the individual’s access to information allowed for more rational and more efficient decisions to be made, resulting in a better society overall. Though being one of the seeds of the birth of the television, this hope or vision went far beyond just that tool; it was one of the central visions behind the societal shift that the Digital Technological Revolution became.

If you were to ask the average user of the internet today what they think the seed or hope that gave rise to the internet was, you would probably hear some form of the following response: “the internet was created as a tool that could serve to connect humanity”. While they would not be wrong in that assumption, it fails to capture the complete picture of the problems, hopes, values, and ideas that gave rise to the Digital Technological Revolution and, in turn, influenced the design, operation, and use of all the tools that came from it---including the internet and the mediums of communication that stemmed from it.

The internet was, in large part, a connective tool. It was intended to be a central pillar of this “ideal information society” through its unprecedented capacity to help us share information, communicate with each other, and collaborate regardless of time and distance. This is something that Ramesh Srinivasan examines closely in his book, The Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World, which discusses the need to deeply analyze the values and aims that go into the design and construction of digital technologies in order to better understand the impact they have on their users and adjust them to better help underserved people and communities within our “Global Village”. In detailing this original ideal that fueled the birth of the DTR, Srinivasan references the work of Clary Shirky, a sociotechnical and socioeconomic writer, stating:

“…indeed, Clay Shirky, a writer who analyzes the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, extols the virtues of these examples, arguing that new technologies provide ‘access to conversation’ placing ‘more ideas into circulation than ever before…changing society’. No longer can an idea, document, or the ‘social life’ of information be viewed solely relative to local place; instead, communities can in theory now be formed across shared interests with larger numbers of participants than ever before…” (5).

But as is commonly the case with these types of tools and mediums, and as just seen with the example of the television, this ideal that accompanied the birth of the technologies of the DTR---including the internet and much of the tools built around it---were distorted by the societal/market forces and philosophies surrounding their conception in such a way that the resulting society they created was not one that predicated on the mass distribution and integration of information but one that centered on the mass use and manipulation of information. To be more specific, what we are referring to here is the adaptation of the tools of the DTR from connective tools used to facilitate collaboration to storage devices used to harvest and manipulate data for the aims of those who operate and govern such tools. This distortion has not led to the creation of a connected, informed, and collaborative digital environment but rather one shaped by “…technological surveillance, invisible labor, and the disproportional ability of the limited few to monetize data...” (5). In order to understand how this came to be, we must go back to the source of this distortion which actually begins hundreds of years before the start of the DTR---The Enlightenment Period. Throughout his book, Srinivasan reviews this history in-depth, writing:

“…to explore the belief systems that shaped an understanding of knowledge that has long dominated the design of many technologies and especially databases, it is useful to explore some key figures within the Enlightenment. They emerged in Western Europe during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Aristotelian "natural" philosophy began to be overturned in favor of empiricism, a philosophy that rested on the belief that knowledge could be articulated through the activities of collecting, comparing, and calculating…we now recognize that the concept of the "public" was quite limited, including males, the upper middle classes, and educated people, yet excluding others. This is a reminder that can also be applied to our contemporary thinking of technology…

…constructionist theory is posited on the belief that knowledge is generated through social interactions, whether between individuals or with a mediating artifact. This approach toward technology design differs significantly from Enlightenment-era paradigms described later in this chapter that privilege the accumulation of facts, control of the setting where knowledge is produced (e.g., the laboratory), and the derivation of postulates and scientific facts a priori. These have greatly influenced the development of storage and collection technologies, and the classification systems that drive most databases…[that treat] knowledge [as simply something that] is to be represented, stored, and communicated. By treating knowledge as a static set of objects to be managed, indexed, classified, and communicated for posterity, many technologies came to represent a far more limited set of epistemologies than what could otherwise have been…

…historian of science and museum studies scholar Robin Boast has worked to uncover the "ghosts in the machine" of twentieth-century digital technologies. He argues that in addition to their ties to Enlightenment-era concepts, digital technologies today can be viewed in relation to a history of telecommunications that dates back to the industrial era of the nineteenth century, when data storage and the dissemination and production of documents became critical…Boast points out that by looking at the history of computers and digital media, we can see a struggle between competing discourses of Computation and Archiving. He argues that "computing technologies" differ from "storage technologies." The former involves the use of analog instruments to make mathematically precise measurements. This mathematical precision lends itself well to analog technology that represents actual signals rather than bit-based approximations. The technologies of today speak to the ambivalence between these distinctive value systems and practices. While the Internet supports real-time communication, it also features a number of technologies devoted to storing, indexing, and classifying massive amounts of data. An important moment in the history of technology occurred during the 1950s when storage and preservation were preferred over computation. This followed from a philosophy that embraced collecting, accumulating, and centralizing information as a central social tenet, which in turn was tied to the colonial legacies of Western museums, archives, and libraries…we thus see two destinies for technology in this period—one which treats technology as computational and process-based, and the other which sees it as a means by which information can be stored, recorded, preserved, and archived. This is an example of sociotechnical thinking in action...” (5)

This philosophical and epistemological legacy is, in large part, the basis for what would later become a shift in the ideals and intended purposes of many digital technologies by societal/market forces that switched the focus of their design, construction, and operation from building tools for communication and collaboration to primarily creating storage devices for the use and manipulation of information recorded as data. While both aspects of digital technologies---“computing” and “archiving” as termed above---are necessary in some part for the operation of the internet and the tools/mediums built upon it (the preservation and classification of data can even be a strength when information is stored and archived correctly in order to create a historical log that can aide future research and better inform decisions), this emphasis that was placed on the storage, archiving, and classification of data resulted in massive hyper-specified datasets built off of the tools of the DTR that were prone to the manipulation and abuse of the societal/market forces surrounding them for the advancement of corporate interests and informational governance. A development that is characterized accurately by Srinivasan’s reference to Adam Curtis’s 2007 film, Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, detailing how the values of the market---with the help of misaligned technology---was able to overwrite the importance of the “voices and perspectives…[of our] diverse constituencies”:

“…[within the film] Curtis explains how political philosophies of the early 1980s (in the United Kingdom and United States) shaped a world where politicians surrendered to the free market under the ruse of supporting individual freedom. 'Transcendental Western concepts such as liberty and freedom were subverted by a system that supported the protocols of elite scientists and technocrats. By blindly trusting numbers, surveys, and black-box technologies, Curtis explains how the public lost an alternative notion of freedom that trusted in the voices and perspectives of its diverse cultural constituencies…” (5)

This hyper-focus that was placed on information storage and manipulation of data greatly influenced how our digital tools were built and operated---essentially turning them from connective tools to capture and storage devices designed to fuel predictive analysis for the purposes of generating monetary value and controlling the flow of information within them. A development that has culminated in changes to our digital technologies in accordance with these new interests and purposes manifested through the introduction of---upon other things---intrusive harvesting methods, mass accumulation/sale of user data, reductive classification methods with the aim of influencing users, and restrictive algorithmic mechanisms overlaid upon our use of these tools for the purposes of informational governance. The introduction of these mechanisms and objectives---which I give a broad overview of within this article---altered the very nature of these tools; effectively destroying their connective and communicative capacities in favor of algorithmically governed closed-loop ecosystems predicated on controlling the flow of information and influencing users for profit.

This shift in values and objectives had a tremendous effect on how these tools and mediums were used and created an entirely different impact on our digital environments and overall society than initially hoped for. This is where our discussion circles back to the argument Postman made concerning the design, use, and impact of the television. To reiterate, Postman argues that by adapting the medium of the television for the purposes of advancing corporate profits, it transitioned from being constructed and used as a tool to inform to being constructed and used as a tool to gather an audience in order to mass target advertising through the captivation and amusement of its viewers. This development closely mirrors the change that has happened to the operation and use of our digital tools and platforms. Due to the unprecedented capacity that the above mechanisms gave to the operators of these technologies to control information. target ads, and influence users for profit---the focus of the environments and mediums built upon these tools shifted from being open spaces where information can flow freely to being attention harvesting machines that use addiction and escapism to pull and hook users into closed-loop ecosystems custom tailored to keep them within the machine or, in order words, to captivate and amuse users. To frame it in other terms, in the same way that the television was distorted by the corporate interests of the television industry for the purposes of the captivation and amusement of its viewers for profit, our digital technology and the mediums of connection/communication they enable have been co-opted by similar interests for this same purpose; except, with digital technology, the capacity to capture attention in order to target advertising has been supercharged leading to not just captivation and amusement but rather escapism and addiction. This shift has had a deteriorating effect on the quality of our digital environments, the public discourse conducted within them, and the psychological health of its users which has, in turn, resulted in disastrous consequences for the overall health of our society. We will thoroughly explore the impact these technologies have had on us, our society, and even our entire civilization in two upcoming publications which will be posted to Crescere Nexum titled: The Gap Between The Digital World & The Real World: How The Digital World Is Eroding Our Real-World Experience and Meaningful Growth & Impact: Redirecting The Power Of Digital Platforms Towards Better Outcomes.

References

1. Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Television. New York, NY: Penguin Random House LLC.

2. Postman, N. (1988, January 22). Life And Career Of Neil Postman. (B. Lamb, Interviewer)

Interview: https://www.c-span.org/video/?7-1/life-career-neil-postman

3. Postman, N. (1995, July 25). Neil Postman on Cyberspace, 1995. (C. Gault, Interviewer) Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49rcVQ1vFAY

Original Source: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_507-2r3nv99w5k

4. Srinivasan, R. (2019). Beyond The Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

5. Srinivasan, R. (2017). Whose Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World. New York, NY: New York University Press.