onfocus

I'd like to review Tom Standage's book The Victorian Internet, but I know I'm going to end up talking about Neil Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood (again) instead. Oh well.

The Victorian Internet is a history of the telegraph, from the 18th century optical telegraph to the electrical telegraph that eventually wired the globe. The book looks at many of the personalities and conflicts that shaped the worldwide development of the telegraph—especially Samuel Morse—and describes some of the early cultural impacts that instant global communication had. It's an entertaining read filled with stories about entrepreneurial inventors, brilliant (and not-so-brilliant) engineers, code-breakers, telegraph operators, and a general public at the time who just didn't get this new technology.

By titling the book The Victorian Internet, Standage invites readers to draw parallels with our newest global communication network, and there are plenty to find. One of my favorites is the predicted demise of newspapers. In the early 1800's, news was local, and any other news travelled at the speed of ocean liners and horses. Newspapers devised elaborate schemes like meeting large ships in the ocean with faster boats or using carrier pigeons to get the news first. When the telegraph appeared, one newspaper man said, "The telegraph may not affect magazine literature, but the mere newspapers must submit to destiny, and go out of existence." He assumed the new speed of news would make print too slow for breaking news. In reality, the telegraph was a boon to Newspapers, and the public fell in love with the novelty of news from around the world.

The most striking parallel that Standage hammers home is the euphoric feeling people had that this technology would bring about world peace. Here are a few quotes from the time:

"It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all nations of the earth." - Briggs and Maverick, The Story of the Telegraph, 1858

"...the telegraph wire, the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing the causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world." - a toast to Morse, 1868

"...the touch of the telegraph key welded human sympathy and made possible its manifestation in a common universal, simultaneous heart throb...indicitive of a day when science shall have so blended, interwoven and unified human thoughts and interests that the feeling of universal kinship shall be, not a spasmodic outburst of occasional emotion, but constant and controlling, the usual, everyday, abiding feeling of all men toward all men." - Scientific American, 1881

Wow. One frustration I had with the book is that it offers up example after example such as these with love for the telegraph with little contemporary criticism. Addressing this, Standage offers:

Unfortunately, the social impact of the global telegraph network did not turn out to be so straightforward. Better communication does not necessarily lead to a wider understanding of other points of view; the potential of new technologies to change things for the better is invariably overstated, while the ways in which they will make things worse are usually unforeseen.

And that's about it! (That paragraph could be the synopsis of a good book.) He doesn't go into the ways the telegraph potentially made things worse. I thought some criticism was coming, with chapters titled War and Peace in the Global Village, and Information Overload, but rather than exploring criticisms these chapters show how the telegraph worked for good in various areas. Part of the problem is that we're living in the world the telegraph created and any critical history is also critical of our uses for technology today. Maybe looking at its potential downside should be work for social critics (or science fiction authors) rather than historians. But I feel like the title of the book invites comparisons with the Internet, and almost exclusively showing historic boosterism for the telegraph doesn't help us make informed decisions about today's technology.

I know the only reason I'm this cranky is because I happened to read The Disappearance of Childhood at the same time. Postman covers the history of the telegraph, but includes some of its discontents:

It is alleged that upon being told that through the telegraph a man in Maine could instantly send a message to a man in Texas, Thoreau asked, "But what do they have to say to each other?" In asking this question, to which no serious interest was paid, Thoreau was directing attention to the psychological and social meaning of the telegraph, and in particular to its capacity to change the character of information—from the personal and regional to the impersonal and global.

Now Postman is seeing himself in this (maybe apocryphal) story because he's critical of the changes mass communication brought to our culture, including his predicted demise of childhood. But I think this skepticism is healthy, and it's something missing from many conversations about new technology.

I think one of the biggest changes the telegraph brought (that Standage alludes to) is the possibility of centralized control of large organizations. The telegraph (and following electronic media) made transnational corporations possible. And it brought the ability to galvanize (control?) the public like never before. After all, the telegraph not only spread information at the speed of light, but disinformation as well. There have been negative effects from this, but it's hard to imagine the world any other way.

I'm an unashamed Internet-utopian, but I think it's important to keep the potential downsides of communication technology in mind so history doesn't repeat itself. The early days of the Internet helped wrestle some control away from the established info-controllers. After all, you're reading this and it wasn't approved by any centrally-controlled organization. But I think that centralized control is still a possibility. And if we simply end up shifting the control of information from a handful of corporations to a different handful of corporations, have we accomplished anything?

In the end a fun read, but it doesn't fully address the dark side of the telegraph's legacy.

ps. The stuff about the steam-powered pneumatic tubes was awesome.

pps. Happy New Year!

I'm still alive! And if I had time to blog, I might post stuff like this:

• Eddie is doing great. Two months old, super chubby. Loves eating and sleeping. Hates gas.
• Last month Machinist had a nice summary of How Comcast blocks your Internet traffic—another reason network neutrality should be set in legal stone.
• How about those Google coalitions of the willing? What happened to open standards? And when will we get open cell networks, already? Walt Mossburg nailed the reasons why we need this in Free My Phone. Google's entry into the cell world isn't disruptive at all.
• But hey, I dig Gmail's IMAP. I'm using it everywhere now—especially on my iPhone. And the Google can block spam like nobody's business.
• I was quoted in a Baseline article about Yahoo!: YaWho? (In the section Accentuate the Positive.) Basically I said that I liked Yahoo's REST-based Web APIs, and I was disappointed Google shut down their Web APIs. I do, and I am.
• I love this picture of an Alaskan lake with aurora.
• sk and I have been reading lots of parenting advice on Ask Metafilter. The following questions have been particularly helpful:
  • Ways to keep being the rock for my family?
  • Good advice for a new dad.
  • How to play with a newborn?
  • How do I stay sane while home all day with a newborn?
• And yeah, my work at MeFi is going well. Did a fun Twitter thing a while back to go along with the Flickr thing. Lots of behind-the-scenes stuff going on now.
• I want to be Neil Postman when I grow up. I'm loving his book Disappearance of Childhood. It's a crash course in media history, how media affects our concept of childhood, and how literary and visual cultures differ. And to go along with that, I'm reading The Victorian Internet about the history of electronic communication. The book opens talking about France's network of optical telegraphs in the early 1800's—fun!
• Next up on my to-read list is Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, Books on Fire, and The Plague.

Until next month (probably), have fun without me.

I have a guest post over at Hackszine today: Hacks Authors' Blogs: One Feed to Rule Them All. As the name implies, I describe how I threw together a master list of blog feeds by authors in the Hacks Series. I think it'd be fun to compile a list of blogs by Hacks contributors as well, but those names aren't as accessible.

I extended my review of The Consumer Trap from a week or so ago for J.D.'s excellent personal finance site, Get Rich Slowly. You can read the longer version here: Book Review: The Consumer Trap.

I recently read the Penguin Classics version of Aristotle's Poetics, and holy crap, why didn't anyone force me to sit down and read this sooner? In college I minored in Film Studies and English, and I thought I had a good introduction to deconstructing texts through those years of classes. Little did I know I've been missing a core way to think about stories.

A great book about giving presentations is Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson. (I've mentioned it here before: Public Speaking.) Atkinson has a very useful system for telling a story via Powerpoint that's based on some of Aristotle's ideas in Poetics. He mentions that a couple times in BBB. I've put together a few presentations using the advice in the book, and the ideas were very helpful. So I figured ad fontes (I often think in Latin, heh), and picked up Poetics. I also recently read Eco's Name of the Rose, which tangentially featured Aristotle.

I know next to nothing about Artistotle beyond the fact that his books are sort of teaching notes on various subjects, and only a few survive today. I'm also vaguely aware that Aristotle and Plato had two different ways of viewing the world that continue to split our collective psyche to this day. (Something about Plato's love of ideal forms vs. Aristotle's favored observation of the real world.) I guess this basic understanding kept me from reading Aristotle. Why would I want to read some half-finished ideas? I figured the ideas were probably so remote, abstract, and ancient that they wouldn't have much relevance to me. So I had low expectations going in. I figured I wouldn't even be able to understand it.

I read the introduction to Poetics by Malcolm Heath, and I got quite a bit out of it. Of course it's very dry and academic, but it did help explain some sort of consensus of thinking about Aristotle, some of the issues raised in Poetics that people have been struggling with, and some of the context in which Aristotle was writing. But the real value was Poetics itself.

Aristotle shows how Greek tragic plays like Oedipus are most effectively constructed. He contrasts tragedy with comedy and epic a bit, but Poetics is focused on tragic stories as a form. And he wasn't so concerned with plays as they are performed, but as they are written. So his thoughts translate well to any type of story.

The overriding idea I've been thinking about since reading this is that stories, art, any media we consume, is an imitation of reality—and this imitation is trying to evoke an emotional response so we can identify with it. (And I've been thinking about this in relation to advertising, especially, which are really little stories that evoke emotions about products.) Aristotle says that tragedy should evoke fear and pity, and discusses the best way to evoke these emotions: by having normal characters go from good fortune to bad through no fault of their own.

Aristotle places quite a bit of emphasis on social status which is sort of taboo in our society. And it's a bit uncomfortable to read. But now that I've seen stories through Aristotle's eyes, I can't help but see changes in fortune and differences in status in stories everywhere. It's like seeing a fundamental building block of the content I continually consume for the first time. And this is why I can't believe I haven't read it sooner. I know this sounds obvious, but character status, arc through the story, and emotions evoked should be the first step in analyzing a story. I've found it's very useful when watching a Youtube video, reading a blog, or looking at a billboard to think, "What emotion is this work trying to evoke?" This step back seems so clear that I should have been doing this all along. But analyzing for Aristotelian effectiveness is quite a bit different from "Hot or Not", Love/Hate decisions about stuff I consume.

Anyway, this is my attempt to sit you down and force you to read Poetics, because I wish someone would have made me do it sooner. There's a lot more than what I've described to get out of it, and I think it will help you think about media in a new (old) way.

A few years ago I put together a list of books about media that have helped me understand different pieces of our culture. I'm currently reading a book that I'm officially adding to my Guerilla Media Literacy List. The Consumer Trap by Michael Dawson sounds at first like a personal finance book, and I suppose it might affect readers' buying habits in some ways. But the book is really an examination of the business systems that influence and direct our off-the-job lives.

Before reading this book I was very aware of standard marketing terms such as branding, differentiation, distribution channels, and targeting. I was even aware of psychological advertising methods that were pioneered by Edward Bernays, explored by folks like Vance Packard, and are in heavy use today. (Check out the excellent documentary The Century of the Self for a crash course in psychological advertising.) So I considered myself fairly familiar with the Marketing Machine. But reading Dawson's book brought together these familiar concepts and many more new marketing tools into a complete, coherent picture.

The book starts with a history of both marketing and marketing criticism. Dawson introduced me to Frederick Winslow Taylor, who used methods from science to organize business, and Thorstein Veblen, an economist and early critic of corporate business practices. In one example of scientific observation, Taylor attached lights to workers, filmed them as they worked, and found ways to make their movements more efficient. Taylor's ideas about engineering work environments, objects, and people's actions lead to companies taking a similar, scientific approach to people's off-the-job, product-related activities as well. Veblen, on the other hand, coined the term conspicuous consumption and found that corporate marketers were using "force and fraud" to engineer people's activities in a form of absentee ownership that has existed throughout history. These two figures set up the tension that exists throughout the book.

At times I couldn't tell if I was reading a critique of marketing or a how-to manual. But I think a big part of being a literate media consumer is understanding how the system works. Dawson shows that marketing is about much more than advertising, and that it's marketing that decides which products are produced. He describes marketing strategies such as differentiation between equal products, planned obsolescence that increases the chances someone will buy a new product before an old one is used up, and elaborate packaging that extends the brand.

I don't think we can be completely free from the forces of marketing, and we probably wouldn't want to be. But a greater awareness of the carrots and sticks that are out there can help us make informed decisions. If you're interested in how your media environment influences you on a daily basis, you are the target market for The Consumer Trap.