Pre-TV humanity

William Gibson's novel Neuromancer has stirred some of my first-year level university students to protest that they just don't know how to deal with something like this. I think they refer to the genre issues--science fiction and cyberpunk. Not to the real book, printed page medium, but as I get older, that too becomes a possibility. Today in a senior course, I watched a student read his class presentation from the screen of his iPhone.

Gibson and I are both early baby-boomers. He is all of four months and a day my senior, which means we do have a few formative experiences in common.  In an article called "Rocket Radio,' first published in Rolling Stone in June 1989, but recently republished in Distrust That Particular Flavor, Gibson writes of one of those experiences:

 "I belong to a generation of Americans who dimly recall the world prior to television.Many of us, I suspect, feel vaguely ashamed about this, as though the world before television was not quite, well, the world. The world before television equates with the world before the Net--the mass culture and the mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human."

I hate to disagree with my elders--I was taught to respect them, mainly by my elders. But I don't feel that way at all. Either of those ways: ashamed, or once having been other than human.

Oh, I have a smartphone, complete with a data package, so I carry my e-mail, Google maps, and the Internet with me everywhere I go these days. I don't use Twitter yet--but I suspect it's coming. Who wouldn't?

Some of my colleagues at work, apparently.

Last week I was at a meeting of just before middle-aged to middle to somewhere past middle-aged academics (I saw a motto tile once that said that the most difficult decision a person makes is when middle age ends and old age begins. I admit to late middle-aged. I'm not on Old Age pension yet--but the government recently sent me the application forms, completely unasked for. I haven't yet filled them in.). One was telling us how he uses various forms of newer technology to help him handle his large-enrollment classes. He lets the shy ones Twitter him their questions, rather than force them to raise their hands and speak in front of a large audience. But others, while not exactly admitting to electro-Ludditism, declared their ignorance of and disaffection towards such things as Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other options. Some don't even like using the classroom computer equipment, in case it reduces eye contact with their students. I asked how much eye contact I have when I have my back to the class filling the board with notes, compared to looking over the top of the monitor?

One didn't even carry a cell phone yet, let alone a smartphone. Maybe that's why he finds the technology so easy to dismiss. Even if he had one, just a straight cell phone is just not that useful or intriguing, anyway. I didn't begin to get value for my monthly bill until I got a smartphone.

All I know is that I would have been so fascinated by the equipment when I was a kid, and why if then, would I  not be so fascinated with it now? Found it useful then, why not now?

I'm not too old to be able to learn or use or appreciate this stuff. It's the kind of thing I would have nagged my parents mercilessly for when I was a kid. Like I sort of did for them to get a television, even if I could always go to my friend Elliott's to watch Walt Disney on Wednesday evening, right after supper. (You might recall Elliott from "Dressing for Church," some postings above. Or below.)

Always with my younger brother Bob in tow (though Elliott wasn't even his friend except on Wednesday evenings), I'd show up at 6:29, knock on the door and ask if Elliott wanted to come out to play. Elliott was always just getting ready to watch Walt Disney. Did we want to come in to watch with him? We always agreed: "Okay." We kept right on agreeing until some time about 1956 or so, when a huge, ungainly tv antenna sprouted on our roof, to join the aluminum forest above the family quarters at the RCAF base in Claresholm. Bigger antenna above, to pick up Calgary: smaller antenna below, to pick up Lethbridge. Until a Chinook wind took the top part off one night, and we became Lethbridge (CJLH) viewers only. But that was enough. We were not dependent on Elliott anymore. We had our fake fumed oak cabinet, GE 21-inch, black-and-white window on . . . something.

In one respect, though, variety, radio was and stayed better, at least until cable and satellite. We could pull in stations from all over North America on a good night in winter. Two respects: our radio had a record player built in. 


But I'm never going to experience, or admit to, any feelings that the me who listened to Saturday and Sunday morning story hours on the radio, who played kids' 78 rpm records to scratchy ruin, was any less human than I would claim to be or feel now.  That's got to be Gibson over-reaching for rhetorical effect. Or I hope it is.

Life pre-television and pre-Net was every bit as human as life with it.

In 1926, Tesla predicted: "When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance."


True enough. But being able to communicate across larger distances more quickly does not make us more human. Wanting to communicate across a larger representative portion of the human race, to tell our stories to a bigger audience and to hear the stories from a larger community--that is definitively  human in the first place, and has nothing to do with the technology we have--more to do with the reasons we develop new technologies, new means. Greater flexibility of means is not the same as changing ends, of redefined traits. The technology just makes it possible to achieve our eternal human ends on a larger scale.
Some of a more nostalgic outlook might even  insist that life pre-TV and pre-Net was more human, but that is a whole other argument. Better? Worse? Or just different? I'm with the last option, except on evenings now when there just is nothing worth watching (that's definitely disappointing), and I don't feel like getting behind this keyboard and reaching out (that's making some space and time just to be me in isolation. Or its laziness). At those times, I sometimes read a book. Like Distrust That Particular Flavor. 

Tribalisms and truths

Rob Shields makes the point in his foreword to The Time of the Tribes, by Maffesoli, that aesthesis, in the classical sense, had to do with truth and beauty, or truth and correctness, not in an absolute sense but as defined by collective experience and consensus. It wasn't really news that beauty was a matter of consensus, and subject to shifting and differing community standards. A short walk through any shopping mall with a large population of young people will show that there are all sorts of ways to present oneself or makes oneself presentable, even within a generation. It was rather more surprising to hear that truth and correctness were subject to debate. I felt like Diane Keaton's character, Erica, in Something's Gotta Give, when she complains to Jack Nicholson's character, Harry, that he has deceived her. He answers, "I've always told you some version of the truth." She howls back that "the truth doesn't have versions." But, of course, she is wrong. Armies of spin doctors out there live with that convenient truth every day.

           I think what Shields is getting at is related to something Leslie Marmon Silko says about the role of story in helping build consensus, or maybe it's the ways consensus relates to stories, in traditional Pueblo cultures. Maybe in many such tribal cultures? Story telling has two functions: a) to define and preserve tradition (i.e. to define and reproduce cultural norms), and b) to accommodate change. The Pueblo, Silko explains, "sought a communal truth, not an absolute. For them, truth lived somewhere within the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points, outright contradictions tangling with old feuds and village rivalries" ("Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination").

          Tribalism is no longer a village thing, however, not something set by geography, blood and marriage ties. We do not live in a single, reasonably homogeneous tribalized culture anymore, and have not for rather a long time in urbanized North America (or pretty much anywhere else in the urbanized world). We are in an age predicted by Tesla and given a name by McLuhan. Tesla, in a 1926 interview in Colliers Magazine, predicted: 

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

Picking up on something like this idea McLuhan in, Understanding Media (1964): said “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself into a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” And somewhere along the way mentioned the "global village" in an era of tribalism mediated by electronic technology: "...electronic technology creates not the nation but the tribe."

In effect, as I see it, electronic technology creates not the tribe, but multiple tribalisms--a lot of villages one can be part of from one electronic centre, a centre that moves when we do (or when our shirt pocket does--though doctors advise us not to carry those devices so close to our hearts). Maybe even a lot of different kinds of villages. And it creates different ways to belong, electronically.

       What am I saying about "friendships" negotiated through Facebook, if people who are in that tribe (or in a  tribalized group within the bigger world of my Facebook friends) are not something or someone I'm following on my Twitter? And if they are or are not in my "Contacts" list on my cell phone? Or in my e-mail? Or even in the hard copy notebook I carry such information around in? Do my different social media/electronic and non-electronic communications devices, that let me reach out and touch someone, not only connect me with different tribes, based on different loyalties and interests? Do they also create different kinds of tribes through the different ways they mediate the connections?  Am I tribalized different ways by every medium I tribalize through? Even if the same person or persons are members with whom I associate via different media, are my tribal relations different in each case?

        If so, are the truths open to me and the beauty I can be exposed to and levels of correctness I can reach some kind of consensus over, different because of the different webs and socially mediated, electronically programmed conventions through which I seek consensus?

       Somehow the idea of epistemes begins to gnaw at the corners of my curiosity. What are the unexamined norms the different tribalizing media make me party to?