Critical Mass

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Mass Communications

Critical Mass The emergence of electronic media with dynamic content is changing, and has already changed, the perceptions and modes of communication that have for centuries transmitted and maintained a unified culture in the West. Many of the characteristics that are so uniquely Western -- institutionally, physiologically and culturally -- can already be observed to be in a state of crisis as the society as a whole integrates wholly new means of communication. In the May 2, 2008 issue of The Wall Street Journal, an article titled “How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language,” reports the recent findings of neuroscientists. Looking at magnetic resonance images of the brains of children who read English and also Chinese, scientists found that different parts of the brain are stimulated differently by their respective alphabets. The article concludes: Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception … No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization. “Once you have different writing systems in place,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. “They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove” (Hotz).

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Mass Communications To paraphrase the findings reported in the article: “The actual character of the text

itself may shape the brain”; these changes affect “cultural differences” in perception; and, these cultural differences are “reinforced” in each generation by the learning of writing. Also of import in the article was the mentioning of the skills needed to learn to read and write in different cultures: “To learn the ABCs of English, we essentially harness our listening skills to a phonetic code. To become literate in Chinese, however, we must make much heavier use of memory, motor control, and visual-perception circuits located at the front of the brain” (Hotz). This is to say, different senses are stimulated by the different languages which in turn stimulate different regions of the brain, but the primary interface with the media occur at the senses. If the differences in just the characters in alphabets can have such profound implications in creating and sustaining cultures, then it is reasonable to look at the broader characteristics of an alphabet to understand its effects on a society. Juxtaposed with the ideogramic characters of Chinese, the Latin character set used in English is much more visually abstract: the letters represent nothing seen in nature, and even the phonetic sounds that they do represent are abstract and meaningless in themselves. Even though the code is based on the older phonetic medium, the English language, even when compared to other European alphabets such as Italian, is much more visually independent (Hotz) -- everyone is familiar with the prohibition of sound in a library. Furthermore, the English alphabet is a linear code. As opposed to a Chinese character that may represent an independent concept, words in English, while having a definition, usually must be in the context of other words to communicate a concept.

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Slight deviations in the “code” can significantly alter the meaning, and therefore letters and words are placed in a logical sequential order: A precedes B precedes C. Finally, the alphabet, especially the printed book, as juxtaposed with newer media, is static – it does not change. In the 1960s, a communications theorist working at the University of Toronto in Canada named Marshall McLuhan began looking at the characteristics of print media and found similar characteristics in Western culture. Physically the printed book, an extension of the visual faculty, intensified perspective and the fixed point of view. Associated with the visual stress on point of view and the vanishing point that provides the illusion of perspective there comes another illusion that space is visual, uniform and continuous. The linearity, precision and uniformity of the arrangement of moveable types are inseparable from these great cultural forms of Renaissance experience. The new intensity of visual stress and private point of view in the first century of printing were united to the means of self-expression made possible by the typographic extensions of man (Understanding Media, 172). Leonard Shlain, in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, further elucidates the differences between ideograms and typography: Images are primarily mental reproductions of the sensual world of vision. Nature and human artifacts both provide the raw material from the outside that the brain replicates in the inner sanctum of consciousness. Because of their close connection to the world of appearances, images

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Mass Communications approximate reality: they are concrete. The brain simultaneously perceives all parts of the whole integrating the parts synthetically into a gestalt. The majority of images are perceived in an all-at-once manner. Reading words is a different process. When the eye scans distinctive individual letters arranged in a certain linear sequence, a word with meaning emerges. The meaning of a sentence, such as the one you are now reading, progresses word by word. Comprehension depends on the sentence’s syntax, the particular horizontal sequence in which its grammatical elements appear. The use of analysis to break each sentence down into its component words, or each word down to its component letters, is a prime example of reductionism (Shlain, 5). The use of communicating using all-at-once symbols, such as hieroglyphs, is the

habit of a culture that perceives nature holistically. Holistic orientation is the mark of an aural, as opposed to visually oriented culture. The ear has not the ability to focus, like the eye. It does not quantify, it cannot. Our sense of equilibrium comes from the ears, and equilibrium is an orienting of oneself in space – equilibrium is holistic. “Even our ideas of cause and effect in the literate West have long been in the form of things in sequence and succession, an idea that strikes any tribal or auditory culture as ridiculous, and one that has lost its prime place in our own new physics and biology” (Understanding Media, 86). Newtonian physics and calculus describe the world until radio brings a new sense of spatial orientation with Einstein and relativity. Of prime importance in the function of literate communication is the “literalness” of the content. The Western world has exerted a phenomenal amount of energy into

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quantifying and categorizing data and information with the intent of minimizing ambiguity. Dictionaries and biological and botanical volumes have been meticulously manufactured for this purpose. That is, like the stoic printed letter, the definitions of our words are static, and standing opposed to the flux of nature as experienced.i The etymological root of the word authority is derived from author (Harper), and it is easy to see that the content of books is authoritative, not least for the fact that the content does not change; and when the printed book was still a novelty, it is not hard to imagine the great unconscious effect the form had on the European mind, as evident in the language and institutions that resulted from this new medium. Aside from any neurological effect that the Latin alphabet may have on the young student’s developing memory and perceptions, the static nature of print content creates an orientation with symbols that is highly defined – or “hot” to use McLuhan’s terminology: “[…] hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience” (Understanding Media, 23). Thus, after four centuries of print-based education, the relationship of the student to the information presented in books creates a uniform dynamic. By not having to participate by “filling in” informationii on the book page, the book and the author become i

In reference to Linnaeus, the botanist who created the binomial nomenclature system for naming plant

species, Raoul France once said: “Wherever he went, the laughing brook died, the glory of the flowers withered, the grace and joy of the meadows was transformed into withered corpses whose crushed and discolored bodies were transformed into a thousand minute Latin terms” (Tompkins, 108). ii

That is, it is not the imagination that is being used when interacting with symbols, as with the electronic media – it is the semantic circuits. This is the fundamental difference between the hot print and a cool media like radio. Radio retrieved the tribal pathos in Europe in the 1930’s, and the Romantic myths of Germany in particular.

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the sources of information, while the student’s primary task is to “match” the correct meaning to the correct symbol. This is not to say that critical thinking is de-emphasized, much to the contrary. Critical thinking is actually enhanced by this process, for “reading is a complex and peculiar task. At the speed of thought, readers of English turn letters into sounds, sounds into words, and words into meaning” (Hotz). This is what Tony Schwartz, in his book Media: the Second God refers to as “perceived” media, which he distinguishes from “received” media, namely, electronic media. The difference between perceived media and received media is critically important. It requires skill and learning for a person to understand most perceived media. Nearly everyone understands received media. In addition, perceived media require time to be understood. Received media are instantaneous. As a result, people react to received media, whereas they interact with perceived media (Schwartz, 18). Or again from McLuhan: “Perhaps the most significant of the gifts of typography to man is that of detachment and noninvolvement – the power to act without reacting. Science since the Renaissance has exalted this gift which has become an embarrassment in the electronic age, in which all people are involved in all others at all times” (Understanding Media, 173). Although McLuhan’s assessment of the involvement experienced by the new instantaneous electronic media may have been premature and extreme, the observation of “acting without reacting” to print is important. To understand this, it is necessary to

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recognize that the use of print media requires thinking – or rather, stimulates the faculty and centers the awareness at thought. Taken to its extreme, as McLuhan points out, the result is dialectical thinking, wherein it becomes possible to distrust all sensual faculties but the linguistic and to say with conviction, cognito, ergo sum. It is also important to recognize that the nature of English thought is to quantify relationships with and between objects in a lineal-visual bias, and that this habit of thought is not the only one available to man: Perhaps there are better approaches along quite different lines; for example, consciousness is regarded as the mark of a rational being, yet there is nothing lineal or sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness […] Yet during all our centuries of phonetic literacy we have favored the chain of inference as the mark of logic and reason (Understanding Media, 85). As Schwartz points out, the content of electronic media requires no specialized training (with exceptions today, of course, presented by the computer – an aggregate of many older mediums), and the tendency towards total involvement with the media – an immersion in the content – is critically important as the user does not need to “match” meanings with the author. In fact, quit the opposite is true. Take, for instance, the story told by the media critic Michael Arlen in Thirty Seconds about the making of an AT&T “Reach Out and Touch Someone” commercial. In one version of the commercial, a group of men have gone off to a rural retreat for a weekend of fishing. The weekend is a

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Mass Communications disaster; it has been pouring rain the whole time. We see the men huddled in their cabin in the woods, cooking hamburgers, while one of them talks to friends back home, singing the praises of their manly adventure. The man on the phone is staring into a frying pan full of hamburgers while he says into the receiver, “Boy, you should see the great trout we’ve got cooking here.” When test audiences were asked what the men were cooking for dinner, they replied overwhelmingly – trout…” (Graber, 197). In a chapter titled “Meaning in Motion,” James Lull writes of the enduring

success of Madonna: … [Her] fame and fortune do not result from any inherent personal characteristics. Nor can her achievement be attributed to a media blitz, no matter how expensive. Madonna’s success comes from the widespread acceptance of her multiple fan bases. Madonna is the queen of polysemy (many meanings), and the more polysemic (or open-ended) the text, the greater the popular potential […] This kind of large-scale semiotic and cultural activity is what John Fiske calls “production of the popular.” People choose, combine and circulate media representations and other cultural forms in their everyday communicative interactions and in doing so produce meaning and popularity (Lull, 140) [Italics added]. In other words, she changes; she lacks a static definition – she’s “cool”. It is appropriate that the word “icon” should be retrieved in the popular vernacular to refer to these multi-meaning figures.

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Mass Communications The consequence is that communication in the literal sense becomes more

difficult. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the classroom, where the “hot” lecture is presented to an audience conditioned to making meanings. Students today have a difficult time meeting the teacher on his grounds; they have no patience for long explanations. Students desire to “paint” the words with their own colors, becoming producers themselves. This results in relativity. In a philosophy class a few years back, the lecturer defined philosophy as the search for “truth”. “But there is no truth,” replied a student, with murmurs of agreement around the room. This is a profound cultural shift of perspective. What the student was saying, essentially, was that everything changes and that there are no constants. In addition, the student did not perceive the professor’s definition of “truth”. But what has happened in the interval between the birth of the professor, an elderly man, and the young, early 20’s student? Technology, for certain. The immersion in an environment that is as dynamic as to transcend space and time as media content does today has further consequences for the distancing of the young from their host culture. “In the new cofigurative society, messages flow horizontally within generations rather than vertically across generations – in other words, this society follows the communication patterns of the media, a pattern that isolates as it connects” (Schultz, 56) [Italics added]. The media in themselves are information transferring devices, exchanging electromagnetic waves or bits of information via optic wires; they have no concern over what is traditionally termed “content”. As more people spend more time engaged in these data

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transferring machines, the tendency appears towards favoring the sensation of sensual stimulation as opposed to any real pragmatic use of the information. In the formulation of the “cofigurative society”, anthropologist Margaret Mead observed that sub-cultures arose around shared content – content that is not localized or time-bound – with the effect of an “increasing cultural gap between parent and child” and a “crisis of authority” (Schultz, 58). Why is it that in a group of people, one usually observes the majority talking on cell phones instead of their neighbor? The preference for the phone is not hard to understand; the phone places a foreign space in the aural sense – it is another dimension quit literally. The odds are the phone conversations are not always more pertinent than a conversation that could be had with the person standing along side the phone user; the implication is that content in a conversation is subordinate to the actual experience of the phone itself. “Did you ever get the sense that there’s something fishy about the way people speak these days,” begins a newspaper article on the topic of “phattic” phrases. ‘“They’re ways of establishing or ending contact that don’t really mean what they say,” Toby Miller, chair of UC Riverside’s department of media and cultural studies, says. […] The phrase “Have a nice day” is a “classic closing instance of phatic communication”’ (Han). Phatic communication is just another example of the manifestations of the postliterate society. Phatic phrases, as opposed to emphatic phrases, are polysemic in nature and are used more often in communication than just opening and closing conversation.

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Mass Communications One needs look no further than cliché-riddled text-messages for affirmation of this

statement. As McLuhan predicted as early as 1981: “[…] electronic-messaging […] quickly converts alphanumeric text into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs” (The Global Village, 103). Parents tell me their kids have invented a language that older folks do not comprehend. They've perfected a form of shorthand -- or short thumb -- to dash off cryptic messages on their laptops and cell phones. Good for them. My generation invented the twist (Bernstein). Children now grow up in a communication environment of polysemic symbols, much like that of their Chinese counterparts, with predictable results. A research study that was published in the journal Pediatrics in 2005 was covered in USA Today: Human brains change very rapidly in early life, says UCLA neuropsychologist Elizabeth Sowell, and animal research shows that stimulation can “rewire” the brain. Things happen fast on the TV screen, so kid’s brains may come to expect this pace, “making it harder to concentrate if there’s less stimulation,” says study leader Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle […] Educators may need to change their methods to keep the attention of stimulation-saturated children, says Los Angeles media psychologist Stuart Fischoff. “Rather than seeing these kids as pathological, maybe we should see them as adaptive, pointing the way to how our society is evolving. Brains may be changing, and we don’t know if it’s going to be bad or not” (Elias).

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Mass Communications Rationality, defined as a logical “line” of inference, has been the mark of Western

man for four centuries. The heavy use of print media concentrated awareness at the thought faculty (the frontal lobes) and detached thought would dictate a man’s actions. A language oriented culture made great advances out of necessity and through the sheer power of the repeatable and static printed page toward shared meanings of its symbols. Fragmentation of time from space, and people from culture result: The social and cultural transformations ushered in by the spread of printing presses and books cannot be overestimated. As historian Elizabeth Eisenstein has noted, when people could learn for themselves by using maps, dictionaries, Bibles, and the writings of others, they could differentiate themselves as individuals; their social identities were no longer solely dependent on what their leaders told them or on the habits of their families, communities or social class. The technology of printing presses permitted information and knowledge to spread outside local jurisdictions. Gradually, individuals had access to ideas far beyond their isolated experiences, and this permitted them to challenge the traditional wisdom and customs of their tribes and leaders (Campbell, 351). This was the result of the demands of print media; reading words requires a mental process by which the reader must reconstruct meaning from a linear sequence of abstract symbols that, in order to work, require an emphasis on definition. This communication environment and the culture that was a by-product of it have been squeezed into a small space by the newer media environment. The newer media, by virtue of its flux of content and multi-sensual presentation does not require – and indeed,

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makes difficult – a critical and thoughtful interaction by encouraging reactions. Also, the electronic media audience develops an increasing personal autonomy over the forms representing data, or content, reversing the traditional roles created by the book environment. Awareness need not be centered on the linguistic faculty, and the sensual nature of electronic media enhances different dynamics of consciousness. With decreasing emphasis on the “intellect”, patterns of social communication change and the content of conversation becomes less important than “feeling” the other person.

That’s All, Folks

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