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Issue 3.01 | Jan 1995

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Revolution in the Revolution (continued)

Mediology tends to take a very long and very broad view of how technologies might influence the transmission of ideas. What can it tell us about our own preoccupation with the impact of technology today?

Giuseppe Verdi once said, "Looking back at the past is a real sign of progress." In my opinion, futurologists such as Alvin Toffler tend to overemphasize the thread of technological determinism in history and then project it into the future.

The technologies of transmission - writing systems, printing presses, and computers - do not necessarily drive changein a predictably specific direction.

It wasn't the invention of the mechanical clock that modified the medieval conception of time; monasteries needed a timekeeper for their religious rituals, so the clock became a plausible technology.

In the same way, a given technology can lead to very different effects in different mediaspheres, as the invention of printing attests. Although wood-block printing first developed in China, it did not evolve into moveable type, presumably because it was more appropriate to a calligraphic tradition.

In Europe, however, wood-block printing appears to have led almost inevitably to our Gutenberg culture of typesetting and print shop. There is no fatality about the given effects of what appears a natural advance to any specific technology.

What, in your view, is missing from the manifold debates on the history of technology development today?

What I call the jogging effect. When the automobile was industrialized, futurologists said that people would develop atrophied legs from sitting cramped in their cars all day. What happened was commuters put on Lycra shorts and started running on their lunch breaks.

Each technical step forward means a compensating step backward in our mind-sets. Islamic fundamentalists don't come from the traditional universities deeply rooted in a literary educational system; they graduate from engineering schools and technical colleges. Last century, some futurologists foresaw the end of national wars under the influence of spreading railroad lines and electrical telegraphy; others believed that industrialization would wipe out religious superstition.

In fact, an imbalance in technologies tends to provoke a corresponding refocusing on ethnic values.

France has taken much flak over GATT and its "cultural exception" clause for film production. You waged a friendly, if uncompromising, duel with the free-marketeering Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, over what is at stake in this issue of media dominance. How does a mediologist view the high-culture-versus-pop-culture issue?

Just as the concept of biodiversity seems to be developing into a general concern for nature, so I think we should negotiate a contract for mediodiversity in a mediosphere that is continually threatened with increasing uniformity of content because of the spread of global networks.

The contrast between commercial entertainment product and cultural artwork reveals two competing world views. Commercial entertainment products meet consumer needs, whereas cultural objects create their own audiences, often against the grain of current taste.

The Nielsen ratings not only spell the demise of filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini or John Cassavetes, they also write the coda to an essentially Enlightenment vision that puts the quality of artistic mind over the quantity of box-office matter. Simply put, movie studios like Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers might be good for the US, but there is no reason why they will be good for humanity as a whole.

As Thomas Edison said a century ago, "whoever controls the film industry will control the most powerful influence over people." And today that means everyone on the planet. Images govern our dreams, and our dreams drive our actions. Seeing Easy Rider or Mourir à Madrid (To Die in Madrid) or Citizen Kane can change a kid's life. But 320 different types of cheese or wine won't, however much the studio bosses suggest that America makes movies and France sticks to gastronomy.

Political dominance always means that you kill off other ways of seeing things. By transforming three-quarters of the world into a cultural proletariat, you will make people of this class into more determined rebels in the 21st century. Far more determined, in fact, than the economic proletariat has been in the 20th century.

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