HU520: A Review of Deibert's Chapter 1.

Deibert, Ronald J. (1997). Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia:

Communication in World Order Transformation, New York: Columbia U. P.

 

Go to review of Chapter 2.

Chapter 1: Medium Theory, Ecological Holism, and the Study of World Order Transformation

• Foreshadows the problem of speculating about "information revolution" in International Relations discipine (IR). His brand of Media Theory (MT), "ecological holism" will help: open-ended, nonreductionist, thoroughly historicist view. He then outlines the chapter.

The three terms above tell us a lot about what he is trying to avoid.

His GAP:

• Communication issues left out of IR theory => comm. work in IR theory focuses on content not technology => or control of media / communication FLOW / hegemony => technology subsidiary variables. (19)
• Karl Deutsch is an exception: interested only in statistical aanalysis of info. flow and how technologies influence that flow. Too narrow.
• Interesting observation: "increased communication flow does not, by necessity, lead to common identities." "In other words, increased intercultural communication can easiy lead to hostile backlashes rather than to seductive integration" (21).
• If not focussing on "flow," theorist are content bound, the "medium through which the message is imparted is abstracted from the analysis" (21). Changes in the techn. of communication are also ignored.

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MT

• Flips the medium of comm. into the front position
• Credits Socrates, Plato, Eric Havelock, Wlater Ong, Ernst Gellner, Rousseau quote (22), Marshall McLuhan (meteoric rise yet limited academic acceptance)
• McLuhanesque slogans: "Modes o communication have important consequences for society" (23). Communication epochs: oral, writing, printing, and electronic. "Media act as extensions of human senses" Oral societies lived by the ear, electronics returns us to that state and to the "global village." Hot (high resolution, broadcast) vs. Cool media (low resolution, participatory).

Reminds me of Giddens' structuration theory model/duality of structure: we act into a system and that system biases the type of interaction. But as we work in a system we change the system: a dialogic relationship. Giddens assumed that there are always unintended consequences of technologies and their use and redesign. Very useful in our C&W panel analysis of research and "chronically adept cybercitizens". This also reminds me of Foucault's bit on the current epoch of space/simultaneity vs old epoch with it's focus on time/history.

Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and

contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley: U of California P.

Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, Spring, 22-27.

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• Founder Harold Innis: "the interaction between media form and social reality creates various biases, which strongly afect the society's cultural orientation and values": space/time biases of comm. modes and monopolies of knowledges.
• Havelock: alphabetic literacy (25); Ong: Elizabeth Eisenstein, Mumford, Gellner

Theory and Epistemology

• "Toward a Nonreductionalist Medium Theory" (26):avoiding "monocausal reductionism and technological determinism"(examples of this criticism: havelock and eisenstein)
• He'll not assume that new technologies are an "autonomous force with certain definite and predictable results" (27) and he will place them in a social context: "social embeddedness" (29)
• Technologies are always socially constructed. But don't avoid the influences associated with the technologies themselves.

Reminds me of Andrew Feenberg and his critical theory of technology.

Feenberg, A. (1995). Alternative modernity: The technical turn in philosophy

and social theory. Berkeley: U of California P.

• See the tecnologies as media environments and apply Darwinian evolutionary analogy to them. (human agency?): distributional changes= who gets what and when? Foucault might say that they set up differing power relations between communicators ("Subject and Power" 1982)

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His Methodology!

• There's a "logic" or "nature" of comm. environments. They influence social forces. he wants to "identify those social forces whose interests, goals, and logics of orgnization are likely to "fit" with the new comm. environ. and those that do not" (32). The former florish, the others, not so much.
• Sounds deterministic at bottom of 32. resist often with little success; institutional inertia; we don't think about long-range implications.
• Social epistemology (SE)= web-of-beliefs into which people are aculturated and through which they perceive the world around them" (33). Good list of examples follow. Unpack? Looks at social, economic, political, AND, he adds, technological factors. Mumford. SE is "implicated in the architecture of the world order" (34). Comm. technologies will "rethread the webs of significance." Intergenerational effects more important than idividual.
• Social darwinianism: Dawkins' memes
• He will deal with individual identities, spatial biases, and imagined communities as memes. He outlines chapters in a nonlinear manner.

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Ecological Holism and Medium Theory

• Ecological Holism takes into account:
  • neurophysioogical adaptations and traints of species--little bearing here
  • web-o-beliefs = SE
  • formal/informal institutions and organizations
  • techniques, technologies, and technics (technical artifacts)?

Avoids Heideggerian knot by claiming that humans aren't being devoured by technology (technological mindset) but claimes that we ARE our technologies.

• geophysical environment--important in studies of longue durée.
• source of fundamental change "reflects a multiplicity of factors--material and idea--that happen to converge in the form of a sudden transformation in human patterns of interaction" (40).
• MT is part of this approach that focusses on comm. techn.

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Ecol Holism, MT, & IR theory

• fits himself into his own discipline--very important to him and them, but us? not so much.
• His methodology seems to be a "historical narrative": (quoting Polkinghorne, 44) the narrative schme organizes the individua events it addresses using a framework of human purposes and desires including the limits and opportunities posed by the physical, cultural, and personal environments" (106).

Go to review of Chapter 2.