HU520: A Review of Deibert's Preface & Intro.

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

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

Go to review of Chapter 1.

This Chapter Review:

I hope to understand Ronald Deibert's notions of ecological holism and world order transformation well enough to better understand the constructed "world order" of our 1500 year old print culture as well as apply it to the changes in world order that may be occurring as a result of what's happening in the digital realm. Where is this approach most useful in helping us understand observations of specific areas of cultural interest: education, law, forestry, sports, art, . . .? I ask myself these questions: What other writers, theorists, or practitioners can be related, contrasted, compared productively to Deibert? Finally, once I make an honest attempt to understand how he intended this volume to be read, what can I see that is not here? By that I mean, can we identify digital and print-based literacy practices that challenge or require some adjustment of the theory in his book?

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Intro. to the Introduction

Theorizing the Communications Revolution

The Study of World Order Transformation

Architecture of the Medieval and Modern World Orders

What are the Medium's Multiple Messages?

Preface

• "... the landscape of world politics is undergoing rapid and fundamental transformation related to the advent of digital-electronic telecommunications--what I call the hypermedia environment. . . " (ix).
• Medium theory (MT) (via Innis and McLuhan) is the most useful way of fathoming the transformations and discomforting "postmodern world order" (WO): a "a pastiche of multiple and overlapping authorities--a quasi-feudal, 'multicentric' system" (ix).
• MT = the study of how information is stored, transmitted, and distributed through different media at different times in history.
• He reformulates MT into an "ecological holist framework" and uses an evolutionary analogy to "describe the processes by which social forces and ideas at the margins of society are brought into the center by the unintended consequences of technological change" (x). (Gidden's language)
• Methodology: retrace previous changes in modes of communication & their effects on world order transformation. Apply what we learn there to contemporary changes.
• Comes from a historical-materialist perspective: Mumford, Innis, and Braudel as opposed to Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard.

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Introduction

Intro. to the Introduction (written after all other chapters?)

• Incontrovertible statement? "the present era is one in which fundamental transformation is occurring"--Ruggie, Zacher in International Relations theory (IR) and outside IR--"[C]urrent transformations are deeply intertwined with developments in communication technologies (1).
• His GAP: IR pays little or no attention to shifts in means of communication: the "specific form in which ideas and knowledge are stored, transmitted, and distributed" (2).
• list of WO transformations over last 35,000 yrs. and accompanying changes in communication media (2).
• The above are not coincidences: "changes in modes of communication . . . have significant implications for the evolution and character of society and politics at a world level" (2).
• BUT Not techno-deterministic. Comm. technologies don't offer a 'master key' to the unlocking of human history. Other forces are important. Together these "provide insights into the character of an emerging postmodern world order . . ." (3).

Theorizing the Communications Revolution

• Duh'piphany: we are living through a revolutionary change in technologies of communication . . ." Anecdotal evidence leads to his primary question: How do we do so [assess where we are heading] without being swept up in the hype?
• IR theory provides few suggestions except for Karl Deutsch. But his material is caught up in quantitative measurements of information flow. Others who have touched briefly on the issues include: Marxists and neo-Marxists, James Rosenau, and some postmodern and poststructuralist works.
• Popular speculation is insightful, entertaining but not systematic or written in a social science mode: "a surfeit of hyperbole" (5). Stampede of publications has generated a plethora of confusing terminology.
• This all yields confusion between two efforts: publications that just explore "what we will be able to do" and those "informed analyses of what is going on here and now" (6).
• Medium Theory (MT) (Innis & McLuhan): = "changes in the modes of communication . . . have an important effect on the trajectory of social evolution and the values and beliefs of societies." They have a certain 'logic' or 'nature,' though "not in a deterministic sense" (6). They will have a substantial effect on the power distribution, the nature of the individual and social cognition, and the values and beliefs that animate a particular population" (6). (cf., C. Selfe, in Jan. CCC and Selfe & Selfe, in Yagelski, forthcoming)
• Why the gap? Innis' writing style is dense and complex; McLuhan's is self-consciously mosaic with bullet like aphoristic probes => academic avoidance. Deibert's elaborations and modifications of MT will get "back to the roots" of this approach.
• Bases his theory on Childe, Mumford, the French Annales school of medieval historians Braudel, Bloch, Duby and Le Goff which => "a more holistic view of communication technology and social change" (7). Ecological holism comes out of IR historicists like Ruggie, Cox, and Deudney and social constructivists like Wendt, Kratochwil, & Onuf.
• Important contribution: "the elements of international politics which mainstream rationalist approaches presuppose to be 'natural, 'essential,' and 'unchanging' are, in fact, the products of historical contingencies and thus subject to change over time" (7). (i.e., nation states as mutual exclusive political entities).

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The Study of World Order Transformation

• Approach of HU520: "Fundamental changes, such as those being pursued here in communications, by definition resonate throughout the whole of society leaving virtually nothing untouched" (8) yielding world order transformation. (Hu520 folks should be able to see "fundamental changes" in any cultural arena.)
• IR discipline assumes political units are stable, assumed, and unproblematic. These units have become part of the cultural ideology. Need a deeper analysis.
• World Order (WO): NOT necessarily referring to planet as a whole. NOT focusing on ongoing, day-to-day relations between political units. It is (quoting Ruggie) 'the basis on which the human species is socially individuated and individuals in turn bound together into collectivities' (8). It focuses attention on the nature and spatial organization of the units themselves" (9).
• Political Authority (PA): the 'right to set the rules of the game' (quoting Ruggie). "It is the specific form in which PA is manifested at different times and in different contexts . . ." (9).
• Architectural analogy (9).
• WO = PA as well as production of subsistence, physical security, and spiritual yearnings (10). It is a type of longue duree from the French Annales school: "large historical structures" that may shape day-to-day events "for extended periods of time."
• The transformation that "ushered in the sovereign states system" (medieval-to-modern WO) may teach us about the hypermedia environments influence on the postmodern (PM) transformations of political authority and thus the PM WO. Very reminiscent of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory/duality of structure: "changes in communication technologies both influence, and provide a window on [through which we can view our chance for agency], changes in other spheres of life" (11).
• My concern: Keep in mind that we are analyzing processes taking place over 1500 years (6th to 19th centuries) and applying them to a 50-year period (since WWII).

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Architecture of the Medieval and Modern World Orders (12)

• Broad generalizations about the form of WO during the High to late Middle Ages (. . . 11th to 15th centuries) can be made that would probably find agreement among most medievalist" (12):
  • Moving contradictorily between two social formations:
    • a single spiritual community: 'distant horizons of the whole of Christendom" (quoting Le Goff, p. 12)
    • the horizons of the clearing in which they lived
  • "All past and present believers were linked together seamlessly in a great corpus mysticum."
  • It "never crystallized into a single political structure because of a "jungle of particularist dependencies" (13): lords, churches, towns, princes, kingdoms, free cities, Germanic settlements, and scattered dukedoms. (quoting Spruyt, 13) "were all based on 'nonterritorial logics of organization.'
  • "mutually exclusive sovereign political entities would have been considered by philosophers of the time as a 'repulsive anarchy (quoting Mattingly) . . . almost a blasphemy.'
  • There were "those who prayed, those who fought, and those who labored" (citing Duby, 13).
  • Transformation from medieval heteronomous structure to modern world of territorially distinct . . . nations was a slow process encompassing changes that span centuries" (13).
• "the division of political authority into territorially distinct, sovereign nation-states defined the architecture of modern world order in Europe" (14). Currently, the ideology of the nation-state is very strong (citing Krasner) BUT
• (paraphrase, 15) Many interlocking elements of the nation-state are being rapidly dismantled. Trends point away from
  • mass identities
  • linear political boundaries
  • exclusive jurisdictions
  • territorial spaces
• Trends point toward
  • multiple identities
  • nonterritorial communities
  • overlapping boundaries
  • nonexclusive jurisdictions
• "changes in communication technologies occurring today suggest [that these trends will continue]" (15).

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Go to review of Chapter 1.