The way we communicate and share information determines the way we think, interact and organise our lives, but this is not a static, fixed process. The means by which we communicate has changed over the centuries as a result of technological advances. But if the effects of our modern age are rooted in changes in the technological advances in communication and information processing, then our thought patterns, our social relations and our ways of being will mirror these advances.
The medieval age was primarily an oral culture and for the vast majority, representation was dominated by images. Power lay in the hands of the church, who relied on iconography to assert their message and this led to a society based on mystery, superstition, and the afterlife. Recurrence and presence prevailed in a circular fashion. Illuminated manuscripts consisted of an interdependent relationship between text and images, but it was visual imagery and an oral delivery that fired the imagination and determined a culture based on faith.
Books stimulated the collection of memories, ordered analysis and rationality. Science prevailed, as observation flourished and ideas were shared over a wider space and time. History was recorded and geography mapped in a linear fashion. Power lay in the hands of academics and entrepreneurs, whose texts led to a society based on materiality, facts, and progress. Text based media during the enlightenment analysed images and pinned them down to explanation and classification in a dominant manner. This culture was based on discovery, invention and reason.
The digital age has usurped text written in books. Information and communication has shifted to a space only conceivable in imagination and a time faster than experience. The new apparatus has returned to an oral exchange of information, presenting images outside our experience with no depth or explanation, in a myriad of new and powerful media. The image now flies free of its textual marker. Power now lies with the people who control the technology and the media and this culture is based on information, rather than material goods.
Much has been done in the study of written literature against the background of the oral tradition of the medieval era; and much can be achieved in the study of modern media against the background of written texts. But we can also compare our age with a previous age where similar conditions in communication and information sharing predominated. In the digital media age, there is a definite decline in the power of the book as a source of information. Young people no longer strive to read in order to get on; they yearn for the latest iPhone. Information is transferred through visual representation rather than text and listening has replaced reading. But images can be manipulated to the point of ‘deep fake’ and podcasts and other forms of social media are difficult to pin down in terms of fact, relation to true events and testability. This is very much the culture that predominated in the medieval era, when people took their learning from the Bible, preached by priests in an environment surrounded by images, designed to stir the emotions and control by fear.
These processes of engagement with an oral, image-based source of communication and information will affect how we become immersed with this new media and how we interact with it. Is its lure and influence as powerful as the illuminated manuscript culture of Christion ideology and can we view it dispassionately enough to evaluate the messages delivered through it? There remains the fact that text has intervened between these two ages and that the orality and imagery that exist today do so in a far more absenting medium than a priest in a pulpit. However, we can see reflections in the key areas of knowledge, identity and politics.
Knowledge and information:
- As the power of written information in books has declined, there has been a real postmodern shift in the acceptance of absolute truths. There is no one way of looking at the world and there are multiple interpretations, depending on individual experience and background. While this leads to a much more socially liberal and accepting manner towards others, it also makes it harder to align one clear vision of the world, which impacts policy and decision making. It is reminiscent of the medieval mentality where although the Church was the most powerful institution, different interpretations of doctrine were abundant, such as, the right to acquire wealth and the definition of fact based on hallucinatory visions. The question was not whether God exists, but what is the will of God; what is he trying to communicate with us? This idea of multiple viewpoints made consensus impossible and conflict inevitable.
- As a result of this scepticism in the Middle Ages, myth and fantasy prevailed. The products of imagination carried far more weight than the theories of reason. An indubitable base for knowledge is once again coming under attack with the rise of quantum mechanics and relativity, which have undermined traditional Enlightenment principles. But there is also a rise in notions of space-time travel and conspiracy theories which distrust the established sources of information and question the conclusions reached by so-called experts.
- The Modern Newtonian view of the world where objects are dead and uncommunicative are now reanimated and live artificially in the informational environment and systems. Digital media is replacing the material world and becoming synonymous with reality, creating new digital worlds which are increasingly synchronised, delocalised and correlated to create a new time space interaction. This is reminiscent of an age when the biblical concepts of heaven and hell existed as a parallel world, running alongside the real one.
- The outlook from this will become similar to pre-technological societies or cultures which interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by teleological forces. Information in a myriad of different forms makes it appear it is separate from the medium in which it is delivered, which suggests a reversal to a belief in ‘the ghost in the machine’, and a more religious, superstitious state of mind. There is also a rise in other forms of immaterial escapism such as imaginative spectacle (music and sport) and substance abuse.
- Part of the cause of this is the proliferation of fictional and dramatic narratives produced and transmitted by digital media. We are bombarded by sagas that need to inspire viewers to continue subscribing, so the past is re-written and often sanctified, sanitised or demonised depending on the gist of the storyline. There is an intermingling of the past, present and potential future, which creates a cycle of probability rather than a chain of established events in recollection.
- Many different points of view with equal validity and no strict analysis as to their basis in fact or reality is a result of our reaction to a screen culture. We respond to what we are told, without the interaction to question and the time to consider as the next ‘item’ grabs our attention. Even reputable news programmes require little mediation or meditation. We just soak it all up as a passing string of episodes and scenes, without any deliberate focus. The lack of a secure certitude as to what has occurred in the past again effects attitudes to future planning, negotiation and opposition.
- This is confounded by the way we store information. “Our digital memory seems as volatile as our oral culture was but perhaps even more unstable, because it gives us the opposite impression.” (Luciano Floridi: The Fourth Revolution, 2014) ICTs are not preserving the past for the future, because they live in the perennial present. Digital ‘prehistory’ is a paradox. Memory is not just about storage and management, it is about careful curation of significant differences ie a stable sedimentation of the past as an ordered series of changes and these two historical processes are seriously at risk. There is no deletion of old files, but websites constantly upgrade, documents are rewritten and replace old versions therefore it is ahistorical. Huge amounts of data are left behind when there is a change in the digital support, hard discs, etc. so through technological transition, much is selectively lost, unavailable or inaccessible. Files trapped on computers are corrupted or damaged in a very short time. Cloud, online storage means files are available online, so they are easily recovered, but storage still relies on a physical infrastructure that needs increasing management, maintenance and energy consumption. In text culture or ‘history’, it was determined what to save, but in ‘hyperhistory’ saving is the default. Therefore, the new tends to replace the old, the first is pushed out or updated by the last or most recent. For example, photos are no longer printed out and kept in albums, even music or films are streamed on a temporary basis. This speed of turnover is becoming ever faster. The past is constantly being rewritten and history is reduced to the perennial here and now. Knowledge is in the hands of forgetful memory and imprisoned in the perpetual present, as it was in the oral culture of the Middle Ages.
Identity, social relations and behaviour:
- Feudal communal living and oral communication in the Middle Ages produced an immediate community consciousness and group validation mentality, which gave way to private worlds of self-conscious free will. These particular features of the text culture of modernity, such as individuation and personal identity are being eroded. In the social media world of digital media, the individual has again disappeared. People have become mass produced, anonymous entities who self-brand and reappropriate themselves online. Their embodiment as a carbon-based figure in a world of other physical beings is being replaced by the idea of a ‘persona’ in the silicon community of ‘profiles’ and ‘posts’, forever seeking validation by others.
- During the 19th and 20th centuries, old systems of communication progressively eroded informational friction, but the social phenomenon of the new metropolis counteracted these effects by fostering privacy based on anonymity. This was unheard of in the pre-industrial rural settings or small villages of the medieval world and brought to completion the process that begun with the invention of printing. “Some steps forward into the information society are really steps back into a small community and … the claustrophobic atmosphere that may characterise it.” (Floridi, p.108) But breaches of privacy which bring about reciprocal shame and embarrassment are the result of the unauthorised collection of personal data, not publication as in print culture, which had a way of self-regulating and limiting breaches of privacy. As in small village culture, there is no such constraint in the global village.
Politics:
- Rulers in the medieval era cultivated an impression that they ruled according to a divine right, rather than the will of the people. Democracy became one of the central tenets of the culture governed by textual communication and information. It respected the needs of the individual and the benefits of a social contract to protect life, liberty and property. It avoided the cult of personality as the arguments were set out in print, rather than heard in person and this provided the time and space to evaluate and criticise. However, the decline in democratic operation and choice has led to an increasingly narrow and privileged ruling class who are more and more destined to take charge and ever dependent on force to protect their position. Tribalism and nationalism and a need to defend oneself from ‘invaders’ is again on the rise as in the dark ages of constant warfare.
- The Feudal system was replaced by capitalist owners of production and labourers, who were not slaves but had some power to bargain for conditions and wages. Capitalism is the socio-economic structure of the text age. But the more inequality that arises in the distribution of wealth, the more dependent workers become on the beneficent attitude of their bosses. Hierarchies in status are reasserting themselves and despite their dependence on menial workers to provide services and create their wealth, wealthy individuals and corporations contribute less and less to their well-being (eg zero-hour contracts).
- In Medieval societies, the King would pass laws or statutes (eg The Ordinance of Labourers 1349) to benefit his barons, in return for supporting his wars. The barons needed restrictions placed on serfs or labourers so they carried on to working for them. Today we see a similar nepotism or cronyism in governments that hand out contracts to their supporters, who make huge amounts of money from the State. Workers continually have their wages and working conditions undermined in order to benefit the banks and shareholders of companies, who in turn bankroll the government when required.
- In times before text increased the custom of written contracts and administration, agreements were verbal and sealed by various behaviours like handshakes. Written contracts became verifiable and less open to corruption. The rule of law was a direct consequence of this for enforcement and taxation for the state. Today we see a return to contracts and agreement outside the legal structure, as gangs operate with violence, subcultures avoid contribution and a black market operates without legislation over the internet.
- The centres of power have shifted from castles and forts to city skyscrapers. The seats of power in the post-modern world enforcing their position in the hierarchy are masked and hidden behind huge stretches of glass windows, like mirrors that distort the world reflected in it. They are as impregnable as castles with turrets and moats and their inhabitants as unaccountable and untouchable, just like earls and squires in the medieval world. These have replaced the ivory towers of learning, which characterised the seats of power of the text era, where research was funded to produce opportunities for discovery and invention to increase wealth.
- Attitudes to the vulnerable or poorer members of society are again laced with the notion of charity, rather than entitlement to a decent standard of living. There is a feudal reversion to the medieval practice of the Lord of the Manor giving to the poor and unfortunate, rather than providing employment to counteract poverty and begging. Stricter Laws and harsh penal systems exist to control the spread of outlaws.