Carey, the Telegraph, digital time and the voice of energy

I loved this reading, because I think that Carey points out an important historical, social and economic moment that should be common knowledge, or at least taught more in schools, and that is is how our current system of time zones and coordinated timing of trains (and the stock market thereafter, most likely) came into being. According to our reading today is the anniversary of the first time people in the USA conceptualized the nation continentally in four time zones by matching major city clocks across these zones. I like how Carey writes about the telegraph as having such far reaching consequences in narrative style and human speech, in changing human thought to understand the possibility of instantaneous communication over a long distance. It probably isn't a coincidence either that when I type in "telegraph" into Google's search engine, the first item that appears in my browser window is a link to the UK newspaper, the Telegraph.

My father has worked for decades in the telecom industry and he spent his early career as an electrical engineer at Bell Labs before deregulation. I never tire of telling people how proud I am of his work- he was involved in the research and development of early frequency control devices, oscillators made first of quartz and later silicon, that control digital devices by stabilizing their electrical signals. In essence they act as clocks for digital devices, controlling the stream of 1s and 0s in our iPhones and computers, amongst other more sophisticated electronic devices and machines. I am (obviously) too young to remember the telegraph but I do remember early telephones developed by AT&T for consumer use that enabled people to see the person they were speaking to on a small screen above the keypad. I thought these machines were revelatory at age 7, and so did the people at the AT&T convention we attended, but consumers never wanted to buy $1000 telephones even if they could see their friends and distant relatives on them. Perhaps the 'transaction costs' were too high. Now, we have virtual teleconferencing capabilities and telepresence technologies that make use of the Internet, though the costs of these media is still prohibitive to some extent to the mass market (at least in the latter technology.)

I'm going to end this post by citing the lyrics to The Voice of Energy, a lesser known song/speech through vocoder by one of my favorite music groups, Kraftwerk. I have always been a fan of their playful yet obsessive engagement with technology, electricity, electronics, and communication. Carey says this, tangentially, and I agree- changes to synchronous/instantaneous communication technology depended largely on controlled manipulation of electricity, which dates back to the late 19th century- quite recent! Back to Kraftwerk, though- I think that their continued use of metaphors linking humans to machines is appropriate to our discussion here and also to Carey's notion of discourses of electricity and religious ideology:

Kraftwerk
 - The Voice Of Energy

Hier spricht die Stimme der Energie

Ich bin ein riesiger elektrischer Generator

Ich liefere Ihnen Licht und Kraft

Und ermoegliche es Ihnen Sprache, Musik und Bild

Durch den Aether auszusenden und zu empfangen

Ich bin Ihr Diener und Ihr Herr zugleich

Deshalb huetet mich gut
 Mich, den Genius der Energie
***

This is the Voice of Energy

I am a giant electrical generator

I supply you with light and power

And I enable you to receive Speech,
Music and Image through the Ether

I am your servant and lord at the same time

Therefore guard me well

Me, the genius of Energy

Imagined Communities

Benedict Anderson has me wondering how much of a "community" like the nation is in fact "imagined", that is, related to my presumption or belief that I have historical or social affinities with people whom I will never see. I find it hard to conceive of the "Nation" (the capital "N" is intentional"), a seemingly enormous and somewhat ambiguous entity, as a "community" in the first place, since the latter term carries with it connotations and associations of the local, of smaller, more focused boundaries and perhaps a different kind of social participation than the national, semi-abstracted scale of a representative democracy.

We see national symbolism around us, and systems of representation that reach into our personal and political identities. Even I choose not to call myself American for whatever reason, I can't escape the fact that identity by way of country of origin is linked to how other people perceive me and how I am recognized by my government (if I want to be legally recognized with attendant Constitutional rights.) Is national awareness a matter of social conditioning and construction like we said in class? Aren't nations a little too gigantic to be functional communities, if even imagined ones? Clearly Anderson is trying to do is change existing anthropological and sociological ideas of "community" from their roots in observed and rule-based structural analyses to something more psychological, attitudinal, and even technologically defined.

On another note, when I think about all of our discussions about technology, education, and life and literacy in the past versus the present, I always return to the same head-scratching paradoxes. We are living in a world where depending on the scope of our investigations of human patterns we can find elements (to name just a few) supporting the predominance of globalizing forces that reach beyond traditional "imaginings" of the nation, like the force of stock market, trading, and extensive trans-national currency systems and forms of governance/justice. On the other hand we are right to believe that the governments of nations instrumentalize the idea of the "nation" as imagined community to shape themselves and wield sovereignty over other nations or disputed territories.

It's so difficult to think about the importance of nationalism without thinking about globalization (and capitalism and colonialism) and all of these ideas turn into one giant historical game of Chicken and Egg, at worst. I do like how we are discussing these ideas from the lens of communication and media, and the entryway of print and language as central to the process of nation-building, identity politics, and popular culture. I also think our discussion about generational attitudes towards media is worth returning to for the last part of this blog: There is definitely a push and pull of different generations, from inside the family, to the makeup of institutions like schools and government throughout the world, to negotiate the influence of popular culture through music, television shows, movies, video games, and the technologies that transmit or mediate these elements. Do these products represent their home nations (or not), and how critical are they to establishing an imaginary collectivity and sense of "community" in their dynamics of language, space and time along the lines of what Anderson sees in print media? I see a strong demographic and ideological segmentation in the "imagined-ness" of the nation, and that even within one nation different groups will embrace or reject cultural products as representative of their nation. And because people have migrated and settled all over the world at this point, it makes analysis even more difficult. Think of the rejection of "Slumdog Millionaire" by many Indians all over the world and also in India- it was passed off by many for portraying India in a negative light, as an impoverished nation and full of the standard cliches pertaining to countries with regions and people in different stages of development. Yet what do the statistics of recent urban Indian poverty show? If the film was directed by an Indian person would it have been portrayed and received differently internationally, as "authentic"? Who can criticize national identity- the insider or the outsider? How do we imagine our nationality now in a world that is both nationalist and post-national, depending on who you ask and where you are and what angles you are comparing? Just some thoughts.

Elizabeth Eisenstein & Conjectures on Printing

I've heard the book that this article eventually becomes cited innumerable times, and I was happy to finally read the initial investigations. The little voice in me of proper historical method was first irritated that Eisenstein lacked much empirical evidence to back up her conjectures in this particular article, but it didn't matter later as the article developed and readers like myself could see how her project is twofold: one, to bring a revisionist angle to current accepted facts regarding history of printing and books, attacking generalizations such as "the book led to standardization in language and religious thought" and "the religious standardization of printing and language led to a demystification in texts and social practice"; and two, to bring questions of printing's "effects and consequences" into other fields of research, such as technology, sociology, the political economy of media, language, and theology/religion.

As Eisenstein says, the history of printing and its ramifications is "uneven", with differences in the kinds of social, religious and political impact depending on the scope of one's research. For example, Eisenstein brings our attention to how book printing had numerous distinctions for its first consumers, who themselves varied in demographics, and in what they perhaps wanted to read, what they could read (based on limitations in literacy and in government or religious-decreed access), and their level of access to books. Some other thoughts I gathered from this article (though it sort of conjectures a little too far into the present at the very end) relate to methodology: good historical research needs to constantly question assumptions and also that the printing of books is an example of an object of study where there is a clearly meta-communicative and meta-investigative level, especially for the historian. Books are not exclusively disposable commodities- they are objects that can be constantly re-circulated, and their content is in some sense another form of sociopolitical or socioeconomic value: books can increase one's skills, change or reinforce one's opinion, and bring about non-localized or localized solidarity.

The same is true today vis-a-vis more "immaterial" non-printed forms of content and their corresponding economies of information distribution and circulation, which are products and processes clearly linked to (and also divergent from) economies of book distribution. Regarding non-printed text, I think that format does play a huge role in distribution and in acceptance of content. How differently do we treat reading ancient documents in comparison to the windows we read onscreen? How does our attention change in relationship to these reading formats? How might our attitude change when we look at books versus computer printouts or flyers we get on the street? How might certain formats work well with specific kinds of content? I recall feeling a little disdain when I first saw the Kindle. Are children reading PC tablets or text on the iPhone as their versions of "My First Book"?