Historicizing Utopian Popular Discourse on the Internet in America in the 1990s:
Positions, Comparison, and Contextualization
Merav Katz-Kimchi
Office for History of Science and Technology
UC Berkeley
Abstract:
This paper aims at historicizing and contextualizing American popular discourse on the internet during the 1990s. The first part explorestwo contrasting academic views including the “historical continuity” approach that sees the utopian discourse on the internet as a straightforward continuation of earlier discursive traditions,and the contextualist position that sets each discursive tradition in its own historical context.
Arguing that both approaches are relevant for comprehensively understanding the discourse on the internet, the second part historicizes this discourse by comparing it to earlier technological utopian discourses from the turnofthecentury (1880s-1930s) and to the utopian discourses accompanying the introduction of earlier communication technologies into American society including the telegraph, the radio, the telephone and television; the third part briefly hints at possible ways to contextualize contemporary discourse.
Key Words: technological utopianism, historical continuity position, contextualist position, communication technologies, internet
In the United Statesthe process of assimilating the internet into daily life in homes and offices during the 1990s was accompanied by dramatic, loud, and often hyperbolic and enthusiastic discourse as regards personal and social life in the age of the Internet Revolution.Academics from across the humanities and social sciences sought to decipher and comprehend this discourse by relating it to earlier discursive traditions about technology. The first part of the article reviews a selection of these important and seminal attempts. In particular, it presents the historical continuity approach and the contextualist position. The former sees the utopian discourse on the internet as a straightforward continuation of earlier discursive traditions such as myth telling, the religion of technology, technological utopianism, and the relatively more recent 150-year old discourse on electronic communication technologies. By contrast, the latter argues for a thematic similarity between these discursive traditions and the discourse on the internet but seeks to understand each discourse in its own historical context.
Arguing for the relevancy of both these different approaches, the second part, relying on earlier scholarship, historicizes the discourse on the internet by comparing it toearlier technological utopian visions from the turn of the century (1880s-1930s) and to the utopian discourses accompanying the introduction of the telegraph, the radio, the telephone and the television into American society.It hints at the similarities and differences between these earlier discursive traditions and discourse on the internet. The third part suggestssome possible ways to contextualize the utopian discourse on the internet, showing how it embodies contemporary ideals, ideas, and perceptions.
Part 1
1. The “Historical Continuity” Approach
Diverse authors from various academic disciplines responded to the enthusiastic and often hyperbolic discourse on the internet by trying to relate it to former discursive traditions, from the most general to the most particular. Sociologist Vincent Mosco interprets the discourse on the internet within the larger universal phenomenon of “myth telling” that sociologists see as an integral part of all human societies from the first human societies onward. He argues that this discourse is a collection of myths, or “seductive tales containing promises unfulfilled or even unfulfillable” (Mosco, 2005, 22). As such, like all myths, they provide routes to transcendence, ascribe meaning to human life, represent an important part of the collective mentality of the age, and render socially and intellectually tolerable what would otherwise be experienced as incoherence Mosco, 2005, 29).[1]In particular, Mosco discusses three powerful myths of cyberspace; namely, the ability to transcend time (the end of history), space (the end of geography) and power (the end of politics). He further argues that almost every wave of new technology since the mid- nineteenth century has brought with it declarations of (various positive and negative) Ends (Mosco, 2005, 117-127). Thus, overall, Mosco views the enthusiastic discourse on the internet as part of a wider phenomenon of “myth telling” in response to the unsettling event of the introduction of a new technology into society. In the same manner, and in a far-reaching interpretation of Leo Marx, David Nye, and James Carey, he argues that these myths promote a vision of the “technological sublime”; i.e. “a literal eruption of feeling that briefly overwhelms reason only to be recontained by it” (Mosco, 2005, 22).
Whereas Mosco sees no difference between the internet myths and those that went along with the introduction of nuclear power, the radio, the television and cable TV into society in general, other scholars have suggested that this discourse is part of a specific American tradition that is optimistic in its relation to technology and enthusiastic about its role in shaping human life. Historian Warren Susman commented that “[o]ne of the reasons [Americans] talk so persistently about the impact of media is because thinking and talking about its role, and about the role of technology generally, have become cultural characteristics”(Susman, 1984,257).
What exactly is this tradition or cultural characteristic? What typifies it? Where and when it is rooted?
Historian David Noble terms this tradition the “religion of technology” in his 1997 book and suggests that the contemporary [American] enthusiastic discourse about technology or “the present enchantment with things technological” is “a continuation of a thousand-year-old Western tradition in which the advance of the useful arts was inspired by and grounded upon religious expectations”(Noble, 1999, 3-4)Providing a Weberian argument as regards the Christian roots of contemporary technology, Noble focuses on religious transcendentalism that is at the heart of many techno-scientific projects.
Beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth century, the ideal of knowledge as preparatory to salvation served, for the first time in the history of the West, to bring the mechanical arts[2] (or later, technology) into the fold of philosophy by subsuming both under the same function. In effect, this ideological change defined both philosophy and the mechanical arts as a means to a higher end rather than as ends in themselves. The mechanical arts, therefore, like other branches of knowledge, were seen to serve a precise religious and historical function as an aid to recovery from the effects of original sin.
The true center of this original religious faith moved west to the United Statesand was expressed in American thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since the late nineteenth century, and especially in the twentieth century with the growth of secularization, “the old religious themes, masked by a secular vocabulary and largely unconscious, continued subtly to inform [American technological] projects and perceptions” (Noble, 1999, 104). Noble discusses, for example, the quest for divine immortality and angelic-like freedom from bodily existence in the writing of pioneers and theoreticians of Artificial Intelligence and computing such as Marvin Minsky, Michael Heim and Michael Benedikt. Benedikt, for example, the influential editor of the first anthology on cyberspace, observed that the “almost irrational enthusiasm” for virtual reality fulfills the need “to dwell empowered or enlightened on other, mythic, planes.” Cyberspace, according to Benedikt, is the dimension where “floats the image of a Heavenly city, the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation” (Benedikt, 1991, 6, 15 in: Noble, 1999, 159-160).
Noble’s systematic depiction of expressions associated with the historical tradition of the religion of technology explains an important part of the dominant vocabulary, sets of metaphors, diverse aspirations, futuristic mentality, and millennial impulses concerning technology in contemporary American culture. James Carey and John J. Quirk aptly describe this vocabulary and mentality as containing an “orientation of secular religiosity that surfaces whenever the name of technology is evoked”, in particular in response to social crises and technical change (Carey and Quirk, 1989, 114). This secular religiosity, which many proponents voice without realizing they are doing so, has much in common with the American tradition that Howard Segal,in his seminal 1985 book, defines as “technological utopianism”.
Segal canvassed the rich cultural tradition of American utopian writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and identified a significant variant that he terms technological utopianism. He defines technological utopianism as “a mode of thought and activity that vaunts technology as the means of bringing about utopia”, i.e., “the perfect society” (Segal, 1985, 10). Segal demonstrates convincingly that this mode of thought was expressed in the popular writings of twenty-five American technological utopians between the 1880s and 1930s, as a response to the major industrial revolution that the United States went through at that time. It was also later expressed, especially after World War II, in the ways high-tech – broadly defined as computers, satellite communications, robotics, space travel, genetic engineering, etc. – promotes its products and ideology like prophecies, world’s fairs/theme parks and advertising (Segal, 1994).
Historically, technological utopianism is rooted in earlier European and American thought and notably in the utopian tradition (beginning in the sixteenth century) with its images of the perfect society, and in the science-based progressivism of the French Enlightenment that interpreted the scientific (and technological) “domination of nature to promise freedom from scarcity, want, and arbitrariness of natural calamity” (Harvey, 1989, 12).
At the core of technological utopianism is the belief in the inevitability of technological progress, and in technological advance as the ultimate and sole solution to many social and economic problems. In other words, among adherents of technological utopianism technology is seen as a panacea. Adherents of technological utopianism equate advancing technology with utopia itself. That is, utopia would be “a completely technological society, one run by and, in a sense, for technology” (Segal, 1985, 21).
In the group of earlier works written by technological utopians at the turn of the century (1880s-1930s), technology helps sustain a new order that is manifested in perfect cleanliness, efficiency, quiet, and harmony. Inhabitants of the various utopias would tame wind, water and other natural resources into electricity, considered at that time as an efficient and clean technology; they would live in megalopolises, i.e. “massive combinations of urban and suburban tracts covering mass areas” in “perfect comfort, contentment and happiness ever free of dirt, noise, chaos, want, and insecurity”.
The ethos of technological efficiency shapes the values of earlier technological utopias.For example, utopians call for large, heterogeneous communities rather than small, homogeneous ones because they believe that large communities offer the best opportunities for the kinds of contacts and friendships that spawn cooperation, and cooperation is seen as fostering efficiency (Segal, 1985,19-32).
In the loosely connected group of later works associated with a completely different institutional and social setting[3], technological utopians like Alvin Toffler envisioned high-tech to foster freedom of choice and diversity, “ad-hocracy” (i.e. short-term, professional, problem solving task forces), liberation of individuals and democracy (Segal, 1994, 179-180); John Naisbait predicted, amongst others, “a global boom free from past limits on growth and without any future limits” and “the triumph of the individual over the collective through high tech computers, cellular phones, and fax machines” (Segal, 1994, 187) and the 1980s IBM advertisements portrayed personal computers as devices bringing order, profits, and happiness (Segal, 1994, 193-194).
Although Noble and Segal situate the origin of the enthusiastic discourse about technology in different historical eras, the similarity of the two traditions described above lies in the way their advocates conceived of technology and technological progress. In what Noble portrays as the religion of technology, technology is the means to restore lost perfection and to achieve salvation, either in the religious context of previous centuries or in the secular context of the twentieth century where religious metaphors are only a remnant of a lost past. In what Segal depicts as technological utopianism, technology is seen as the means to secular salvation and to achieving the perfect society.
Whereas Noble and Segal situate the utopian discourse on the internet within the wider phenomenon of Western and American discourse about technology and hence see it as a straightforward continuation of earlier trends, a group of historians of communication consider the internet to be the latest communication technology and hence argue that the discourse that accompanied its introduction into mainstream culture is better understood within the narrower field of the history of communication. In other words, they distinguish between technologies in general and communication technologies. In particular they stress the ability of communication technologies to symbolically transmit content and mediate communication.
French historian Armand Mattelart claims that communication dates back more than four hundred years, and includes “the multiple circuits of exchange and circulation of goods, people and messages.”Communication also evokes “the diverse doctrines and theories that have contributed to thinking about these phenomena” (Mattelart, 1996, xiv).He argues that since the seventeenth century, first in France and later elsewhere in the West, communication technologies (broadly understood) – such as the Suez Canal or different national railway and telegraph networks – have been ideologized as agents of social revolution by governments and other regime of power. In other words, Mattelart suggests that the utopian discourse on communication technologies, including the internet, is a repetitive phenomenon, initiated by powerful regimes in order to impose order and regulation.
Unlike Mattelart, historians of communication John D. Peters and Carolyn Marvin take “communication” to be a late -nineteenth century concept and provide a phenomenological explanation for the advent of a discourse accompanying the introduction of electronic communication technologies.
Peters argues that since the late nineteenth century, when electronic communication technologies first appeared, “communication” has become central to reflections on democracy, love, and our changing times. New communication technologies such as the telephone and the radio made “communication” possible as a concept in the first place. Thus, according to Peters, the actual event of introducing new media opens up an intellectual, and one might add popular discussion about the possibility of communication. To state the matter differently, communication as a person-to-person activity became conceivable only in the shadow of electronic mediated communication (Peters, 1999).[4]Thus, according to Peters, the utopian discourse on the internet is a recent manifestation of a hundred-year old discourse on the nature, possibilities and benefits of electronic mediated communication.
2.The Contextualist Position
Carolyn Marvin historically sets the first intense reactions (both utopian and dystopian) to modern communication technologies in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. She describes two ways in which new media have impinged on social life. First, each new medium has shaped the imaginative boundaries of modern communities. As a consequence, the introduction of a new medium challenges, and threatens to re-draw these boundaries. Thus, established habits of social transactions between groups are projected onto a new technological environment that alters, or seems to alter, critical social distances. Second, each new media form restructures and imperils social relationships. Thus, the introduction of new media is “a special historical occasion when patterns anchored in older media that have provided the stable currency of social exchange are reexamined, challenged, and defended” in different public arenas (Marvin, 1988, 4).
In spite of these generalities that explain a recurring pattern of both utopian and dystopian discourses accompanying the introduction of each new type of media over the last hundred years, Marvin is careful to argue that the emergence of every new medium should be understood within a specific historical context. The discourse on the telephone, the electric light and the phonograph during the Victorian era at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, was “built to uphold a scheme of social stratification” that changed much during the twentieth century (Marvin, 1988, 8). It therefore ought to be interpreted in light of specific historical knowledge of the Victorian period.
In the same vein, media scholar Lynn Spigel points out that “while the discourse on new technologies seems to proceed on familiar themes, the historical context change[s] considerably” (Spigel, 1992, 186).[5]
To sum up, the historical continuity position perceives the utopian discourseaccompanying the rise of the internet as a straightforward continuation of earlier discursive traditions including the universal phenomenon of myth telling and the traditions of “religion of technology” and “technological utopianism,” and the discourses that accompanied the introduction of new communication technologies into American society from the mid-nineteenth century on. In contrast, the contextualist position argues for a thematic similarity or a repetitive pattern between these earlier discursive traditions and the discourse on the internet but stresses the different and more specific historical contexts that give rise to diverse and, in many ways, different discourses.
I argue that both the historical continuity and the contextualist positions are relevant to fully comprehend the meanings of the discourse on the internet. The first overcomes the popular amnesia and a-historicism as regards the (proclaimed) newness of the internet and reminds us that previous technologies were also envisioned as heralding a promise for a better way of being and living. It invites us to compare our digital present with the past. In addition, it puts forward conceptual frames and sets of themes and topics that are important for our understanding of contemporary discourse.
However, these frames, themes and topics are still too general to account for the specific characteristics of the utopian discourse on the internet. The contextualist position captures the ways in which contemporary context can explain and elucidate certain themes in the discourse that are otherwise not explicable, such as the prevalence of the theme that the internet empowers the individual in her search for success, identity, self-expression and authenticity or the absence of visions on the internet supporting national unity and solidarity.[6]