The Virtual Time Garden

Possibility of Cultural Engineering

 -- Cyberspace and Culture

the 7th. International Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies( Dresden, Oct. 1999)

 

"The Third Wave"

 

     Telling about his famous "the third wave civilization"(in "The Third Wave" published in 1980), Alvin Toffler, predicted that the computer mediated communication will bring about a big change to the whole human life style, including the domains of economy, politics and culture.

     As it is well known, for Toffler, unlike the industrial society where the production and consumption have been separated, both come to be done within the same sector once again in the post-industrial society. Thereupon, he is suggesting a new concept called "Prosumtion"(that is production + consumption).

      The industrial society must make production in a regular standard, to carry out mass production in the factory. Therefore, it assumed that people must comply with the standard rather than the standard complies with people. In the former society, the self-sufficiency style economy was usual, and the same people did most of the production and consumption. However, the production and consumption were separated in the industrial society and the market came into the center of economy.

     And communication in the form of mass media encouraged it. Senders and receivers of the information are separated there, too. The information is transmitted one-way and the receiver cannot answer but only accept it.

     As a result, in the industrial civilization, people has come to be strictly tied to the following six principles as known as standardization, specialization, synchronization, concentration, maximization and centralization of power. Although these were all born originally from the demand for efficiency in mass production in the factory, they have spread to the industrial society just as the universal moral, and bound the behavior pattern and the worldview of people. It became advantageous to combine oneself with the standard there and have come to increase the uniform human.

      In the information society, the production and consumption are once again connected each other in the same sector. Various kinds of products are made by the consumer's needs in accordance with their various value standards there. And the opposite principles such as de-standardization, de-specialization, diversification, dispersion, minimization have become very important now.

      While reading this best seller book by Toffler written about 20 years ago, I unexpectedly found out many interesting points in it. In short, this journalist who was the chief editor of "Fortune" and obtained a big reputation in the world of business, awfully dislikes the industrial society. Although he seems to be seeing the future, his eyes are looking back on the past, the agricultural society in fact.  This viewpoint well resembles to the ideals of the hippies or Stuart Brand's "Whole Earth catalog" of the 60's unexpectedly.

     However, it is needless to say that the future is not a mere return of the past. The expansion of industrialization and the progress of communication technology sensationally increased the amount of matter and information that a person can touch. So the field of prosumers' self-sufficient life that he mentioned must become the swirl of this excessive information and matter.

      He points out two problems here.

      First, at present, the emerging non-mass media comes to offer such various role models and lifestyles to us. The era when the textbook and mass media were pushing us to the several numbers of standardized life styles has ended now. However, the new media only show instantaneous and fragmentary image. So, by connecting and combining these fragments of information we must make our identity by ourselves. This is surely more difficult than in the past and groping for such cyborg-like identity has become an important problem for us. We may not request fixed or immovable identity there. Our new self-identity is always changing with our combining or connecting fragments of information to each other, as if in a chess game, where situation is changing with every move of piece.

     Secondly, the Pro-consumer comes to make up the decentralized media community and will be not only the receiver but also the sender of information. When Toffler wrote this book, there was not the Internet yet. However, he was taking a great interest in the electronic community with the computer network, although the communication service by personal computers such as "the Source" has just started then. Let us take notice that the electronic communication is grasped as a medium in dispersed and shared style, which is opposed to the mass media.

     It is needless to say that the situation Toffler predicted is advancing now in various ranges. Diversification, dispersion and minimization advance further than his prediction and even the way of life is radically changing.

     However, on the other hand, the separation between production and consumption, the market autocracy and the standardization in general are not abating at all. Rather, diversification and dispersion are thought to be supported by the strength of standardization and unification. It seems that the power of unification and homogenization grows enormously, if we think about the oligopoly of the information industry by U.S.A, the expansion of Microsoft OS or the increase of the dominance of English in the cultural domains, and so on.

     There is a reason for this. First of all, in the world after the cold war, all the frameworks have been dismantled, and the world becomes more globalized. But at the same time, the difference and imbalance of the civilization and social constitution come to be still more remarkable than before. In this situation, a common foundation is seriously requested. The trend that requests the standardization in the world, which meets various contradictions and collisions, is a matter of course. The industrial society does not change so easily as Toffler suggested.

     It also will be said regarding the change of the new medium and human life style. As for the Internet, the discussion mainly focuses on its such as its application to business or the efficiency of the current social structure, for example. It is grasped not as the opposition to broadcast and publication system but rather as an extension of them. Why is it? And how can we draw out its hidden possibility?

 

 

The Knowledge of Database

 

     When we think about the computer as a medium, we should not pass over an article "As we may think" which Vannevar Bush published in 1945 before the end of the World War II. This paper of Bush is known as the origin of the idea of Hypermedia. It also represents the trend of Intelligence Amplifier (IA) that competes with the main trend of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the computer science.

     We do intelligent work by making links between the documents and images by association in the brain. For instance, looking up the index, we find out the paper in the library. If so, we can reduce those documents and images to the microfiche instead of the library itself and link them along the route of thinking. Then by tracing the link once again, we can find out any informations with this system. We can also put notes wherever we like. Bush named this imaginative machine system "memex" for it imitates the human memory.

     However, why did Bush conceive the idea of "memex"?  In the first chapter of his paper, Bush was grieving over the state of knowledge, telling that as a result of the development and specialization of science, we have no time to comprehend and grasp the result.  In the consequence of the overflow of the publication and paper exceeding the human capability, we cannot catch up with them any more. "Memex" was conceived to improve such a situation.

     Norbert Wiener wrote in the preface of his book "Cybernetics" (1948) as follows.

     Since Leibniz there has been probably no one who is able to master the study of all the fields in the certain age. Today's science is so specialized and complicated that except onefs own specialty we must stop understanding at all. Then Cybernetics will supply such a new comprehensive perspective that will change this situation.

     So it will be said that there is a common fretfulness that the situation where the knowledge and science become too voluminous to understand must be changed as soon as possible and make the human beings the subject of knowledge again.

      This viewpoint unexpectedly resembles to the criticism of technology by Martin Heidegger who reacted violently against the appearance of Cybernetics. As is well-known, Heidegger pointed out that the modern technique as the mere "useful system"(Gestell) has transformed all the techniques which were originally the productive activities of human beings deeply connected with the Truth into the mere pragmatic means which governs and controls us. And he asserted the recovery of the true technique citing Holderlin's poetry.

      In short, both Wiener and Heidegger asserted that we must recover the supremacy of the human over the system. One says that we must make the new back-up means and the new system, and the other says that we must recover the old tradition of humanities.

     The computer as the intelligence amplifier is nothing but the attempt that tries to reestablish the supremacy of the human over the flood of information. Those tools such as database in which all parts information are mutually linked or the hypermedia to navigate the sea of information was born from the wish for the recovery of human freedom.

      Certainly the Internet is partially realizing such a dream. Anyone can make access to the voluminous information and can connect not only the text but also the image, voice and animation freely. If the infrastructure such as the portable terminal and the circuit are upgraded furthermore, and the database is more improved, the dream of Bush will be almost realized.

     However, as for the human intelligence, will it be really amplified by it? It will not be so, regretfully. When I want to know something, the electronic database will certainly give me an answer easily. But it will not take the trouble of telling of helping me know "what I really want to know". The voluminous information is saved to the database and those will be increasing every second. Actually the sea of the information is also flooding over every second. So, we have to be assisted by the digest system or the information supply service after all. That is, the mass media style medium also will become the mainstream again. This is why the newspaper and broadcast style information service such as the portal-site is everywhere in the Internet.

     Furthermore, the true problem is inside of the database itself. That is, the database is the spatial arrangement of information. It resembles the library where a lot of bookshelves are arranged and classified. Unlike the library, we can access the electronic database at any time and from any place. At the same time, it means,  "we don't need to access now and here". The information, which is spatially arranged, actually lacks in the sense of time, this way.

     On the contrary, the human knowledge is a temporal experience.  We obtain a knowledge by encountering with it in a certain place and time. Although a text called Dostoevski's " The Brother of Kharamazov " is one and the same, its meaning would be entirely different between when read by a high school student and when read by a middle aged.

      The environment where we can access a huge database anytime, anywhere are certainly the necessary condition for intelligence amplification, but not its sufficient condition of it. If so, the librarian of a big library must be the greatest intellectual in the world. That is to say, the Hypermedia alone don't amplify the human intelligence and occasionally rather intensify the feeling of powerlessness and subordination to the system.  The impression that our intelligence was amplified by contacting with the electronic database is the same as the exaltation that we feel when we entered in a huge library or a bookstore, and that is an illusion after all. We are just pulling out the possibility in advance included in the system or program, and no new experiences will be born there. It is such misunderstanding about the knowledge and intelligence that most of the discussions over the Internet are trapped in.

 

Culture and Economy of Information

 

     There is another misunderstanding around this problem. A lot of discussions over the Internet are concerned with the influence to the economy and politics. However, it is the existing system of economy or politics that are the premise of discussion here. In short, the dominant discourse grasps the Internet as a new instrument and thinks of the "use" of it in the existing system.

     In "Cyber Democracy"(1997), Mark Poster put a severe criticism on such discourse. Since the Internet is a new "mode of information" that he says and totally different from the instrument like a hammer. He says as follows,

 

     Put differently the Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. The effects of Germany upon the people within it is to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the effects of hammers is not to make people hammers, though Heideggerians and some others might disagree, but to force metal spikes into wood. As long as we understand the Internet as a hammer we will fail to discern the way it is like Germany. (Poster;1997)

 

      What I want to say here is that with the Internet we are moving from the economy of matter into the economy of information. When we mouth the words such as "the Information Society" or "the Information Capitalism", this "Information" has been considered along the matter or in the category of matter. But each mechanism that the value is brought forth with is totally different between the matter and the information.

     Fundamentally, the value of matter consists in its rarity. Therefore the matter generates its value through imbalances of possession or occupancy by a certain class or group. For instance, the diamond is precious because of its rarity and not of its beauty. If the natural diamond comes to be sold at 1 dollar, it will lose its value and its market itself had not appeared in the first place. The capitalist economy was based on the rarity of matter and the imbalance of possession like this.

     However, the value of information is born rather from the common possession or sharing. As for knowledge and information, the more information is shared by people the more new information and value will be produced there. It is needless to say that how the education system and the printing technology of modern age have created intelligent value by the expanding distribution of knowledge. Information produces various new ideas and emergent qualities by sharing. Its value is made by sharing and not by occupancy.

     Therefore, the economy of information cannot belong well to the capitalist market system.  I think that most of the present information businesses handling information as matter. In such a condition, the economy and the culture of information will never grow up.

     For instance, it is often said that software and contents are important in the information society. However, the social structure that gives value and vitality to them has not been sufficiently provided yet.  We are witnessing obviously; a lot of smart softwares are developed on the non-commercial basis, through a long time of cooperation and discussion shared by many people.  But they are mainly produced so far only by big units such as companies and research organizations. Moreover, softwares have been handled in the same way as material products there. Under such a condition, it will not be possible to create a new software culture.  We need the open system for editing software or editing knowledge.  Although we already know the tradition of free softwares and the movements of "open source" such as Linux, even they have a tendency to be absorbed to the market mechanism finally.

     These movements were "invisible" part of the existing market economy. In fact, we get many ideas, which could develop into an actual business, from ordinary chat and discussion or conversation at parties and bars. Such processes done voluntarily outside of the sphere of economy will be important in the economy of information.

      Someone throws a seed of idea, someone examines it and still another connects it with a different seed of idea.... The information seed or the cultural gene that Richard Dawkins calls "meme" grows up and produces a chain of new information in this form like.

     Therefore, the most important is not to build the information industrial society over the existing system, but to make a free and voluntary economy apart from it. The economical activity is closely collaborating with cultural activity there. And it is related to the world with a new freedom of the articulated small network and the cyborg-like subject.

     The communication space realized by the computer is now preparing a new design of the human and society. It actualized the mutual infiltration between matter and non-matter, virtual space and real space. However, at the same time as we have seen, it is also deeply connected with the old problem of human communications.

     After all, the human cannot experience the world just through the codes of sign or symbol. Through those codes, we are giving a certain "meaning" to our lonely and mortal life.  For a while, the standardized mass media and the nation as the power device have played the role as the distributor of meaning. And when they stopped working properly, the new devices called the computer and hypermedia appeared. In the sense, it is an extremely important attempt to transform the cyberspace into the place where we can live in gtimeh in its true sense.