The new blog had been tinkered with for so long that it has finally come to a temporary rest, and I should also write something more serious to explain myself.
But this so-called serious writing is not yet that paper I have kept putting off; I’ll deal with that paper properly after the New Year. For now, following the context of tidying up the blog, let me talk about some thoughts on the “network age.”
The last class of Wu’s seminar last semester happened to touch on communication in the network age, and I happened to pick up this thread and speak from there.
The issue of communication in the network age can roughly be divided into two aspects: one is the effect of electronic media’s mode of operation on expression, reading, and writing; the other is the effect of networking on social relations and communication. Of course these two aspects are interrelated.
I’ll set aside the social and ethical aspects for now and first discuss the impact of electronic technology on people’s modes of reading and writing, and even on cognition and expression.
–
As for this impact, Wu seems to regard it lightly; he said he does not feel there is much difference between writing an essay on a computer and writing one with a pen. In fact, according to Wu’s line of technological phenomenology, technology contains intentional structures. Such a major technological transformation could not possibly fail to be accompanied by some change in intentional structure. This change may be large or small, but it cannot be entirely absent. If one cannot feel the change in intentional structure, then the problem is probably with human reflection and understanding. After all, whenever a new technology first appears, people always tend to understand it with old concepts: cars are seen as automatic carriages, telegraphs as faster letters. But in fact, the automobile not only makes travel faster; it also changes the meaning of “travel” itself. It not only gives travel a new image, but also changes the original meaning of the carriage—“the new medium turns the old medium into art.” Likewise, electronic technology will also alter the image of writing; it will even change the meaning of “writing” and “text” themselves.
The reason people find it difficult to immediately recognize the disruptive changes brought by new technology is nothing more than this: people are always accustomed to measuring new technology with concepts from the context of old technology, and the development of concepts often lags behind technology. Imagine a person living in the age of carriages who encounters an automobile for the first time, but has not yet changed his whole way of life and habits. Previously, how he traveled, he still travels that way; previously, how he arranged travel within the rhythm of life, he still arranges it that way; he has simply replaced the old carriage with a car. Then naturally he will find that travel is a bit faster, a bit more convenient, but when the surrounding facilities are not in place (for example, when roads have not been properly laid), the automobile is instead slower and more troublesome—so taken as a whole, it doesn’t seem all that different from the carriage. Only when the whole environment (context) changes—when people rearrange the rhythm of life according to the car’s performance, when the entire social structure and public environment change their setup around the car’s characteristics—can the difference between automobile and carriage truly emerge. Yet by then, people accustomed to a car-based environment have often long since forgotten the world of carriages, and they in turn use the intentionality of the automobile to understand the carriage, still very likely arriving at the conclusion that cars and carriages are not all that different.
To see the differences among technological media, one really does need ontological or phenomenological reflection. First, one must bracket the object, or rather, suspend the “content” and instead reflect on the medium. We cannot confine our gaze to the object of writing, namely the “article” itself; merely measuring the content of an article does not easily reveal differences in medium.
–
But if the difference among media is not embodied in content, then where exactly is it embodied? Here one must note that new media of course cannot avoid transforming content. The problem is that what counts as medium and what counts as content often has no clear boundary. The more it is a period of media innovation, the more inseparable medium and content become. What is called “the medium is the message” is also about this. For example, when the train appeared, what was the “content” it carried? If we still look at trains through the intentional structure of handcarts and carriages, then what we see is a thing made up of carriages linked one after another, and its contents are, say, coal and ore. Analyzing from such a perspective, what transformation can we say the train brought to its cargo? Apparently none. Compared with ore hauled by carriage, ore in a train is no purer or more special; there is no difference at all, except that the ore hauled by train is a bit faster and a bit more abundant. But if we broaden our perspective, and do not regard the “medium” as some specific tangible ready-made object, but rather as an “environment,” as a field that provides possibilities, then the matter is quite different. We discover that the so-called “train” is not merely the carriages standing there one after another; it also includes the entire railway system, the steam engine, the technological background, the social structure, and so on. It is all of this background that enables the train to function as a train. And the content carried by the train is not merely the initial ready-made iron ore and coal. With the appearance of the train, the concept of “cargo” itself was expanded; the train turned many things that originally could not have been regarded as cargo into cargo, and turned many actions that had not originally been imagined as transport into reality. These things that transcend the old conceptual system are the real “message” brought by the train.
So we may ask: you write an article on the computer, what difference is there between the paper you produce and one written by hand? Just as we may also ask: you use a train to haul coal, what difference is there between the coal hauled back by train and that hauled by carriage? The answer, of course, is: yes, there is no difference. But this does not mean that the application of computers has not had a major influence on people’s intentionality of writing.
–
In fact, computers and the network have changed “the article” itself, expanding the very concept of “text.” If we take old ideas and understand computers through the print-age concepts of what counts as an article and what counts as text, then of course it is hard to see what difference the computer has really brought. For when I use a computer to write an article, I am still constraining myself by print-age standards of “article” and setting my own goals accordingly, so my “result” (the product of the computer medium) will naturally come as close as possible to my “goal” (the print-age conception). To make a real comparison, we cannot understand concepts as if they were ready-made things.
For example, when writing a “log,” I can write it in a notebook with a pen, or I can write it in a disk with a computer. If you ask what difference there is between my log written in a disk on the computer and a log written in a notebook with a pen, then if I simply take the keyboard as a substitute for the pen and the disk as a substitute for paper, the thing I write probably really won’t differ much. But the point is that once we become familiar with electronic media, we no longer write logs according to the traditional model at all. “Log” gradually acquires a new meaning and becomes a “web log”; log becomes blog, and then “Weibo” and “Facebook” appear. Among all the acts of traditional pen-and-paper writing, there is none that corresponds to posting a “micro-log” on Twitter; nor is there anything in the traditional activity of passing notes or letters that corresponds to posting a status or a share on “non-dead-can’t-use.” And the traditional habit of writing diaries in notebooks has greatly declined in the network age, while texts still written by hand are given more nostalgic, romantic, or special overtones.
What, after all, is the activity corresponding to the traditional concept of “log”? Is it the act of using a laptop as a substitute for a notebook to keep one’s private diary each day, or is it the blogging act of publishing under the name of “log”? The fact may be that neither is quite right; the traditional concept of log has been completely broken apart and muddied.
By the way, what is my academic writing? According to ready-made standards, perhaps only a properly academic paper, and one published in a properly academic journal, counts as academic activity. But the concept of academic work will change, just as the current academic format is a product of the print age. The network age will have new academic forms; even the “journal” itself will become obsolete, not because something will replace it, but because in the academic system of the network age there will no longer be any concept that corresponds adequately to “journal.” Hyperlinks and pingbacks will replace footnotes and bibliographies, but they also cannot completely replace them in a one-to-one fashion. Although the current paper format will still exist, it will gradually, like dialogues and aphoristic writing, become a kind of “art.”
–
Let me return to the main point and speak again about the impact of electronic media on writing. Since we should not measure it merely by the results it produces or the content it presents, that also means we should pay attention to the writing activity itself and notice how the process of writing changes.
But then a problem arises: how do we divide the process of writing from the “product”? This question sounds strange, but it is indeed a major one. In fact, the ability to distinguish the process of expression from the product of expression so clearly is a characteristic of writing. In the oral age, the process of expression is the content of expression; expression, the expresser, and the expressed are one. “Speech” is both process and product, or rather, there is no real product at all. Oral language is always in motion, never fixed into a finalized result.
Writing culture brought about a split condition—“expression” and “delivery” were separated, “reading” and “writing” were separated, “author” and “work” were separated.
Only when writing as a “process” can be independently distinguished do we come to think that this process—the intervening medium—is replaceable. We can imagine replacing the pen with a keyboard and paper with a disk, and then compare the differences in their results (products). But the question is: how legitimate is this substitution, really?
–
So when we express ourselves through a computer, is it, like writing, something that has a fixed result separate from the process? Or is it, like speaking, something that never really has a formed “result” and instead remains always in a flowing process? This is not something to take for granted. In fact, expression through the computer seems to lie somewhere between the two—speech is like running water: after it flows past, it may leave you with a touch and an imprint, but it does not leave behind a fixed product; writing, by contrast, is like sculpture (printing is mold-making): once the carving and imprinting are done, it becomes a hard result, and although it can still be revised, it still appears solid and stable. But electronic textual input lies between liquid and solid, as if kneading clay: compared with a solid, clay is more malleable while being shaped, and at any time it can be softened again for easy revision; compared with a liquid, clay clearly has more substantial reality, and when fixed it can be as hard and compact as stone, available for objective contemplation at any moment, yet at any moment it can again become soft and even fluid.
Before electronic technology, the pencil counted as a writable-and-erasable writing technology, but at most this only meant that the material for this kind of carving was easier to wipe away. Activities such as, like kneading a lump of modeling clay, cutting, pasting, moving, and dismantling blocks of text at any time, and embedding large blocks of text anywhere in an article at any time, are utterly unimaginable for the pencil. Moreover, the pencil has always been regarded as the lowest-grade writing tool, reserved for elementary school students. From crayon to pencil to ballpoint pen to fountain pen, the “higher” the level of the writing tool, the harder it is to erase, and the more solid what is written becomes. It is clear, then, that a solid finished product is the basic intention of the writing age. But the text on a computer, on the one hand, has solidity; on the other hand, it also always maintains a high degree of malleability.
When is a written text “complete”? The completion of a written text depends on the exhaustion of (possible) space. A page is filled, a diary is filled, and then it is complete. The significance of “margins” began to emerge in the print age: they left readers a little bit of space, allowing them to participate in the final completion of the work. Yet the space thus left is, after all, very small. So when does an electronic text end? The “margins” of electronic text are infinite; no matter how compactly or fully a text is written, it always has ample room. When it is “posted” or published on the network, one can say that it has “come to a temporary rest,” but from then on readers may participate in this text without end, and the author may also revise its text at any time. Especially on blogs or Weibo now, posting the first paragraph of text often does not mark the result of a stretch of expression; rather, it foretells the opening of a stretch of expression, with the author creating little by little in response to readers’ feedback.
–
But the breaking down by electronic technology of the clear boundary between the process and the result of creation is not a simple return to the oral age, bringing everything back to a chaotic state of flow. In fact, the various links in the “process” have instead become clearer, and the layers and structures within the medium have become more distinct. It’s just that these links do not appear as a one-way linear structure; instead, they are mutually nested and interrelated, presenting a multi-layered structure that is hard to reduce to a simple binary.
The computer network, which claims to be “the medium of all media,” can easily turn any medium into its content; that is to say, media that were originally hidden and not conspicuous gain more opportunity to show themselves within the computer network. Media operating at different levels can be juxtaposed or reconnected.
The writing tool of the computer is generally called “word processing”; the most famous word-processing software is the well-known “Word,” while my current blog system is called WordPress, “word printing.” We notice that the word “Word” has been brought to the forefront. In the traditional mode, however, Word is often not made to stand out as the protagonist in our creative process. We write articles, we publish books. The printer’s work is indeed “typesetting,” but this typesetting stage is separated from the preceding and following stages of “writing a book” and “publishing a book”; these stages are arranged in a linear sequence. But in the computer medium, “typesetting” is not merely an independent intermediary stage between creation and publication; at the same time it becomes part of both creation and publication. From Word Processing to WordPress, from “word processing” to “word printing,” we are all along dealing with text or words, because in the whole process, text never fully solidifies, yet unlike speech it is not elusive everywhere; rather, one can always firmly grasp text and arrange it.
“Word processing” does not merely mean “handling affairs through words,” but rather making words the thing being handled. Using words and handling words become one; words are both medium and conspicuous object. The situation of “text” is an example of the media condition in the computer age.
–
Beyond bringing the medium into the open, the computer network also pulls together the two ends of the medium—the creator, the disseminator, and the receiver—so much so that it becomes difficult to draw clear boundaries among them. As mentioned earlier, readers can participate in the creative process; on the other hand, the author can also participate in the reader’s reading process. A work is no longer, as in the print age, flowing unilaterally from author to reader, but is always situated in a position between author and reader, even containing both author and reader within itself. Of course, I am speaking of the internet’s “word printing” mode; and if you still use the network according to the old model, merely taking “WordPress” as a simple substitute for Press, posting an article and acting as if it had been printed, without “online” interaction and creation, then for the time being you still will not be able to appreciate the characteristics mentioned above. But why must people “finish writing” an article before disseminating it? Can dissemination not be part of the creative activity?
A series of technologies centered on word processing were initially classified under the category of “office automation.” This is a typical result of understanding new things through old concepts. For in the age of the printing press, or the mechanical age, the application of machines meant “automation” and meant “dehumanization.” The more central the machine, the more marginal the human, and the widespread use of machines would exclude people from the “process” of production. Thus the use of computers in office work was taken for granted as “automation.” But in fact, the situation does not seem to be so. The application of computers certainly has replaced much human labor, but it has also created more space for people and may allow them to play a more active, more human role in office work. Of course, technological development is not one-directional; there are many possible paths. If one arranges the network according to mechanical logic, for example by using computers to comprehensively, precisely formulate and monitor the rhythm and order of an assembly-line style, then the prospect may indeed be “office automation.” But if one uses network logic to arrange machinery, the characteristics of the network—its explicitness as medium and its decentralization—may bring about a developmental tendency entirely different from mechanization. Of course, these mainly concern social questions, which I will not dwell on here for now.
–
What is called the computer age, the network age, is in its roots Turing’s age. The crux of the Turing machine lies in the unity of tool and result, the unity of program and object, of process and goal. The computing tool can at the same time be computing data and computing result; coding makes the computational process a kind of medium mediated by itself, which is an unprecedented condition. In the past, we always needed one medium to process another medium; even if the materials were the same (for example, using a stone awl to chisel a stone statue), their forms or roles would certainly not be the same. To use a program to program, software to run software, code to verify code—such activities are hard to imagine. This possibility of media self-reference and self-presentation makes it possible for the media environment to become multi-layered and nonlinear (the basic element of a nonlinear system is “iteration”), presenting an infinitely nested structure.
–
In addition to changes in media structure, the “nature” of electronic media is also changing. There are many ways to classify the nature of media, for example, as aggressive or preservative, masculine or feminine, creative or destructive, and so on. Here I mainly want to mention the McLuhanesque distinction: cold/hot, visual/auditory-tactile. (For the specific distinctions, please see my old essay via the link.)
Is the electronic network cold or hot? That is really rather hard to judge. It can be cold or hot, sometimes cold, sometimes hot. This is because the electronic network is not “one” medium, but a nesting of various media, a synthesis of “multimedia,” and thus retains diverse possibilities. That is precisely why it is meaningful for us to reflect seriously on electronic media now: we are not merely passively accepting the results of the network age, but can also participate in the growth of this age.
So is the space unfolded by network media a tactile space or a visual space? That depends on what you compare it with. Compared with the oral, village life-world, the network world is of course more visual. But compared with alphabetic and print culture, network media seems to have invited back the tactile world that had long since been forgotten and banished.
Is handwriting tactile? Indeed, handwriting is writing with the hand of touch. Yet in this process of writing, the tactility of the hand is precisely something that needs to be suppressed; just as in carving, vision is the more dominant sense, while the hand’s tactile sense does not directly “grasp” the object at hand, but must contact it through hard, cold knives or pens. (Chinese brush writing and square-character script are the most distinctive, and also the most tactile.) In the process of writing, I can only grasp the whole “slab” of stone, but I cannot pinch the words and sentences, cannot pinch “Word.” And as electronic technology develops, actions that belong to tactile functions—pushing, pulling, pinching, dragging, tapping, cutting, and so on—are gradually brought into expressive activity.
The earliest electronic-tube calculators were completely visual; people operated them only through the structure of their appearance. The “command line” operating systems represented by DOS, by contrast, introduced hearing to a greater extent. “Command” is itself an auditory concept: it lets the computer’s mechanical logical structure recede into the background, while language and commands in the auditory register take on the role of control. Microsoft’s Windows system, literally speaking, opened up a visual window, but the essential elements of this window are precisely tactile: it is the “desktop” and the “icons.” From then on, operating a computer had tactile actions such as “placing,” “dragging,” and “clicking.” Then the more recently fashionable Apple touchscreen: the revolutionary thing about it is also the strengthening of touch. Although touchscreens had long existed, earlier touchscreens mostly made the finger play the role of the eye, that is, the role of “focusing”; each time one merely used a finger to tap a certain focal point, which cannot really count as true “touch.” It was Apple’s ingenious design that truly opened the intentionality of the “touchscreen,” letting touch return to dominate the visual object called the “screen.” This too has symbolic significance.
I do not agree with McLuhan’s judgment about television, and am closer instead to Postman. In my view, television is clearly a hot medium, a medium of one-way indoctrination. But I think computer networks are different from television. McLuhan’s judgment that television media are an “extension of the nervous system” ought to apply to network media.
–
This article was originally titled “Knowledge Is Linkage,” and I wanted to discuss certain issues involving epistemology, discussing within network media the problem of the “real” in “real-time” and the “being” in “online.” But I laid too much groundwork; let alone the question of knowledge, I still haven’t even talked about “linkage.” So let’s leave these questions for another time. Before I continue discussing related issues, you can join in!
–
February 2, 2011
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply