What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub

Author:Adrian Daub
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Marshall McLuhan appears to have been critical of what came to be popularized as the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, as well as of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, because they paid insufficient attention to “how people are changed by the instruments they employ.” In a strange way, McLuhan and Claude Shannon predicted the two central features that define our twenty-first-century media landscape. Shannon pointed out that by the management of redundancy, almost any content could be beamed across the planet. And McLuhan sensed that, because people would be producing, receiving, and enjoying that content, they would load up every available channel with redundancy right away. In other words: we can communicate better, and therefore we will actually communicate worse.

This isn’t exactly a new problem. In his book Speaking into the Air, John Durham Peters argues that “communication” has always been a concept that brims with potential, a potential that actual acts of communication nearly always fall short of. There is an almost mystical fantasy of perfect transparency, community, and directness behind this concept that draws on imagery of religious visions and divine inspiration. Though the word is quite old, the concept of communication became compelling to philosophers and theorists only once it was both imperative that messages travel with little distortion and clear that they very rarely did. The concept designates, as Peters puts it, both a bridge and a barrier. Or, put another way, communication was often taken to be solving the problems communication had created in the first place.

This has allied both the problem and the promise of communication with technological progress. The more networked we become, for instance, the more abuse of our systems of communication becomes a dangerous issue. Fake news on social media matters a great deal more than, say, a monk writing a fake chronicle in twelfth-century England, or someone drawing a slanderous cartoon in eighteenth-century France. But the fact that discourse about communication has traditionally pulled from mystical or religious language has allowed the media of the internet age to hide behind a convenient sense of disappointment—a dodge that has shadowed acts of communication since well before Huxley took his first gulp of mescaline. As a result, we aren’t able to communicate very well about our systems of communication.

If you require documentation for that claim, simply ask @jack—the Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey—about banning neo-Nazis from his platform. You’ll get back an ever-changing cloud of verbiage, abuzz with ideals and high hopes. He’ll elide the fact that in countries where showing certain content would expose Twitter to legal liability, the company is perfectly happy to let those ideals and hopes be damned and get busy censoring. He’ll elide the incredibly tricky and deeply political choices his company makes to decide what content to take down. He’ll even elide exactly how this is done. At most, you get a sense of profound disappointment: We built you kids this amazing toy, and all you can think to do with it is be Nazis or call each other Nazis.

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