I called these lectures The Real World of Technology for two reasons. One is that I wanted to pay tribute to C. B. Macpherson and his 1965 Massey Lectures, “The Real World of Democracy.” I intend to look at technology the way Macpherson looked at democracy, as ideas and dreams, as practices and procedures, as hopes and myths. The second reason is that I wanted to discuss technology in terms of living and working in the real world and what this means to people all over the globe. This is the “real” part in the title, and this is what I wish to address now, having spent some time in the first talk on certain aspects of technology as practice.
When I talk about reality, I’m not trying to be a philosopher. I think of reality as the experience of ordinary people in everyday life. There are different levels of reality, and I would like to go quickly through these levels and then look at how they are influenced by the technologies around which our real world is built.
The first level of reality is that nitty-gritty stuff, the direct action and immediate experience, the sort of thing I like to call vernacular reality.1 It’s bread and butter, soup, work, clothing and shelter, the reality of everyday life. This reality is both private and personal, but it is also common and political. Feminists have often stressed that the personal is political,2 and it is this realization that has affected much of my own thinking; it will also permeate through what I am going to say here.
For the purposes of these lectures, I will call extended reality that body of knowledge and emotions we acquire that is based on the experience of others. Here we have all those experiences that we would have had, had we been there. These are the experiences of war, of depression, of old age, of foreign travel, of religious experience that those who were gifted enough to put into words have told us about. The extended reality includes also artifacts — that’s the stuff we collect in museums — which we try to make part of our own reality because we like to draw on that continuity, on that experience of the past, so much so that some of us prefer to hear old music performed on original instruments in order to make the linkage to another time more concrete.
Over and above this, we live with what I call constructed or reconstructed reality. Its manifestations range from what comes to us through works of fiction to the daily barrage of advertising and propaganda. It encompasses descriptions and interpretations of those situations that are considered archetypal rather than representative. These descriptions furnish us with patterns of behaviour. We consider these patterns real, even if we know the situations have been constructed in order to make a particular pattern very clear and evident. So when we read Dostoyevsky, we know that the Grand Inquisitor is not just an episode in Russian history, it’s a pattern of inquisition, the prototype of what happens to the powerless in front of the powerful all over the world. Every Christmas, Dickens” Scrooge is paraded as the archetype of grumpy selfishness. The constructed or reconstructed realities are part of the fabric that holds the common culture together. They become so much a part of the vernacular reality that a newcomer confronts with puzzlement references that just cannot be figured out. This happened to me a great deal when I first came to Canada, and it is as awkward as hearing people laugh at a joke and not understanding what is funny about it.
Finally there is projected reality — the vernacular reality of the future. It is influenced or even caused by actions in the present. Heaven and hell or life after death were — and are still — for some people projected reality. Today there’s also “the future” itself, the five-year plan, the business cycle — and these can influence people’s actions and attitudes as much as or more than the price of bread or the level of wages.
All levels of reality have been profoundly affected by science and technology, but before illustrating this particularly with respect to the realities of time and space, I need to touch briefly on two other aspects of the real world of technology: one is the relationship between science and technology; the other is the nature of experience.
With respect to the relationship between science and technology, it has often been assumed that science is a prerequisite for technology. I’m not sure whether this has ever strictly been true. Certainly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century western Europe science did stimulate a large number of technologies. However, today there is no hierarchical relationship between science and technology. Science is not the mother of technology. Science and technology today have parallel or side-by-side relationships; they stimulate and utilize each other. It is more appropriate to regard science and technology as one enterprise with a spectrum of interconnected activity than to think of two fields of endeavour — science as one, and applied science and technology as the other. Thus when I speak of modern science and technology, I mean this unit of enterprise until I specify other constraints.
In spite of what I’ve just said I want to speak for a moment about the scientific method. Science as well as technology is, after all, more than just a body of knowledge; it is a set of practices and methods. The scientific method as we understand it in the West is a way of separating knowledge from experience. It is the strength of the scientific method that it provides a way to derive the general from the particular and then, in turn, allows general rules and laws to be applied to particular questions. Consequently, somebody can today go to a university and learn how to build bridges from somebody who has never built a bridge.3
The scientific method works best in circumstances in which the system studied can be truly isolated from its general context. This is why its first triumphs came in the study of astronomy.
On the other hand, the application of the general to the specific has been much less successful in situations where generalization was achieved only by omitting essential considerations of context. These questions of reductionism, of loss of context, and of cultural biases are cited quite frequently by critics of the scientific method.4 We hear much less about the human and social effects of the separation of knowledge from experience that is inherent in any scientific approach. These effects are quite widespread and I think they can be serious and debilitating from a human point of view.
Today scientific constructs have become the model of describing reality rather than one of the ways of describing life around us. As a consequence there has been a very marked decrease in the reliance of people on their own experience and their own senses. The human senses of sight and sound, of smell and taste and touch, are superb instruments. All senses, including the so aptly named “common sense,” are perfectible and it’s a great pity that we have so little trust in them. For instance, people know at what point an ongoing noise will give them a headache, but all too often they feel the need for an expert with a device that measures the noise in decibels. The expert then has to compare the noise level measured with a chart that indicates the effect of noise levels on the nervous system. Only when that chart and the expert say, “Yes, indeed, the noise level is above the scientifically established tolerance range,” do people believe that it was indeed the noise and not a figment of their imagination that gave them persistent headaches. I’m not talking here about an either-or situation in which either personal experience or an established measuring procedure is paramount; what I am talking about is the downgrading and the discounting of personal experience by ordinary people who are perfectly well equipped to interpret what their senses tell them. I dwell on this because the downgrading of experience and the glorification of expertise is a very significant feature of the real world of technology.5 Sometimes it is important to stress that because the scientific method separates knowledge from experience it may be necessary in case of discrepancies to question the scientific results or the expert opinion rather than to question and discount the experience. It should be the experience that leads to a modification of knowledge, rather than abstract knowledge forcing people to perceive their experience as being unreal or wrong.
Feminist authors in particular have often called for changes in the way in which the social and human impact of technology is evaluated.6 They have stressed the need to base such evaluation on the experience of those who are at the receiving end of the technology. They have also drawn attention to the overbearing role of experts in the lives of those who, like many women, have no claim to certified expertise because most of their knowledge is not separated from their experience. I foresee great changes in the evaluation of technology and almost all of them will come from bringing in direct experience, which is, after all, the central core of vernacular reality.
All the realities I mentioned, the vernacular and the extended, the constructed and the projected, have been profoundly affected and distorted by modern technology. We ought to keep in mind that the effects we perceive as so large come from technologies that are very recent in historical terms. For example, practical applications of electromagnetic and electronic technologies that have so profoundly changed the realities of the world are not more than one hundred and fifty years old. Think for a moment of the speed of transmission of messages; this really didn’t change between the time of antiquity and about 1800. Whether Napoleon or Alexander the Great, even emperors had to rely on teams of horses and riders to send their messages and receive their responses. Then suddenly, around 1800, the speed of transmission of messages changed from the speed of galloping horses to the speed of the transmission of electricity — the speed of light. Before 1800 optical signals were exchanged, particularly in the military. But it was really only around 1800 that batteries were developed sufficiently and long-distance transmission of electrical signals became feasible, and it was 1825 before adequate electromagnets produced currents and fields that were practically useful.
In 1833, Gauss and Weber, two German professors, strung a mile and a half of copper wire over the roofs of Göttingen and sent electrical impulses along it. And at that time in the United States, Samuel Morse (of the Morse Code) experimented with signal transmission. It was 1844 before he was able to string a line over sixty kilometres and transmit a message in Morse Code. He transmitted the sentence, “What hath God wrought?” and thus began the first useable method for the quick transmission of messages. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received his patent. Faraday conducted his crucial experiments in 1833, Marconi experimented during the beginning of the first decade of this century, and people began to play with radios only after the First World War. So it was essentially during the last 150 years that the speed of transmission of messages truly changed. This, in turn, so completely changed the real world of technology that we now live in a world that is fundamentally different.
In terms of the realities that we have discussed, the message-transmission technologies have created a host of pseudorealities based on images that are constructed, staged, selected, and instantaneously transmitted. I’m talking here about the world of radio, television, film, and video. The images create new realities with intense emotional components. In the spectators they induce a sense of “being there,” of being in some sense a participant rather than an observer. There is a powerful illusion of presence in places and on occasions where the spectators, in fact, are not and have never been. Edward R. Murrow’s phrase, “You are there,” led his audience to believe that they were somehow “present” at important international events.
In French the news is called les actualites, although there is very little that is actual and real in the images and the stories that we see and hear. The technological process of image-making and image transformation is a very selective one. It creates for the eye and ear a “rendition” rather than an “actualite.“ Yet for people all around the world the image of what is going on, of what is important, is primarily shaped by the pseudorealities of images. The selective fragments that become a story on radio and television are chosen to highlight particular events. The selection is usually intended to attract and to retain the attention of an audience. Consequently, the unusual has preference over the usual. The far away that cannot be assessed through experience has preference over the near that can be experienced directly. There is a sense of occasion that is conducive to making what is seen to appear seem as if it was all that happened. Anyone who has ever been at a demonstration and then seen their own experience played back on television knows what I mean. Frequently a small counter-demonstration to a large demonstration is treated as if it were the main event. Side-shows move into the centre and the central issues become peripheral.
Because there are now technical and economic means of creating these pseudorealities of images and exposing a large part of the globe to them, experienced realities and their dynamics have changed, and keep on changing.7 Today the question of whether or not an event is reported and televised may be more important than the content of the event itself. The presence of reporters, camera crews, or external observers affects events as they take place, sometimes initiating new actions. Think of the television cameras in China, South Africa, or eastern Europe. Think about the PCBs in Quebec. Among all the difficult problems of disposing of toxic waste, the destruction of PCBs is a relatively minor and doable task if you compare it to, for instance, the problem of nuclear-waste disposal. Nevertheless, the political dimensions of the PCB issue took a quantum jump the moment the events entered the world of images.
The encroachment of pseudorealities and images into the real world of experience of ordinary people occurs all over the world, but there are important local applications and implications. I only have to remind you, for instance, of the effect of images on candidates for political office. A good, warm image doesn’t say anything about competence or integrity. Still, image considerations loom very large in terms of political advancement and success, because political responses, more often than not, are now based on images. And what seems extraordinary to me is that these media images have so permeated every facet of life that they are no longer perceived as external intrusions or as pseudorealities except by media professionals, and only professionals and academics discuss these images. There is no common discourse about how the images were formed, how they were gathered, how they got into our living rooms.
Media images seem to have a position of authority that is comparable to the authority that religious teaching used to have. The images seem infallible in the way the Pope’s authority was unquestionable prior to the Reformation. In the real world of technology, I think, we would be well advised to question the authority of the images in the manner in which the Reformation questioned the authority of the Pope. And I say this because throughout the Middle Ages the Church, with its doctrine and its religious teaching, was the authority that prescribed the conduct of social and political relations. The Reformation challenged that authority of the Church to be the sole arbiter of individual conduct beyond the individual’s own conscience and discernment. Today, technological rationales have very much the force and authority of religious doctrine, including the notion that the laity is unfit to question doctrinal content and practice. It is in a spirit of questioning authority that we should ask, “What about people who are at the receiving end of technologically produced pseudorealities of images?” Their work has changed as their lives have changed. Life and work have been restaged by external forces. The literature of television and advertising is testimony to that, but more so is the practice of both. The reconstructed world of images has taken over much of our vernacular reality, like an occupation force of immense power. And somewhere, someone will have to ask, “How come the right to change our mental environment — to change the constructs of our minds and the sounds around us — seems to have been given away without anybody’s consent?“
While it’s possible, in theory, to opt out of this world of images, in practice one can really only do that in a very limited way. Of course I don’t have to watch television, I don’t have to listen to the news, and many of us have indeed begun to cultivate other channels of information that are more directly related to the life experiences of our contemporaries. But the pseudorealities and the images are there, and the world is structured to believe in them.
If I want to promote change I need to understand and appreciate the structuring of the images, even if I don’t trust their content. Opting out by individuals really doesn’t change the agenda of what is urgent and what is not, unless there is a collective effort to supplement and substitute the images with genuine experience. Just because the imaging technology has emphasized the far over the near, the near doesn’t go away. Even though the abnormal is given a great deal more play than the normal, the normal still exists and, with it, all its problems and challenges. But somehow observing a homeless person sleeping in the park around the corner doesn’t seem to register as an event when it’s crowded out in the observer’s mind by images from far-away places.
Let me give you a recent example. Canadian news has been full of the events in eastern Europe. We have seen East Germans going to the West; we’ve seen the events in Poland. Resonating in the reports was a note of cheering joy: “Yes, democracy means so much to them; they struggle for it; they win; we cheer.” At the same time very significant events in our own country — such as the cuts to Via Rail — are not discussed in Parliament, not voted upon after a democratic debate, but decided in seclusion by Cabinet. So you can understand why I feel that danger lurks when the far so outperforms the near. As a community we should look at what the new technologies of message-forming and -transmitting do to our own real world of technology and democracy. This is why I have a sense of urgency to map the real world of technology, so that we might see how in our social imagination the near is disadvantaged over the far. We should also understand that this does not have to be so.
The strong impact of the world of images on people’s reality has yet another component. Viewing or listening to television, radio, or videos is shared experience carried out in private. The printing technologies were the first ones that allowed people to take in separately the same information and then discuss it together. Prior to that, people who wanted to share an experience had to be together in the same place — to see a pageant, to listen to a speech. Then, printed text — quoted and requoted — yielded some of the common information. Now there are new, high-impact technologies and these produce largely ephemeral images. The images create a pseudocommunity, the community of those who have seen and heard what they perceive to be the same event that others, who happened not to have watched or listened, missed for good. Just listen to a discussion of a hockey game — or, for that matter, to a discussion of a leader’s debate — that no one present attended. The talk proceeds as if all had been there. In this manner, pseudorealities create pseudocommunities.
There are times when the pseudocommunities of viewers and listeners spawn real communities of common concern. Many credit the formation of communities of opposition to the Vietnam War and their political effectiveness to television images of the war. One can perceive these communities of concern as originating from within the pseudocommunities of viewers and listeners. A similar process brought together those who have acted jointly to help victims of famine in Africa — Live-Aid, the Space Bridge movement — and formed international groups that focus attention on particular environmental issues. Since normally only a fraction of the pseudocommunity become members of the real and active community, the possibility of forming such groups may be greater in the case of broadly based international concerns that are “the far” for most viewers than in the case of specific problems of “the near.“
Nevertheless, this reforming of community is a very hopeful sign, particularly against the background of passivity that listening and viewing commonly entails and which, I need to stress again, is so reinforced by the avoidance of direct experience. However, the reformed communities seem to be more successful in addressing manifestations than in addressing the root causes of the concerns that brought them together. Temporary relief from hunger does not eliminate famine, and withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam did not address the fundamental reasons for aggression.
To recap, technology has developed practical means to overcome the limitations of distance and time. Devices, organizations, and structures have been created for this purpose and they are now an integral part of our social and political landscape. Everyone’s vernacular reality has changed. In addition to carrying out established tasks in a different manner (for instance, not to write but to phone, not to use the mail or courier but to fax), there are genuinely new activities that are possible now that could not have been done without the new technologies and their infrastructure. They are, in the main, related to the transfer, storage, and reconstruction of information. Some of these affect our approaches to and perceptions of the future, that is, the projected realities.
The technological possibilities for information gathering, storage, and evaluation, interwoven with a tight net of administrative infrastructures, have made it possible to treat certain parts of the future as parts of the present. Let me give you one illustration. It’s a useful, but not unique, example. There are futures markets and commodity exchanges, and there is such a thing as “trading in futures.” This means that one can buy or sell shares of crops that have not yet been grown, that one is speculating on the price of animals that are not yet born or on the demand for products not yet made. Still, such trading activities are not mere figments of the imagination; they are not totally removed from reality just because the crops have not yet grown, because the results of those trading activities are real. People make money or lose money in futures trading; rent is paid from transactions made on dealings that are essentially hypothetical. Thus money ties the present and the future together in a way that did not exist in an earlier world. What is new, as so often is the case when new technical means restructure social and economic activities, is the organized, standardized, “normal” appearance of transactions that are to be carried out in the future; the deals fit without discontinuity into the procedures for transactions entirely limited to the present. The future is thus perceived and handled as a structural and technical extension of the present.
There is a lot of talk about global crises and “our common future.“8 However, there is far too little discussion of the structuring of the future which global applications of modern technologies carry in their wake. What ought to be of central concern in considering our common future are the aspects of technological structuring that will inhibit or prevent future changes in social and political relations.
And now I’d like to focus for a moment on the human consequences which are particularly evident in what are called the communications technologies, and which I would like to call the “non-communications” technologies because very often that word, “communication,” is a misnomer. Whenever human activities incorporate machines or rigidly prescribed procedures, the modes of human interaction change. In general, technical arrangements reduce or eliminate reciprocity. Reciprocity is some manner of interactive give and take, a genuine communication among interacting parties. For example, a face-to-face discussion or a transaction between people needs to be started, carried out, and terminated with a certain amount of reciprocity. Once technical devices are interposed, they allow a physical distance between the parties. The give and take — that is, the reciprocity — is distorted, reduced, or even eliminated.
I am very fond of a Ben Wicks cartoon which illustrates this point beautifully. The cartoon shows a repairman in a living room removing a television set with a smashed screen. Next to the set stands a man on crutches, one foot heavily bandaged, to whom the repairman says, “Next time Trudeau speaks, just turn the set off.” I think that says it all. It says that a personal response of the kind that the man in the cartoon was obviously eager to give can neither be given nor received when communication is mediated by technology. Any reciprocity is ruled out by design. This loss of reciprocity is a continuing form of technologically executed inequality. It has very profound political and psychological consequences.
I’d like to stress that reciprocity is not feedback. Feedback is a particular technique of systems adjustment. It is designed to improve a specific performance. The performance need not be mechanical or carried out by devices, but the purpose of feedback is to make the thing work. Feedback normally exists within a given design. It can improve the performance but it cannot alter its thrust or the design. Reciprocity, on the other hand, is situationally based. It’s a response to a given situation. It is neither designed into the system nor is it predictable. Reciprocal responses may indeed alter initial assumptions. They can lead to negotiations, to give and take, to adjustment, and they may result in new and unforeseen developments.
I emphasized earlier the extent to which the new technologies of image procurement have invaded the real world of technology. By design, these technologies have no room for reciprocity. There is no place for response. One may want to speculate for a moment whether this technological exclusion of response plays a part in the increasing public acceptance of the depiction of violence and cruelty. I find it hard to imagine anyone actually standing next to a person who is being hurt or abused and enjoying the sight and sound of the experience, nor can I imagine such a direct observer not intervening or at least feeling guilty for having failed to do so. On the other hand, violence depicted on a screen appears to be acceptable and entertaining. It doesn’t seem to matter how violence is depicted or how degrading or obscene it is. Viewers are not called to respond. They are not “there,” where the action is.
The notion of reciprocity may also help to explain an apparent contradiction between responses to viewing or listening in particular settings. Have you ever been in an overflow audience that had to listen to a lecture on closed-circuit television in an adjacent room because the main auditorium was full? Most people in this situation are quite disgruntled and feel cheated, although they see and hear exactly the same thing as people in the main auditorium. Still, they say, it doesn’t feet real, it doesn’t feel right. By the same token, the great hope of using TV or film to let many students benefit from exceptional interpreters, letting them be part of an outstanding lecture, has not been realized. Students just do not like to be taught by a television screen. This does not mean that one can never make good use of a new technology, but here it seems to work only in a supplementary mode, in terms of illustration and extension. Teaching on television is rarely engaging in the way news reports of flood and famine are. The pseudoimages and events reported by regular television are dramatic renditions, carefully selected and assembled fragments. This is different from the camera or the tape recorder in the lecture room, recording everything without selection or comment.
On the other hand, viewers are rivetted to televised proceedings of judicial inquiries or public hearings. It seems that in situations where reciprocity is neither permissible nor desired — such as when observing an actual inquiry — images are acceptable substitutes for reality. However, whenever the potential for reciprocity exists and is valued — as in the lecture or teaching situation — images won’t do.
We should reflect on the possibility that technology that produces pseudorealities of ephemeral images and eliminates reciprocity also diminishes the sense of common humanity. This may sound dramatic, but such a development can start with very simple but pervasive steps. Where there is no reciprocity, there is no need for listening. There is then no need to understand or accommodate. For kids this can mean that one doesn’t have to be moderately civil to one’s younger sister because she is the only one to play with; television allows entertainment without the cooperation of anybody. In school, there is no argument or negotiation with the computer. Sharing work among students takes on a different meaning. Women who work in automated offices often report how much human isolation the automation has brought for them. When work isn’t shared, the instruments of cooperation — listening, taking note, adjusting — atrophy like muscles that are no longer in use.
One illustration of technologically induced human isolation: When I go to work in the morning I often meet a neighbour and her ten-year-old daughter. Every day they walk side by side to the bus stop, each plugged into her own Walkman, isolated from one another and from the rest of the world. Such is the real world of technology. The question that lingers on in my mind is this: How will our society cope with its problems when more and more people live in technologically induced human isolation?
Let me emphasize again that technologies need not be used the way we use them today. It is not a question of either no technology or putting up with the current ones. Just remember that even in the universe of constructed images and pseudorealities there still exists a particular enclave of personal directness and immediacy: the world of the ham-radio operator. It is personal, reciprocal, direct, affordable — all that imaging technology is not — and it has become in many cases a very exceptional early warning system of disasters. It is a dependable and resilient source of genuine communication. I am citing this example so as not to leave the impression that the technological reduction of meaningful human contact and reciprocal response is inherently inevitable.
In this lecture I have tried to demonstrate the changes that technology has brought to our perceptions of reality. Many of these changes have become such an integral part of the fabric of existence in the real world of technology that the resulting distortions of human and social relations are now considered normal and beyond questioning. I hope that I have also shown how one can question and, I hope, mitigate the encroachments of pseudorealities.
In the next lecture I will focus on technology as a catalyst for the spread of control and management, and on the infrastructures that have become part of our society because of this expansion.