Newmedia on Thu, 16 May 2013 16:09:33 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class |
Felix: Thanks -- I was hoping (okay, anticipating) that you would reply! <g> 1) Castels: "Manuel Castells immediately springs to mind" -- of course he does and I've read your excellent review/analysis of his work. How has he been received among his peers? I've talked with a few of them and they all said that his "tour" of various sociology departments in the late 90s was a flop. Has he picked up any traction? It is interesting that Berkeley has been involved in multiple attempts to deal with the "ignoring" of technology by social scientists, including the effort to "endogenize" tech in economics. 2) Concreteness: "But even technological development always takes place in concrete historical settings." Indeed. As someone who once followed 20 companies on Wall Street, I'm convinced that the *very* peculiar details of every situation must be known to have any intelligent ideas about outcomes. However, for-better-and-worse, nowadays that sort of behavior can send you to jail. Btw, McLuhan's "business" consulting was always someone else's idea and fly-by-night at best. Perhaps my record of giving such advice would be a more "organized: example -- including my "price target" of $2000 for Google. <g> 3) McLuhan: "The trouble with McLuhan-style analysis is that in order to avoid these complexities, one has to resort to extreme abstraction." Not really. Frameworks like McLuhan's -- which was only published posthumously in the 1988 "Laws of Media," and which few have read and fewer have tried to use -- only make sense when applied over-and-over to the specifics at hand. Derrick de Kerckhove, who seems to be the primary path-to-McLuhan for Europeans recently noted that he *never* uses the Tetrad (i.e. the heuristic presented in LoM) -- so, based on the score-or-so Continentals with any interest in McLuhan who I've met, I'd suggest that there is very little "McLuhan-style analysis" going on. 4) Soviet Union: "Castells bases his analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union on its inability to move out of an industrial and into a networked mode." Yes, that's an important insight. Or, alternately, to use a McLuhan phrase, they failed to shift from "hardware communism" to "software communism." To this day, there is no viable Silicon Valley equivalent in Russia. The final "straw" in the Cold War, "Star Wars," was a joint DoD/DARPA/Valley project and that same military-information complex is now responsible for yesterday's Google I/O keynote. 5) China: "Yes, life was different in the 'East' and in the 'West'" -- especially if you keep on trucking down the Silk Road. In particular, given the historic importance of "Needham's Dilemma" (i.e. how could the Chinese "invent" everything but not allow any of it to shape their society?), the deliberate efforts now to build a "ubiquitous society" based on networked technology, combined with a detailed "roadmap" for scientific research for the next 40-years, taking us into quite different technological realms, has no historic precedent and no counterpart in the West. 6) Scale: "So, if you shrink the scale, things become more difficult." Absolutely. However, micro-without-macro only compounds those difficulties. If you don't have any "theory" to work with and are simply, or let's say robotically, collecting data until some handy "pattern" emerges -- ala today's Big Data efforts -- you will rarely get much insight. As Kurt Lewin said, "There's nothing as practical as a good theory." Without a theory about how technology shapes society -- which certainly need not be the *only* way you try to understand and anticipate events -- you are operating without the benefit your own critical facilities and, in the process, resembling the very technologies that you set out to comprehend (just as McLuhan predicted you would <g>). Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org