User:Birgit bachler/readings

FOUCAULT AND DATABASES. PARTICIPATORY SURVEILLANCE

Mark Poster

Foucault & Databases by Mark Poster

The database creates a new language situation opposed to the classical television: Databases do not address one individual, they require the individual's input and serve as a repository of messages. Mark Poster links the structure of databases and their relation of society to Michel Foucault and in particular his analysis of discourse, whose theory problematizes the interdependence of language and action.

"All information in all places at all time" , the absolute subject and an impossible ideal. He cites and mentions the following resources:

Gutenberg Two - The New Electronics and Social Change by Godfrey and Parkhill from 1983, evoking what is increasingly becoming an emblem of futurists: "In the comfort of home, seated before a computer equipped with a modem, the individual has access to all the information in all the world's databanks."

Gustave Flaubert, 19th century french writer farcically portraying the search for total, perfect knowledge.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) featuring a character reading an entire library from A to Z "in a similar quixotic quest".

In his own view the more contemporary fantasy assumes that print will entirely be digitally encoded and stored, publicly available for everyone. That this information will be used by individuals without political implications and nothing of significance will be lost during that process, concluding all these assumptions to be highly suspect.

James Rule, 1974, concluded that databases "enable detailed reconstruction of the daily activities of any individual". The Privacy Act, 1974 raises a general social problem of the mode of information, including dramatic changes in the reproduction, transmission, storage and retrieval of information that profoundly affect the entire social system.

"Drastic changes in the means and relations of communication are making a shambles of the delicate balance in the social order that was negotiated and struggled over during the epochs of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and twentieth-century welfare statism. Relations between national and local governments, between these and economic, educational, religious, media and familial institutions, between all of these and individuals, in short the entire social infrastructure must be re-calibrated and synchronized to the databases of the mode of information."

Assuming the reproduction of 1 Judeo-Christian bible took 1 medieval monk 1 year, with a 1990's state-of-the-art 9600 baud rate modem one person could download 52.560 books.

The Enlightenment dream of an educated society, wherein all knowledge is available to the least individual is now technically feasible.

"New gadgets are developed in the context of existing needs, shaped by perceptions of situated individuals; they are restricted in their production and dissemination by ruling powers, and resisted by hegemonic cultural patterns and individual fears."

The aegis of private property makes all efforts to keep material goods under the control of self-interested private individuals. We are being convinced that information is a commodity and properly controlled by market forces, capitalists assumes that resources are scarce and therefore have to be controlled by market mechanisms. information is not scarce but plentiful and cheap - the market inverts itself by restricting the flow of information and producing the scarcity that economists tell us is a fact of nature. Poster states the problem is that information is too easily reproduced. Now information is not inseparable from their packages anymore (books, music film). The threat against sony's VHS recorder reveals that capitalists not only wanted control of the airwaves and the content what is sent on them but also control of the viewer. "Video recorders undermine the control and discipline of the viewer by the broadcaster". With the example of video tapes Poster states that consumers are producing better copies of recordings than the commercial corporations do when using better tapes, maintaining their equipment better and dubbing in real-time. Digital reproduction takes sounds, images and language out of the register of material being. Analog to digital transformation means the transformation from naturally organized matter into manipulable electrons. The relationship of capitalism and language used to rely on the fact that reproduction was only possible by the transformation into heavy, inert shapes of matter, that capitalism was preeminently designed to control. Electronically mediated communication devices took capitalism's ability to control language.

The effort of industry to retain the commodification of information is illustrated through home networking as available since the mid 1980s in France. By providing the consumer with vast databases to view and order products in the convenience of the home new databases are generated each time the consumer orders a product. This information provides detailed information about the customer to the corporations. Kevin Wilson calls this the return channel in an interactive system, that will reveal the consumer's identity to the industry and generate an invaluable portrait of consumer activity for marketing purposes. These systems will create a cybernetic cycle of production and consumption.

The production process results in a database containing demand information based on the information of the consumer and the product.

The chapter Talk, Print and Electrons refers to the dichotomy of the oral and the written opposed to electronic language. Anthony Giddens (born 1938) distinguishes between "talk" and "speech" and argues that talk suggests social activity, is rooted in the daily intercourse of human beings in concrete contexts. He argues that writing lacks the complexity of situated talk. Textual complexity is different from verbal complexity. "The theory of the talking agent obscures the profusion in contemporary society of language practices which include no talking agents, language practices such as the database." By only focussing on the discussion on the binary opposition speech/writing the distinctive importance of electronic language is overlooked.

What characterizes advanced societies of the 20th century is the emerge of new language experiences that are electronically mediated, neither fitting easily in the parameters of speech nor writing. May '68 events indicate by their exceptional character the power of the mode of information, of electronically mediated language, to subdue collective conversations in a context of social change, what Jürgen Habermas calls "the public sphere". >> The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 1962

Habermas and Giddens both see talk as a ground of free action. For Giddens talk can create a moment of outward and inward directed criticism and for Habermas talk requires one Enlightenment-like social individual who can autonomously yet collectively judge rightness, know truth and feel compassion. Spoken language contains conditions for the possibility of an emancipated society "created and composed of free, rational individuals."...

"Confusion over just where reality is and what it might mean are likely accompaniments not of a bourgeois reading public but of a mass viewing audience, one quietly monitored by the silent accumulation and processing of gigabytes of data. The strength of the poststructuralist position then corresponds not to the force of writing over speech but to the penetration of the world of everyday life by electronically mediated language".

In The Oral, The Written and the Electronic Poster distinguished these 3 groups of terms and states that the introduction of new methods of communication require for their analysis language-based theories. The choice for either speech or writing lies in the presence or absence of one party of the communication, the physical presence of the transmitter/receiver. Writing cultivates critical thinking, writing and print is part of the Western experience with its value of reason, freedom, and equality, its institutions of science, democracy, capitalism or socialism.

The chapter Foucault, Discourse and the Superpanocticon come to the point of surveillance and how the differences between speech, writing and electronic language are amplified to what he calls "the major form of power in the mode of information". The vanishing possibility to fix language of everyday life to space/time coordinates becomes a major problem for the dominant groups. Development and spread of movements is not anymore necessarily mediated or manipulated by a centralized institution. Poster names the example of the "suggestion box" at IBM that was made available digital. This changeconfronted IBM with workers having the ability to place insubordinate criticism instantly and anonymously . "In association with the rise of of electronically mediated languages new forms of power have emerged, structures which systematically elude the liberal concept of tyranny and the Marxist concept of exploitation". He states that liberals see tyranny as a political act and Marxists see exploitation as an economic act. "The emergent forms of domination in the mode of information are not acts at all but language formations, complex manipulations of symbols". Foucault: " In basically any society there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body... There can be no possible exersise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association."

Poster concludes that discursive truth is essential to the operation of power in the social field. He compares and juxtaposes the term discourse with Max Weber's "Zweckrationalität". Weber connects written knowledge to institution that carry out power through reason and domination. He focuses on the actions as a form of consciousness and his view is free of analysis of language. Weber sees social sciences not connected to bureaucracy and not as a historical problem. Weber strives for "objectivity" while Foucault focuses on the language in written texts and sees their formation according to rules in social science disciplines as problematic. "The value of Foucauldean analysis rests with the conviction that the close reading of scientific discourse may uncover language patterns which, when associated with practices, position those practices in definite ways and legitimize the patterns of domination inherent in those practices."

Poster exercises the relevance of discourse analysis at the hand of Foucault's writings on prisons. With the term "technologies of power" Foucaults describes the way discourse organizes practice into structures of domination. The panopticon is used to see the normed transformation from the strictly divided state of a prisoner into a non-prisoner. For Jeremy Bentham the panopticon "imposed social authority on the prisoner in a constant, total manner." For Foucault the prison imposes the technology of power, the "micropolitics" of the norm. In modern societies power is imposed by "continual monitoring of daily life, adjusting and readjusting ad infinitum the norm of individuality. Modern society may be read as a discourse in which nominal freedom of action is canceled by the ubiquitous look of the other." The Panopticon granted one-way visual access to the prisoners and its completeness of total surveillance required the keeping of files, a meticulously kept dossier. Poster criticizes that Foucault neglected to take notice of the conditions of surveillance in the late 20th century: "The population as a whole has long been affixed with numbers and the discipline of the norm has become a second nature". "Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance"

Today's databases constitute a Superpanopticon. Not only technological change is part of this process but also populace being trained and disciplined to surveillance and to participating in the process. Here poster names examples such as filling out forms, giving away data by paying with credit cards, by using the Internet. One may see similarities in the reorganization from the early 1920s onward to be a participating and surveilling consumer which slowly results in reciprocal control of the population by itself.

Aside to the advanced technology of speed, accuracy and computational power, digital encoding of analog data also imposes binary reduction on the information which results in loss. The analog inscription of a sound wave on a magnetic tape resembles the characteristics of the original while binary encoding will always result in a simple grid containing a complex pattern of 0s and 1s that does not bear direct relation to the sound waves. "Digital encoding derives its peculiar strength from the degree to which it restricts meaning and eliminates ambiguity or noise".

The possibilities of imperfect reproduction magnifies through history from written, to printed, to electronic copying of text. The printing machine eliminated the or reduced the sensuous link between producers and product, with electronic reproduction this process advances. Poster sees in the embodiment of new mediums (paper book > monitor) a loss of a level of meaning in for example the Bible. He contends that the database imposes a new language on top of those already existing and that it is "impoverished, limited language; one that uses the norm to constitute individuals and define deviants."

"A database arranges information in rigidly defined categories or fields". After mentioning possible categories Poster states that this information in a database constitutes individuals according to these parameters. He plays with the idea of replacing politically charged information with numeric values, so that no field in a database contains ambiguity. "The structure or grammar of the database creates relationships among pieces of information that do not exist in those relationships outside of the database".

Citing Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" he sees a shift from torture to discipline playing a central role in representative democracy. The discourse of databases, the Superpanopticon, is " a means of controlling masses in the postmodern, postindustrial mode of information". This reveals that population is participating in its "own self-constitution as subjects of the normalizing gaze of the Superpanopticon." "We see databases not as an invasion of privacy (...) but as the multiplication of the individual, the constitution of an additional self".

PERSONAL COMPUTERS WITH PERSONAL MEANINGS. THE SECOND SELF: COMPUTERS AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Sherry Turkle, MIT Press 1984

turkle: personal computers with personal meanings

As opposed to children adults are more settled, but also locked into roles, afraid of the new and protective to the familiar.
A relationship with a computer can influence people's conceptions of themselves, their jobs, their relationships with other people, and with their ways of thinking about social processes.
The computer serves as a catalyst of cultural information.
First generation computer users shared not only the obvious mutualities in using the same hard/software, reading the same magazines, attending similarly organized user groups but they also "shared a quality of relationship with the computer, an aesthetic of using the computer for transparent understanding."
"Many people think of themselves as incapable of doing anything technical or mathematical, and learn from their interactions with a personal computer that this simply isn't true."
"Tools are extensions of their users; machines impose their own rhythm, their rules, on the people who work with them, to the point where it is no longer clear who or what is being used."
"We work to the rhythm of machines - physical machines or the bureaucratic machinery of corporate structures, the "system".
"Carl (...) has recently built a small computer system for his home, and he devotes much of his leisure time to programming it. Although Carl works all day with computers, what he does with his home system is not more of the same.
Machines have the potential to create worlds of transparency and intelligibility, coming in a time of hopes for making politics open and participatory.
"Personal computers could be used to bring people together. Everything was in place for the development of a politically charged culture around them."
People believed new kinds of social relationships would follow in their wake, a rebirth of ideas from the sixties, "knowledge cooperatives", "community memories" and electronic bulletin boards, an instrument for decentralization, community and personal autonomy.
Hannah: "I have more control over my time, I can spend more of it with my family."
The computer in the basement, living room or kitchen was a window onto a future where relationships with all technology would be more immediate."
"The actual experience of using the machine offered a way to think about who one is and who one would like to be."
"The first generation computer owners also used the computer experience to think about issues beyond the self."
"Relationships with a computer became a depository of longings for a better, simpler and more coherent life."
"People used to understand more about how things work (...) If people understand something as complicated as a computer, they will demand greater understanding of other things".

PERHAPS A REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT WE NEED

Henry Jenkins >> http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Gladwell is trying to compare movements (civil rights movement) and platforms (facebook).
We do not live on a platform we live across platforms, we choose the tools.

Ramesh Srinivasan:

The success of Algiers' resistance network was its horizontal structure; no point of centrality leaves no point for attack.
Organization and decentralization need not to be mutually exclusive.
One cannot compare social media use (passive, little commitment, weak ties) with successful revolutions (require commitment and organization).
Elements of social media can be utilized to generate and cement ties, spreading awareness via weak ties.
In the case of Kyrgyzstan Twitter was as a medium serving the purpose of refining a message and philosophy and connecting small but influential groups of activists. (the strong ties made the difference through the medium)

Kevin Driscoll:

Gladwell's argumentation suffers lacks in technology and history.
Twitter is a non-prescriptive communication platform.
The 140 character limit makes it compatible to even old cellphones.
Twitter enabled thousands of people with internet access to spend days fixated on a geographically-remote street protest in Tehran.

Amin Vafa:

Emigrated Iranians could follow the protests and provided small bridges between Iran and the English-speaking world.
Twitter enabled people to act and exercise strong ties (Iranian family, friends) on a transnational scale.

Gladwell describes the civil rights movement as "disciplined", "precise", "strategic".

Steven Classen:

Our cultural memory of the civil-rights era is incomplete, the "high-risk" activist movements leave little traces, gaps and discrepancies make research on social movements difficult.
"High-risk" and "Low-risk" activism can differ based on geographic, cultural and religious values.
Non-hierachical, network solutions: "Frown Power", Stetson Kennedy or "It Gets Better", Dan Savage effect a slow quiet change rather than large-scale revolution.
"Real" world activism depends on the tactical selection of social media technologies.

SOCIETY IN AD-HOC MODE. DECENTRALISED, SELF-ORGANISING, MOBILE

Armin Medosch, 2006

The text delivers an interesting perspective on the future of society from a bottom-up view. The text works with examples that mainly deal with the anti-globalization movement and the idea of open source networks. The idea of every user serving as a node simultaneously, so that commercial providers of networks are not necessary anymore, is an interesting attempt to describe an open society. Whether democracy does not work together with an ad-hoc society is a point that made me think a lot. Fascinating is the fact that the text has been written before most of the mentioned mobile technologies, such as 3G hat their impact in Europe. The ideal of technological development for the benefits of humanity and society instead of capitalistic aims is a romantic idea.

ANTISOCIAL APPLICATIONS: NOTES IN SUPPORT OF ANTISOCIAL NOTWORKING

Geoff Cox, 2008

The notes of Geoff Cox rather seem to be an accumulation of portentous terms, and the text is therefore really hard to read. He tries to describe the fact, how social networks affect society, capitalism, consumerism, work and politics. Websites like facebook are based on connections between users, which therefore create a new immaterial product called 'subjectivity'. That leads to the fact that the consumer is finally being sold to a product, based on their network connections. He uses the term 'antagonistic' very often and in a for me not comprehensible way. Why does he have to mention that social relations are produced as friendly rather than antagonistic? Calling a computer network a social factory is an interesting approach, but in my opinion not pointed out well enough. Also the 'Notworking' is not discussed very well. Why has in his opinion labour time become more difficult to measure? How has the observation being made that work and action have become indistinct? He also focuses on Peer-to-Peer relations being the more advanced way of social networking, compared to Server-Client relations. He sees that as a chance to rethink politics from within network cultures. His final conclusion/suggestion left me alone rather helpless, that is why I put it here, because I will never read this paper ever again. The suggestion of this notes - in support of antisocial notworking - is that without the identification of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged.

PROTOCOL: HOW CONTROL EXISTS AFTER DECENTRALIZATION

Alexander Galloway, 2006

The book starts describing a new apparatus of control that consists out of a distributed network, that uses the technology of computers and communicates via protocols. It also mentions the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze who predicts a shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control. Galloway argues, that the existence of a protocol stands for a mean of control after decentralization. He sees the DNS database as a controlling hierarchic system over the Internet, the most extensive "computerized information system" today. By quoting Marshall McLuhan's the content of every new protocol is always another protocol he describes the Internet through the nested protocols it depends on. Without a shared protocol, there is no network. Galloway also uses Michel Foucault's theory on biopolitics and calls the protocol a democratic panopticon of the control societies. He writes that distributed architectures make protocological/imperial control of a network easy, a centralized protocol is doomed to fail. He sums up Periodization from Centalization to Decentrentralization to Distribution. In his notes Galloway makes us of a lot of well-known philosophers whos quotes he uses to undermine his theories on forms of control within societly and technology, and the relation between nodes in networks.

HAIL THE MULTITUDES

Michael Hardt, 2005

Michael Hardt describes the name Multitude" as a form of social and political organization, that represents a movement in horizontal, decentralized structures and might constitute an upcoming form of power that refuses central leadership and unified programs. The central point of his text is the following hypothesis: In each era the most powerful form of political organization corresponds to the dominant organizational model of economic production. Since the structures nowadays are not as hierarchical and centralized as they were in the past centuries, he sees a future in decentralized, collaborative, horizontal organizations taking over political power.

TEN THESES ON NON-DEMOCRATIC ELECTRONICS: ORGANIZED NETWORKS UPDATED

Geert Lovink & Rossiter, 2007

1. Politics of diversion: Both organized and loosed structures are problematic. The power of unstructured networks to be able to do bottom-up changes opposites their unreliability, unsustainability and their high fluctuation. People need some structure in their life. Both models neither compete nor overlap each other.

2. Think Global, Act Local. Growing gaps, ruptures and tensions make place for changes, temporary coalitions, radically take sides with the new digital generations and go for change.

3. Networks are ready to interact on political level. Tensions lead to actions.

4. Platforms such as Indymedia and Wikipedia are not an alternative to CNN anymore. They grew into the shifting landscape of media, while there is no more space for activism anymore.

5. A participatory revolution? YouTube and MySpace are considered the apogee of participatory media, but lacking media activism.

6. There is no politics of networks, if there are no borders of networks.

7. What remains of a former pulsating, energetic network are the ruins of its borders. How to engage the border as the condition of transformation and renewal?

8. There is a difference between citizen's rights and user's rights. It's important to loose the ties between 'democracy' and 'the media'. What can be translated from offline networks to online networks? The rules do change.

9. How can the fragility of the borders of a network turned into a strength of the future of networks?

10. How can we use the potential of new media in an educative sense? Can these energies be directed into a creative collaboration of minds?

THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET - AND HOW TO STOP IT

Jonathan L. Zittran, 2008

Tethered Appliances, Software as Service and Perfect Enforcement

Zittran summarizes appliances that are controlled remotely from the producer/vendor etc. rather than from the end-user in this chapter. He concludes that the generative aspect of the PC led to is big success but also to its biggest failure: bad code. Since most glitches in performance can not be fixed by the consumer easily, people move away toward more centrally controlled devices such as mobile phones, video game consoles, iPods, TiVos, iPhones, Blackberries... The ongoing communication between device and their vendors assures functionality, no one but the vendor should change them to ensure functionality.

He names the term Web 2.0 a buzz word that describes the migration of traditional PC functionalities onto the internet, and the therefor user-generated content just being a side effect to this.

With the example of TiVo against EchoStar he mentions an incident in already in 1998, where infringement of intellectual property rights caused the deletion of user recordings on a DVR including the whole DVR-functionality.

Describing the borders of law in those cases very flexible he states that those in control of the tethered appliance can control the behavior undertaken with the device in a number of ways: preemption, specific injunction, and surveillance - described in detail.

He also deals with the topic of "the perfect law enforcement" and evaluates the term, naming actual examples, he also includes the term "tolerated uses" in copyright infringement. He sees the end of generativity, generative PCs not only in the upcome of more stable working, tethered appliances but also in the shift from classical software to web 2.0, where the user has the feeling not to be surfing the internet but using online software as they were working locally on their PCs. These makes tethered appliances worrisome, since the loss of their generative character also raises the possibilities of (remote) regulation.

These possibilities arose through the continuously available high-speed internet access and the text was written in a state where ebook-readers have not hit the market as much as now, so it seems a pretty informative basis and perspective on the development of tethered appliances from a critical point of view. The text uses a lot of interesting historical events that help envisioning how the future could look like, and also questions the aspect of centralized control on content generated or owned by a user digitally.

CYBERTEXT - PERSPECTIVES ON ERGODIC LITERATURE

Espen J Aarseth, The John Hopkins University Press, 1997

(Introduction) Aarseth brings an interesting perspective on the relation of narrative text on its own to the reader but also to the medium it is connected to. He describes as well the parallels as the differences he sees between conventional text and hypertext, also referring to literary critics and theorists who do not see his point (1997) and do not acknowledge his essentially new perspectives on "ergodic literature". He tries to picture the impact of interactivity through new technology from a time, where terms as web 2.0 where not present yet and "cybertext" as present and common today could not have been imagined yet. This gives an interesting insight on the hypertext culture and its hopes and views.

In the introduction to his book Aarseth tries to define his approach to the notion of cybertext. He explains the term "ergodic literature" as text where nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text and counts cybertext/hypertext to this definition. Cybertextuality is nonlinear and produces verbal structure for the aesthetic effect. Literary theorists, however, claim also forkable text/hypertext being a linear sequence during reading. Aarseth argues that when reading hypertext one is constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies, paths that are not taken, voices which are not heard. The reader misses the exact result of his choices. A reader that is strongly engaged in the unfolding of narratives is powerless, similar to the spectator of a soccer game is not a player himself and does not experience the pleasure of influence but the pleasure of being a voyeur - safe, but impotent.

Aarseth sees narrative text as a labyrinth, a game, an imaginary world where the reader is able to explore at will, get lost, discover secret paths, follow rules... According to Penelope Reed Doob one must distinct between unicursal and multicursal mazes: "If on a winter's night a traveler"(1993) by Samuel Beckett/Italo Calvina can be seen as a unicursal maze. "Rayuela"(1966) by Julio Cortazar is a multicursal maze, "Pale Fire"(1962) by Vladimir Nabokov is both unicursal and multicursal. A footnote in a text can also be seen as both, it offers the reader a choice of expansion.

Aarseth also describes the term "book" as printed, bound and sold in the most traditional fashion, the "codex format" is one of the most flexible and powerful information tools yet invented and its capacity can probably never be exhausted. Writing always has been a spatial activity, referring to 2-3-dimensionally layouted wall inscriptions on temples in ancient Egypt. "I Ching" receives special attention through its hexadecimal system where 64 symbols result in 4096 possible texts, used as a oracle, being one of the oldest Chinese texts, also inspired Leibniz and the binary system used for computer technology. Through digital computing Aarseth sees the concepts such as "the text itself" being broken down into two independent technological levels: the interface and the storage medium.

Talking about poetics in writing computer programs he sees a constant evolution, mentioning Eliza (1963), Adventure and Tale-Spin. He summarizes cybertext being not a new form but only a perspective on all forms of textuality. He mentions the conventional split between text and reading, the second reading of the text always changes the experience, the relation between signifiant and signifié. Text never exists without a context, convention, contamination. Describing text as a machine as a mechanical device for production and consumption of verbal signs, this machine is not complete without a human operator.The textual machine connects the operator, the verbal sign and the medium. Each text can be positioned in this multidimensional field according to its functional capabilities (see chapter 3).

MARSHALL MCLUHAN - GUTENBERG GALAXY

The Gutenberg Galaxy deals with the great changes from the handwritten to the print. He mentions philosophical and social aspects of that change, mainly pointing out the print representing uniformity and certitude in language and changing the relevance of semantics in the written medium. He puts the reader of print in a different position than the reader of a manuscript, calling print a frame-by-frame version of thoughts and stressing the point-of-view, the importance of the perspective of the reader. He also mentions the printed book as a mass medium in a relation to trends and markets, pointing out its importance on the cult of individualism through being portable and breaking the library monopoly. McLuhan describes the change of an era that seems unseizable for a person born in the 20th century, reigned by mass production, making a world without mass-produced goods unimaginable. This record of an era keeps in mind the pro's and con's of a mass-produced society by serving with a broad set of facts and examples from past centuries. McLuhan's book itself being print serves as an example as well as a paradox of its own content.

"Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic" (74f)

McLuhan points out the important difference between scribal and typographical books in the history of the book in the Western world and that only one-third of the book's history is typographic. He cites G.S. Brett's "Psychology Ancient and Modern": The idea that essentially book learning describes knowledge is a modern view, whereas the original idea is that of "cunning" or the possession of wits. He specifies a dichotomy that the book brings into any society and mentions the work of James Joyce in this regard. With Finnegans Wake he describes the "emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the audile world of simultaneous resonance into the profane world of daylight". He sees the Wake as Joyce's Altamira drawings of the entire history of the human mind. All basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology resemble a wake that can disappear again. He makes connections with the terms wake, awake, light and darkness and refers to self-awareness as a quality of humans to be able to live simultaneously in all modes of culture while staying conscious, awake in a cultural clash between the oral and visual, the savage and civilized, the sacral and profane. "The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, and the first mass-production." (124-126)

In this chapter McLuhan declares typography an instrument of uniformity. He quotes Abbott Payson Usher stating "The invention of printing marks the line of division between medieval and modern technology". McLuhan calls it the first reduction of a handicraft term to mechanical terms, translating a movement into a series of static shots or frames. This reminds me of the translation from analog to digital signal-transformation, the most popular equivalent of that idea in the late 20th century. He calls print the first mass-production and also points out the change of relation to the writer the reader has when not reading a manuscript but print. Print culture can be seen as a visual homogenization, reducing an experience to the visual only while relegating the auditive and sensual. The "point of view" habit of a fixed position gave popular extension to the avant-garde perspectivism of the 15th century, which puts a focus on the relativity of knowledge, which revolutionized descriptive sciences, mathematics and modern technology.

"A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism"

The fixed point of view is described with the explicit visual linking of components in a composition, the purification of the classical image and the isolation of the visual factor in experience. McLuhan compares the dynamics of the two-dimensional with Kepes' description of medieval painters who repeated the main figure many times in the same picture to represent all possible relationships that affected him. The paradox of the Gutenberg era is its strictness in being a series of static shots, that result in the homogenization of men an materials.

"With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life" In his "Defence of Poetry" Sir Philip Sydney declares the poet to be the only one who applies matter to the erection of the human spirit while the philosopher only teaches and the historian only gives examples. Descartes recognizes that print changes philosophy by rendering the probing and checking of every term unnecessary. Print discourages verbal play through its strong demand for uniformity of spelling and meaning, resulting in certitude that puts the reader into the center. He compares the contrast of "To be or not to be" with the conflict between "conscience" and "resolution". The printed word is an arrested moment of mental movement, the reader is dealing with a "still shot". The alphabet in print serves as the highest intensity of definition, print is the technology of individualism.

"The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new cult of individualism" Printing broke the library monopoly by making the book an individual object through its portability and increased reading speeds because of uniform and repeatable type. McLuhan describes the book also in its character of being a product that is regulated by a market. An author needs capital for printing and publishing, runs the risk of commercial failure, is dependent on the drive of sales and markets. A new kind of consumer world arises, Latin books are losing ground around 1530, the reading public changes, includes women and middle class people. We can only imagine the medieval book trade through its parallel with today's art market, where great paintings are mostly traded second-hand.