True or False? Right or Wrong? Eyes or Ears?

New Technology. New Religion. New (Terrifying) World.

New technologies are fascinating. And sometimes gruesome, as per the instrument of torture pictured above (the image is from Shutterstock). But I suggest that new communications technologies are the most fascinating of all. Why? Because they always screw up our heads and our societies. Every time. Every single goddam time.

The fact that a new comms tech will rapidly lead to societal confusion is, it seems, a one hundred per cent cast iron certainty, as are the lashings of actual and attempted censorship that must inevitably accompany it.

All of which is being evidenced right now.

Revolution! Heresy!

Along comes a new comms tech - Digitalization in the current instance … amazingly clever, enables brilliant new things, including the power to kind of join up the whole world …

BUT … at the same time it breaks the whole world apart, isolates people and completely messes with the thing we call Society.

And because this kind of event (from previous posts you may know that I christen them Drucker Transformations in honor of Peter Drucker, the 20th century management guru) happens so infrequently (say, three times in the last millennium) we have to learn from scratch on each occasion. After all, no-one around today actually experienced a previous occasion.

However, we can, as ever, look to the past to see if there are any clues that might aid the present to steer us towards a more stable future.

The comms tech bombshell prior to the current one happened centuries ago. It was the invention of printing with movable type. Yes, there was a kicker in the nineteenth century when the telegraph came on the scene and, subsequently, new electronic methods to transmit sounds and images arrived, but this was really a continuation of of what we might term the mechanical & electrical engineering age. I’ll come back to this later.

But, now, let’s focus on the current transformation. Among other things, the new comms tech - the enabler of digitalization - has given us “social” media. (The inverted commas are there as a reminder that ‘social’ is not the same as ‘sociable’, and a country mile away from ‘relational’). Which leads us directly to ‘social platforms’.

Hmm, what is a social platform?

1. Is it, on the one hand, an open communication channel available to everyone, where individuals are able openly to express their views (provided they don’t break the law or promote law breaking)?

2. Or, on the other hand, is it a communication channel that is so ‘open’ that it must be ‘closed’ via monitoring and control … in which case, who is authorized to guard it and, most important, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

There seems currently to be a lot of pressure in the direction of the second of these options.

Here’s Will Oremus in the Washington Post of 31 August 2024:

While freewheeling internet companies have long clashed with authoritarian regimes — Google in China, Facebook in Russia or pre-Musk Twitter in Turkey — Western governments until recently generally did not regard social media and the vision of free speech they promoted as being fundamentally at odds with democracy. Politicians and regulators recognized there was bad stuff on the internet, decried it and sought ways to mitigate it. But banning entire social networks or arresting their executives simply wasn’t something liberal democracies did. Now, for better or worse, it is.

And, in the Guardian of 30 August 2024, under the headline “Elon Musk is out of control. Here is how to rein him in.” Robert Reich offers up a set of actions to stop that pesky free speech advocate in his tracks. Indeed, he offers up “six ways to rein in Musk”:

1. Boycott Tesla …
2. Advertisers should boycott X …
3. Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X …
4. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission should demand that Musk take down lies that are likely to endanger individuals – and if he does not, sue him under Section Five of the FTC Act …
5. The US government – and we taxpayers – have additional power over Musk, if we’re willing to use it. The US should terminate its contracts with him, starting with Musk’s SpaceX …
6. Make sure Musk’s favorite candidate for president is not elected.

Wow! That’s told him! Let’s financially cripple the chap who is the outstanding innovator and entrepreneur of our age. What a sensible idea … not!

To help balance up the argument a bit, in a letter dated 29 August 2024 to U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret that he had allowed Facebook to be pressured by the Biden administration, particularly regarding communications about the Covid-19 epidemic. As reported by MSNBC:

He also said that Meta shouldn’t have “demoted” a news story about the Biden family and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Mind your language

That comment just above prompts me to add a few words about the vocabulary that is being used.

Demoted

What does it mean?

Up until yesterday ‘to demote’ meant to lower in rank: “I have no choice but to lower your rank from sergeant to corporal” - that sort of thing.

But, today, the verb has been deployed as a synonym for ‘to censor’.

Then there’s a little clutch of ‘information’ based terms, as follows:

Disinformation

According to Wikipedia …

Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals.

Misinformation

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information. So, as the American Psychological Association puts it:

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information—getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead—intentionally misstating the facts.

Then there is a newly emerging variation …

Malinformation

According to Media Defence :

Mal-information is information that is based on reality but it is used to inflict harm on a person, organisation or country.

Methinks we have some Orwellian linguistics going on here - the use of language to confuse as much as to illumine. These particular words are deployed, by some, to suggest that information is too dangerous to be allowed out ‘on the loose’ so to speak. Rather, they argue, it must be regulated. Which returns us to the topic with which I started.

We’ve been here before …

As mentioned earlier, the major comms tech transformation before the current one had to do with Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable type. Here’s historian Norman Davies on the topic:

The power of the printed word inevitably aroused the fears of the religious authorities. Hence Mainz, the cradle of the press, also became the cradle of censorship. In 1485, the local Archbishop-Elector asked the city council of nearby Frankfurt-am-Main to examine the books to be exhibited at the Lenten Fair, and to help in the suppression of dangerous publications. As a result, in the following year, Europe’s earliest censorship office was set up jointly by the electorate of Mainz and the city of Frankfurt. The first edict issued by the Frankfurt censor against printed books banned vernacular translations of the Bible.¹

That’s not the half of it. Wherever printing spread to, it was always accompanied by some form of censorship.

In England, for example, printing could only be done by English citizens and anything that was to be printed had to be approved by the privy council.

One of their key targets was heresy - that is, holding an opinion contrary to the prevailing religious orthodoxy. But this provides a salutary lesson regarding the dangers of restricting freedom of speech and imposing “I’m right! You’re wrong!” rules.

Throughout the five year reign (1553-1558) of Henry VIII’s Roman Catholic daughter, Mary Tudor, the heresy was Protestantism. Hence, Catholicism good: Protestantism bad. And, boy, was it enforced - which is how she earned the soubriquet Bloody Mary.

But, after her death, and the installation of Elizabeth I, who ruled from 1558-1603 and was a committed Protestant, the heresy flipped. Protestantism good: Catholicism bad.

The moral of which is surely that mandating what people may or may not think is a rather tricky business! And, anyway, as Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) said:

There is a utilitarian case for free expression. It recognizes that the freedom to speak must also be insisted on for the person who thinks differently, because it is pointless to support only free speech for people who agree with you.²

I’m far from the first to say this but the religious reference is highly relevant to the current situation. A secular religion is in play. One that demonizes Western Judaeo-Christian traditions and history.

The civilization that played a major role in transforming the world for the better is now apparently to be regarded as wholly evil. Language and history are being rewritten to try to justify this slander.

As King Lear himself says:

O, that way madness lies, let me shun that³

… and here’s an oddity

There is, of course, another option regarding the adoption or not of a new comms technology …

Don’t do it. Ban it from the outset.

But is this even possible? There is an example that we can investigate …

When Gutenberg’s printing press took off, one group outright banned its use right from the start. The Muslim community. And they maintained the ban for about four hundred years, right up into the nineteenth century.

This repays investigation, I suggest, not least because it brings us right back to a fundamental issue that I introduced in an earlier post: human minds and brains cannot communicate; only communication can communicate.

So, why did Muslims ban printing?

This topic is covered in a superb paper⁴ from 1993 by British historian and academic, Francis Robinson (1944 - ). Here’s how it starts:

More than five hundred years ago there was a revolution in information technology; Johann Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press for the Roman alphabet. This made possible a further revolution, a revolution in the transmission of knowledge. Down to the Middle Ages, oral transmission was the normal way in which knowledge was passed on. Knowledge was stored up in men; the art of memory was amongst the most highly prized of arts; scholars were masters of mnemonic tricks. But, the advent of mass-produced printed books steadily reduced dependence on oral systems of transmission, until they became mere traces in our language and our values; we still talk, for instance, of auditing accounts, we still worry about the loss of the arts of memory in educating our young. Gutenberg's press also accelerated a revolution in human consciousness. This is, of course, the particular insight of Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner, who perceive a transformation of human consciousness as it moves from oral to written speech, as it moves from a consciousness dominated by sound to one dominated by visual space. Knowledge became less warm, less personal, less immediate and more cold, more abstract, more intellectual.

Robinson then goes on to explain the importance of the Quran for Muslims, stemming from the fact that the Quran is …

… the very essence of knowledge for the Muslim … For Muslims the Quran is the word of God—His very word. It is more central to Islamic theology than the Bible is for Christians or the Torah is for Jews. It is the divine presence. It is the mediator of divine will and grace.

And it is the oral tradition that takes precedence:

The oral transmission of the Quran has been the backbone of Muslim education. Learning the Quran by heart and then reciting it aloud has been traditionally the first task of young Muslim boys and girls. It is a process begun with celebration, a Bismillah ceremony, celebrating the first words the child will learn. It is a process which if completed successfully, and the whole Quran is committed to memory, will be celebrated with great joy. It is not given to many to learn to recite the whole Quran, and the title thus won of Hafiz or Hafizah al-Quran is greatly respected.

Writing down, in the Islamic tradition, was as an aid to the oral tradition. An author would dictate the text and the copyist would then read it back. This process would be repeated for as many times as it took until the author gave it his approval - the ijaza, ‘to make lawful’.

In Islam, the spoken word spoken by the author was the authentic word. Any other communication put ‘veils’ in the way of authenticity. Oral expression, preferably by the original creator of the text, was vital for authenticity and clarity.

In short, the ears had it over the eyes.

But, then, in the nineteenth century, the Muslim community did adopt the printed word. It was at a time when the Islamic world was under pressure from the West and the use of printed materials did help the religion to stabilize and reverse its decline.

Moral: ultimately, you cannot stop change.

‘The only constant in life is change’

That quote is from Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher. So, indeed, change is nothing new. Neither is fear of change.

But what seems to happen when a new communications technology comes along is extreme change that may later be modified to mitigate the impact.

A new element is the understanding, if Niklas Luhmann’s work is correct, that what communicates is communication itself … not the bodies or minds that create the communication.

And a new communications technology is always extremely likely to cause upset because communication is itself the thing that we call Society.

I know that I’m an old social conservative but I do think that it is advisable to tread more carefully into the future than is currently being pushed by the so-called elites in our societies. And, for heaven’s sake, stop using a ‘religious’ narrative and dogma to promote unbridled change.

In other words, outlaw heresy. We do not want to put people on any kind of rack - physical or mental.

Thanks for reading.

1. Norman Davies. Europe: A History (1996)

2. Christopher Hitchens. Quoted in Forbidden Thoughts: A Roundtable on Taboo Research (American Enterprise, January/February 1995)

3. William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of King Lear, Act III, Scene 4 (1605, published 1608)

4. Francis Robinson. Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print, Modern Asian Studies / Volume 27 / Issue 01 / February 1993, pp 229 - 251