March 14, 2010
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Winter 1999 Vol. 8 No. 4
TECHNOS Interview I:
On Yesterday
Paul Levinson
by Carole Novak
This
discussion with best-selling author Paul Levinson is titled “On Yesterday”
only because it begins with the theories and ideas of media guru Marshall
McLuhan, whose work was prevalent during the 1950s and ’60s and who was a
teacher and mentor to Levinson in the 1970s. Levinson applies those ideas
to today’s society and projects them into tomorrow by revealing their relevance
to the Internet and the web and their effects on human communication and education.
A media theorist and historian, he is a keen observer of society, one who
understands the lessons of the past. His writings about technology and the
future have been featured in Wired, Omni, Shift, and The Village
Voice. Levinson’s most recent nonfiction books are The Soft Edge: A
Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (Routledge, 1998)
and Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium (Routledge,
1999). A recipient of CompuServe’s Homer Award for the Best Science Fiction
Novelette in 1997, he is author of a science fiction novel, The Silk Code
(TOR Books, 1999). In 1985, he and his wife, Tina Vozick, launched Connected
Education, Inc., or Connect Ed, which offered the first-ever online courses
for college credit. He is president of the Science Fiction Writers of America
and is visiting professor of communications at Fordham University in New York
City.
In your most recent nonfiction work, Digital McLuhan, you explain Marshall McLuhan’s theories and ideas and their application to today’s media technologies and societal change. What is the most important lesson for us today to be gleaned from his writings of nearly a half-century ago?
The single most important lesson is that media are always far more than casual encounters and that the time we spend on any medium — whether it’s now the Web or some kind of Internet connection, or in the Sixties television, or in prior centuries when the only choice was reading a book or going out and seeing a live theatrical presentation, regardless to some extent of what the content of those activities was — that activity has extremely important consequences for the lives of the people involved.
And this holds true for children in school?
That’s right. One of the implications of Web access is that the role of the teacher changes from a presenter of information to more of a guide to how students can get information directly, even outside the classroom. There is so much information on the Web — everything ranging from traditional sources like newspapers and magazine articles to more current technologies that are created especially for the Web — that is available outside of the classroom to anyone who has a personal computer and a modem and Web access, as do more than 80 million people now in the United States. To some extent, this is changing the very nature of education, where up until now, the only places to get information were in the classroom or the library, places outside the home; and it took a specific act beyond being in your home and sitting down at a desk to access the information.
I was interested in your discussion of the gatekeepers in Digital McLuhan. Would you consider traditional teachers to be gatekeepers?
Yes, absolutely. That’s a very good point. Up until the last few years, education, journalism, publishing, and the entertainment world — all the various aspects that conveyed information and knowledge and entertainment — were predicated on the relative scarcity of those vehicles. That is, there weren’t that many newspapers and books that were published, there weren’t that many things that were available on television, and in the classroom itself there is a finite amount of time. So what inevitably happened was that the people in control of those things, the people who were the decision makers in those environments, made decisions about what would be part of the curriculum in terms of education, what would be published in the newspaper in terms of journalism, what would be made into a movie or a television series in terms of entertainment. It was unfair that the gatekeepers had to play that role, but it was necessary, given the scarcity of resources, the relative limitation of spaces and places and times that information could be presented.
I always liked Adlai Stevenson’s line that editors separate the wheat from the chaff and publish the chaff. Sometimes those decisions were not good decisions. Sometimes there were factually incorrect things that were taught in schools, and newspapers made mistakes — but even more important than that were the things that were left out of the process. One of my favorite poems is Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard,’ in which there are four lines in the middle of the poem that always struck me as significant. He wrote: ‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene, the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear; full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.’ Throughout history, there were undoubtedly a lot of flowers that were born and blossomed but no one saw their beauty, simply because the gatekeepers kept them out. Not through any malice, but just because they were designed to err on the side of keeping things out. There may be great books and pieces of music we’ll never know about. But the Web is changing all that, because it’s so easy to get information on the Web; it’s a very revolutionary development.
I’ve been thinking about the recent decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to prohibit the teaching of the science of evolution in their schools. When I first heard about it, I was just appalled, but I’m now thinking, what’s to keep the kids from finding out what’s going on, right there on the Web?
That’s absolutely right. McLuhan actually had a sardonic side to him. There was once a newspaper strike in Toronto, and his comment was, ‘You know, media go on strike, and do absurd things directly in proportion to how unimportant they’ve become.’ So, it struck me the same as you when I heard about this Kansas decision that it just shows you the unimportance now of these educational gatekeepers. A hundred years ago, that would have been a devastatingly horrible decision. Now, it’s almost laughable, because it doesn’t matter really what they teach in school, because, as you correctly point out, the kids will find out about evolutionary theory anyway.
But that must strike terror into the gatekeepers’ hearts.
Well, yes, and they’re struggling to keep up, and to this day you find some educators who are not comfortable with the Internet and the Web. They think it’s a gimmick, a distraction — and some of it might indeed be that — but it’s all really a question of how you view your role. My approach, as a professor, has always been not only to convey information that I know but always to try to point my students towards becoming learners on their own. That’s on a graduate and undergraduate level, where the students are a little older and self-motivated. But I think even on a K–12 level, many teachers and school boards understand that the best learning is active learning. There’s a whole tradition of education theory — Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, John Dewey, a lot of 20th-Century philosophers, psychologists, and educational theorists — that says the best learning takes place when the student learner is an active participant and goes out and seeks information, rather than just being the recipient of somebody injecting knowledge into their heads.
What’s your opinion of accreditation of college courses? I know you and your wife established Connected Education in 1985 and offered the first graduate-level courses for academic credit on the Internet through accredited institutions. Obviously, again, we’re back to the gatekeeping...
There is some gatekeeping; I think that’s important. To use the most extreme example: When you are suffering from some acute illness, and you need medical attention right away, you want to have the confidence that the person that you’re going to see has M.D. after his name, has been accredited in some way, has gone through some gatekeeping, because you can’t afford the error of being treated by a person who’s not competent. That’s a far different situation than looking for a book in the library. There it’s better to err on the side of including more rather than less because the penalties and perils of getting information that’s not good, I think, are not as serious as not having access to information that might otherwise be kept out. So, accreditation for universities, while not as life-and-death important as medical accreditation, is still something valuable. If a person is going for a degree at a university, I think it’s not unreasonable to expect that the university will have been approved by some group external to the university. So that way, the student can have confidence in that institution. But hopefully the accreditation process isn’t abused, and the accreditors have to be ecumenical in what they approve.
As I was reading through Digital McLuhan, one of discussions I enjoyed was that of ‘cool’ versus ‘hot’ media. Can you explain a little bit about it for our readers?
Sure. Well, it began with McLuhan with the very fundamental realization that on some level, the less that’s presented to us, the more we become intrigued. So, if you think about someone totally naked, for example, and then you think about someone wearing just the scantiest of clothing — it’s interesting that we might be more intrigued by the person wearing just the scantiest of clothing. We want to see what’s behind that little, scanty bit of clothing.
So, moving this into media: If you think about how we look at the small piece of poetry and go over and over it; what do the words mean? And then think: Is there any equivalent paragraph of prose that we spend as much attention to — maybe the Preamble of the Constitution — but, for the most part, poetry invites much more involvement and participation than prose does. McLuhan pointed out that that’s because poetry offers less; it’s a more ambiguous presentation than prose, which is more clear-cut. McLuhan said, when media present us with less information, when they’re ‘cool,’ on a hot-to-cool scale, they draw us into them more than media which give us a large display of information without inviting us to move further into them. The original distinction actually came from jazz. There are two kinds of jazz: the kind of Big Band jazz that’s ‘hot,’ and the kind of subtle tinkling on the keys, which is ‘cool.’
But then, what McLuhan also did — and this was part of his brilliance — was to move from talking about a medium being hot or cool to talking about society being hot or cool. In Digital McLuhan, I talk about the movie Bedazzled in which there is a wonderful scene that typifies this idea. The story of the movie is that someone is given X number of wishes by the devil, and the devil grants the wishes but is always trying to confound the person who is the beneficiary of this. At one point, the person getting the wishes says he wants to be a famous rock star, and he’s made into an Elvis Presley kind of rock star. But by this point in time, music had changed to more like the Rolling Stones — scraggly, low-key — and so even though the beneficiary looks and sounds like Elvis, in the mid-Sixties that wasn’t an especially powerful thing to be. So the point is: in music, you can see rock-and-roll and society being hot in the ’50s, and by the ’60s, things cool down. The level of intensity is much lower but it’s also much more provocative. The person in the movie Bedazzled is out of luck, though, because he changed into the hot icon at a time when cool icons were more in the ascendancy.
You would consider the Web a cool medium, especially in terms of how it can draw kids into it, wouldn’t you?
That’s right. The Web is a quintessentially cool medium. There’s another part to this as well: interactivity. The telephone, for instance, is going to be cool, almost regardless of what goes on, because you’re talking to a live person on the other end. There’s an enormous sense on the Web, regardless of how clear your screen is, that there is an infinity of information behind what you’re shown on the screen. Think about clicking on words, the links that take you from one place to another — think about those words on the screen in comparison to words printed on a page in a book. Words printed on a page in a book only carry the information that is there, so, in effect, what you see is what you get. That’s a classic hot medium, right? It’s all there. Whereas the words on the screen on the Web not only convey the information on the surface — the hot part — they also convey this almost infinity of possible additional links behind every word that you might click on, which could bring you to who-knows-where. So that’s an enormously cool and involving process.
Yes. And it tends to intimidate. I know a lot of teachers who say, ‘I can’t even imagine what I’m missing. There’s so much out there, and I’m afraid I’ll miss it all.’
Right. That’s an understandable reaction, but there really shouldn’t be any fear. Hopefully what will happen is that teachers will become comfortable not having all the answers to every question. They’ll become comfortable with the essential incompleteness of their presentations, which actually in no way casts anything negative or derogatory on the teacher. It rather is just recognizing the infinity of knowledge that’s out there, which was always the case. How can any teacher possibly present all that? But it is difficult, because — and I’ve felt this myself — when you’re standing up in front of a class, and you’re talking about something, you want to feel that you have the complete picture. You want to do your best for your students.
And there’s the authority factor, too.
That’s right. But you can maintain your authority without having, in effect, to pretend that you have complete knowledge of everything. It’s okay to have just a little more knowledge than your students, and even more important, to give your students navigational help.
Can you talk a little about McLuhan’s ideas of the ‘global village’ and ‘centers everywhere’?
McLuhan talked about the global village in the 1960s; it was one of his best-understood concepts. It was immediately apparent what he was saying: that it didn’t matter if you were watching television, whether you were located in the middle of New York City or someplace out on the desolate highway, your television screens have the same exact view in terms of what was being shown. He compared this to old-time village life, where everyone in the village could hear the town crier and see the same thing on Main Street. But the television kind of global village wasn’t really a village in the essential aspect of interactivity and the capacity of the villagers to participate in the information process. In the traditional village, people were not only able to watch and listen to the same thing, but they also were able to talk to each other and to the players — you could ask the town crier a question. You certainly couldn’t do that when you’re watching television.
The other thing is that even in the global village of television, there were really only a handful of centers of information in terms of where the process began. So in the 1960s in the United States, for instance, you had basically the three television networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, and they were very distinctly at the center. And again, it goes back to gatekeeping to some extent; they controlled and created the information that went out.
How does the global village translate to the Internet and the Web?
What the Internet and the Web have done is taken the global village and made it much more real and vivid than it was when McLuhan was talking about it. In the first place, when you have a computer anywhere in the world, as distinct from a television set, that computer is something in which people can participate. They have much greater power over the selection of information; they can create their own information, as in putting up a Web page; they can ask questions in online forums. So, what the Internet does is make the global village interactional — that’s Number One, extremely important — and second, it completely disseminates and disperses the idea of the center and the way it was in the classic television age. Because, everyplace that there’s a Web page, that’s a center of information. McLuhan said that in the electronic age we’re moving to a situation where centers are everywhere, and margins are nowhere; or, actually, it’s the same thing as: margins are everywhere, and centers are nowhere. In the Sixties, that was harder to see, because there were still those broadcast centers, but now in the age of the Web, we are indeed in a situation with centers everywhere — and that kind of decentralization is a key aspect of the Internet revolution.
On the other hand, there are hazards to that.
This is really a key point in the evolution of media and technology in general. Rarely, if ever, is a technology an undiluted good for society — it’s rather a trade-off. I think we can comfortably count this as progress, if in the trade-off we gain more than we lose. But the Victorian idea of progress without retribution, I think, is not correct. On the other hand, neither was a lot of the cynicism in the latter part of the 20th Century that somehow we’re going downhill and technology is taking us over. I think our lives have improved, but we have to be aware of the problems. Antibiotics — to shift this discussion from media to medicine for a second — are an excellent example. We’re certainly better off with antibiotics, no doubt about it. But there’s also no doubt that with the spread of antibiotics into the biosphere, there are now some bacteria that are becoming resistant to them, and they’re even worse than ever. So, we would be naive to say that we’ve conquered disease and we shouldn’t worry about it anymore. But at the same time, we should be happy with the genuine progress that we’ve made. I think the same applies to a lot of media.
You wrote in your introduction to Jason Ohler’s Taming the Beast [TECHNOS Press, 1999] that ‘humans have options, meaning that we, not our technologies, are ultimately in control.’ There seems to be a lot of fear about the idea that if media and technologies do continue to evolve, they’re going to take over someday. That’s not your theory at all, is it?
No, not at all. For a variety of reasons. First of all, it’s important to bear in mind where we actually are now as far as artificial intelligence — I think that term is an oxymoron; it’s really artificial stupidity, at least as far as the machines are concerned. There’s nothing at all in computer programming that is anything like human intelligence, or autonomous human intelligence. Even a human idiot savant possesses the kind of intelligence that encompasses far many more things than any computer can do. The most brilliant computer can do one, two, ten, fifteen things, and that’s it; it can’t do anything else. It’s an incredible abstraction — and nothing like the performance of human intelligence. The idea that anything that we currently have today would take us over — there’s just no evidence to see that happening.
What usually is the concern among critics of technology is that we create an automobile to get us from one place to another more quickly; and then quite unknowingly, because the automobile depends on gasoline to move it, we become slaves towards making sure we have enough oil and gasoline to make the automobile run. And because automobiles can’t run over dirt roads too well and can’t go through trees, can’t go around bends the way horses could, we becomes slaves to these goals and remake our environment into roads so that the automobile can run and drive more efficiently. So, in other words, we unwittingly become servile mechanisms — so this criticism goes — to our own creations. However, I think that although there are some grains of truth to that theory — and again, nothing is ever 100 percent — the more important reality is: we retain our rationality. We, being most human beings, most of the time are rational. And we have a capacity to assess what’s going on. If we find ourselves too dependent on a particular technology, or if we find ourselves in some way imperiled because of a new technology, historically the evidence shows that we’re very good at coming up with what I call ‘remedial media,’ or technologies that remedy the problems of the older ones. The best example is the window. Once upon a time, people wanted to be able to look outside without getting rained on or without being exposed to a cold wind that was blowing. So somewhere, a long time ago, someone invented the idea of the window — and the window is great, because it allows us to look out without being at the behest of the natural elements when they aren’t comfortable. But the window also brought into being the peeping tom; in other words, the window weakened our privacy because we could look out, but other people could also look in at us. So that’s a classic example of an unintended disadvantage of the technology. And what was the best solution? To basically board up all the windows? No. A far better solution that humans came up with was the window shade, the Venetian blind, curtains, so that we could have the window when we wanted it, and if we didn’t want people on the outside to see in, we could close it off. In a way, the VCR is that kind of window shade for television. In the early days of television, people were saying that even if it is a good medium, it’s just here this instant; there’s no way you can control the programming. So 25 years after television became an important medium, the VCR was invented, and now over 90 percent of televisions in the Western world have VCRs.
Because we don’t want to watch all those commercials!
Well, that’s part of the point. That’s exactly right. And that’s also good for control. So all these examples show that contrary to these criticisms, we human beings are, by and large, in control rather than vice-versa.
That gives us some comfort. And of course, you and I are talking about technologies right now and the Year 2000. But let’s project further into the future and talk about science fiction, which you know a little bit about. You’ve just finished writing your first science fiction novel.
The Silk Code is science fiction, but it’s science fiction almost more about the past and the present than it is about the future. I got part of the idea for the book years ago at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, when I heard a presentation about the fact that ancient Chinese culture relied very heavily on bamboo, which crumbles pretty quickly. An anthropologist was making the point that we therefore might not know some of the things that the ancient Chinese did, simply because their medium didn’t last, the way that carvings in the West, more durable media, lasted. After that, I got to thinking: what would happen if someone, some group, say 30, 40, 50 thousand years ago, some group of human beings or Neanderthals were working in a medium that would be even more disguised to us today? What could that medium be? Well, it could be life itself; it could be living organisms. Charles Darwin talked about artificial selection, making the point that a lot of what we think is natural selection is actually artificial selection. We know that human beings have bred dogs and cats and fruit trees and flowers for centuries, even millennia — but let’s say that 40 or 50 thousand years ago there was a systematic breeding of various things to who-knows-what end — how would we know about that today? How could we separate what arose through natural selection from what was the legacy of this advanced technology, this possible biotechnology? What evidence would there be of that in today’s world? So that’s the sort of background, scientific possibility, that The Silk Code picks up on. It’s a detective novel, too, so it has the requisite number of bizarre deaths, and it features my New York City forensic detective, Dr. Phil D’Amato, who actually appeared in three issues of Analog, the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fact, in which I have had many science fiction stories published over the last few years.
Which do you prefer writing: science fiction or nonfiction?
That’s a good question... I love writing nonfiction, but the truth is, for me, writing science fiction is at this point in my life more fun than writing nonfiction. There is something about writing science fiction that taps back to when I was about 12 years old, and I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and I could sort of see writing things myself; and it gives me a very deep and unique satisfaction. At the same time, Digital McLuhan was and is a very special book for me, because I knew Marshall, worked with him, and am still close to his family. So that was a very personal thing, too.
Do you teach science fiction writing?
No, at present I don’t. I teach theory courses on various levels about the impact of communications on our lives and courses about the impact of digital media. But I am president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and I’ve always thought that science fiction is really unique in our literature. All forms of fiction deal with human relationships, and there’s wonderful stuff there, obviously. There are so many things that can be written about in human relationships: people falling in love, family relationships, between parents and children and siblings, people pursuing their professions, people exploring the world, wars, famine, disaster, heroism — all those things are wonderful. But science fiction, in addition to doing that, also deals with the question of human beings vis-à-vis the larger cosmos, and how we might be able to use our technology to change things and discover things about our place in the universe. I think that’s extremely important. So I’ve always been a fan of science fiction, in addition to more recently being a writer of science fiction.
Photo courtesy of Mario Suriani.
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