Technology, and especially the technology of communication, has tremendous consequences for human relations - social, economic and political.

Socrates raged against the written word, insisting that it was the end of philosophy which, in his view, required two or more people in direct conversation. Anything else, such as a text, was at least one step removed from the real thing and, like music and poetry which he also despised, represented a pale imitation (or bastardization) of authentic life. (Thank goodness Plato wrote it all down.)

From an oral to a written society was one thing, but as Marshall McLuhan so eruditely explained in his book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, the printing press altered fundamantal cultural patterns again - making reading matter more easily available and, in the process, enabling the Protestant Reformation and its emphasis on isolated individual interpretations of whatever people imagined their god to be.

In time, the telegraph and the telephone began the destruction of space, time and letter writing, making it possible to have disembodied conversations over thousands of miles. Then electronic communications in the form of radio and television wiped out domesticity and Sunday dinners. And now, of course, I sit in front of a keyboard spilling quasi-academic drivel into cyberspace, while my students tweet each other silly, often experiencing twitter-anxiety which apparently besets them if their Facebook friends fail to "like" them or othewise respond within a limited number of minutes.

Those, students, of course have access to oddles of "information" on the Internet, but they have no sense of scholarship, nor are many of my younger colleagues in a position to assist them ... and why would they in an era not of "mass" but of "universal" education when the principal measure of academic success is "customer satisfaction" ... which means declining standards of reading, writing and research and a desultory attitude among the bulk of dissolving "academic community."

All of this is evident in the more advanced areas of thought - the postmodern world on people like Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (ctheory.net) at the University of Victoria who, if nothing else, are preparing to perform an autopsy on what used to be education.

Remember Socrates: that cunning old proto-fascist may have been right. The invention of the alphbet may have been our species' definitive curse. But, for all the part-time optimists in the crowd, remember McLuhan as well. I vividly recall him saying (back out 1970) that, if he had the power, he'd destroy all TV sets.

That was in Toronto at his Centre for Culture and Technology. Kroker now operates the Pacific Center for Technology and Culture. It's all in the name.

I remember those lectures by McLuhan at his coach house--I would look at the work of Harold Innis, and Ivan Illich.

Of course ... and I'd also suggest Kroker's "Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant (1984), etc

And Henry A. Giroux?

Don't forget Elizabeth Eisenstein, 'The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change'. (1979),

But --- what do you think ?

I think that Harold Innis, George Grant and Marshall McLuhan had some important things to say. I think that Arthur Kroker and Henry Giroux have some important things to say. I am "blessed" to have met four of the five. I have some niggling sense of a potential synthesis, but I'm a senior citizen and time is short. Besides, this stuff is above my pay grade.

And, come to think of it, I also think Karl Marx, Max Weber and Gregory Bateson had some important things to say ... but I only studied at the feet on one of them.

Many of the readers of this forum come from different scholarly traditions. They may no doubt be unaware of the exact meaning of your references to these writers. Would you be kind enough to be more specific as to what you think about any parallels that may or may not exist between the effects on society of the printing press (circa 1450) and the effects of the internet. (circa 1994).

Howard, great to have read your wonderful ideas.Alicia and Jean Thanks also for sharing views on the Howard; ideas. If you have the "book",then you do not need a Socrates to tell you what is good and evil.You do not look to those who claim to be " experts"in dialectical method. I see nostalgia and longing and fear in the reflections of Howard.The fear with the internet is also the same.It destroys the "pundit" class of academic priesthood perpetuated by the modern university across the world.There were times when the "mysteries and secrets of knowledge" were the exclusive domain of the priest,pundits and mullahs.They would jealously and fiercely guard this "scared treasure" because their social power and prestige depended on protecting these "books" to be accessed by the man on the street.From Gutenberg to Internet; the road is treacherous and littered with blood and toil of many of our brave Europeans brothers and sisters who dared to challenge the "cultural epistemology" of Roman Church and let the human beings taste the fruit of the forbidden tree of knowledge. The " acoustic space" (a concept McLuhan)of knowledge has expanded beyond all imagination and it will continue to expand till the human species realizes its eventual unity.So more technological revolutions to come.I would have never known Howard and shared his experience that he sat with Kroker,McLuhan, Innis and several others,thanks to this wonderful thing called internet..It has connected me with my true self; that is my humanity; that i belong to the entire globe and its rich gardens of knowledge.I can instantly get access to these great minds and be a part of their personal journey to find out truth and reality.

Ahmad

There is no simple answer to Jean Colson's question. The writers I mentioned all dealt in one way or another with how the medium of information affects not only the "efficiency" but also the "quality" of communication. Not unlike the "observer effect" in physics, the mere act of communication not only delivers information but also alters the nature of the sender and the receiver of that information. The technology of communications is NOT value-free. For example, oral (pre-literate) communication privileges inspirational oratory over formal logic. I also involves person-to-person exchanges where much of the "meaning" is conveyed through non-verbal communication. (One traditional African saying is: "Let is sit closer to the fire, so we can see what we are saying.)

Discussions "in person" are more holistic and can be more emotive than those carried on on papyrus, in books or in pixels. Likewise, written communications (letters, magazines) can be read and experienced "in private" whereas oral (and often community-wide discussions are heard and experienced viscerally as well as cognitively.

As for recent electronic communication, it too has transformative aspects. The evidence is not yet conclusive, but reading a screen may have serious consequences for brain activity. Attention deficit disorder, the inability to concentrate for hours as we can with the printed page, etc., may be permanent consequences of the decline of the printed page. Meanwhile, the restriction of "tweets" to 140 characters appears to have significantly reduced our capacity for sustained thought and writing.

As for Ahmad's praise for the Internet as a facilitator of communication, I agree completely. Years ago I carried on a "long-distance relationship" using the post office. A letter written in Honolulu would be received in Toronto in about four days, a reply would be written and the response collected in my mail box anywhere up to ten days after my initial correspondence. The letters, you might rightly assume, were more than 140 characters and, in fact, often five to ten pages in length. Today, communication of that sort would be "virtually" instantaneous and much, much shorter. So, technology makes a difference - some good (speed), some maybe not so good (brevity leading to a decline in nuance and "literary" skill).

That, however, wasn't Socrates' main point. Although I am no Platonist, I think I understand his problem. Ideas, for him, were eternal, absolute and perfect. To think about them was to experience them at the distance of the human mind from its immaterial object. To talk about them was to take one more step away from the reality. To write down what was said was yet another step away and to talk about what was written down involved a further deterioration of the "truth."

By reading what Plato wrote down (which is what he either made up or transcribed and attributed to Socrates) we do NOT get access to his "great mind"

but only to the latest translation (out of many translations) of what Plato claimed Socrates actually said. And, we do not have the chance to enter into "their" personal journey. What we have is the opportunity to pretend we understand what they said (absent any genuine understanding of their historical circumstances), to relate to these hand-me-downs using the cultural assumptions and culturally based perceptions that we, in the 21st century impose on those antique texts.

Is there any point to examining what Plato or Aristotle (or any of the "greats") said about this or that? Probably ... but it is the height of intellectual conceit to imagine that we are involved in their "journey." And, what's more, they are not involved in ours. There is no conversation - a lesson worth learning, perhaps from an attentive (albeit second-hand) reading of John G. Gunnell's "Philosophy and Politics: The Alienation of Political Theory" - and I, for one, am not connected to "my true self" via the Internet, unless of course my true self is nothing more (or less) than the cumulative thought and action of my species as it is squeezed onto the screen before me. As such, it is neither manifest nor knowable.

If however, I were to try to contribute to a technologically mediated conversation that I no longer understand, I'd offer this quote: "Homo sum. Nihil humani a me alienum puto" (Publius Terentius Afer) - "I am human. Nothing human is alien to me."

Speaking of "nostalgia" (which I wasn't), I have reminded myself that "nostalgia began its life as a word when, in 1688, a doctoral student named Johannes Hofer (1669–1752) introduced it in dissertation at the University of Basel. It was meant to describe the mental disorder experienced by Swiss mercenary soldiers stationed in the "low countries" and suffering from a debilitating homesickness. More than a passing melancholy, it is said to have been triggered by memories of mountain landscapes and (honest) the sound of cowbells of the sort that encourage downhill skiiers today. As well, among its symptoms were high fevers, headaches, gastrointestinal upset, fainting and even death.

As I have written elsewhere, “Thus, nostalgia seemed destined for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (the "bible" of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists). Its definition, of course, has widened to include not just pathological yearnings for home, but almost any level of distress or "separation anxiety" with a temporal dimension. As Simone Signoret so eloquently put it in the title of her autobiography: "Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be."

I am (or would be if I had the courage) something of a "Luddite." One problem with our electronic age is that we have forgotten much of our history. Another (perhaps more serious) problem is that we have distorted much of what we seem to remember. So, "Luddite" is commonly used as a term of abuse to describe anyone with an irrational fear of technology or of a future world in which technology plays an important part. The reference is to early 19th-century English artisans (mainly weavers) who opposed the introduction of the steam-driven loom which rendered many of them redundant to the emerging industrial process. As E. P. Thompson wrote in his excellent book, "The Making of the English Working Class," they have been forced to endure the "enormous condescension of posterity."

In fact, they were not "romantic machine-breakers." Their only wish was that the benefits of "automation" be shared equitably and that, at the least, those thrown out of work by industrialization be afforded new skills or such social assistance as would keep them alive, rather than having the value of the increased productivity appropriated wholly by the machine-owners (not unlike today when in the (post)industrial world the economic benefits of computerization have been swallowed up by the already obscenely rich, while middle and working class incomes have "flat-lined" since the 1980s and the middle class seems poised for elimination.

Today, it is not only economic producers but also teachers and students who must be attentive to technological change in education. The commodification of knowledge, the commercialization of teaching and the decline of cultural understanding (never mind critical thinking which has become a hideously misused slogan covering for passive corporate education) all point toward a mechanized factory system of learning that will destroy independent thought as completely as Fordism destroyed the skilled worker.

It almost makes me yearn for the "groves of academe," but I am sensible enough to know that they are long since dead, and I am also sensible enough to know that a "webinar" with poseurs claiming to be in dialogue with the "greats" won't work either.

the first round of "new" (rather than "reprinted") texts to emerge from the printing press included a large number of apocalyptic (and other "imaginative") works. within a few generations, the printing press played a key role in a wave of new religious movements that swept through mostly northern Europe and are known retrospectively as "Protestantism." the internet is also home to a great deal of apocalyptic/conspiracy-theory/UFO/messianic sites, and is likely to play a key role in the emergence of new religions in our age. (See Brenda Brasher, *Give me that Online Religion.* The one NRM that Brasher does not treat, but that may be the most powerful one to "take" in the 21st century with extensive help from the internet is a kind of neo-Islam with close associations to global Jihad (see Richard Landes, *Heaven on Earth*, chap. 14.

Although somewhat sullied by its appearance within the context of the Cold War, Kohn's "The Pursuit of the Millennium" with it's discussion of Medieval and Reformation-era "millennarian" movements sheds some interesting light on the apocalyptics of the time (though the communications-technology link is absent). For that, we still must use McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy" as a springboard.

Near-contemporary examples worth exploring include the Amerindian "Ghost Dance Religion" of the last half of the 19th century and the Melanesian "Cargo Cults" (largely of the 1st half of the 20th century)

Howard ! your critical evaluation of modern and (post)modern condition of knowledge and academe is marvelous.It could feel the warmth of your lines right in my heart.But as you rightly underscored that the old academe is dying out and new "forms" of communication and scholarship are fast taking holding.

"Upanishads", an old Hindu book of philosophy(it means literally, "come sit close to me") basis its philosophical teachings on the very basic notion of spatial-temporal proximity of teacher and student in the learning context.There is no way, i could confirm its historical authenticity, and veracity of its claims and names of its authors.But you can see the symbolic commonality between the old African quote and the thoughts of Upanishads in their attitude towards reality.There is no extant historical record that the ancient Africans and ancient Indian philosophers have any sort of communication.But they talk about the same reality.The reality of their times and places.Now space-time has compressed (or underwent a cognitive shift due to external causes).Yet there is no way one can assure the "presence"of a person sitting close to me..That means every age has its own modes of communication.

The cultural dimension of books,semantic web, internet,tweets etc is largely a movement towards humanization and democratization of knowledge.The words, the sounds,the colors,the signs all fill us with meaning and inspiration. So it is phenomenologically irrelevant, whether, i am in close proximity to a person called Socrates,Plato,Krishna,or Layotard.I am culturally connected to them through a language and a common human history.I create and recreate them in my imagination for my literary and aesthetic experience.In my solitude, they are very much present and they talk to me and i communicate with them.The emerging cultural context will decide which mode of communication remains in tact. You never know that a time may come in future that people may be able to learn the language of silence.They may even not have to speak to each other to understand each other.

What you see as the "humanization" of knowledge is what others see as the dehumanization of communication. When McLuhan called the media "extensions of man," he meant that devices of various sorts from the written word and eyeglasses to television and telescopes allowed people to extend the range of their sounds and sights. He recognized that, in doing so, "phenomenology" would be mechanized and electrified with what he imagined would be transformative results. (Incidentally, he was once asked what single thing he would do if he were given the power to do anything on Earth and he answered: "Destroy all television sets!" On another occasion he was asked whether he was an optimist or a pessimist, and he replied: "I am neither an optimist or a pessimist; I am an apocalyptic only, for only an apocalypse can save us.)

Less given to such melodramatic "probes," John Livingstone, in his Canadian Governor-General's Award winning book (1993), "Rogue Primate" expanded on what I guess is basically a Heideggerian point (made also in numerous books by University of Montana philosopher, Albert Borgmann); namely, that there are two sorts of technological implements - "tools" and "devices,"

Tools sit comfortably between, for example, an artisan and some object (a chef's knife, a carpenter's hammer or a mechanic's wrench in relation to food, wood or motors). They are are visible, "at hand" and can only be of a certain shape and size; what's more, they require knowledge and skill if they are to be used properly. Devices are invisible and anonymous, requiring little or no skill (a household thermostat, a microwave oven). The first contribute to engagement in a world of our own making. They call attention to "focal things." The second ease us into passivity, de-skill the artisans among us and reduce us to the instruments of technology, rather than the other way around.

Whether the Internet fits in the first or the second category is uncertain at the moment. There are passionate voices on both sides.

All I will say on the matter is that it is one or the other, for "values" are embedded in technology and it is nonsense to say that technology (tools or devices) are "value-neutral" and can be used for good or ill (a rifle can be used by a traditional hunter to provide meat for his family or it can be used to murder a neighbour over a gambling debt); the truth is not (as the NRA says) that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" but rather that guns make "everything into a target" ...

Howard! Amazing breath of knowledge when you create "pictures" with words and move from one image to another.I feel that I am sitting close to you when i read your vibrant words.It is definitely emotive, blended with Mcluhanian philosophic thought and literary craftsmanship..

I agree that technology is not value-free.It is also culturally contexted.But i look beyond that.I see that internet is neither a" tool "nor a "device"It is all about sharing, collaborating and participating in the diverse sources of human knowledge.For me internet is a dynamic "virtual space" in which I can interact with wonderful people.I am experiencing this wonderful dialogue with you ;thanks to internet and researchgate.The internet has destroyed the "political"power of the knowledge.It has freed human understanding from narrow cultural space-times.It has also destroyed the attendant cultural and religious apparatuses of control and domination of human beings.You will find all sorts of political orientations towards creation and dissemination of information on the internet.From "info-liberals to info-communists, to info-socialists to info-capitalists,to info-fascist". But it is not a point of worry.It is rather a cultural strength of internet.Complexity,multiplicity and diversity, all come together and loose their respective cultural space time into a new " virtual space" It has left the acoustic space far behind.We all have finally become "participators" of knowledge. There are no teachers and students and we do not need a Nietzsche to tell us that values are dead.There are no temples of knowledge and no pundits who posses extra ordinary elixir of truth.

About 40 or 50 years ago I heard much the same about the liberating qualities of various "psychedelic" drugs. I understand the appeal of "ecstasy" but I am not sure that it is the best guide to intellectual understanding or practical action. I saw "Hair" on Broadway in 1968 and thoroughly enjoyed it as a musical entertainment, but I never quite believed that "the Age of Aquarius" was upon us ... and I was right, for within a few years everyone was dancing in discos to the music of the Bee Gees ... and then it got worse.

Howard, much has been done on the subject of millennialism since Cohn's *Pursuit.* in addition to mine (Heaven on Earth: The Variety of the Millennial Experience), Catherine Wessinger has come out with the Oxford Handbook of Millennialism. As for the media dimensions of the printing press (and religion), Elizabeth Eisenstadt's Printing Press as Agent of Change is still the masterwork. In some senses, it's applied McLuhanism.

Elizabeth Eisenstein presents the complex relationship between the printing press and the growth of literacy in far clearer detail than McLuhan. She details the direct effects of the printing press on society. Larger numbers of people learned to read and write, thus placing the possibilities of power in new hands. The increases in exchange of information between groups meant that distances between people became less of an obstacle to communication. Physical and social boundaries between groups began to break down and were more frequently crossed. "Ordinary" people learned to write rather than rely on a scribe, and therefore to express their ideas more readily. The scribes and clerics were not the sole holders of knowledge.

The meaning of 'Luddite' carries far more baggage than a simple implication of 'not liking technology'.

The Luddites were destroyers of machines that removed their employment, even though that employment was based on "sweated" labour, a 12 -14 hour day, no possiblity of getting an education and other skills, and a legacy and heritage of a debased artisanl skill-set. These people were dis-empowered and unemployed. There appeared to be no alternative form of employment - If your personal were centred on artisanal weaving and perhaps tending your vegetable garden, those things were your only resource that sustained life. I imagine that in that situation, most of us are going to be frantic. Many factory workers had already left the countryside and there for had no gardens in which to grow food.

The main point here is that some sort of relief from what appeared to be an essentially a life threatening situation - such as alternative employment was not immediately available. Luddites were shocked by the 'forced' changes on their lives that were wrought by a profound shift in the shape of manufacturing processes. - This is also comparable to companies who move their manufacturing plants out of the country. What do the folks who worked there do now? At the very least, they can write blogs about it, where as the Luddites didn't have that voice.

Factories were not a novel idea. COMPANIES owned /operated by single individuals or groups of individuals have been in existence for millennia prior to 1820s and 1830s. Companies have always handled the manufacturing of products, the sourcing of raw materials, the management of manufacturing and the distribution of those products; these processes were frequently aggregated under one 'umbrella' group

The Ghost Dance, a millennial movement, is not also directly associated with the Printing press or the internet. It is associated with the transmission of knowledge, understanding, and power, which is indirectly connected to both the oral traditions and to the printed newspapers and the telegraph. It is also connected to the ignorance of the general population surrounding both 'sides' of the issue.

It was a severe reaction to the pressure of being persecuted by American military and others. Perhaps if the people of the Ghost Dance had been able to successfully communicat...

The Ghost Dance also had a great deal to do with the railroad ... transportation and communications are, of course, linked.

I "probed" both in "Cargo Cults and Corporate Culture," in Culture and Difference: Essays in Canadian Society, a little anthology I cobbled together with Marino Tuzi (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2011) FC 95.5 D48 2006; ISBN 9781550712872

Many interesting parallels between the 'printing revolution' and the 'digital revolution', not least the increasing availability of portable 'cultural technologies' such as iPads, iPods, iPhones, etc., as parallel in their impacts to the 16th/17th century increasing availability of the earlier cultural technology of the portable (codex) printed book in the form of the bible, prayer books, almanacs, Luther's 95 theses, etc., which were, for the first time, available in vernacular languages rather than just Latin. It was this 'material culture' and its diverse uses rather than simply the 'spread of ideas' which lead to the European Reformation, the formation of early modern nation-states, the development of national languages, canons of literature, dictionaries for standardising the language, etc. I would recommend on this Benedict Anderson 'Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origins and Spread of Nationalism', London, Verso, 1985 and Elizabeth Eisenstein 'The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe', Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. I am also attaching a recent short discussion paper by me for the European Commission which touches on some of these themes.

thank you, Colin, for your succinct answer. Ideas multiplied and spread as a result of the development of these 'cultural technologies'. We are at the beginning of major changes.

If anything, it is the fundamental human perceptions of the nature of time and distance that have changed with each technological permutations of the basic model of human communication. The interval between "ticks" of the clock of perception by the senses and conceptualization by the brain began to shrink with the first marking stroke of the hand, shrank again with print, and again with digital photo-telecommunication. Has the human capacity for imagination increased with each new dose of "facts"? Are these technologies prompting evolutionary changes, or are they the result of evolution?

You all ight meet my friend Arthur Kroker (ctheory.net) or just say hello to me...

@Colin Mercer, Thanks for your contribution to this column and the article that you attached. I have downloaded a copy. I also thank the other contributors of this column.

McLuhan is the first source that springs to mind, it appears it's being well-covered above. Along those lines, the printing press reframed our thinking about information, introducing the possibilities of standardization, uniformity, and repeatability, among many others. The Internet (not just the web) is reframing our understanding of information according to the characteristics of its medium: information is ubiquitous, artifact-less, and transmutable--you can change it yourself, not merely receive it. The transmutability of information goods means fundamental changes in how it moves through the economy, and through its population of users: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1109962

Aside from that, there are some basics. Just as the printing press represented a huge leap forward in speed, from hand copying to printing presses, the Internet provides another huge leap forward in reproducibility. The key here is that at this scale, the merely quantitative difference (shorter time) becomes a qualitative difference, in that we experience information in fundamentally different ways as a consequence of its near-instant availability.