Peter Fleissner

Introduction

Austria and Hungary: Historical Roots and Present Developments

While the first volume of "Philosophy of Culture and the Politics of Electronic Networking" is devoted to early Austro-Hungarian thinkers and writers who are related to the emerging patterns of thought and texts which were provoked by electronic technology, the second volume deals with more generic problems of cyberspace. Although constructed on the basis of exact and supposedly value free science the infohighway is burdened with human interests from the very beginning of its existence. Started as a military based strategy for survival it moved into the realm of academia. Now the world of business is creating new markets in cyberspace, and by this its ubiquity is promoted, leading to widespread effects within our society.

This book consists of two parts. The first one investigates the links between new technologies and culture in both directions. The authors try to navigate luckily between the scylla of technological determinism and the charybdis of culturalism. They look at the phenomena of cyberspace from different perspectives:

Wolfgang Hofkirchner leads us directly into the center of contemporary reasoning about information society. He tries to reduce the intertwined relationships of technology and society to a few, essential questions. He asks if contemporary electronic information technology can bring about a significant qualitative change of human society. By exploiting a specific part-whole dialectics he understands technology on the micro-level as supportive to new societal functions. Conversely from the macro-level technology is controlled to a certain extent by society. The relationship is ambivalent: sometimes it resists the societal intentions, sometimes it fulfills them to a higher degree than expected. By this type of feedback loop (Hofkirchner calls it "technological organisation") the stage is set for allowing new developments to emerge. In a similar way Hofkirchner defines "material reproduction" and "cultural formation". Material reproduction means the mechanism which steers material flows, energy and information between nature and humans, based on technology and resulting in essentials for human life; cultural formation builds up on these essentials to create cultural values by money, power and knowledge. The output of cultural formation, values, shapes material reproduction, and finally technological organisation, in a way that new developments are possible.

After he established this basic theoretical view on society Hofkirchner tries to identify particular periods in history applying an evolutionary perspective. By the use of new electronic technology the technological organisation could evolve into a post-Fordist phase; material reproduction could be driven into a post-industrial age; and cultural formation could surpass the economic epoch. By subsuming the three layers of analysis under the aggregate perspective of anthropogenesis Hofkirchner opens up a field of possibility for an essential qualitative change, the emergence of the "global brain". For the time being new technology can only offer the necessary condition for a qualitative change of technological organisation, but this is not yet sufficient: material reproduction and cultural formation have to change as well.

In a bottom up approach Endre Horányi calls the contemporary changes in electronic technology the fifth revolution of communication. After human speech, script, printing and electronic mass communication the connectivity and interactivity of open networks is "something totally new". Electronic networking loosens the ties of information to time and space; the access to an incredible high amount of information has improved; storage capacity is cheaply available, copying has become easy. New services and protocols (e-mail, ftp, telnet, WWW, HTML, WebPhone, Chat, virtual cities) help to exchange and to access the wealth of information in structured ways. Horányi confirms Hofkirchner's assertion that technology provides the means for a change in society. But as we are absolutely influenced by our past we are not able to use the yet hidden possibilities.

From a completely different point of view László Ropolyi looks at electronic networking. He does not ask for the effects have the new technologies on human culture but - conversely - he investigates the opposite direction of influence. He tries to understand how human ideas and political organisation shape electronic hardware. In a two step approach he identifies the computer as one of the reifications of modernity thinking which can in fact be dated back to the mechanical devices of clockworks. Seen from his perspective clocks and computers have several features in common: a central control unit (the balance spring resp. the computer "clock" which sets the time, once more indicating the close relationship between the clockwork and the modern computer), operational units (cogwheels resp. flip-flops), memory units (perhaps the position of the hands resp. the memory chip) and a kind of quantitative representation (numbers symbolised by a hand resp. digital code). He expands the analogy much further: the computer, one of the essential technical products of the 20th century, is seen by him on the same level as state power and the market economy. In Ropolyi's structuralistic view the memory chip (in the technology system) represents the equivalent of the court (a vital element of state power) or the bank (an important institution of the contemporary economic system).

But recently the historical process has created at the same time two co-evolutionary developments: post-modern thinking on the one hand side, and electronic networking, a different use of the modernistic computer, on the other. Ropolyi interprets this coincidence of the sixties as the surface of a deep crisis our culture is undergoing: the crisis of knowledge which he compares with the crisis of religious belief in the Renaissance. By Renaissance and Protestantism the traditional religious belief has been transformed into a new view: human beings can establish and develop their own personal relationship to God and by that their individuality; in contemporary society the crisis of knowledge is on its way to transform the abstract, theory-based structure of knowledge of the experts into a more practical, hands-on knowledge for everybody, characterized by plurality, fragmentality and virtuality (see content and form of the contribution by Roland M. Mittermeir in this volume). The essential tools for having direct access to the new type of knowledge Ropolyi sees in the Internet and the World Wide Web (as the printing press was the key technology for having individual access to the Bible). As post-modern thinking does not exclude facets of modernity, the computer continues to be one part of the electronic network, but he is used in a different way (see Hofkirchner in this volume). By referring to the culture of the first phase of the Internet he rather optimistically concludes that the net user rejects the power structures of modernity and a new age of a more equal access to knowledge and therefore to power will emerge.

Peter Purgathofer and Sylvia Müller understand electronic networks as a new medium which starts to interact in a certain context of and has to compete with the traditional ones. In their opinion this "media clash" has its impact on the old as well as on the new media. Different stages of development can be seen. First, in the beginning phase the new medium will spread because it is of better quality, of a wider scope, more efficient, and, last not least, cheaper, but it does not have any other choice than to imitate the old one (like it happened to photography substituting portrait painting). Second, the new media will find its own, creative and characteristic expression (photography no longer is limited to portraits). Third, the old media is changed as well (painting was freed from being a one-to-one mirror of real world). Hypertext and book could undergo similar changes. While the hypertext was first seen as a replacement of the book, more and more new applications are already and will be created in the future which go beyond the scope of the traditional book, and finally, the good old book will change itself.

But this dialectical approach is not the full story Purgathofer and Müller provide. As Orson Wells's famous radio play "War of the worlds" has empirically illustrated not only the authors can find new ways in forming the media. Users have to be trained in the new ways of understanding, too. Most of the listeners had interpreted the radio play in their traditional understanding as radio news (and this was the intended effect by Wells), and not as a new way to present science fiction.

New technical possibilities often are the screen for the projection of human emotions, euphoria and anxieties. On the one hand the Internet is seen as a source of depraving the youth by pornography, as a playground for hackers who destroy the defense capacity of the military forces, or as misused by organized crime which could hide behind unbreakable encryption technologies. A demand for control could be found whenever a new medium came into being. The script, the book, the telephone, the radio broadcast, the TV, they all were accompanied by requests for regulation. The Internet is no exception: The US government thinks to allow encryption only if the keys are available to some of their representatives, censorship should prevent negative effects for the youngsters. On the other hand great expectations are linked to the infohighway: it could bring more participation and democracy and/or more profits. But to fulfill these goals just the opposite policy is needed: real privacy and no censorship at all. It will be interesting to observe how this conflict will be solved in the future (and may be to modify the solution by active participation and intervention).

By asking the multi-faceted question "Is it purely by chance that cyber-urbanists align themselves with the bohemistic avant-garde of the Parisian arcades and with the post-war avant-garde of situationism or with architectural utopists of the 60ies?" Oliver Marchart is pushing the reader away from his/her more or less speedy computer environment and beams her/him directly into the heart of political and ideological wars, wars about space. Like William the Conqueror took over the power in the besieged British island, like the architectural avant-gardes had in common a heroic programme of redefining the meaning of "City", the discourse about Cyberspace seems to challenge and maybe redefine the traditional meaning of space. From the traditional point of view space can be seen as the ossified, sedimented, crystallized form (a Crystal is a periodic structure per se) of a repeated process in time where differences are produced and kept up by traditional practices. In the cultural battlefield avant-gardes always are dealing with despatialization, with the creation of new meaning, with only "temporary" fixation or counter-fixation depending on different powers of order in regard to traditionalism. But does Cyberspace function and may it be seen like other traditional spaces? Marchart claims that Cyberspace in contrast to physical locales 'will always be lacking any ontological grounding in "real", or "material" space' and that what is needed is an 'iconography of contemporary popular imaginary' for electronic networks.

A particular kind of Cyberspace, the MUD, is investigated by Peter Fleissner. Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) represent the first generation of new spaces created within the realm of electronic networks. Peter Fleissner describes their potential for becoming "real" meeting places (although constructed virtually) for human beings to interact with each other. One could say that they open up the possibility to live in an interactive hypertext. For some students they have become so attractive that the danger of addiction arose. What is it that makes them so interesting to people? In his "philosophy of symbolic forms" Cassirer has described the mythological consciousness as the first type of societal consciousness in history. It does not seem to be by pure chance that the first scripts for the MUDs (opening up new areas for a completely new type of society) are dealing with some mythical stories. Problems common in myths represent ways how to deal with essential events and situations of human life, like birth, sexuality, death, human experience in terms of bodily sensations, emotions, situations of shortage, and power. Myths offer ways how a society can react to these sources of uncertainty and challenge and how to add meaning to them. The players in a MUD like in a myth learn to use certain means and find certain ways of dealing with their problems they experience related to the space they are in. They experience a kind of life beyond real life. The fascination produced by the MUD could be a compensation for hostile reality, but as well it could be seen as a possibility how to create a new and extended reality and to experience it in a shared way.

Fleissner's contribution represents a bridge to the second part of the book which tries to reveal the enigma of hypertext, a widely praised new way of knowledge representation. Once again different views and approaches are presented which imply their own inner hypertext structure:

the stage for hypertext is set in a broad way by dealing with the subtleties of information and knowledge in the everyday world;

traditional and new kinds of knowledge representation are critically reviewed and evaluated;

Richard Rorty's reasoning about textuality is exploited and applied to hypertexts;

finally the notion of givenness of hypertexts is questioned by arguing about the necessity of creative activities on the part of the user.

In a rather poetic text Roland Mittermeir invites the reader to accompany him on a reflected journey of writing his paper by means of a text processor. By and by during the journey it becomes clear that in encountering various types of human knowledge and its representations, various types of communication, and, connected with them, different kinds of information, he detects different functions of the computer. In the beginning of his journey he seems to start from the science based perception of information (Shannon and Weaver) as an objectivated entity which may be transferred physically to an other person who is able to digest it in a rather passive manner. For such a purpose the immediate function of the computer is that of a tool ("Werkzeug") to assist the writer in bringing ready made thoughts down to paper that other persons can read them. But step by step along the journey additional ways of information and communication are described. Objectivated information is working only as a trigger to induce new thought processes on the side of the receiving person. Can the computer contribute to this creative process as well? Mittermeir identifies a different function representing the ability of the computer to support and stimulate the human thought process ("Denkzeug") which he describes as an internal discourse where levels of abstraction can be changed immediately, leaving room for completely new associations of thought, where human interests and practical action induce emotions which may feed back to the original thought processes as well. Thus hypertext (like other creations of the human brain to structure and improve thought processes: language, drawings, number systems, script) could be used in a dual way: it represents a tool to communicate ones ideas to others, it is used as a "Denkzeug" if it assists the association production and creativity of its user.

Eva Obermüller and Margit Pohl elaborate the "Denkzeug"-"Werkzeug" duality in additional detail. They ask if hypertext is really a new concept of knowledge representation and alternative learning tool, more natural for human thinking processes than e.g. the traditional book we are used to work with. The authors analyse hypertexts on both levels, the macro and the micro context.

The macro level is dealt with along Vannevar Bush's ideas. After World War Two in the United States Bush looked for a new way of engaging all the scientists, who had worked for years on warfare, in civil society. He had the idea of a large hypertext which could contain all the knowledge of the world. Everybody should have access to it in zero time. Bush´s fantasy comes very close to the Internet and the World Wide Web where literally spoken all the knowledge of the world is present. But there are some critical remarks to be made: First, it is not proven that the written or drawn or painted knowledge is the only one we refer to in everyday life; second, it cannot be taken for granted that by assuring the access to this large assembly of information (a politically and economically difficult task per se) the users can distill and create their own knowledge base useful for them and others.

On the micro level one should be even more cautious. Often one can hear in unison from members of the scientific community and representatives of the electronic industry that hypertext is the more natural form to represent human thinking, thus it should replace the traditional book. But one must add the commonplace that reading a book as surfing a hypertext are skills which have to be learned and trained. Neither of the two comes as a "natural" gift to the human brain. In both skills people have to be trained.

At the end of their paper Pohl and Obermüller vote for a compromise, i. e. a productive combination of traditional linear texts and of nonlinear hypertexts, as there are certain specific tasks which could be performed better by books, others by hypertexts.

In his contribution Daniel L. Golden connects his understanding of the electronic universe with Richard Rorty's consideration about "textualism" as a main direction of contemporary thought. As Rorty says, instead of the idealistic statement "There is nothing but ideas" the new paradigm may be characterized by "There is nothing but texts". While in the 19th century scientific idealism had tried to replace philosophy, another science, the 20th century textualism, wants to place literature to the center, and to treat both, exact sciences and philosophy, at best, as literary genres. More than that, all human activities are seen like texts, which should get an interpretation, and these texts are of equal rank. The latter seems to echo the democratic utopia of citizens with equal rights, nobody has the right to rule, everybody has the right to be understood. The symbols used by Rorty to visualize his ideas are the ascetic priest (a term taken from Nietzsche to represent all traditional philosophers) and the novelist who is able to move here and there among them.

How does this view relate to electronic media and to political structures? Golden interprets the World Wide Web as being an amplifier of textualism in the future. Individual homepages are linked by him to Rorty's statement on human beliefs and desires: "...a belief becomes simply a position in a web." So the WWW could be seen as a kind of materialization of this web of beliefs. No single text is able to rule - utopia ahead. Nevertheless metastructures of texts could arise: Multitext, a never ending variety of text - having the same title and author; Hypertext, a never ending openness of texts to others in the textual worlds; Multimedia, reflecting the more and more visual character of nowadays culture.

Golden thinks that these technological developments will in a more or less radical way destroy the good old text and the book (In their essay Peter Purgathofer and Sylvia Müller forecast the opposite. They conclude "One day we might well say ‘Networks saved the book’".).

New electronic media challenge the traditional belief that printed texts are somewhat given, at least syntactically, literally fixed and accessible. But according to Ong and Havelock radical conversions of our way of thinking and of the forms of human knowledge come about with the change of the media of the physical records of cultural and mental cognitive activities. To clarify the effect which could be induced by contemporary electronic networking technologies, András Benedek and Sándor Ferencz introduce the distinction between "Supertext" and "Cybertext", related to two different kinds of literacy, super-literacy and cyber-literacy. Their distinction reflects in my view the changing understanding of the concept of "information". While the influential theory developed by Shannon/Weaver focus on information as it were a physical good, just to be transported through a channel without too much of a distortion, but available at the receiver side (self recovered after error correction if not in the original version) to be digested, the human communication process is of a more complex nature. The receiver is a very active part of the reconstruction of the message. To a certain degree she/he is responsible for the content of the message, and therefore information cannot be, once and for all, "objectively" defined. The reader becomes more important in the case of Cybertext. It offers food for thought and mental associations, one of the basics for creative processes. But, of course, it is not possible to create only Cybertext, Supertexts must accompany it as the other of the Siamese twins.

I hope that by these different approaches to electronic networking the reader can develop and elaborate her/his own understanding of Cyberspace that he/she finally no longer remains a reader but an author as well - and by that fulfilling one of the better promises of the emerging information society.

 

 

 

 

Peter Fleissner and Kristóf Nyíri (eds.)

"Philosophy of Culture and the Politics of Electronic Networking"

Vol. II "Cyberspace: a new battlefield for human interests?"

Table of content

Peter Fleissner

Introduction

Part 1

Networks, hardware and human interests

Wolfgang Hofkirchner:

"Does electronic networking entail a new stage of cultural evolution?"

Endre Horányi:

"On the possible roles of electronic communication in human interaction"

László Ropolyi:

"Society in computers"

Sylvia Müller, Peter Purgathofer:

"Media Clash"

Oliver Marchart:

"The flâneur and his duck. Towards a discourse theoretical analysis of (cyber-)spatiality"

Peter Fleissner:

"Multi-user dungeons"

 

Part 2

Hypertexts: new tools for new thoughts?

Roland T. Mittermeir

"Hypertext: Werkzeug? - Denkzeug?

Eva Obermüller, Margit Pohl:

"The great hypertext swindle"

András Benedek, Sándor Ferencz:

"Hypertext - Is it something given?"

Dániel L. Golden:

"Cybertextualism"