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Media Survivability as Cultural Survivability
© 2004 Neils Clark

At its core this paper is about using new media forms to preserve as much of our past as possible. If its antecedent held any success in proving cultural death possible, if not likely, then this may be seen as an attempt to discuss the ways in which humans, especially contemporary humans, might create technologies capable of sustaining culture past its normal breaking point. It should be seen as the second of three related papers.

Both knowledge and experience are real,
but reality has many forms,
which seem to cause complexity.
By using the means appropriate,
we extend ourselves beyond
the barriers of such complexity,
and so experience the Tao.
-Lao Tzu, from poem one of the Tao Te Ching. Translation by Stan Rosenthal

Human beings operate on experience. As each individual human lives and grows, it by nature differs in its experiences. Classical sense making theorists have created equally strong arguments in defense of the primacy of either conception or of perception as central to a true experience, or at least true understanding of life experience. Modern theorists have additionally argued for the primacy of intuition or of practice as central to the human experience. While Idealism, Materialism, Phenomenology, and Pragmatism may each argue for the primacy of conception, perception, intuition, and practice, respectively, these outlooks are very far from mutually exclusive. Though the Tao Te Ching says many things, if not all things simultaneously, the above may suggest that divisions within experience only succeed in obfuscating our view. Selected theories of personal development, combined with the synthesis of the two schools of Symbolic Interactionism, offer insight necessary for breaking down ideas of communication so that they may better apply to ways to better survive information.

Psychological and Interactionist theories forwarded by Freud, Mead, and others have one thing in common: despite their best intentions they layer or section human experience. Diagnostically, this is necessary, though any partition delineates the purity of experience far too much for the conception of communication we need. George Herbert Mead’s qualitative analysis insightfully presents human growth as a constant process of human interaction. Kenneth Burke carries Mead’s generalized other, or perception of the self, further. He asserts that humans use signs and symbols, central to the concepts of the earlier paper, in order to create themselves through communicative interaction. While offering a very process-oriented, experiential view of human communication, Symbolic Interactionism, especially within the Iowa School, seeks to group individuals using pre-defined concepts. While sense making processes often occur using the symbols and actors of society, they just as frequently occur as insular permutations enacted by private or esoteric experiences.

Human communication is therefore a synthesis, or reduction, of the immense amount of information inherent in an individual’s life experiences. For example, even if we strap a video camera to the head of some poor subject in order to view and analyze the variegate of their experiences, we cannot know what information is key in figuring their sense making. Their interpretations of past experience will lead them to perceive their world irrevocably different, in small or large ways, from anyone else. Once information reduction is understood on the level of the individual, it can be understood as a transmission to media.

This view of communication will be broken into three parts: experience, frame, and communication, with the two deviously devised concerns: fidelity and reproducibility. Experience is the sum of sense making processes up to the point where the frame temporally follows the communication. The concept of the frame comes from sociologist Erving Goffman, who sees experience as a continual process sectioned into specific stages or frames. For our purposes, the frame is simply the way in which experiences are thrown together while constructing a particular communication. Communication, then, is framing certain life experiences in order to reduce their inherent information into media. Fidelity represents a medium’s ability to transfer large amounts of information. Reproducability represents a medium’s ability to reliably present the reduced information to the intended audience.

The reduction of experiential information is the prevailing theme within the advancement of any media. Rhythmic oral legends, for instance the Iliad and the Upanishads, may be the bulk of what remains from all human experience before writing. The greatest transfer of information can occur between two people who have shared numerous experiences over time. As far as media goes, this media has the greatest fidelity, yet the lowest reproducibility. That is to say that if a few people have experienced anything together, future communications about that event, and to a degree about other events, will allow sharing of an immense amount of information. Unfortunately, pure experience is almost impossible to reproduce.

Books by comparison offer far greater survivability than either oral poetry or basic human interaction. The written word lasts longer, while consistently giving the exact same information. The fidelity of the information suffers, as a shared view of the same experience is very unlikely. As a reader of any one book will be reading the same words of any previous or future readers, reproducibility is high. Both thoughts and specific events may be recorded with varying degrees of usefulness. Television viewerships are so large that only in very few cases do audiences share any degree of true experiential fidelity. As media audiences grow, however, a second fidelity grows, whereby those watching the same program begin to share in immaterial experiences. Reproducibility of television is obviously very high, as the same broadcast can reach hundreds of millions of viewers, if not billions, simultaneously. The internet allows all humans ability to proliferate infinitely and perfectly reproducible written and graphical media, with a second fidelity that, due to interactivity, is much more inclusive. This interaction, seen especially in blogs and massively multiplayer games, creates fidelity that is immaterial, yet is perceived in just as real a sense as traditional interpersonal communication. In a way we have come full circle.

If the whole of our past can be held in poetry and word, then how much of our present do we really need to save? In his lectures, professor Aaron Delwiche identifies the “information architect” as a professional class of knowledge worker capable of navigating our huge information networks in order to garner concise and critical knowledge. If all of our information is preserved, then these architects, who are becoming more and more pervasive, will be able to make use of any and all information. We must preserve as much of it as possible.

A problem facing the contemporary information architect’s networks is the lack of texts that are, as of now, only written. This lack of the past’s representation in our knowledge banks could lead to more than a few overdrawn accounts. The cliché adage runs something like, “those that cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” How many fantastic fonts of knowledge are simply un-reachable through contemporary database structure? This has an implication beyond that of the book-fearing, computer-dependent information architect. Old media must be transported to the new in order to increase their reproducibility, therefore immensely increasing their survivability. If they are not reproduced before they are taken by age, world war, or flood, then our children will literally never know what we have lost.

The technology of inscription finds itself developed alongside speaking and writing, and frequently outlasts even creations of the ingenious printing press. In discussing structuralist theory, John Fiske equates oral myth with televised myth. Likewise, it is reasonable to equate writing with the internet. It may follow that a fast-approaching future technology will allow the permanent “inscription” of all data found in all of today’s media. While compact disks, hard drives, and flash memory offer information storage, their lifespan is greatly limited by use. Furthermore, they only hold a wanting fraction of the mass of information we find today even on the internet. If the Babylonian novel Gilgamesh lasted over 4,000 years in cuneiform, then a technology allowing our mass of information to persist even half as long would contribute such reproducibility as to afford our children a great insight into our machinations.

Meanwhile, our future generations must be able to use these technologies. The Rosetta Stone offers two major insights into how future cultures, even if illiterate, might make use of such near-permanent information centers. The Rosetta stone compared the words of three languages. To promote the actual realization of knowledge in future cultures we must survive numerous forms of media. Each must also offer some form of sign recognition or media training. Brian Lewis, a graduate student in the University of Hawaii’s philosophy department, brings science fiction to the fore in offering a critical warning put forth in A Canticle for Lebowitz. This book portrays a class of people charging themselves with the preservation of knowledge. Lebowitz was an engineer in life. Later, those who preserve knowledge canonize him as a saint. When one of his random blueprints is found within a metal cave, it is treated as a holy scripture. Bound in gold leaf, it is preserved merely for the sake of preservation. Lewis uses Canticle to warn that preservation for its own sake defeats the purpose of knowledge, which is use.

The effect of mass media has been to increase the reproducibility of human information, thereby increasing its survivability, yet it does this at a definite change in fidelity, or the amount of information successfully transmitted. One the one hand, humans and information architects today possess great stores of knowledge, allowing us the know such a breadth as never before known to be known. On the other hand, proliferation of these information networks without regard to past knowledge, whether oral, literate, or even electronic, lets those media sink into the past and quite tragically become lost. Additionally this new media, albeit new, may have downfalls of survivability. We must be vigilant in not only producing technologies that might permanently record present information, we must guard it against natural disaster and wear. We must also ask ourselves how much information is truly being exchanged. Can secondary fidelity replace the information shared when a few individuals witness an event firsthand?

With a better grasp on how we reduce experience to media, we can determine how to best present those reductions as history for the future. Human sense making is done primarily through no one channel, making the umbrella term “experience” effective for analysis of media in terms of survivability. Through viewing the fidelity and reproducibility of various media, we can see the patterns within each which dictate how capable that media will be in preserving itself. The pattern connecting each recurring media is an increase in represented information rather than information coming from actual experience, yet there is untold experience in our past. We owe it to our ancestors, our children, and ourselves to represent past and present works in their entirety in our mass media forms. Meanwhile all generations are charged with relentlessly seeking the “stone etching” that allows us to permanently record the massive surplus of data in our culture today. Finally, the magic in sharing even simple experiences can never be forgotten. Mass media may augment this, yet it can just as easily make us lose sight of it.

A small country may have many machines,
but the people will have no use for them;

…and they are happy in their ways.

…the people of the villages;

grow old and die in peace.
-Lao Tzu, from poem eighty of the Tao Te Ching. Translation by Stan Rosenthal

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