Contents
Part I (Original Edition)
Introduction
I Newtonian and Bersonian Time
II Groups and Statistical Mechanics
III Time Series, Information, and Communication
IV Feedback and Oscillation
V Computing Machines and the Nervous System
VI Gestalt and Universals
VII Cybernetics and Psychopathology
VIII Information, Language, and Society


V. Computing Machines and the Nervous System





CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Introduction by Steve J. Heims
Apprendix

I Cybernetics in History
II Progress and Entropy
III Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior
IV The Mechanism and History of Language
V Organization as the Message
VI Law and Communication
VII Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy
VIII Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist
IX The Frist and the Second Industrial Revolution
X Some Communication Machines and their Future
XI Language, Confusion, and Jam


INTRODUCTION by Steve J. Heims

G. H. Hardy, the Cambridge mathematician and author of A Mathematician's Apology, reflecting on the value of mathematics, insisted that it is a 'harmless and innocent occupation'. 'Real mathematics has no effects on war', he explained in a book for the general public in 1940. 'No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theroy of numbers of relativity... A real mathematician has his conscience clear.' Yet, in fact, at that time physicists were already actively engaged in experiments converting matter into energy (a possibility implied by the Theory of Relataivity) in anticipation of building an atomic bomb. Of a younger generation which he taught, Hardy wrote, 'I have helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own...'
Nobert Wiener took issue with his mentor. He thought Hardy's attitude to be 'pure escapism', noted that the ideas of number theory are applied in electrical engineering, and that 'no mater how innocent he may be in his inner soul and in his motivation, the effective mathematician is likely to be a powerful factor in changing the face of society. Thus he is really as dangerous as a potential armourer ofthe new scientific war of the future.' The neat separation of pure and applied mathematics is only a mathematician's self-serving illusion.
Wiener came to address the alternative to innocence - namely, taking responsibility. After he himself had during World War II worked on a mathematical theory of prediction intended to enhance the effectiveness of anti-aircraft fire, and develooped a powerful stistical theory of communication which would put modern communication engineering on a rigorous mathematical footing, any pretence of harmlessnes was out of question for him. From the time of the end of the war until his death in 1964, Wiener applied his penetrative and innovative mind to identifying and elaoraint on a relation of high technology to people which benign or, in his words, to the human - rather than the inhuman - use of human beings. In doing so during the years when the cold war was raging in the United States, he ofund an audience among the generally educated public. However, most of his scientific colleagues - offended or embarrassed by Wiener's views and especially by his open refusal to engage in any more work related to the military - saw him as an eccentric at best and certainly not to be taken seriously except in his undeniably brilliant, strictly mathematical, researches. Albert Einstein, who regarded Wiener's attitude towards the military as exemplary, was in those days similarly made light of as unschooled in political matters.
Undaunted, Wiener proceeded to construct a practical and comprehensive attitude towards technology rooted in his basic philosophical outlook, and presented it in lucid language. For him technologies were viewed not so much as applied science, but rather as applied social and moral philosophy. Others have been critical of technological developments and seen the industrial revolution as a mixed blessing. Unlike most of these critics, Wiener was simultaneously an irrepressibly original non-stop thinker in mathemaics, the sciences and high technology and equally an imaginative critic from a social, historical and ethical perspective of the uses of his own und his colleagues' handiwork. Because he gave rather unchecked rein to both of theses inclinations, Wiener's writings generate a particular tension and have a special fascination.
Now, four decades later, we see that the tenor of his commetns on science, technology and society were on the whole prophetic and ahead of his time. In ther intervening years his subject matter, arising out of the tension between technical fascination and social conscience, has become a respectable topic for research and scholarship. Even leading universities have caught up with it and created courses of study and academic departments with names such as 'science studies', 'technology studies' or 'science, technology and society'. His prediction of an imminent 'communication revolution' in which 'the message' would be a pivotal notion, and the associated technological developments would be in the area of communication, computation and organization, was clear-sighted indeed.
The interrelation between science and society via technologies is only one of the two themes underlying The Human Use of Human Beings. The other derives as much from Wiener's personal philosoophy  as from theoretical physics. Although he was a mathematician, his personal philosophy was rooted in existentialism, rather than in the formal-logical analytical philosophy so prominent in his day and associated with the names of Russel, Moore, Ramsey, Wittgenstein and Ayer. For Wiener life entailed struggle, but it was not the class struggle as a means to social progress emphasized by Marxistss, nor was it identical with the conflict Freud saw between the individual and society. In his own words:


Even when we discount the romantic, heroic overtones in that statement, Wiener is articulating what, as he saw and experienced it, makes living meaningful. The adjective 'arbitrry' before 'order and system' helps to make the statement appropriate for many; it might have been made by an artist as readily as by a creative scientist. WienerÄs outlook on life is couched in the language of conflict and hestruggle agains overwhelming natural tendencies. But he was talking about something very different from the ruthless exploitation, even destruction, of nature and sucessfully beding it to human purposes, which si part of the legacy of the nineteenth-century heroic ideal, of Western man. Wiener in his discussion of human purposes, recognizing feedbacks and larger systems which include environment, had moved far away from that ideal and closer to an ideal of understanding and, both consciously and effectively, of collaborating with natural processes.
I expect that Wiener would have welcomed some more recent developments in physic, as his thinking was already at times tending in that direction. Since his day developments in the field of statistical mechanics have come to modify the ideas about how orderly patterns - for example, the growth of plants and animalss and the evolution of ecosystems - arise in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. As Wiener anticipatedd, the notions of information, feedback and non-linearity of the differential equations have become increasingly important in biology. [...]
It was Wienere's lifelong obsession to distinguish the human from the machine, having recognized the identity of patterns of organization and of many functiions which can be performed by either, but in The Human Use of Human Beings it is his intention to place his understanding of the people/machines identity/dichotmy within the context of his generous and humane social philosophy. Cybernetics had originated from the analysis of formal analogies between the behaviour of organisms and that of electronic and mechanical systems. The mostly military-technologies new in his day, which today we call 'artificial intelligence', highlighted the potential resenblance between certain elaborate machines and people. Academic psychology in North America was in those days still predominantly behaviourist. The cybernetic machines - such as general-purpose computers - suggested a possibility as to the nature of mind: mind wa analogous to the formal struture and organization, of the software aspect, of a reasoning-and-perceiving machine that could also issue instructions leading ot actions. Thus the long-standing mind-brain duality was overcome by a materialism which encompassed organization, messages and information in addition to stuff and matter. But the subjective - an individual's cumultive experience of being alive - is belittled, seen only within the context of evolutionary theory as providing information useful for survival to the organism.
In shorn of WienerÄs benign social philosophy, what remains of cybernetics can be used within a highly mechanical and dehumanizing, even militaristic, outlook. The fact that the metaphor of a sophisticated automaton is so heavily employed invites thinking about humans as in effect machines. Many who have learned merely the technical aspects of cybernetics have used them, and do so today, for ends which Wiener abhorred. It is a danger he foresaw, would have liked to obviate and, althought aware of how little he could do in that regards, valiantly tried to head off. [...] 
Steve J. Heims
Boston, October 1988

Since the end of World War II, I have been working on the many ramifications of the theory of messages. Besides the electrical engineering theory of the transmission of messages, there is a larger field which includes not only the study of language but the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such automata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system, and a tentative new theory of scientific method. This larger theory of messages is a probabilistic theory, an intrinsic part of the movement that owes its origin to Willard Gibbs and which I have described in the introduction.

 Until recently, there was no existing word for this complex of ideas, and in order to embrace the whole field by a single term, I felt constrained to invent one. Hence "Cybernetics," which I derived from the Greek word kubernētēs, or "steersman," the same Greek word from which we eventually derive our word "governor." Incidentally, I found later that the word had already been used by Ampere with reference to political science, and had been introduced in another context by a Polish scientist, both uses dating from the earlier part of the nineteenth century.

I wrote a more or less technical book entitled Cybernetics which was published in 1948. In response to a certain demand for me to make its ideas acceptable to the lay public, I published the first edition of The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950. Since then the subject has grown from a few ideas shared by Drs. Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, and myself, into an established region of research. Therefore, I take this opportunity occasioned by the reprinting of my book to bring it up to date, and to remove certain defects and inconsequentialities in its original structure.

In giving the definition of Cybernetics in the original book, I classed communication and control together. Why did I do this? When I communicate with another person, I impart a message to him, and when he communicates back with me he returns a related message which contains information primarily accessible to him and not to me. When I control the actions of another person, I communicate a message to him, and although this message is in the imperative mood, the technique of communication does not differ from that of a message of fact. Furthermore, if my control is to be effective I must take cognizance of any messages from him which may indicate that the order is understood and has been obeyed.

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever increasing part.

When I give an order to a machine, the situation is not essentially different from that which arises when I give an order to a person. In other words, as far as my consciousness goes I am aware of the order that has gone out and of the signal of compliance that has come back. To me, personally, the fact that the signal in its intermediate stages has gone through a machine rather than through a person is irrelevant and does not in any case greatly change my relation to the signal. Thus the theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical, is a chapter in the theory of messages.

Naturally there are detailed differences in messages and in problems of control, not only between a living organism and a machine, but within each narrower class of beings. It is the purpose of Cybernetics to develop a language and techniques that will enable us indeed to attack the problem of control and communication in general, but also to find the proper repertory of ideas and techniques to classify their particular manifestations under certain concepts.

The commands through which we exercise our control over our environment are a kind of information which we impart to it. Like any form of information, these commands are subject to disorganization in transit. They generally come through in less coherent fashion and certainly not more coherently than they were sent. In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.

Much of this book concerns the limits of communication within and among individuals. Man is immersed in a world which he perceives through his sense organs. Information that he receives is co-ordinated through his brain and nervous system until, after the proper process of storage, collation, and selection, it emerges through effector organs, generally his muscles. These in turn act on the external world, and also react on the central nervous system through receptor organs such as the end organs of kinaesthesia; and the information received by the kinaesthetic organs is combined with his already accumulated store of information to influence future action.

Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.

The place of the study of communication in the history of science is neither trivial, fortuitous, nor new. Even before Newton such problems were current in physics, especially in the work of Fermat, Huygens, and Leibnitz, each of whom shared an interest in physics whose focus was not mechanics but optics, the communication of visual images.

Fermat furthered the study of optics with his principle of minimization which says that over any sufficiently short part of its course, light follows the path which it takes the least time to traverse. Huygens developed the primitive form of what is now known as "Huygens' Principle" by saying that light spreads from a source by forming around that source something like a small sphere consisting of secondary sources which in turn propagate light just as the primary sources do. Leibnitz, in the meantime, saw the whole world as a collection of beings called "monads" whose activity consisted in the perception of one another on the basis of a pre-established harmony laid down by God, and it is fairly clear that he thought of this interaction largely in optical terms. Apart from this perception, the monads had no "windows," so that in his view all mechanical interaction really becomes nothing more than a subtle consequence of optical interaction.

A preoccupation with optics and with message, which is apparent in this part of Leibnitz's philosophy, runs through its whole texture. It plays a large part in two of his most original ideas: that of the Characteristica Universalis, or universal scientific language, and that of the Calculus Ratiocinator, or calculus of logic. This Calculus Ratiocinator, imperfect as it was, was the direct ancestor of modern mathematical logic.

Leibnitz, dominated by ideas of communication, is, in more than one way, the intellectual ancestor of the ideas of this book, for he was also interested in machine computation and in automata. My views in this book are very far from being Leibnitzian, but the problems with which I am concerned are most certainly Leibnitzian. Leibnitz's computing machines were only an offshoot of his interest in a computing language, a reasoning calculus which again was in his mind, merely an extention of his idea of a complete artificial language. Thus, even in his computing machine, Leibnitz's preoccupations were mostly linguistic and communicational.

Toward the middle of the last century, the work of Clerk Maxwell and of his precursor, Faraday, had attracted the attention of physicists once more to optics, the science of light, which was now regarded as a form of electricity that could be reduced to the mechanics of a curious, rigid, but invisible medium known as the ether, which, at the time, was supposed to permeate the atmosphere, interstellar space and all transparent materials. Clerk Maxwell's work on optics consisted in the mathematical development of ideas which had been previously expressed in a cogent but non-mathematical form by Faraday. The study of ether raised certain questions whose answers were obscure, as, for example, that of the motion of matter through the ether. The famous experiment of Michelson and Morley, in the nineties, was undertaken to resolve this problem, and it gave the entirely unexpected answer that there simply was no way to determine the motion of matter through the ether.

The first satisfactory solution to the problems aroused by this experiment was that of Lorentz, who pointed out that if the forces holding matter together were conceived as being themselves electrical or optical in nature, we should expect a negative result from the Michelson-Morley experiment. However, Einstein in 1905 translated these ideas of Lorentz into a form in which the unobservability of absolute motion was rather a postulate of physics than the result of any particular structure of matter. For our purposes, the important thing is that in Einstein's work, light and matter are on an equal basis, as they had been in the writings before Newton; without the Newtonian subordination of everything else to matter and mechanics.

In explaining his views, Einstein makes abundant use of the observer who may be at rest or may be moving. In his theory of relativity it is impossible to introduce the observer without also introducing the idea of message, and without, in fact, returning the emphasis of physics to a quasi-Leibnitzian state, whose tendency is once again optical. Einstein's theory of relativity and Gibbs' statistical mechanics are in sharp contrast, in that Einstein, like Newton, is still talking primarily in terms of an absolutely rigid dynamics not introducing the idea of probability. Gibbs' work, on the other hand, is probabilistic from the very start, yet both directions of work represent a shift in the point of view of physics in which the world as it actually exists is replaced in some sense or other by the world as it happens to be observed, and the old naive realism of physics gives Way to something on which Bishop Berkeley might have smiled with pleasure.

At this point it is appropriate for us to review certain notions pertaining to entropy which have already been presented in the introduction. As we have said, the idea of entropy represents several of the most important departures of Gibbsian mechanics from Newtonian mechanics. In Gibbs' view we have a physical quantity which belongs not to the outside world as such, but to certain sets of possible outside worlds, and therefore to the answer to certain specific questions which we can ask concerning the outside world. Physics now becomes not the discussion of an outside universe which may be regarded as the total answer to all the questions concerning it, but an account of the answers to much more limited questions. In fact, we are now no longer concerned with the study of all possible outgoing and incoming messages which we may send and receive, but with the theory of much more specific outgoing and incoming messages; and it involves a measurement of the no-longer infinite amount of information that they yield us.

Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

I have already referred to Leibnitz's interest in automata, an interest incidentally shared by his contemporary, Pascal, who made real contributions to the development of what we now know as the desk adding-machine. Leibnitz saw in the concordance of the time given by clocks set at the same time, the model for the pre-established harmony of his monads. For the technique embodied in the automata of his time was that of the clockmaker. Let us consider the activity of the little figures which dance on the top of a music box. They move in accordance with a pattern, but it is a pattern which is set in advance, and in which the past activity of the figures has practically nothing to do with the pattern of their future activity. The probability that they will diverge from this pattern is nil. There is a message, indeed; but it goes from the machinery of the music box to the figures, and stops there. The figures themselves have no trace of communication with the outer world, except this one-way stage of communication with the pre-established mechanism of the music box. They are blind, deaf, and dumb, and cannot vary their activity in the least from the conventionalized pattern.

Contrast with them the behavior of man, or indeed of any moderately intelligent animal such as a kitten. I call to the kitten and it looks up. I have sent it a message which it has received by its sensory organs, and which it registers in action. The kitten is hungry and lets out a pitiful wail. This time it is the sender of a message. The kitten bats at a swinging spool. The spool swings to its left, and the kitten catches it with its left paw. This time messages of a very complicated nature are both sent and received within the kitten's own nervous system through certain nerve end-bodies in its joints, muscles, and tendons; and by means of nervous messages sent by these organs, the animal is aware of the actual position and tensions of its tissues. It is only through these organs that anything like a manual skill is possible.

I have contrasted the prearranged behavior of the little figures on the music box on the one hand, and the contingent behavior of human beings and animals on the other. But we must not suppose that the music box is typical of all machine behavior.

The older machines, and in particular the older attempts to produce automata, did in fact function on a closed clockwork basis. But modern automatic machines such as the controlled missile, the proximity fuse, the automatic door opener, the control apparatus for a chemical factory, and the rest of the modern armory of automatic machines which perform military or industrial functions, possess sense organs; that is, receptors for messages coming from the outside. These may be as simple as photoelectric cells which change electrically when a light falls on them, and which can tell light from dark, or as complicated as a television set. They may measure a tension by the change it produces in the conductivity of a wire exposed to it, or they may measure temperature by means of a thermocouple, which is an instrument consisting of two distinct metals in contact with one another through which a current flows when one of the points of contact is heated. Every instrument in the repertory of the scientific-instrument maker is a possible sense organ, and may be made to record its reading remotely through the intervention of appropriate electrical apparatus. Thus the machine which is conditioned by its relation to the external world, and by the things happening in the external world, is with us and has been with us for some time.

The machine which acts on the external world by means of messages is also familiar. The automatic photoelectric door opener is known to every person who has passed through the Pennsylvania Station in New York, and is used in many other buildings as well. When a message consisting of the interception of a beam of light is sent to the apparatus, this message actuates the door, and opens it so that the passenger may go through.

The steps between the actuation of a machine of this type by sense organs and its performance of a task may be as simple as in the case of the electric door; or it may be in fact of any desired degree of complexity within the limits of our engineering techniques. A complex action is one in which the data introduced, which we call the input, to obtain an effect on the outer world, which we call the output, may involve a large number of combinations. These are combinations, both of the data put in at the moment and of the records taken from the past stored data which we call the memory. These are recorded in the machine. The most complicated machines yet made which transform input data into output data are the high-speed electrical computing machines, of which I shall speak later in more detail. The determination of the mode of conduct of these machines is given through a special sort of input, which frequently consists of punched cards or tapes or of magnetized wires, and which determines the way in which the machine is going to act in one operation, as distinct from the way in which it might have acted in another. Because of the frequent use of punched or magnetic tape in the control, the data which are fed in, and which indicate the mode of operation of one of these machines for combining information, are called the taping.

I have said that man and the animal have a kinaesthetic sense, by which they keep a record of the position and tensions of their muscles. For any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act. For example, if we are running an elevator, it is not enough to open the outside door because the orders we have given should make the elevator be at that door at the time we open it. It is important that the release for opening the door be dependent on the fact that the elevator is actually at the door; otherwise something might have detained it, and the passenger might step into the empty shaft. This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors—that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.

I have just mentioned the elevator as an example of feedback. There are other cases where the importance of feedback is even more apparent. For example, a gun-pointer takes information from his instruments of observation, and conveys it to the gun, so that the latter will point in such a direction that the missile will pass through the moving target at a certain time. Now, the gun itself must be used under all conditions of weather. In some of these the grease is warm, and the gun swings easily and rapidly. Under other conditions the grease is frozen or mixed with sand, and the gun is slow to answer the orders given to it. If these orders are reinforced by an extra push given when the gun fails to respond easily to the orders and lags behind them, then the error of the gun-pointer will be decreased. To obtain a performance as uniform as possible, it is customary to put into the gun a control feedback element which reads the lag of the gun behind the position it should have according to the orders given it, and which uses this difference to give the gun an extra push.

It is true that precautions must be taken so that the push is not too hard, for if it is, the gun will swing past its proper position, and will have to be pulled back in a series of oscillations, which may well become wider and wider, and lead to a disastrous instability. If the feedback system is itself controlled— if, in other words, its own entropic tendencies are checked by still other controlling mechanisms— and kept within limits sufficiently stringent, this will not occur, and the existence of the feedback will increase the stability of performance of the gun. In other words, the performance will become less dependent on the frictional load; or what is the same thing, on the drag created by the stiffness of the grease. Something very similar to this occurs in human action.

If I pick up my cigar, I do not will to move any specific muscles. Indeed in many cases, I do not know what those muscles are. What I do is to turn into action a certain feedback mechanism; namely, a reflex in which the amount by which I have yet failed to pick up the cigar is turned into a new and increased order to the lagging muscles, whichever they may be. In this way, a fairly uniform voluntary command will enable the same task to be performed from widely varying initial positions, and irrespective of the decrease of contraction due to fatigue of the muscles. Similarly, when I drive a car, I do not follow out a series of commands dependent simply on a mental image of the road and the task I am doing. If I find the car swerving too much to the right, that causes me to pull it to the left. This depends on the actual performance of the car, and not simply on the road; and it allows me to drive with nearly equal efficiency a light Austin or a heavy truck, without having formed separate habits for the driving of the two. I shall have more to say about this in the chapter in this book on special machines, where we shall discuss the service that can be done to neuropathology by the study of machines with defects in performance similar to those occurring in the human mechanism.

It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.

We have seen in this chapter the fundamental unity of a complex of ideas which until recently had not been sufficiently associated with one another, namely, the contingent view of physics that Gibbs introduced as a modification of the traditional, Newtonian conventions, the Augustinian attitude toward order and conduct which is demanded by this view, and the theory of the message among men, machines, and in society as a sequence of events in time which, though it itself has a certain contingency, strives to hold back nature's tendency toward disorder by adjusting its parts to various purposive ends. (pp. 15-27)

V Organization as the Message

The present chapter will contain an element of phantasy. Phantasy has always been at the service of philosophy, and Plato was not ashamed to clothe his epistemology in the metaphor of the cave. Dr. J. Bronowski among others has pointed out that mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually, in terms of the success of this metaphor.

The metaphor to which I devote this chapter is one in which the organism is seen as message. Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism.

We have already seen that certain organisms, such as man, tend for a time to maintain and often even to increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the general stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation. Life is an island here and now in a dying world. The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis.

We can continue to live in the very special environment which we carry forward with us only until we begin to decay more quickly than we can reconstitute ourselves. Then we die. If our bodily temperature rises or sinks one degree from its normal level of 98.6° Fahrenheit, we begin to take notice of it, and if it rises or sinks ten degrees, we are all but sure to die. The oxygen and carbon dioxide and salt in our blood, the hormones flowing from our ductless glands, are all regulated by mechanisms which tend to resist any untoward changes in their levels. These mechanisms constitute what is known as homeostasis, and are negative feedback mechanisms of a type that we may find exemplified in mechanical automata.

It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. 

A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message. How else do we employ our radio than to transmit patterns of sound, and our television set than to transmit patterns of light? It is amusing as well as instructive to consider what would happen if we were to transmit the whole pattern of the human body, of the human brain with its memories and cross connections, so that a hypothetical receiving instrument could re-embody these messages in appropriate matter, capable of continuing the processes already in the body and the mind, and of maintaining the integrity needed for this continuation by a process of homeostasis.

Let us invade the realm of science fiction. Some forty-five years ago, Kipling wrote a most remarkable little story. This was at the time when the flights of the Wright brothers had become familiar to the world, but before aviation was an everyday matter. He called this story "With the Night Mail," and it purports to be an account of a world like that of today, when aviation should have become a matter of course and the Atlantic a lake to be crossed in one night. He supposed that aerial travel had so united the world that war was obsolete, and that all the world's really important affairs were in the hands of an Aerial Board of Control, whose primary responsibility extended to air traffic, while its secondary responsibility extended to "all that that implies." In this way, he imagined that the various local authorities had gradually been compelled to drop their rights, or had allowed their local rights to lapse; and that the central authority of the Aerial Board of Control had taken these responsibilities over. It is rather a fascist picture which Kipling gives us, and this is understandable in view of his intellectual presuppositions, even though fascism is not a necessary condition of the situation which he envisages. His millennium is the millennium of a British colonel back from India. Moreover, with his love for the gadget as a collection of wheels that rotate and make a noise, he has emphasized the extended physical transportation of man, rather than the transportation of language and ideas. He does not seem to realize that where a man's word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere. Given his limitations Kipling, nevertheless, had a poet's insight, and the situation he foresaw seems rapidly coming to pass.

To see the greater importance of the transportation of information as compared with mere physical transportation, let us suppose that we have an architect in Europe supervising the construction of a building in the United States. I am assuming, of course, an adequate working staff of constructors, clerks of the works, etc., on the site of the construction. Under these conditions, even without transmitting or receiving any material commodities, the architect may take an active part in the construction of the building. Let him draw up his plans and specifications as usual. Even at present, there is no reason why the working copies of these plans and specifications must be transmitted to the construction site on the same paper on which they have been drawn up in the architect's drafting-room. Ultrafax gives a means by which a facsimile of all the documents concerned may be transmitted in a fraction of a second, and the received copies are quite as good working plans as the originals. The architect may be kept up to date with the progress of the work by photographic records taken every day or several times a day; and these may be forwarded back to him by Ultrafax.

Any remarks or advice he cares to give his representative on the job may be transmitted by telephone, Ultrafax, or teletypewriter. In short, the bodily transmission of the architect and his documents may be replaced very effectively by the message-transmission of communications which do not entail the moving of a particle of matter from one end of the line to the other.

If we consider the two types of communication: namely, material transport, and transport of information alone, it is at present possible for a person to go from one place to another only by the former, and not as a message. However, even now the transportation of messages serves to forward an extension of man's senses and his capabilities of action from one end of the world to another. We have already suggested in this chapter that the distinction between material transportation and message transportation is not in any theoretical sense permanent and unbridgeable.

This takes us very deeply into the question of human individuality. The problem of the nature of human individuality and of the barrier which separates one personality from another is as old as history. The Christian religion and its Mediterranean antecedents have embodied it in the notion of soul. The individual possesses a soul, so say the Christians, which has come into being by the act of conception, but which will continue in existence for all eternity, either among the Blessed or among the Damned, or in one of the little intermediate lacunae of Limbo which the Christian faith allows.

The Buddhists follow a tradition which agrees with the Christian tradition in giving to the soul a continuity after death, but this continuity is in the body of another animal or another human being, rather than in some Heaven or Hell. There are indeed Buddhist Heavens and Hells, although the stay of the individual there is generally temporary. In the most final Heaven of the Buddhists, however, the state of Nirvana, the soul loses its separate identity and is absorbed into the Great Soul of the World.

These views have been without the benefit of the influence of science. The most interesting early scientific account of the continuity of the soul is Leibnitz's which conceives the soul as belonging to a larger class of permanent spiritual substances which he called monads. These monads spend their whole existence from the creation on in the act of perceiving one another; although some perceive with great clarity and distinctness, and others in a blurred and conf used manner. This perception does not however represent any true interaction of the monads. The monads "have no windows," and have been wound up by God at the creation of the world so that they shall maintain their foreordained relationships with one another through all eternity. They are indestructible.

Behind Leibnitz's philosophical views of the monads there lie some very interesting biological speculations. It was in Leibnitz's time that Leeuwenhoek first applied the simple microscope to the study of very minute animals and plants. Among the animals that he saw were spermatozoa. In the mammal, spermatozoa are infinitely easier to find and to see than ova. The human ova are emitted one at a time, and unfertilized uterine ova or very early embryos were until recently rarities in the anatomical collections. Thus the early miscroscopists were under the very natural temptation to regard the spermatozoon as the only important element in the development of the young, and to ignore entirely the possibility of the as yet unobserved phenomenon of fertilization. Furthermore, their imagination displayed to them in the front segment or head of the spermatozoon a minute fetus, rolled up with head forward. This fetus was supposed to contain in itself spermatozoa which were to develop into the next generation of fetuses and adults, and so on ad infinitum. The female was supposed to be merely the nurse of the spermatozoon.

Of course, from the modern point of view, this biology is simply false. The spermatozoon and the ovum are nearly equal participants in determining individual heredity. Furthermore, the germ cells of the future generation are contained in them in posse, and not in esse. Matter is not infinitely divisible, nor indeed from any absolute standpoint is it very finely divisible; and the successive diminutions required to form the Leeuwenhoek spermatozoon of a moderately high order would very quickly lead us down beyond electronic levels.

In the view now prevalent, as opposed to the Leibnitzian view, the continuity of an individual has a very definite beginning in time, but it may even have a termination in time quite apart from the death of the individual. It is well known that the first cell division of the fertilized ovum of a frog leads to two cells, which can be separated under appropriate conditions. If they are so separated, each will grow into a complete frog. This is nothing but the normal phenomenon of identical twinning in a case in which the anatomical accessibility of the embryo is sufficient to permit experimentation. It is exactly what occurs in human identical twins, and is the normal phenomenon in those armadillos that bear a set of identical quadruplets at each birth. It is the phenomenon, moreover, which gives rise to double monsters, when the separation of the two parts of the embryo is incomplete.

This problem of twinning may not however appear as important at first sight as it really is, because it does not concern animals or human beings with what may be considered well-developed minds and souls. Not even the problem of the double monster, the imperfectly separated twins, is too serious in this respect. Viable double monsters must always have either a single central nervous system or a well-developed pair of separate brains. The difficulty arises at another level in the problem of split personalities.

A generation ago, Dr. Morton Prince of Harvard gave the case history of a girl, within whose body several better-or-worse-developed personalities seemed to succeed one another, and even to a certain extent to coexist. It is the fashion nowadays for the psychiatrists to look down their noses a little bit when Dr. Prince's work is mentioned, and to attribute the phenomenon to hysteria. It is quite possible that the separation of the personalities was never as complete as Prince sometimes appears to have thought it to be, but for all that it was a separation. The word "hysteria" refers to a phenomenon well observed by the doctors, but so little explained that it may be considered but another question-begging epithet.

One thing at any rate is clear. The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made. Modern methods of tagging the elements participating in metabolism have shown a much higher turnover than was long thought possible, not only of the body as a whole, but of each and every component part of it. The biological individuality of an organism seems to lie in a certain continuity of process, and in the memory by the organism of the effects of its past development. This appears to hold also of its mental development. In terms of the computing machine, the individuality of a mind lies in the retention of its earlier tapings and memories, and in its continued development along lines already laid out.

Under these conditions, just as a computing machine may be used as a pattern on which to tape other computing machines, and just as the future development of these two machines will continue parallel except for future changes in taping and experience, so too, there is no inconsistency in a living individual forking or divaricating into two individuals sharing the same past, but growing more and more different. This is what happens with identical twins; but there is no reason why it could not happen with what we call the mind, without a similar split of the body. To use computing-machine language again, at some stage a machine which was previously assembled in an all-over manner may find its connections divided into partial assemblies with a higher or lower degree of independence. This would be a conceivable explanation of Prince's observations.

Moreover, it is thinkable that two large machines which had previously not been coupled may become coupled so as to work from that stage on as a single machine. Indeed this sort of thing occurs in the union of the germ cells, although perhaps not on what we would ordinarily call a purely mental level. The mental identity necessary for the Church's view of the individuality of the soul certainly does not exist in any absolute sense which would be acceptable to the Church.

To recapitulate: the individuality of the body is that I of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance. When one cell divides into two, or when one of the genes which carries our corporeal and mental birth-right is split in order to make ready for a reduction division of a germ cell, we have a separation in matter which is conditioned by the power of a pattern of living tissue to duplicate itself. Since this is so, there is no absolute distinction between the types of transmission which we can use for sending a telegram from country to country and the types of transmission which at least are theoretically possible for transmitting a living organism such as a human being.

Let us then admit that the idea that one might conceivably travel by telegraph, in addition to traveling by train or airplane, is not intrinsically absurd, far as it may be from realization. The difficulties are, of course, enormous. It is possible to evaluate something like the amount of significant information conveyed by all the genes in a germ cell, and thereby to determine the amount of hereditary information, as compared with learned information, that a human being possesses. In order for this message to be significant at all, it must convey at least as much information as an entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In fact if we compare the number of asymmetric carbon atoms in all the molecules of a germ cell with the number of dots and dashes needed to code the Encyclopedia Britannica, we find that they constitute an even more enormous message; and this is still more impressive when we realize what the conditions for telegraphic transmission of such a message must be. Any scanning of the human organism must be a probe going through all its parts, and will, accordingly, tend to destroy the tissue on its way. To hold an organism stable while part of it is being slowly destroyed, with the intention of re-creating it out of other material elsewhere, involves a lowering of its degree of activity, which in most cases would destroy life in the tissue.

In other words, the fact that we cannot telegraph the pattern of a man from one place to another seems to be due to technical difficulties, and in particular, to the difficulty of keeping an organism in being during such a radical reconstruction. The idea itself is highly plausible. As for the problem of the radical reconstruction of the living organism, it would be hard to find any such reconstruction much more radical than that of a butterfly during its period as a pupa.

I have stated these things, not because I want to write a science fiction story concerning itself with the possibility of telegraphing a man, but because it may ! help us understand that the fundamental idea of communication is that of the transmission of messages, and that the bodily transmission of matter and messages is only one conceivable way of attaining that end. It will be well to reconsider Kipling's test of the importance of traffic in the modern world from the point of view of a traffic which is overwhelmingly not so much the transmission of human bodies as the transmission of human information. (pp. 95-104)

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design. 

If the number of messages in the set is finite then this number or any monotonic function of this number can be regarded as a measure of the information produced when one message is chosen from the set, all choices being equally likely. As was pointed out by Hartley the most natural choice is the logarithmic function. Although this definition must be generalized considerably when we consider the influence of the statistics of the message and when we have a continuous range of messages, we will in all cases use an essentially logarithmic measure.  (p. 1)

Introduction to the Second Edition

CONTENTS

PART I

Introduction

1 The Medium is the Message 
2 Media Hot and Cold 
3 Reversal of the Overheated Medium 
4 The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis 
5 Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 
6 Media as Translators 
7 Challenge and Collapse: the Nemesis of Creativity 

PART II 
8 The Spoken Word: Flower of Evil? 
9 The Written Word: an Eye for an Ear 
10 Roads and Paper Routes 
11 Number: Profile of the Crowd 
12 Clothing: Our Extended Skin 
13 Housing: New Look and New Outlook
14 Money: the Poor Man's Credit Card 
15 Clocks: the Scent of Time 
16 The Print: How to Dig it 
17 Comics: Mad Vestibule to TV 
18 The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism 
19 Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane 
20 The Photograph: the Brothel-without-Walls 
21 Press: Government by News Leak 
22 Motorcar: the Mechanical Bride 
23 Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses 
24 Games: the Extensions of Man 
25 Telegraph: the Social Hormone 
26 The Typewriter: into the Age of the Iron Whim 
27 The Telephone: Sounding Brass or Tinkling Symbol? 
28 The Phonograph: the Toy that Shrank the National Chest 
29 Movies: the Reel World 
30 Radio: the Tribal Drum 
31 Television: the Timid Giant 
32 Weapons: War of the Icons 
33 Automation: Learning a Living

[...] The section on "the medium is the message" can, perhaps, be clarified by pointing out that any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes. In his splendid work Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press, 1963), Eric Havelock contrasts the oral and written cultures of the Greeks. By Plato's time the written word had created a new environment that had begun to detribalize man. Previously the Greeks had grown up by benefit of the process of the tribal encyclopedia. They had memorized the poets. The poets provided specific operational wisdom for all the contingencies of life  — Ann Landers in verse. With the advent of individual detribalized man, a new education was needed. Plato devised such a new program for literate men. It was based on the Ideas. With the phonetic alphabet, classified wisdom took over from the operational wisdom of Homer and Hesiod and the tribal encyclopedia. Eduation by classified data has been the Western program ever since.
Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data move instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of "information overload," men resort to the study of configurations, like the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe's Maelstrom. the drop-out situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educatiional scene relates to the "mythic" world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted. As one IBM executive puts it, "My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their gransparents when they began grad one."
"The medium is the message" means, in terms of the electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created. The "content" of this new environment is the old mechanized environment of the industrial age. The new environment reprocesses the old one as radically as TV is reprocessing the film. For the "content" of TV is the movie.TV is environmental and imperceptible, like all environments. We are aware only of the "content" or the old environment. When machine production was new, it gradually created an environment whose content was the old environment of agrarian life and the arts and crafts. This older environment was elevated toan art form by the new mechanical environment. The machine turned Nature into an art form. For the first time men began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values. They began to marvel that earlier ages had been so unaware of the world of Nature as Art. Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form. When writing was new, Plato transformed the old oral dialogue into an art form. When printing was new the Middle Ages became an art form. "The Elizabethan world view" was a view of the Middle Ages. And the industrial age turned the Renaissance into an art form as seen in the work of Jacob Burckhardt. Siegried Giedion, in turn, has in the electric age taught us how to see the entire process of mechanization as an art process. (Mechanization Takes Command)
As our proliferating technologies have created a whole series of new environments, men have become aware of the arts as "anti-environments" or "counter-environments" that provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself. for, as Edward T. Hall has explained in The Silent Laguague, men are never aware of the ground rules of their environmental systems or cultures. Today technologies and their consequent envirnonments succeed each other so rapidly that one environment makes us aware of the next. Technologies begin to perform the function of art in making us aware of the psychic and social consequences of technology.
Art as anti-environment becomes more than ever a means of training perception and judgement. Art offered as a consumer commodity ratherthan as a means of training perception is as ludicrous and snobbish as always. Media study at once opens the doors of perception. And here it is thata the young can do top-level research work. The teacher has only to invite the student to do as complete an inventory as possible. Any child can list the effects of the telephone or the radio or the motor car in shaping the life and work of his friends and his society. An inclusive list of media effects opens many unexpected avenues of awareness and investigation." (pp. viii-x)

 Introduction

James Reston wrote in The New York Times (July 7, 1957): 

A health director . . . reported this week that a small mouse, which presumably had been watching television, attacked a little girl and her full-grown cat. . . . Both mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder that things seem to be changing. 

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man —the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. 

Some of the principal extensions, together with some of their psychic and social consequences, are studied in this book. Just how little consideration has been given to such matters in the past can be gathered from the consternation of one of the editors of this book. He noted in dismay that "seventy-five per cent of your material is new. A successful book cannot venture to be more than ten per cent new." Such a risk seems quite worth taking at the present time when the stakes are very high, and the need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour. 

In the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time. We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age. 

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate with in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement. In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. 

The Theater of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man, the man of action who appears not to be involved in the action. Such is the origin and appeal of Samuel Beckett's clowns. After three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has become compressional by dramatic reversal. As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implo-sive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media. 

This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any "point of view." The partial and specialized character of the viewpoint, however noble, will not serve at all in the electric age. At the information level the same upset has occurred with the substitution of the inclusive image for the mere viewpoint. If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch. As extension of man the chair is a specialist ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative absolute of backside, whereas the couch extends the integral being. The psychiatrist employs the couch, since it removes the temptation to express private points of view and obviates the need to rationalize events. 

The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology. The age of mechanical industry that preceded us found vehement assertion of private outlook the natural mode of expression. Every culture and every age has its favorite model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything. The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude — a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being. Such is the faith in which this book has been written. It explores the contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them. In the full confidence that it is possible to win an understanding of these forms that will bring them into orderly service, I have looked at time anew, accepting very little of the conventional wisdom concerning them. One can say of media as Robert Theobald has said of economic depressions: "There is one additional factor that has helped to control depressions, and that is a better understanding of their development." Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society.

 

1 The Medium is the Message

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium ― that is, of any extension of ourselves ― result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships. 

The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, "What is the content of speech?," it is necessary to say, "It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal." An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs. What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for. 

Let us return to the electric light. When the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the "content" of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that "the medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. It is only today that industries have become aware of the various kinds of business in which they are engaged. When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with dear vision. The General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as much as A.T.& T., it is in the business of moving information. 

The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no "content." And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the "content" (or what is really another medium) that is noticed. The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized. For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth. 

A fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man could be made up from selections from Shakespeare. Some might quibble about whether or not he was referring to TV in these familiar lines from Romeo and Juliet:

 But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It speaks, and yet says nothing.

 
In Othello, which, as much as King Lear, is concerned with the torment of people transformed by illusions, there are these lines that bespeak Shakespeare's intuition of the transforming powers of new media:

Is there not charms 
By which the property of youth and maidhood 
May be abus'd? Have you not read Roderigo,
Of some such thing?

 In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, which is almost completely devoted to both a psychic and social study of communication, Shakespeare states his awareness that true social and political navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of innovation:

The providence that's in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus' gold, 
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps, 
Keeps place with thought, and almost like the gods 
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.

The increasing awareness of the action of media, quite independently of their "content" or programming, was indicated in the annoyed and anonymous stanza: 

In modern thought, (if not in fact) 
Nothing is that doesn't act, 
So that is reckoned wisdom which 
Describes the scratch but not the itch. 

The same kind of total, configuration awareness that reveals why the medium is socially the message has occurred in the most recent and rad,cal medial theories. In his Stress of Life, Hans Selye tells of the dismay of a research colleague on hearing of Selye's theory: 

When he saw me thus launched on yet another enraptured description of what I had observed in animals treated with this or that impure, toxic material, he looked at me with desperately sad eyes and said in obvious despair: "But Selye, try to realize what you are doing before it is too late! You have now decided to spend your entire life studying the pharmacology of dirt!" 
(Hans Selye, The Stress of Life) 

As Selye deals with the total environmental situation in his "stress" theory of disease, so the latest approach to media study considers not only the "content" but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates. The older unawareness of the psychic and social effects of media can be illustrated from almost any of the conventional pronouncements. 

In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Again, "Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium. of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form. General Sarnor Twent on to explain his attitude to the technology of print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to General Sarnoffthat any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are. 

Such economists as Robert Theobald, W W. Rostow, and John Kenneth Galbraith have been explaining for years how it is that "classical economics" cannot explain change or growth. And the paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series. Yet, as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant. With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg's idea for getting more eggs. 

Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. Mechanization was never so vividly fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the movies the moment that translated us beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation. The  message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to configurations. It is the transition that produced the now quite correct observation: "If it works, it's obsolete." When electric speed further takes over from mechanical movie sequences then the lines of force instructures and in media become loud and clear. We return to the inclusive form of the icon.

To a highly literate and mechanized culture the movie appeared as a world of triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy. it was at this moment of the movie that cubism occurred, and it has been described by E.H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion) as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas." For cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for "the point of view" or facet of perspective illusion. Instead of the specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradictio or dramatic conflict of patters, lights, textures and "drives home the message" by involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise in painting, not in illusion.

In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specializied segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, "The medium is the messsage" quite naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that hte medium is the message. The message, it seemed, was the "content," as people used to ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor what a house of a dress was about. In such matters, people retained some sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity. But in the electric age this integral idea of structure and configuration has become so prevalent that educational thhas taken up the matter. Instead of working with specialized "problems" in arithmetic, the sturctural approach now follows the linea of force inthe field of number and has small children mediating about number theory and "sets."

Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, "He understood the grammar of gunpowder." Napoleon had paid some attention to other media as well, especially the semaphore telegraph that gave him a great advantage over his enemies. He is on record for saying that "Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." 

Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print and typography. He was thus able to read off the message of coming change in France and America as if he were reading aloud from a text that had been handed to him. In fact, the nineteenth century in France and in America was just such an open book to de Tocqueville because he had learned the grammar of print. So he, also, knew when that grammar did not apply. He was asked why he did not write a book on England, since he knew and admired England. He replied: 

One would have to have an unusual degree of philosophical folly to believe oneself able to judge England in six months. A year always seemed to me too short a time in which to appreciate the United States properly, and it is much easier to acquire clear and precise notions about the American Union than about Great Britain. In America all laws derive in a sense from the same line of thought. The whole of society, so to speak is founded upon a single fact; everything springs from a simple principle. One could compare America to a forest pierced by a multitude of straight roads all converging on the same point. One has only to find the center and everything is revealed at a glance. But in England the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by travelling down each one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole. 

Alexis the Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print and typography. he wsa thkus able to read off the messag of coming change in France and America as if he were reading aloud from a text that had been handed to him. In fact, the nineteenth century in France and in America was just such an open book to the Tecqueville because he had leanred the grammar of print. So he,also knew when that rammar did not apply. He was asked why he did not write a book on England, since he knew and admired England. he replied.

One would have fo have an unusual degree of philosophical folly to believe oneself able to judge England in six months. A year always seemed to me too short a time in which to appreciate the United States properly, and it is much easier to acquire clear and precise notions about the American Union than about Great Britain. In America all laws derive in a sense from the same line of thought. The whole of society, so to speak, is founded upon a single fact; everything springs from a simple principle. One could compare America to a forest pierced by a multitude of straight roads all converging on the same point. One has only to find the center and everything is revealed at a glance. But in England the paths run criss-cross, and it is onlyl by travelling down each one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole.

De Tocqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from north to south. The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. The Revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers. 

In England, however, such was the power of the ancient oral traditions of common law, backed by the medieval institution of Parliament, that no uniformity or continuity of the new visual print culture could take complete hold. The result was that the most important event in English history has never taken place; namely, the English Revolution on the lines of die French Revolution. The American Revolution had no medieval legal institutions to discard or to root out, apart from monarchy. And many have held that the American Presidency has become very much more personal and monarchical than any European monarch ever could be. 

De Tocqueville's contrast between England and America is clearly based on the fact of typography and of print culture creating uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has rejected this principle and dung to the dynamic or oral common-law tradition. Hence the discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture. The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwritten culture and institutions. The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural forms of typography. Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication of his Decline and Fall; "Another damned fat book, eh, Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?" De Tocqueville was a highly literate aristocrat who was quite able to be detached from the values and assumptions of typography. That is why he alone understood the grammar of typography. And it is only on those terms, standing aside from any structure or medium, that its principles and lines of force can be discerned. For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody. 

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster is a dramatic study of the inability of oral and intuitive oriental culture to meet with the rational, visual European patterns of experience. "Rational," of course, has for the West long meant "uniform and continuous and sequential." In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology. Thus in the electric age man seems to the conventional West to become irrational. In Forster's novel the moment of truth and dislocation from the typographic trance of the West comes in the Marabar Caves. Adela Quested's reasoning powers cannot cope with the total inclusive field of resonance that is India. After the Caves: Lite went on as usual, but had no consequences, that is to say, sounds did not echo nor thought develop. Everything seemed cut off at its root and therefore infected with illusion." 

A Passage to India (the phrase is from Whitman, who saw America headed Eastward) is a parable of Western man in the electric age, and is only incidentally related to Europe or the Orient. The ultimate conflict between sigh and sound, between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us. Since understanding stops action, as Nietzsche observed, we can moderate the fierceness of this conflict by understanding the media that extend us and raise these wars within and without us. 

Detribalization by literacy and its traumatic effects on tribal man is the theme of a book by the psychiatrist J. C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease (World Health Organization, Geneva, 1953). Much of his material appeared in an article in Psychiatry magazine, November, 1959: "The Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word." Again, it is electric speed that has revealed the lines of force operating from Western technology in the remotest areas of bush, savannah, and desert. One example is the Bedouin with his battery radio on board the camel. Submerging natives with floods of concepts for which nothing has prepared them is the normal action of all of our technology. But with electric media Western man himself experiences exactly the same inundation as the remote native. We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.

Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with semiliterate and the postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patters of information. Wyndham Lewis made this theme of his group of novels called The Human Age. The first ofthese, The Childermass, is concerned precisely with accelerated media change as a kind of massacre of the innocents. In our own world as we become more aware of the effects of technology on psychic formation and manifestation, we are losing all confidence in our right to asssign guilt. Ancient prehistoric societies regard  violent crime as pathetic. The killer is regarded as we do a concer victim. "How terrible it must be to feel like taht," they say. J. M. Synge took up this idea very effectively in his Playboy of the Western World.

If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice. On the other hand, in a culture that assigns roles instead of jobs to people - the dwarf, the skew, the child create their own spaces. They are not expected to fit into some uniform and repeatable niche that is not their size anyway. Consider the phrase "It's a man's world." As a quantitative observation endlessly repeated from within a homogenized culture, this phrase refers to the men in such a culture who have to be homogenized Dagwoods in order to belong at all. It is in our I.Q. testing that we have produced the greatest flood of misbegotten standards. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers assume that uniform and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence, thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man.

C. P. Snow, reviewing a book of A. L Rowse (The New York Times Book Review, December 24, 1961) on Appeasement and the road to Munich, describes the top level of British brains and experience in the 1930s. "Their I.Q.'s were much higher than usual among political bosses. Why were they such a disaster?" The view of Rowse, Snow approves: "They would not listen to warnings because they did not wish to hear." Being anti-Red made it impossible for them to read the message of Hitler. But their failure was as nothing compared to our present one The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as "content." The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech. 

Arnold Toynbee is innocent of any understanding of media as they have shaped history, but he is full of examples that the student of media can use. At one moment he can seriously suggest that adult education, such as the Workers Educational Association in Britain, is a useful counterforce to the popular press. Toynbee considers that although all of the oriental societies have in our time accepted the industrial technology and its political consequences: "On the cultural plane, however, there is no uniform corresponding tendency." (Somervell, I. 267) This is like the voice of the literate man, floundering in a milieu of ads, who boasts, "Personally, I pay no attention to ads." The spiritual and cultural reservations that the oriental peoples may have toward our technology will avail them not at all. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception. 

The operation of the money medium in seventeenth-century Japan had effects not unlike the operation of typography in the West. The penetration of the money economy, wrote G. B. San-som (in Japan. Cresset Press, London, 193 1) "caused a slow but irresistible revolution, culminating in the breakdown of feudal government and the resumption of intercourse with foreign countries after more than two hundred years of seclusion." Money has reorganized the sense life of peoples just because it is an extension of our sense lives. This change does not depend upon approval or disapproval of those living in the society. 

Arnold Toynbee made one approach to the transforming power of media in his concept of "etherialization," which he holds to be the principle of progressive simplification and efficiency in any organization or technology. Typically, he is ignoring the effect of the challenge of these forms upon the response of our senses. He imagines that it is the response of our opinions that is relevant to the effect of media and technology in society, a "point of view" that is plainly the result of the typographic spell. For the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the "private point of view" as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake's awareness or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold. 

Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in which it was unknown. Professor Wilbur Schramm made such a tactical move in studying Television in the Lives of Our Children. He found areas where TV had not penetrated at all and ran some tests. Since he had made no study of the peculiar nature of the TV image, his tests were of "content" preferences, viewing time, and vocabulary counts. In a word, his approach to the problem was a literary one, albeit unconsciously so. Consequently, he had nothing to report. Had his methods been employed in 1500 a.d. to discover the effects of the printed book in the lives of children or adults, he could have found out nothing of the changes in human and social psychology resulting from typography. Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century. Program and "content" analysis offer no dues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge. 

Leonard Doob, in his report Communication in Africa, tells of one African who took great pains to listen each evening to the BBC news, even though he could understand nothing of it. Just to be in the presence of those sounds at 7 p.m. each day was important for him. His attitude to speech was like ours to melody - the resonant intonation was meaning enough. In the seventeenth century our ancestors still shared this native's attitude to the forms of media, as is plain in the following sentiment of the Frenchman Bernard Lam expressed in The Art of Speaking (London, 1696): 

'Tis an effect of the Wisdom of God, who created Man to be happy, that whatever is useful to his conversation (way of life) is agreeable to him ... because all victual that conduces to nourishment is relishable, whereas other things that cannot be assimulated and be turned into our substance are insipid. A Discourse cannot be pleasant to the Hearer that is not easily to the Speaker; nor can it be easily pronounced unless it be heard with delight. 

Here is an equilibrium theory of human diet and expression such as even now we are only striving to work out again for media after centuries of fragmentation and specialism. 

Pope Pius XII was deeply concerned that there be serious study of the media today. On February 1 7, 1 950, he said: 

Failure in this respect has for centuries been typical and total for mankind. Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users. As A. ]. Liebling remarked in his book The Press, a man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there. For each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups. The result is that the present age has been one of multiple civil wars that are not limited to the world of art and entertainment. In War and Human Progress, Professor J. U Nef declared: "The total wars of our time have been the result of a series of intellectual mistakes ..." 

If the formative power in the media are the media themselves, that raises a host of large matters that can only be mentioned here, although they deserve volumes. Namely, that technological media are staples or natural resources, exactly as are coal and cotton and oil. Anybody will concede that society whose economy is dependent upon one or two major staples like cotton, or grain, or lumber, or fish, or cattle is going to have some obvious social patterns of organization as a result. Stress on a few major staples creates extreme instability in the economy but great endurance in the population. The pathos and humor of the American South are embedded in such an economy of limited staples. For a society configured by reliance on a few commodities accepts them as a social bond quite as much as the metropolis does the press. Cotton and oil, like radio and TV, become fixed charges" on the entire psychic life of the community. And this pervasive fact creates the unique cultural flavor of any society. It pays through the nose and all its other senses for each staple that shapes its life. 

That our human senses, of which all media are extensions, are also fixed charges on our personal energies, and that they also configure the awareness and experience of each one of us, may be perceived in another connection mentioned by the psychologist C. G. Jung: 

(pp. 19-35)

History - World History as Message, Great Messengers;
Language and Literature - Etymological Roots of the term Message in All Languages; Message Mediation in Literary Genres, Reader Response Criticism and Message Reception;
Art, Music, Dance, Film - Messengers and Imagination;
Physics, Chemistry and Biology - DNA Messengers;
Engineering/AI - Robot Messengers;
Sociology, Psychology, Political Science, Economics - The Social, Psychological, etc. Aspects of Messages and Messengers.

The new understanding gained can be used to build the conceptual foundations of Angeletics. There are similarities to the agenda of social epistemology as described in 1967 by Jesse Shera (Shera, J. (1967): The sociological foundations of librarianship. Sarada Ranganathan lectures, 3. New York. Asia Publishing House) and by Steve Fuller in 1988 (Fuller, S. (1988): Social epistemology, Bloomington. Indiana University Press.), both of whom see the structures and uses of knowledge and knowledge transmission a keys to understanding social institutions and human life.

Who are the messengers?
How are they chosen?
What interests do they represent?
What determines the content and the delivery form of the messages?
Who receives which messages?
Who receives messages first? Last?
Are any receivers excluded?

"Communication" is a word with a rich history. From the Latin communicare, meaning to impart, share, of make common, it entered the English language in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The key root is mun- (not: uni-), related to such words, as "munificent," "community," "meaning," and Gemeinschaft. The Latin munus has to do with gifts or duties offered publicly―including gladiatorial shows, tributes, and rites to honor the dead. In Latin, communicatio did not signify the general arsts of human connection via symbols, nor did it suggest the hoope for some kind of mutual recognition. Its sense was not in the least mentalistic: communicatio generally involved tangibles. In classical rhetorical theory communicatio was also a technical term for a stylistic device in which an orator assumes the hypothetical voice of the adversary or audience; communicatio was less authentic dialogue than the simulation of dialogue by a single speaker.[8]
As in Latin, one dominant branch meaning in "communication" has to do with imparting, quite apart from any notion of a dialogic or interactive process. Thus communication can mean partaking, as in being a communicant (partaking of holy communion). Here "communicatiion" suggests belonging to a social body expressive act that requires no response or recognition. To communicate by consuming bread and wine is to signify membership in a communion of saints both living and dead, but it is not primarily a message-sending activity (except perhaps as a social ritual to please others or as a message to the self or to God). Moreover, here to "communicate" is an act of receiving, not of sending; more precisely, is to send by receiving. A related sense is the notion of scholarly "communication" (monograph) or a "communication" as a message or notice. here is no sense of exchange, though some sort of audience, however vague or dispersed, is implied. Communication cal also mean connection or linkage. In the nineteenth century United States, "steam communication" could mean the railroad. In Hawtherne's House of Seven Gables we read: "She approached the door that formed the customary communication between the house and garden." In the sense of linkage, comunication could also mean coitus.[9] Curiously, "communication" once meant what we now call communication (the varieties of human dealings). The ambiguous term "relations" underlies both.
Another branch of meaning involves transfer or transmission. The sense of physical transfer―such as the communication of heat, light, magnetism, or gifts―is now largely archaic, but it is the root, as I argue in chapter 2, of the notion of communication as the transfer of pschical entities such as ideas, thoughts, or meanings. When John Locke speaks of "Communication of Thoughts," he is taking a term with a physical acceptation and appropriating it for social uses. here too there is nothing necessarily two-way about communication. One can speak of the one-way transmissions of advertising and public relations as communications, even if no response is possible or desired. One senses that the purveyors of these things would like them to work like communicable diseases, another transmissive sense of the term.
A third branch of meaning is communication as exchange, that is, as transfer times two. Communication in this sense is supposed to involve interchange, mutuality, and some kind of reciprocity. The nature of the exchange can vary. Communication can mean something like the successful linkage of two separate termini, as they say in telegraphy. Here simply getting through, as in delivery of mail or e-mail, is enough to constitute communication. If both ends know the message has arrived, then communication has occurred. A further, colloquial sense of communication calls for the exchange of open and frank talk between intimates or coworkers.[10] Here communication does not mean simply talk; it reers to a special kind of talk distinguished by intimacy and disclosure. An even more intense sense of communication as exchange dispenses with talk altogether and posits a meeting of minds, psychosemantic sharing, even fusion of consciousness. As Leo Lowenthal put it, "True communication entails a communion, a sharing of inner experience." [11] Although Lowenthal is not necessarily saying we can share inner experience without the materiality of words, he nicely states the hight-stakes definition of communicatias contact between interiorities. And though clearly not the only definition of communication, it is the one that has risen to prominence in the past century. Here the normative pathos is most intense.
"Communication" can also serve, in a much more modest way, as a blanket term for the various modes of symbolic interaction. here communication is free of spe pleading about what we human should be capable of but is a descriptive term for our relations in signification. There is something of this in the King James translation of Matt. 5:37, "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; nay, nay:  for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Here communication translates logos, one of the richest words in the Greek lexicon. Ranging across such senses as word, argument, discourse, speech, story, book, and reason, logos served as an overall term for the capacities that foll from the fact that humans, as Aristotle said, are animals possessing the word. Matt. 5:37 suggests that our speech be simple, but the usage suggests a general policy about humans and the logos.
"Communication" can mean something similarly general. As Charles Horton Cooley wrote in 1909, "By Communication is here meant the mechanism through which humans relations develop―all the symbols of the mind, togethe with the means of conveying them through space and preserving them in time." In this book I will use "communications" in the plural in this sense. As Raymond Williams puts it in a serviceable but too psychological definition, communications are "the institutions and forms in which ideas, information, and attitudes are transmitted and received."[12] They might include tombs, hieroglyphics, writing, coins, cathedrals, stamps, flags, clocks, the press, the post, telegraphy, photography, cinema, telephony, phonography, radio, television, cable, computer, the Internet, multimedia, virtual reality, or any other signifying medium.[13] "Communication," in contrast, I take as the project of reconciling self and other. The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.
Although I am skeptical that the word "communication" can ever fully shake the ghosts of worldless contact, the term marks out a marvelous zone of inquiry: the natural history of our talkative species. Communication theory claims this zone. As I argue below, the notion of communication theory is older than the 1940s (when it meant a mathematical theory of signal processing), and no one had isolated "communication" as an explicit problem till the 1880s and 1890s. Throughout I use "communication theory" not to refer to any extant pract of inquiry, but in a loos, ahistorical sense for a vision of the human condition as in some fundamental way communicative, as anchored in the logos. In this  way communication theory becomes consubstantial with ethics, political philosophy, and social theory in its concern for relations self and other, self and self, and closeness and distance in social organization. Though few of the figures examined in this book had any notion of "communication theory," our current situation allows us to find things in their texts that were never there before. As Benjamin knew, the present can configure the past so as to open up new points of rendezvous."

[8] Cicero, De Oratore, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 3.204, and Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft (Munich: Hueber, 1960), 379-84. Thanks to Donovan Ochs for help on this point.
[9] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "communication," 5b.
[10] Tamar Katriel and Gerry Philipsen, "'What we Need Is Communication': 'Communication' as a Cultural Category in Some American Speech," Communication Monographs
[11] Leo Lowenthal, "Communication and Humanitas," in The Human Dialogue: Perspectives on Communication, ed. Floyd W. Matson and Ashley Montagu (New York: Free Press, 1967), 336
[12] Raymond Williams, Communications (London: Penguin,1962), 9. In contrast to the common usage that calls the academic field "communications," I will use "communication studies."
[13] The motley list is a standard genre in treatises on media that I have no intention of omitting. 48 (1981): 301-17.
(pp. 7-10)

Sorting Theoretical Debates  in (and via) the 1920s

Two other visions of  communication from the 1920s remain: those of Martin Heidegger and  John Dewey. These are paths less taken but are fertile sources of communication theory that I want to rehabilitate. Despite their profound differences, each rejects the mentalist vision and its accompanying subjectivization of meaning; each makes an end run around the solipsism/telepathy couplet. Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), perhaps the single most influential work in twentieth-century philosophy, announced its distaste for any notion of communication as mental sharing: "Communication [Mitteilung] is never anything like a transportation of experiences, such as opinions or wishes, from the interior of one subjectinto the interior of another." [21] The transmission of messages or assertion of facts was for Heidegger a special case; more fundamentally, Mitteilung is the interpretive articulation of our "thrownness" into a world together with other people. Being with ohters is fundamental to our existence. To be human is to be linguistic and social. Speech can make our relations explicit, but there is no question for Heidegger of communication's failing between people any more than there is of people's ceasing to dwell in societies and in language. We are bound together in existential and lived ways before we even open our mouths to speak. Communication here does not involve transmitting information about one's intentionality; rather, it entails bearing oneself in such a way that one is open to hearing the other's otherness. As in Jasper's Psychology of World-Views (1919) or Buber's I and Thou (1923), here communication is about the constitution of relationships, the revelation of otherness, or the breaking of the shells that encase the self, not about the sharing of private mental property.
Certainly communication has its dangers for Heidegger. Whereas for Ogden and Richards the chief worry is discrepancy or clouded meaning, for Heidegger it is inauthenticity. The chatter of the crowd and the brooding omnipresence of "das Man"―a coinage variously translated as the "anonymous anyone" or the "they-self"―threatens to drown out "the call of conscience" and the care (Sorge) of being. The dictatorship of "das Man" is inconspicuous and hard to detect, but it can swallow up authentic selfhood. [22] Heidegger claimed to be describing a perennial existential possibility in human life―the descent into distraction―but but in fact it has a clear historical and political dimension. As Peter Sloterdijk puts it, "Everything we have heard about [das Man] would be, in the final analysis, inconceivable without the precondition of the Weimar Republic with its hectic postwar life feeling, its mass media, its Americanism, its entertainment and culture industry, its advanced system of distraction." [23]
The political dimension is also clear in Heidegger's disdain for the public sphere. Like his fellow Nazi Carl Schmitt, Heidegger took politics as a matter of sorting out friends and enemies, not of compromise and discussion. Government by public opinion was a prescription for the reign of chatter. In contrast to Ogden and Richards, Lippmann , and Dewey, Heidegger found the question of how to provide accurate information to the citizenry all but irrelevant. he wasted no love on the democratic public. His notion of communication was neither semantic (meanings exchanged) nor pragmatic (actions coordinated) but world disclosing (otherness opened).[24] Communication as the revelation of being to itself through language resounds variously through those influenced by Heidegger―Sartre, Levinas, Arendt, Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, and many more. Some took his vision as an agonistics impossible dialogue, others as a mode of authentic encounter, but no one in the Heideggerian inheritance has any time for communication as information exchange.
John Dewey, also writing in 1927, was equally concerned with distraction: "No one knows how much of the frothy excitement of life, of mania of motion, of fretful discontent, of need for artificial stimulation, is the expression of frantic search for something to fill the void caused by the loosening of bonds which hold persons together in immediate community of experience." Dewey's historical account of such froth is more precise than Heidegger's: the conquest of scale through technology and industry and the subsequent disappearance of the face-to-face community. Like Heidegger, Dewey eschewed a semantic view of language as intermental plumbing, carrying "thought as a pipe carries water." The mediation of thought by language was not dangerous, but fruitful and necessary. He viewed as folly the attempt to create a consensus in idem between isolated individuals, in either a spiritulist or a scientific guise. In his educational ambition, however, he was more like Ogden and Richards than Heidegger: he aimed for the reinvigoration of communication on a large scale to correct for the loss of "immediate community of experience." [25] Dewey's conception of communication as pragmatic making-do in community life represents a final strand for analysis.
Like the other pragmatists, and like Hegel, Dewey regarded the univrse as more than matter and mind: it was also the worlds that open up between people. What Hegel called Geist, Peirce called "thirdness," and Royce called "the world of interpretation"," Dewey called "experience"; in his very old age he proposed the term "culture" instead. For Dewey, communication went on in the publicc world of experience interwoven through shared signs and practices; it could not reduced to reference to objects without of psychic states within. To be sure, he thought the discovery of individual private experience "great and liberating," but it was also misleading if it painted communication as the junction of two sovereign egos. With Heidegger he viewed language as the precondition of thought: "Soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy." [26] Thus solipsism would be the luxury of already socialized individuals who had forgotten their histories. 
[...]
Each of these five views is also anticipated in earlier doctrines. Communication as propaganda was famously captured in the quip of Juvenal, the Roman satirist, that it takes nothing more than panem et circenses to satisfy the passes―bread and circuses.[29] The dream of mental conjunction via semantic agreement was traced by John Locke and mysticism. The breakdown of communication was explored by Kierkegaard and Emerson, and Hegel saw communication as the staking of an existential claim to recognition of action appears in the British empiricists and its central theme in pragmatism before Dewey's Experience and Nature.[30] The 1920s serve as a window for both what has come since and what went before.
Today the most influential thinkers about communication are probably Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas. Certainly each has much of originality. But their lineages are clear enough. Habermas, like Dewey (though it is mead he more frequently invokes), takes communication as a mode of action that not only implicates a morally autonomous self but is also a process that, if generalized, entails the creation of a democratic community. Habermas is emphatic that communication is not the sharing of consciousness but rather the coordination of action oriented to deliberation about justice. The term has for him an undeniable normative tint.[31] Levinas, in turn, builds  on the phenomenological inheritance of Husserl and Heidegger to understand communication not as fusion, information exchange, or conjoint activity but as a caress. 
[...]
The task today, I will argue, is to renounce the dream of communication while retaining the goods it invokes. To say that communication in the sense of shared minds is impossible is not to say that awe cannot cooperate splendidly. (This was precisely Dewey's point). On the other hand, to point to the pervasiveness of pragmatic coordination is also not to say that no abysses loom in the self and the other. (This was precisely Heidegger's point). Habermas, to my taste, underplay the strangeness of language; his French foes such as Derrida (himself importantly influenced by Levinas) underplay its instrumentality. Each of the Dewey-Habermas and Heidegger-Levinas-Derrida lineages grasps important truths about communication that are inaccessible to the propagandists, semanticists, and solipsists in our midst, but neither has quite the full palette of colors. The one position hast too much gravity while the other floats in a zero-gravity chamber. Habermas's sobriety misses what Charles Sanders Peirce called the play of musement; Derrida's revelry misses the ordinariness of talk.
The tak is to find an account of communication that erases neither the curious fact of othern at its core nor the possibility of doing things with words. Language is resistant to our itnent and often, in Heidegger's phrase, speaks us; but it is also the most reliable means of persuasion we know. Though language is a dark vessel that does not quite carry with I, as a speaking self, might think it does, it still manages to coordinate action more often than not. This middle position is represented in recent debates by Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, but I also want to identify it with a pragmatism open to both the uncanny and the practical. Pragmatism, in its Emersonian lineage, remembers both the wildness of the signs and tokes around us and the massively practical fact that we must finds ways to get on with business. Dewey and Habermas know the latter but generally forget the former, an oblivion that stains their vision of democracy through dialogue." 

[21] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1972; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962), 162.
[22] Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 126.
[23] Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 199.
[24] Stephen K. White, Political Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
[25] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), 214; Dewey, Experience and Nature, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (1925; Caarbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 134.
[26] Dewey, Experience and Nature, 136, 135.
[30] For an empiricist forerunner, See George Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge (17210), section 20: "Besides, the communicating of ideas marked by words is not the chief and only end of language, as is commonly supposed. There are other ends, such as raising of some passion, the exciting to or deterring from an action, the putting the mind in some particular disposition."
[31] See especially Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2, vols. (1981; Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
(pp. 16-22)

Contents

Chapter 1 Understanding Media
Chapter 2 Of Cetaceans and Ships; or, The Moorings of Our Being
Chapter 3 The Fire Sermon
Chapter 4 Lights in the Firmament: Sky Media (Chronos)
Chapter 5 The Times and the Seasons (Kairos)
Chapter 6 The Face and the Book (Inscription Media)
Chapter 7 God and Google

Conclusion: The Sabbath of Meaning
Appendix: Nonsimulteanity in Cetacean Communication


Chapter 7: God and Google

Wikipedia

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is a book by science history writer James Gleick published in March 2011 which covers the genesis of our current information age. It was on the New York Times best-seller listfor three weeks following its debutt

Synopsis

Gleick begins with the tale of colonial European explorers and their fascination with African talking drums and their observed use to send complex and widely understood messages back and forth between villages far apart, and over even longer distances by relay. Gleick transitions from the information implications of such drum signaling to the impact of the arrival of long distance telegraph and then telephone communication to the commercial and social prospects of the industrial age west. Research to improve these technologies ultimately led to our understanding the essentially digital nature of information, quantized down to the unit of the bit (or qubit).

Starting with the development of symbolic written language (and the eventual perceived need for a dictionary), Gleick examines the history of intellectual insights central to information theory, detailing the key figures responsible such as Claude Shannon, Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and John Archibald Wheeler. The author also delves into how digital information is now being understood in relation to physics and genetics. Following the circulation of Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication and Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics many disciplines attempted to jump on the information theory bandwagon to varying success. Information theory concepts of data compression and error correction became especially important to the computer and electronics industries.

Gleick finally discusses Wikipedia as an emerging internet based Library of Babel, investigating the implications of its expansive user generated content, including the ongoing struggle between inclusionists, deletionists, and vandals. Gleick uses the Jimmy Wales created article for the Cape Town butchery restaurant Mzoli's as a case study of this struggle. The flood of information humanity is now exposed to presents new challenges Gleick says, as we retain more of our information now than at any previous point in human history, it takes much more effort to delete or remove unwanted information than to accumulate it. This is the ultimate entropy cost of generating additional information and the answer to slay Maxwell's Demon.

Reception

In addition to winning major awards for science writing and history, The Information received mostly positive reviews. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin said it is "so ambitious, illuminating and sexily theoretical that it will amount to aspirational reading for many of those who have the mettle to tackle it." Other admirers were Nicholas Carr for The Daily Beast and physicist Freeman Dyson for The New York Review of Books. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow in his BoingBoing review called Gleick "one of the great science writers of all time", "Not a biographer of scientists... but a biographer of the idea itself." Tim Wu for Slate praised "a mind-bending explanation of theory" but wished Gleick had examined the economic importance of information more deeply. Ian Pindar writing for The Guardian complained that The Information does not fully address the relationship between social control of information (censorship, propaganda) and access to political power.

"Folks, Ted's crisp summary reminds me once again of one recurring theme surrounding the sturdy issue on the difference between dynamics in time and dynamics of time. Recently, I had an opportunity to spend some time with a young fellow just 1 year and 2 months old both in the morning and in the evening for about a month. Of course, she does not speak, but is very sharp in pointing to what she would like to do. She likes to eat pear much more than apple. She never fails in pointing to a piece of peeled pear when both pear and apple are on the plate. When her mouth is full of juicy pear, she does not care even if I have eaten up all pieces of peeled pear on the plate. But, she got angry to find no pear to take when she was ready for another piece. This incidence has again waken[ed] me up to the simple fact that dynamics of time is more basic empirically. Even if one does not have a clear perception of what time looks like, experiencing time-phenomena or dynamics of time can  proceed as facing no obstacles. A difficult problem, however, arises to those who can speak. Those who take framing whatever statements in present tense for granted has to have some preconception of time as a criterion of what present tense is all about. One popular vehicle for this objective is space-time continuum. Theoretically, it may be okay. Empirically, it is not. My young fellow has been quite sensitive to the discontinuity between the movement in progress (pear in her mouth) and the movement perfected (ready for another piece) without being bothered by the global context referred to in the present tense (somebody eats up all the pieces on the plate)." (Koichiro Matsuno, FIS 2002, 17.01.03)

"The process of organic communication in natural systems admits multiple dynamics to form (biological plasticity or adaptability or flexibility). One type of dynamic can be called "error" if one has created a norm that admits a variance from that norm. Thus, organic communication can admit error in the process of  generating a message, in the process of transmitting the message or  in the process of responding to the message. (...) The natural history of living systems created an efficient form of message transmission. The generating function is one set of organic components. The transmitted message is another organic component. The response generating function is still another set of organic components. All of these functional components collaborate (work together in a thermodynamic sense). The system functions locally. This internal collaboration negates the need for a separate system to generate errors. (From a cynical perspective, one could say modern management methods are foreign to biological design)." (Jerry LR Chandler, FIS 2002, contribution from 6.07.02)

Life proceeds symptomatically on an in-formational and on an angeletical basis. It transforms given forms following rules or by making a difference through abduction. A cell constructs itself through angeletic processes that may make possible for an information or, sit venia verbo, for a form-as-message to inform it in both original senses of the word, namely the ontological (moulding matter) and the epistemological (moulding of the mind) ones. In other words, message phenomena at the biological level are processes of form production (Andrade 2002).  

JOSEPH BRENNER: ANGELETICS AND LOGIC IN REALITY

published in:. Rafael Capurro & John Holgate (eds.): Messages and Messengers - Angeletics as an Approach to the Phenomenology of Communication  Munich 2011, 85-112.

cfr.
Wikipedia: Flaschenpost http://www.capurro.de/angeletics_notes_varia1.html#Wikipedia:_Flaschenpost
Jeremy Berlin: Oldest Message in a Bottle: Behind History's Famous Floting Notes. In: National Geographic, Sept. 20, 2012

L'ange qui orne notre couverture, c'est, en grec, le messager, et celui qui s'appelle Gabriel fait généralement son entré par la gauche.
C'est que l'image, ici plus qu'ailleurs, est soumise à l'ordre du texte: l'Annonciation met en scène une énonciation, ce tableau très logocentrique est l'écrin d'une parole qui s'écrit sur certaines fresques (de Simone Martini ou Fra Angelico) à même la peinture. On voit les mots s'envolerll de la bouche de l'Ange vers Marie, comme un phylactère.
Parole pleine, et plus qu'une autre fécondante, puisque de logos spematikos engrosse la Vierge d'un enfant qu'on dit Fils de Dieu. Mais l'Annonciation n'est pas une partie de plaisir, et l'onsait que Marie commence par refuser, saisie d'effreoi devant cette chose énorme au seuil de la chambre... Quelques peintres nous ont rappelé la vraie nature des anges: non pas l'angelot kitsch mais l'éclaireur sillonnant le ciel, le guerrier des armées du Bien. Celui de Leonard de Vinci (conservé à Florence au musée des Offices) équilibre à merveille violence et suavité; cet ange a le corps éloquant, et l'injonction des doigts dressés est de celles qu'on ne discute pas.
Cette communication céleste, et qui demeure eunique dans l'histoire, a peut-être engendré une autre image: la dame des couvertures Larousse qui "sème à tout vent" les messages d'un pissenlit ne serait-elle pas un peu cousine de l'Ange?
(p. 19)

DANIEL BOUGNOUX: INTRODUCTION AUX SCIENCES DE LA COMMUNICATION
Paris 2001

[...] C'est qu'en 1988-89, en effet, je fus invité par Daniel Bougnoux, professeur à l'université Stendhal de Grenoble, à donner un enseignement de médiologie dans le cadre de l'unité de formation et de recherche (UFR) en sciences de la communication. En 1989-90, Daniel Bougnoux et moi-même avons ensuite conjointement dirigé un séminaire sur le même sujet au Collège international de philosophie. Ce livre reprend les séances de ce parcours didactique et correspond au tome premier du traité annoncé. [...]
Quel fil directeur nous a conduit à l'étude des médiations? Note viel interêt pour la figure du médiateur, de l'hommedium - le scribe, le clerc, l'intellectuel. La généalogie historique de cet être intermédiaire, Janus bifrons, à la fois homme de Dieu et homme d'Etat, chargé par su groupe d'appartenance de faire le lien entre les valeurs fondatrices et le cours des choses, débouchait sur une bifürcation. Vers l'aumont, vers la fonction symbolique elle-même: que faut-il que soit le groupe pour qu'il ait toujours besoin, à travers ce témoin de l'extérieur, d'un point de fuite, utopie ou transcendance? D'où la recherche, en quelque sorte transhistorique, d'un invariant explicatif, baptisé, à paratir du théorème de Gödel, incomplétude, qui a servi de noyau logique à un déchiffrement du fait religieux [1]. Vers l'aval, vers une connception opératoire des actes de pensée puisque la transmission du sens est l'exercice professionnel de l'homme de parole, qui, par son dire, fait faire. Que faut-il donc que soit le dire, mot dit ou écrit, pour qu'il fait, tout au long de l'histoire, des effets aussi réels de transformation du monde objectif? D'où la recherche d'une pragmatique de la pensée, qui fait l'objet de ce cours. En fait, ligne amont et ligne aval se rejoingnent. Logique de la trasmission et logique de l'organisation ne semblent pas séparables, et c'est bien l'hypothèse centrale de la médiologie.

1. Critique de la raison politique ou l'inconscient religieux, Paris, Gallimard, 1981.

(p. 10)

[...] En France, le terme de communication remonte au XIVe  siècle, inventé par un philosophe et physicien, conseiller du roi Charles V, Nicole Oresme. Charles V, fondateur de la première bibliothèque royale. Oresme, traducteur émérite, du latin au français, vulgarisateur décidé du savoir de son temps. Ce concept au XIVe siècle était nouveau, car l'univers médiéval ne connaissait que le concept de communion que suppose une non-distance, une symbiose non seulement entre ses acteurs mais aussi entre le médiums et les messages [1]. L'intrigue médiologique se noue peut-être, tout en amont, autour de ce premier décollement, ce flottement, ce dégagement d'une distance problématique, insolite, entre un savoir et une forme, une information et un médium langagier (le latin), reflet d'une distance nouvelle entre les hommes, où la questioin de la circulation du sens surgit comme quelque chose qui ne va plus de soi, qui n'est plus "naturel".
Ce qui m'emène à la question de la paternité. Elle ne se pose pas: seules les doctrines ont des géniteurs, les disciplines n'en ont pas. C'est même l'inverse. Nous sommes des enfants de la médiologie, issus d'elle et tissés par elle, simples continuateurs d'un tissu bicentenaire qui eut des dizaines d'ouvriers, inconnus ou célèbres. McLuhan, géniale et baroque figure de proue, leur a fait de l'ombre (nous parlerons de lui en détail dans un second cycle). Heureusement pour vous et pour nous, nos précurseurs son légion. Ils sont d'abord dans la littérature, chez les écrivains qui ont réfléchi à leurs support et à leurs moyens: Diderot et Balzac au premier chef, qui ont fait de la médiologie sans le savoir, comme monsieur Jourdain faisait la prose. Les familiers de la Lettre ont eu dans ce domaine plus d'intuitions que les servants de l'Esprit baptisés philosophes. Encore que Leibniz avec sa théorie des passages et de transformations, son goût pour les réseaux et les machines. Encore qu'Emmanuel Kant, lorsqu'il analyse dans son Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique (trad. Michel Foucaul), ce qu'est "un bon repas en bonne compagnie" – la forme de bien-être, dit-il, qui paraît s'accorder le mieux avec l'humanité"  – pénétrant exercise de médiologie appliquée (à la table comme support et rite de communication). Encore que Valéry, avec son Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, son approche physique de la pensée et sa constante préoccupation technique. Encore Derrida avec sa Grammatologie, qui a problématisé la trace et l'inscription. Bernard Stiegler, de son côté, après avoir conçu en 1987, l'exposition Mémoires du futur au Centre Pompidou, poursuit une réflexion fondamentale surr les "nouveaux instruments de la mémoire"[2]. Je m'arrê. Il me faudrait un cours entier pour mentionner nons créaciers. Sans parler du penseur de l'aventure humaine le mieux informé, le plus puissant et le plus synthétique de notre siècle. André Leroi-Gourhan. Il a posé, du dehors et sans même mentionner le poncif "communication", les cadres de référence de notre discipline. Mis à part ces grands noms, il est troublant de constater, parmis les pionniers de la médiologie, le rôle sinon des marginaux, du moins des outsiders de l'Institution universitaire. Je pense à Auguste Cochin, historien assez obscur mort au début du siècle. Et surtout à Walter Benjamin, l'auteur de L'Œuvre d'art à l'ère de sa reproduction mécanisée (1935), à qui Malraux doit le Musée imaginaire et qu'il passe sous silence. Cet esprit pathétique et froid qui, entre tant d'autres anticipations fulgurantes, notait à propos de la radio, au bas d'une page, en passant, que "cette nouvelle technique vide les parlements comme elle vide les théâtres". Benjamin, le Traducteur, l'homme des Passages et de la Photographie, le suicidé de Port-Bou en 1940, pourrait donner son nom à notre salle de conférences. Rien ne convient plus à la médiologie, qui se voudrait mémoire de toutes les mémoires, que de ployer soul "le noble joug du passé."

[1] Antoine Berman, "Traduction, communication, entropie", communication au colloque Mémoires du futur, sous la direction de Bernard Stiegler (Paris, 1987)
[2] Stiegler, "Les temps de la lecture", Signes du présent, Rabat, 1988, et "Mémoires gauches", La Revue philosophique, juin 1990.

SOCRATE: Eh bien! j'ai entendu conter que vécu du côté de Naucratis, en Égypte, une des vieilles divinités de là-bas, celle dont l'emblème sacré est l'oiseau qu'ils appellent, tu le sais, l'ibis. et que le nom du dieu lui même était Theut. C'est lui, donc, le premier qui découvrit la science du nombre avec le calcul, la géometrie et l'astronomie, et aussi le trictrac et les dés, enfin, sache-le, les caractères de l'écriture (grammata). Et d'autre part, en ce temps-là régnait sur l'Égypte entière Thamous, dont la résidence était cette grande cité du haut pays que les Grecs nomment Thèbes d'Égypte, et dont le dieu est appelé par eux Ammon. Theut, étant venu le trouver, lui fit montre de ses arts: "Il faut, lui déclara-t-il-, les communiquer au reste des Égyptiens!"" Mais l'autre lui demanda quelle pouvait être l'utilité de chacun d'eux, et, sur ses explications, selon qu'il les jugeait bien ou mal fondées il prononçait tantôt le blâme, tantôt l'éloge. Nombreuses furent donc les réflexions donc, au sujet de chaque art, Thamous, dit-on, fit part à Theut dans l'un et l'autre sens: on n'en finirait plus d'en dire le détail! Mais, le tour venu d'envisager les caractères de l'écriture: "Voici, ô Roi, dit Theut, une connaisance (to mathema) qui aura pour effet de rendre les Égyptions plus instruits et plus capables de se remémorer (sophôterous kai mnemikôterous): mémoire aussi bien qu'instruction ont trouvé leur remède (pharmakon). Et le roi de répliquer..." Etc.

(p.   107-110)
 

ENVOIS

(p. 199-200)