Flattening the Nation through Decontextualized Time and Space

The innovation of the telegraph can stand metaphorically for all the innovations that ushered in the modern phase of history and determined, even to this day, the major lines of development of American communications. The most important fact about the telegraph is at once the most obvious and innocent: It permitted for the first time the effective separation of communication from transportation. - Carey, page 203

Carey's analysis of the telegraph (and the railroad) takes us deeper down the rabbit hole we discussed last week regarding the imagined community of the nation by highlighting how the separation of communication from transportation broadened our sense of awareness of time. This shift in awareness significantly transformed trade, helped to centralize government power, and broadened a previously localized experience of time to a nationalized and standardized one. 

Transforming Trade 

Carey begins by addressing how the telegraph affected monopoly capitalism to the extent that it forced processes of production to adapt to the new, more rapid form of communication. He states,

the volume and speed of transactions demanded a new form of organization of essentially impersonal relations - that is, relations not among known persons but among buyers and sellers whose only relation was mediated through an organization and a structure of management. - Carey, page 205

My interpretation of this is that the organizational shift in business relations led to a more impersonal set of interactions among staff that both flattened and distanced the experience by making everyone faceless and therefore similar but also unknown. Carey later discusses how there was also a standardization of products (not just business interactions) that allowed for rapid trade of mass amounts of product to happen. I wonder whether one beget the other: Was capitalism already heading in this direction and needed a tool like the telegraph to best pull it off? Or did the telegraph set off light bulbs in businessmen across the country? I imagine it's a bit of both but I'm not sure where Carey stands. 

Centralizing Imperial Government

Carey brings up another example of how the separation of communication and travel broadened our awareness when he discusses how the transatlantic cable and the telegraph created "a system in which the center of an empire could dictate rather than merely respond to the margin" (page 212). Power was no longer local by default and I imagine that this must have had some major effects on how colonies were managed and self-perceived as a component of the empire. 

Carey also discusses the standardization of time and how this came about. I read this as another example of a structure that allowed us to imagine the nation as one community. I would agree with his statement on page 224 that: 

the control of time allows for the coordination of activity and, therefore, effective social control. 

I see it as another imagined layer to the social structures we create for ourselves, which frankly, is a bit worrisome! 

The Nation defined by its Boundaries

The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.

- Anderson, page 7

I find it fascinating how as social beings we are constantly defining ourselves in contrast to Others. Anderson's point that the nation is imagined as limited because it's defined in large part by its boundaries strikes me as a curious, if necessary, characteristic of how we explain and define the social structures in our world. As I processed this, the first question that came to mind was this:  If the nation is in part defined by its exclusion of all other nations, can you be a citizen of multiple nations at the same time? The legal answer, by the way, is yes in many countries and sort of in the United States. If you are becoming a naturalized citizen in the U.S., you are required to renounce any other citizenships under oath (although, the State Department doesn't often bother checking up on this anymore so you can still keep your other passport). I know this because I became a U.S. citizen about 10 years ago and am still a Mexican citizen in the eyes of Mexico.

In my experience, it's been difficult to manage the dual identity of belonging to 2 nations at the same time --  in part because establishing your national identity sometimes involves claiming that "we're" the best and always involves speaking with a point of view that comes from inside that imagined boundary ("we" being Americans by default). That's a hard transition to make! It took me years to stop referring to Americans as "you"! But eventually I did start referring to Americans as "us." My life is here and as much as I can easily access Mexico's newspapers online now, (what would Anderson make of that??) my nation as an imagined community is composed of my day-to-day interactions that are bound by American culture and physicality.

I guess the next question is whether the power of new communication tools will once again help reorganize our understanding of institutionalized imagined communities like nations? We'll have to wait and see...

Memory, Learning, and Creativity TAKE 2

So once again, I'm running a week behind in blog posts. BUT I am ending the vicious cycle this week so look for a timely post tomorrow!

In my previous post on our class titled "Memory and the emergence of the modern out of the medieval mind" (taken from our online syllabus), I spoke out against losing perspective against a new set of communication tools, e.g., Web 2.0 and The Cloud in current discourse, and the danger of claiming that they can inherently help solve issues that continue to plague us. Clearly the readings for last week on the invention of printing and changes in social, cultural, and political forms were set up to mock that blog post!

Needless to say, reading Eisenstein's chapter "An Unacknowledged Revolution" helped me see the bigger picture in understanding the dissemination of the printing press and the rippling effects it had on trades, culture, and society as a whole. I related particularly strongly with her discussion of "new kind of shop structure":

The advent of printing led to the creation of a new kind of shop structure; to a regrouping which entailed closer contacts among diversely skilled workers and encouraged new forms of cross-cultural exchange." - Eisenstein, pg 23

As someone who has worked in the Web 2.0 area for almost four years, I've seen a parallel collision of forces take place between website developers (those who create and manage where the content is stored), subject matter experts (those who drive the content), organizational leadership (those who say what goes), clients, stakeholders, etc. Everyone is intrigued by the prospect of new products that can help carry out a mission, but folks are not sure how to best accomplish it. It's an exciting process but confusing and frustrating at the same time. 

Eisenstein also touched on the fact that the printed book allowed new forms of interplay between text, tables, graphics, and drawings. I realized that I had been taking for granted a lot of the visual representations that we are currently afforded with the communication tools we have at our disposal. 

To close: I'm not taking back my previous comments because I do believe we have to tread carefully and realize that most of the Web 2.0 strategies that are part of the discourse in many industries (in public health specifically for me) involve the same common sense, cultural competency, and collaboration concepts that have been around for decades. So the tools may provide a wealth of opportunities, but if we don't apply them properly they are just gadgets (see Eisenstein's discussion of the publishing of vernacular manuals that were useless to most practicioners to understand what I mean).

P.S. I didn't comment on the Cochran reading here but found several of his points equally interesting, including:

• His argument and struggle to organize printed knowledge (which I think has happened organically more or less, no?)
• The ability to institutionalize history which helped to create the sense of national identities
• The major difference between printed books and the domains of architecture, sculpture, painting in that the latter are not reproducible in mass and can only be experienced at one point in space and concretely. 

Memory, Learning, and Creativity

...memoria is "the firm mental grasp of the words and things for the purpose of invention." 

- in Mary Carruthers' How to Make a Composition: Memory-Craft in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages

In the readings for last week, I was most intrigued by the notion that the way we interact with information and learn it -- therefore incorporating it into our existing bank of memory and knowledge -- has an effect on the way we can create and innovate new ideas, symbols, visual representations, etc. The extent of that effect is up for debate, and I imagine won't be determined anytime soon as our understanding of the human mind and spirit is continually evolving. If we stop and think about the limitations that our environment sets upon us and the ways we overcome those limitations to create new ideas (e.g., Ockham's banishment and use of memory to continue writing and philosophizing), we can begin to understand that the regardless of the tools we have at our disposal, our intellect is driving the process.

However, for me there is a tension when I think about whether this technological revolution we're experiencing will significantly change our capacity for innovation and intellectual exploration or not. In part, we can't deny the power of technological advancement as a way to advance society (e.g., consider the role of the printing press in providing access to information and helping to quickly disseminate ideas). At the same time, I like to think that human intellect and curiosity persevere even in austere communication environments. I want to keep the tools of communication that we've developed in perspective and not elevate them onto a pedestal that may in the end give us limited foresight. I fear the belief that the power of The Cloud can fix much more than it actually can.

During last week's class we didn't really discuss the fact that scouring information in books or online requires a skill-set that we acquire (including literacy at its basic level) and that not everyone has. This may be deviating from our primary interest in this class, but the issue of equitable access to information and these communication tools that are so revolutionary is a problem (dare I say an issue of justice?) that we haven't resolved yet.