Fascinating (if unsurprising) Similarities

I recently read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage.  The book was set up to draw parallels between the telegraph and the Internet, and it did so admirably.  The themes that emerge there certainly appear to be themes related to ICTs and their relationships to society.  Today, I read an article that filled in another gap in this pattern.  Chronologically, the telephone comes between the telegraph and the Internet.  Some excerpts from Stanley Aronson’s “The Sociology of the Telephone”.*

A discussion of the social effect of the telephone would, however, be incomplete were reference to its relationship to other modes of communication omitted.  In the absence of research one can only suggest these relationships through a series of questions: Does telephone communication lessen or increase total face-to-face communication?  Does it supplement or replace the latter?  How does telephone communication change the character of face-to-face and written communications?  What effects has use of the telephone had on the rate of use of the telegraph and on the letter writing habits of Americans?

These are all questions that have been, in one way or another, asked and answered about the Internet.  I’m not grounded enough in the literature on the telephone to know if they were answered in that arena (though I suspect there are probably answers in Katz’s Connections, which is sitting in the study with me right now - I read exerpts of it several years ago but haven’t revisited it recently).  Standage raised many of the same issues in The Victorian Internet as well, as well as touching on the effects of the telegraph on business (as Aronson does), as a mass medium (as Aronson does; I had never been aware of the use of the telephone as a mass medium, but it apparently was), and so on.

*Aronson, Sidney H.  1971.  The Sociology of the Telephone.  International Journal of Comparative Sociology 12(3): 153-167.

TV and the loss of the taboo

The public and all-inclusive nature of television has a tendency to collapse formerly distinct situations into one.  In a society shaped by the segrgated situations of print, people may secretly discuss taboo topics, but iwht television,t he very notion of “taboo” is lost.

–Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, p. 92

If taboos are lost on TV, what are they on the Internet? 

In some ways I’m being glib, but there’s a more serious question here:  what’s the difference between TV and the Internet as far as this sort of thing goes?

Books versus broadcasts

Each book we choose to “associate” with takes up part of our physical environment. It must be physically carried into the home and stored somewhere, whether on a coffee table or under a mattress. A book is a belonging. Although records, tapes, and disks are also belongings, broadcast television and radio content is evanescent; it is consumed and leaves no tangible evidence. Watching a program on television, therefore, is like stopping to watch an event in a public park. One does not have to take it into one’s home, place it among one’s possessions, and make it part of one’s self.–Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, p. 83.

This quote raises some questions for me. Yes, a broadcast is not an object in the way that a book is. But what about the DVDs of Seasons 1 - 4 of The West Wing that are sitting on the shelf of the entertainment center? Those are objects that I have invited into my home. What about the practice of recording television shows, either to watch at a later date or to keep? What about Tivo? A recording of that sort is not an object in the way that a book is, but it isn’t properly a broadcast either; it isn’t something that “is consumed and leaves no tangible evidence.”

Or are bits on a hard drive considered intangible?

Two quotes from Alan Wolfe

“Boundaries are the stuff of sociology, and in modern societies no boundary seems quite as important, yet quite as porous and ambiguous, as the one between private and public. Modern individuals require both a realm of private self-expression and intimacy buffered from the larger world of politics and a sense of belonging to a larger community that expresses obligations to all its members, even if they are strangers” (187-188).

“We cannot take care of our public business without recognizing that we have private selves, and we cannot appreciate a private self unless we understand ourselves as public creatures” (188).

Both from:

Public and Private in Theory and Practice: Some Implications on an Uncertain Boundary. IN Jeff Weintraub & Krishan Kumar Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1997).

…

“When one is forced to talk incessantly, to have an opinion on everything, to always express oneself, there remains little room for thoughtful consideration of what one is saying (not to mention time ot listen to others.)”

(J. Macgregor Wise. 2004. An Immense and Unexpected Field of Action: Webcams, Surveillance & Everyday Life. Cultural Studies 18(2/3): 424-442. (p. 431)

He is writing about bloggers here… and often, it seems that he’s right.

That said, I’m going to use blogging as a means to force myself into actually making progress with daily “what I did today” updates. Working from home with no nearby institutional support is HARD.