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The Mobile Information Society |
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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON 21ST-CENTURY COMMUNICATIONSSummaries
Translated by Zsolt Bánhegyi |
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A 21. századi kommunikáció új útjai: Tanulmányok. Ed. by Kristóf Nyíri. Budapest: MTA Filozófiai Kutatóintézete, 2001.
Kristóf NYÍRI:
Foreword
In his introduction (http://21st.century.phil-inst.hu/nyiri/nyiri_bev.htm)
to the first phase of the project Communications in the 21st Century,
and in the talk „The Mobile Information Society: Back to the Roots“ given
at the May 29 conference http://21st.century.phil-inst.hu/2001_maj/Nyiri_prez/nyiri.htm),
the author made the following observations: 1. communication and
community are interdependent. 2. communicating via perceptual signs
is anthropologically prior to communicating via verbal language. Multimodal
communication is more fundamental than verbal communication. 3. As
compared with communicating in spoken or written language, computer networking
vastly increases our capabilities for multimodal communication. A new type
of personality emerges: the network individual. 4. The rise of the
internet leads to more, not less, physical movement; and to more, not fewer,
personal contacts. Increased volumes of communication can imply increased
levels of travel and transportation, while more travel leads to an increase
in the demand for mobile internet access. 5. Information does not
amount to knowledge; knowledge is information in context.
These observations inevitably lead to
issues bound up with the dichotomy between the two concepts of „community“
and „society“ as formulated in Tönnies’ classic Gemeinschaft und
Gesellschaft (1887), as well as with the related dichotomy between
„culture“ and „civilization“. In the present foreword the author indicates
that under the conditions of mobile networked multimedia communication
it is possible not only that the gigantic torrent of information by which
we are confronted may become transformed into flows of real knowledge,
but also that today’s society of mere civilization might become a community
of culture.
Vilmos BENCZIK: Secondary Orality
and Mobile Telephony
To date, man has steadfastly regarded
multimedial direct human communication as the paragon of communication.
All the numerous communication technologies devised in the past aspired
to broaden the scope of this communication and at the same time to preserve
its specific features. The value of a given technology is judged by the
yardstick of how much it is capable of simulating direct human communication.
In the course of emerging communication technologies the invention of the
telephone was a revolutionary step, for this instrument was the first to
operate in two of the three dimensions of direct human communication: the
suprasegmental and segmental language dimensions, or stated differently,
the vocal and verbal dimensions, and to transmit the product of our body,
the human voice, in its unencoded, original form. The relatively successful
replication of direct human communication transcending spatial limitations
has caused the telephone’s development to skyrocket. However, the localized
nature of the cabled network substantially subverts the natural hue of
telephone-based communication, since man is by nature a mobile creature.
Mobile telephony that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century
as a result of a long-standing development in technology marks a giant
stride toward the perfect simulation of human communication. Moreover,
elements of direct human communication which are virtually present in communication
via other technologies tend to be reappearing in mobile communication as
well.
Tamás RITUPER: Mostly Harmless:
Chat on WAP
Chat is an extraordinary form of communication
that owing to its peculiarities constitutes a transition between oral and
written communication and can be termed as a kind of written orality. The
communication that is carried on in WAP-based chats is aggravated by a
variety of factors. The limits to space in the choice of name and the written
text, the hardships of keying on the mobile phone and the speed of chat
shunts the user into a different yet by no means worse use of language.
The study, based upon the scrutiny of approximately 8 hours of conversation
as well as more than 5400 contributions, was aimed to assess the habits
of name selection by the WAP-chatters, the users’ insistence upon these
names, the language use, the shortening, the modes of greeting, the role
of these in group formation and the role of time and space on WAP-chat.
The findings confirm that the chatters, even though they do their best
where they can to widen the bounds of chatting, by and large comply with
the rules and enjoy now in frolicsome mood, now in serious discussion the
extraordinary situation of communication.
András
NYÍRÕ: What’s the Oplogo Good
For? On the New Visual Popular Art
With
the aid of the oplogo-editor accessible at the URL: www.777sms.hu, 25 thousand
oplogos were created in one year. It is by no means a crop of some lunatics’
burning fury for action: the daily creation of 60–to–80 brand new oplogos
may well be the manifestation of a new visual popular art. The oplogo is
small, of poor resolution, and black-and-white. There is no use blowing
up or scaling down, the image will crumble. He or she who wants to draw
an oplogo must think in terms of the oplogo. Incidentally, the visual folk
arts favour hard, uncomfortable surfaces. Conventional art would rather
be inclined not to stoop for the capabilities which is the stuff of egg
painting, graffiti, and tattooing. Motifs originating in these three forms
of art do emerge in oplogos.
The caliber of the fashion of oplogos may
be measured in the future by the degree how this motif-borrowing will be
utilized by high art.
Kristóf
NYÍRI: Pictorial Meaning and Mobile Communication. An Outline
Face-to-face communication is, generally
speaking, richer in content than written text, for the latter is devoid
of the dimensions of body language, facial expression, gesture, and intonation.
Face-to-face communication is also richer in content than verbal communication
lacking visual support, such as a telephone conversation. The background
assumption of the present research is that computer graphics could alleviate
these deficiencies. – While the attention of mobile service providers becomes
increasingly concentrated on the application of visual and sound symbols,
the screen, and in particular the small screen, has been discovered as
a promising domain of research by experts on visual languages. The issue,
clearly, is not just one of technology. It raises the question of the verbal
and/or pictorial nature of thought: if our mental mechanisms are – wholly,
or in part – pictorial, perceptual, then pictures could conveniently serve
as vehicles of thoughts, as instruments of communication. The issue of
visual languages also raises the question of linguistic redundancy: iconic
languages have to make do with a rather less complicated syntax than, say,
Hungarian, German, or even English. And it raises the philosophical question
of the completeness and unambiguity of pictorial meaning: in twentieth-century
philosophy doubts were very much alive as to whether pictures, by themselves,
are really suited to carry meanings – do they not, invariably, rely on
the interpretative support of words? The research adopts the hypothesis
that ambiguous pictures might be disambiguated by some appropriate animation;
while static pictures are often in need of interpretation, the resultant
dynamic pictures would be self-interpreting.
Béla BUDA MD: The Seamy
Side of the Culture of Electronic Communication? Concerns and Facts about
the Abuse and Overuse of the Internet and the Mobile Phone
As every technical device that emerged
in the history of global communication, the personal computer and the mobile
phone too have elicited a number of negative statements from the quarters
of social criticism. These two principal instruments of modern electronic
culture, as well as the modes of communication, e-mail and the presence
on the net enabled by them, are put to scrutiny by many researchers who
are exploring the potential drawbacks these devices may entail in usage.
The chief concern is the stunting of direct human relations, the decline
and disintegration of interpersonal contact and unmediated verbal communication.
The new gadgets might also be instrumental in making one’s escape into
the virtual world from immediate human and social challenges. The study
surveys the various viewpoints from those of anxiety to the critically
driven professional and social opinions and analyzes the empirical content
of reality in each. While accepting the potentials of abuse and excessive
use (stressing at the same time that these existed also with the electronic
devices of the personal space and under the conditions of earlier forms
of communication) the author tries to strike a balance taking stock of
the positive features and perspectives as well. He claims that every new
technical tool poses a serious challenge and lure offering up opportunities
of recompense for coping with the problems of personality development or
existential predicament, yet having an effect of stimulus as well. The
negative effects of the new technical devices, Buda concludes, are insignificant
and do not imply any peril, and even these minor ill-effects can be prevented
or treated with a dose of care.
Attila KRAJCSI – Kristóf KOVÁCS
– Csaba PLÉH: Habits of Communication of Internet Users
Habits of communication (in the use
of the Internet and the mobile phone) of frequent Internet users were investigated
with questionnaires that were accessible via the Internet. From the data,
the study strives to extract partly general answers. The results show that
among the frequent Internet users the dependent and alienated types of
usage are not characteristic, the latter can be markedly distinguished
from other intense uses of the net. Among the intense users of the Internet
e-mail has become the prevailing tool of communication compared to other
means. The anxiety of people who thought the lack of authentication dangerous
has not proved true: methods develop with the users that check the trust-worthiness
of the source. Concerns of employers appear to have been proved, however,
that employees, when they have the opportunity, do gladly resort to forms
of communication by which they can tend to their private matters discreetly.
Beside the phenomena described here, the study analyzes a number of de-tailed
data.
Miklós SÜKÖSD –
János L. LÁSZLÓ:
The Prehistoric/Heroic Age of M-Government.
How Do Self-Governments in Hungary Use the Mobile Phone and Who Settles
the Bill?
The study is the result of an empirical
pilot project conducted at self-governments of fifteen townships in Hungary.
Within the framework of this, the habits of local decision-makers and officials
in the use of the mobile phone in 2001 was investigated and analyzed by
members of the e-Democracy Workshop. In the course of the research, a total
of 38 questionnaire-based interviews was made involving the following types
of settlement: 10 villages 10 interviews with villages’ mayors and notaries);
3 small-towns 18 interviews with small-towns’ mayors, their deputies and
representatives); 2 districts of Budapest 10 interviews with self-government
representatives, one deputy mayor, and two heads of office). It was found
that local politicians and decision-makers, by actively making use of the
mobile, have quicker access to information which is more voluminous and
more substantial than prior to the inception of the device. Primarily,
this has an impact upon the preparation for decision-making. It was mostly
in situations of „physical and political emergency“ that politicians of
local governments had come to realize advantages stemming from the mobile
phone. Decision-makers on all three levels of settlement regard the mobile
phone as a device of work, a warranty for connectivity, accessibility,
security, and exchange of information. Most interviewees fill the post
of representative or mayor as a supplementary activity, in addition to
a primary job or business. As a consequence, their mobile communication
is perpetually pursued across networks of the working place, the self-government,
and that of private life. Earlier boundaries of life rhythm are, therefore,
being eroded toward those detached previously and the blocks of private
life too are partly sliding into one another. The subjects’ life of mobile
communication is found to be characterized by an incessant alertness, a
continual constraint of responding and of compliance in the different systems
of communication, and the parallel functioning of networks which were discrete
and separate in time earlier. This mobile existence is interpreted by the
authors as a kind of schizophrenia kept under control and limits. Practically,
local politicians fail to filter their incoming calls. Half of the small-town
office-holders do not turn off their devices even at night. A significant
minority of our interviewees favours all-round public presence and unrestricted
access and even makes public their mobile-phone numbers. In spite of this,
the electors would not communicate with their elected ones via the mobile
or in SMS. The political and administrative leaders of self-governments
– mayors and notaries – receive free mobile use. This, however, is usually
not granted to representatives. The mobile privileges are decided upon
by those who in most cases secure an unlimited mobile use for themselves.
The distribution of privileges along these lines strengthens the oligarchic
tendency of local authority.
Béla MESTER: Political
Community and the Media. The User as Citizen
In every structured society, political
community is of a hierarchic structure. This is obvious from the phenomenon
that different strata of education in society maintain a qualitatively
different relation with the media they have access to. As early as in oral
cultures, the official commemorators have an erudite faculty of
mnemo-technique not amenable to all for storing and evoking important information.
And starting from chirographic societies, the primary instrument
of rule over the minds is the faculty of traversing between diverse and
simultaneously present media. The concept of bimediality worked
out to describe this specific formation of culture can be applied not only
to the traversing between hand writing and orality but also to the newer
range of media. It must be admitted though that this latter poses a much
more complex picture, and it is harder to determine what a new medium is.
For a moment, the homo typographicus
held that the (educated) public
opinion might become homogeneous, everyone was thought to be able to individually
create ideas committed to written works and to judge these in a self-contained
manner. This is where some of our notions originate, like freedom of the
press and censorship, which presuppose that ideas arise in the minds of
the individuals independently of anything and then the (improper) power
would destroy a number of modes recorded in documents of some of them.
Still, the more frequent form of power technique is to determine what the
citizens should think and less to monitor the exchange of their thoughts
already in existence. It follows, then, that instead of the concepts freedom
of the press and censorship the adoption of the concept rule over the minds
and the broader category of freedom of this could be more fertile, particularly
in the semi-typographicus
political public realm of our era.
Péter GEDEON:
Market and Money in the Mobile Information Society
By creating market co-ordination, modern
society brought about a complex economic system based on impersonal relations
among individuals. In order to stabilize inter-personal transactions in
the modern economy, the trust resided in personal relationships is substituted
for by trust in money. Indeed, the personal confidence felt toward members
of the community is replaced by confidence in money. Mass production dividing
work processes into homogeneous entities and turning out standardized products
fitted well in to the logic of regulation requiring mainly impersonal trust.
In mass production, the single units of products, of the workforce as well
as of the consumer became replaceable with one another. The market of mass
production did not require personal relations and personal trust between
the actors. By contrast, in the new production and regulation paradigm
that builds on the introduction of information technology and supplants
mass production the mass consumer has become an individualized and personalized
consumer with whom the seller must build up personal contacts owing to
the pressure of market-driven competition. The importance of trust between
seller and buyer will be enhanced. In this new paradigm of production and
regulation accomplishing the mass customization of products the prevalence
of impersonal trust in money is supplemented in market transactions with
an aspiration to personal relationships. As a result of these two tendencies,
the market is now governed by the principle of „impersonal intimacy“ –
the impersonal as personal. The appearance of the mobile phone spawns between
the actors of the market a relationship even more personal and more direct
than that spawned by the internet. In addition, by means of the mobile
phone the sellers are able to customize the commodities of mass production
along the dimensions of locality. Information technology, then, clears
the way not only for electronic commerce but for the advent of electronic
money as well. The spontaneous emergence of electronic money may question
the role of nation states in the process of money-making. Also, the mobile
phone is readily applicable for mediating micro-payments bound to locality.
Information technology makes possible not only the customization of mass
production but also that of money mediating the exchange of goods and services.
János LAKI
– Gábor PALLÓ: The World of Projects and Informal Network
in Science
Big Science: the concept conveying the
new form of scientific work emerged in the wake of World War Two. It helped
the community of scientists reflect upon the slow changes evolving in the
organization of science that had culminated in the Manhattan Project. It
was recognized that an ever growing area of research was moving beyond
the bounds of a given discipline into multidisciplinary and mobile collectives
organized for resolving well-defined problems. This situation implied the
danger of an ultimate fragmentation of knowledge. However, the new communication
technologies, especially the Internet, engender not only the continued
relations within projects but opportunities for linking between projects
as well. Our study explores these relations and links by using a novel
terminology that aims to render the novelty of the situation. Referring
to project management when the issue is organization, the study describes
the actual cooperation in research as a notion of data mining (shared use
of databases) from the side of the input, and as a notion of publication
scouting (functioning of gateways designed for scientific purpose) from
that of the output, while this latter serves also the daily routine of
research. The new form of the operation of science puts some fundamental
questions of the philosophy of science into a light not seen before: the
correlation of the empirical and theoretical plane, the decision made between
competing theories, the activity of the individual and collective agent
of cognition (episteme). Also, it demonstrates the new form of the unity
of knowledge vis a vis fragmentation.
Ulrich KISS,
SJ: The Theology of Communication
It is the expressed will of the author
to spark a dialog between scholars of the theology of communication and
those of communication theory for the benefit of both disciplines. In the
catholic church, the theology of communion assumed a central role in the
wake of the Second Vatican council. Communio has a dual meaning of community
and unity. For the first time in the history of the church the Vatican
II has drafted a unified and coherent tenet concerning communication and
determined as its chief aim the unity and advancement of men living in
society in the pastoral instruction titled Communio et Progressio.
The theology of communication is centred around the Holy Trinity and it
contemplates the inner community and communication of God as a model for
human communication. This latent divine communication revealed itself in
Jesus Christ, who Himself is the supreme communication – that of the Father
– and the Perfect Communicator. The Spirit sustains His work, and Pentecost
is the symbol thereof, and the church is its concrete locale, its sign,
its sacrament. In Christ, the communication of man is restored which in
the ‘original’ sin had broken between man and God as well as between men.
How does the church communicate all this? Not only is the adaptation into
practice deficient, the author claims, but theology itself stands in need
of new impulses as well. The desirable dialogue with the world is introduced
with the following proposition: the intimate communication in the womb
appearing with the mammals may well be the paradigm and primordial experience
of community-building and mutuality-based communication.
Kristóf NYÍRI: Manuel
Castells,
The Information Age. A Review
Castells’ celebrated three-volume work
presents a wealth of new insights and perspectives. The review attempts,
first, to convey a general picture, or impression, of Castells’ magnum
opus by citing from some of his own summary passages in the book. It
then concentrates on a single phrase of Castells’ – „space of flows“, his
most famous phrase – trying to uncover its meaning by tracing it, in a
kind of backward narrative, to its first occurrence in his work, the essay
„Crisis, Planning, and the Quality of Life“ written in 1982. That essay
was a highly interesting and important one; the review will summarize its
main theses, and then follow up those theses, this time in a forward narrative,
by working through some of Castells’ main writings, before arriving at
the book The Information Age once again. The survey concludes by
emphasizing that Castells’ analyses on nations and nationalisms constitute
a major topic which was absent from his earlier work.
Csaba PLÉH: Merlin Donald,
A
Mind So Rare. A Review
Merlin Donald, Professor of Psychology
at Queens University, Province of Ontario, Canada is an extraordinary author
representing that Canadian tradition we usually specify and evoke with
the name of Marshall McLuhan. It is a tradition that, in its psychological
message, aspires to locate a connection between procedures of communication,
techniques of communication and the architecture of mind. Donald’s new
book combines this approach to communication with an analysis of the process
of human evolution and the nervous system of man. Consciousness develops
in idiosyncratic steps that secure the detachment from dependency on our
immediate environment. This however is not enough for the human mind. Some
other agents are still required for the specific human consciousness to
develop: the enormous plasticity of brain, the augmented capacity for working
memory as well as the formation of symbolic fields which clear the way
for new distributed functions and social semantics. It is pointed out in
the review that this concept is a provocative synthesis for the current
trends in neurology and in evolutionary theory while at the same time it
singles out the motif of communication as the key to the non-reductive
interpretation of man’s gregarious and societal being.