The Guardian and Dunder Mifflin

Dunder Mifflin and The Guardian face the same basic problem (even if the former isn’t a real organization): peddling paper-based products in the age of PCs, tablets, and smartphones. Granted, The Guardian’s problems are more complex than that, but in order for this comparison to work I begin on an overly reductionistic note. Interestingly, both parties decided to respond to this problem of increased irrelevance with advertisements. Please. Consider the following:

In the end branch manager, Michael Scott, couldn’t really escape the absurdity of running a company that sells paper: “Limitless paper in a paperless world.” But, of course, that is the joke and Dunder Mifflin is a corporate metaphor for Mr. Scott himself. R.I.P seasons 1-3 of The Office.  Anyway. The Guardian (which began in some form in 1821) has a bit more at stake as it faces more than a shift away from print but also cultural and technological shifts that are changing how the world receives, reacts to, produces, and understands news. (Of course, my 2.5 readers are up on all this since this topic has come up before.) Needless to say, The Guardian’s advertisement (though I fear calling it that will cheapen their rhetorical artifact) is a bit more effective than Michael Scott’s:

Pretty intense, huh?

We find ourselves in a time where publications are going paperless, every one carries an adequate news camera on them (so to speak), and the means of expression are increasingly available and frictionless. So the question facing every newspaper is one of relevance – to say the least. I want to walk through this video a bit and comment on the argument(s) it makes, but I fear that might get cumbersome for one post (I mean, who reads a blog post more than a paragraph long?). So. More to come. 

Marketplace's Technology Series: "Robots Ate My Job"

If you listen to APM's Martketplace at all then you've probably heard some of their stories within their "Robots Ate My Job" series. It has been a lot of fun and I've particularly enjoyed David Brancaccio's trip across America with no human contact. He made his final observations on today's episode and ends on the following note: 

It’s a lot of time to ponder existance sitting behind the wheel for that long. And I’ve got to take a vow of abstinence moving forward. I’m talking about some technological abstinence. It may not be that robots are eating my journey, it’s my own compulsion, really, to bury myself in technology. That’s got to change. I got to add some more real-life conversations to the general mix, pull my head out of the iPad screen and my smart phone and all that stuff. I mean, there’s a large country and a large world around us, and too often this technology just absorbs too much of our attention.

Interestingly, after attempting what should have been a virtually frictionless experience (an exaggerated form of his media-filled life before the project), he  decides that a bit of friction would do him good. I strongly suggest checking out some of the related articles and following David's road-trip journal. 


((As a side note, I also tuned in to hear about the automated cupcake robot in Beverly Hills and appreciated that the journalist, after trying out the machine for her producer, preferred to experience the friction of sight, scent, and perhaps even longer waits and lines when choosing her dessert.))

Quick Video: Nancy Baym

Here is a pretty good interview with Nancy Baym from last year. It serves as a great summary of her book and is definitely worth a watch - especially for the rhetorically minded as she discusses audience, content, and rhetorical spaces (if not exactly in those terms). 

Nancy Baym and The Digital Age: A Brief Overview

In framing the debate over digital media and their influences on users, Nancy Baym describes the more pessimistic side as Determinists:

The tendency is to think about new technologies deterministically, asking what they do to us, and whether that is good or bad. Thus we see concerns that mediated communication damages our ability to have face to face conversations, degrades language, undermines our connections to our communities and families, and replaces meaningful relationships with shallow substitutions... Determinism can be recognized from its causal construction. The media are positioned as cause, the people are positioned as changed. (Personal Connections in the Digital Age, pg. 150-51)

Even the most casual readers of this blog should recognize that Postman and Carr would fit very nicely into this "Deterministic" caste. Baym's strength throughout her book is not that she outright denies these claims, but that she carefully shifts the emphasis by asking different questions. She makes this shift most explicit at the end of her book:

To ask whether mediated communication is as good as unmediated interaction, or whether online relationships are as good as unmediated relationships, is to miss the point. It is not a question of either/or, of one versus the other. It's a question of who's communicating, for what purposes, in what contexts, and what their expectations are. There are circumstances in which mediated interaction is preferable to face to face interaction, circumstances in which it is worse, and others when it's interchangeable. (pg. 153)

In some ways Baym, like Postman, also casts the discussion in terms of form and content, but she is far more accepting of different kinds of content. She asks important rhetorical questions in order to see what form would be most appropriate - an experience I had recently when I wanted to wish my father-in-law a happy birthday: text (my preference), email, or phone call. Purpose and expectations required that I make a phone call, but in other contexts with different expectations - the purpose being the same - I could appropriately wish someone a happy birthday on Facebook.

Baym rightly describes technology as mirroring our culture and simply allowing us to do what we would otherwise want to do more easily - shaping us along the way (e.g., she says digital media are "developed and deployed in social and cultural contexts" pg. 153). She denies that technology could cause any kind of revolution in and of itself (a very different sentiment than Postman, according to whom the revolution had already arrived). In the end she sees our relatively quick appropriation of digital media for socially-oriented purposes as evidence that we will not lose interpersonal relationships, identity, and community in the ever-changing digital age.

This last bit of optimism could sound a bit like the technological Marxism that Postman brings up at the close of his book, but I think Baym makes some important arguments that make this conclusion sound less speculative than "progress for progress's sake." All in all, I recommend Baym's book as a good interlocutor among the more negative voices of Postman and Carr. 

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Part 4

This will be my last treatment of Postman, and the following quote does well to leave the reader with a clear idea of Postman's concerns. Whether you agree with him or not, Postman goes out with a bang:

To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple... Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for the absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement. (AOD, pg 157-58)

Since finishing Postman's work, I've also read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, and Nancy Baym's Personal Connections in the Digital Age. In one way or another these books seem to rely on Postman, even if not explicitly. I've intentionally left The Shallows out of these discussions because while  it was certainly more developed and, in my opinion, less speculative - it nevertheless seemed to be a sophisticated update to AOD.[1]

On the other hand, Baym relies on commentators like Postman (and Walter Ong along with their contemporary counterparts like Carr) as opposing voices in the debate. While I think she is generally very moderate in her appraisal of digital media and its influence on relationships, she does come out in stark opposition to what I've recorded here from Postman.

I will offer a quote or two in the future to briefly orient the interested reader to Baym's position, especially in relationship to Postman, since I've spent so much time here covering his perspective.

I've really enjoyed Amusing Ourselves to Death. It helped me formulate better questions about digital media and gave me some important framework through which I was better able to understand the history of the debate around new media - especially as I read Carr. Postman gives a lot of credit to the prophetic power of Aldous Huxely (who suggested that technology would turn the enemy from a suspicious thug to a smiling entertainer), but I think regardless of where we fall in the debate it is safe to say that Postman was ahead of his time in a lot of important ways as well.

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[1] We've also talked about Carr's article in RWS511, so much of the discussion would seem redundant.