Credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service
Keywords: McLuhan, Flusser, cognitive abilities, Gutenberg galaxy, virtual reality, visual thinking
Introduction
The motivation for the following essay was a question raised during the Information Policy seminar. Asked what the information society would look like in a few years’ time, I put forward the thesis that society would be dominated by virtual reality and by a new kind of thinking that comes with it. During the semester I had already written one shorter paper on this question. This text expands my speculation on it.
Text
One of the subtopics that information policy deals with is the information society. At its core, this not very stable concept is in fact trying to articulate something intuitively obvious, namely that technology is a non-negligible element of human life. Humans and technology influence each other. It is a kind of relationship for whose description I like to borrow the terminology introduced by the field of cybernetics, namely the notions of “feedback” or “feedback loops”, which serve me as a visual aid for grasping the thoroughly abstract symbiotic relationship between humans and technology. Abstraction is a necessity, even though (or perhaps precisely because) each of us can imagine tangible examples and personal anecdotes of how our lives are influenced by modern technology.
An intuitive grasp of the problem is not wrong, but just as we are not satisfied with a highly compressed jpg image, here too something is missing on closer inspection. What is missing, and what must supplement our intuition, is the existing and extensive literature dealing with the concept of the information society. It offers many topics and debates examining whether the influence of information in today’s modern society is something markedly new or whether it has played its role since time immemorial, or how technology changes, from the ground up, the structures of our thinking and our idea of what it means to be human, as we see in trans- and post-humanist approaches to the traditional problems of the humanities.
The analysis of the information society does not leave out questions concerning the ongoing changes in the labour market and in opportunities. The examination of changes in the labour market as a response to new technologies appears in many works of information society theorists, and personally I consider this part of the analysis of the information society an interesting meeting ground where economic, sociological and even cognitive-psychological topics come together.
For whether we like it or not, the current economic system of most of Western society, combining elements of the free market and state regulation, is based on the ability to innovate constantly, and those who are capable of it gain financial reward and the social status that goes with it. I would say that many analyses by information society theorists end at this point. But I want to ask further. If we have defined sets of values that are emphasised in the socio-economic system, what kind of people meet the requirements for creating these values; in other words, what specifically can these people do, what do they know, and how does their cognitive apparatus differ, that they are able to stand out above others in the given context?
The choice of cognition as an influential factor is justified, for it is becoming ever more evident that cognitive abilities, intelligence and creativity are important factors in the economic success of individuals, of commercial firms and ultimately of society as a whole, if we regard society as the sum of the individuals who participate in it. Terms such as “creative industries”, “creative economy” or “cognitive capitalism”, which describe the abilities valued by the market, clearly build on the concept of the information society at the theoretical level, for in all cases, according to them, these types of contemporary economy not only amplify the importance of information but also specify that it is above all the generation of new and useful information (which is roughly the definition of creativity) that is the proverbial engine of economic growth.
But what exactly changed with the arrival of information technologies that intelligence and creativity suddenly have such value? Since these qualities have more or less always been present in people, including their uneven distribution, what exactly is different about information technologies and the society built on them that these qualities are so highly valued? Or we can ask more generally: what exactly does a technology contain in a certain revolutionary period, how is it constituted, that it gave rise to a demand for certain skills and abilities? And were these abilities always present, albeit only latently waiting for their proper time, or did the emergence of technology give rise to a genuinely new “human consciousness”, as Marshall McLuhan describes it in his book Gutenberg Galaxy, which comments on the influence of media on humans?
In the book McLuhan writes that a theory of cultural change must rest on knowledge of how technological changes alter the ratio in which the individual human sense organs are used and the importance they have. McLuhan takes up his thesis and analyses the period of European civilisation before and after the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press. Whereas before its introduction society was predominantly oriented towards the part of reality that can be perceived and transmitted orally, aurally and through touch, the printing press and the expansion of the read word brought society into a new, visual mode of perceiving the world. McLuhan can claim this because the printed word, as a medium for transmitting information, had to be seen. McLuhan’s argument is of course more complex, especially his description of how the human consciousness of the pre-print period of society was wrapped in a unified, holistic whole, which with the arrival of print and the printed word was carved up into parts, for the printed word, the book and reading are very individualistic activities which, according to McLuhan, led (among other things) to the rise of individualism and nationalism (MCLUHAN, 157-158) and also to a demand for more mechanical and quantitative thinking and for a grasp of logic and dialectics (MCLUHAN, 159). McLuhan’s thesis, which is not easy to identify since it “dissolves” in fragments across his whole book, lies in showing that technology and technological revolutions are among the most important causes of industrial revolutions, which moreover bring about non-trivial cognitive changes in human consciousness and a heightened sensitivity, or conversely a desensitisation, of some of the five human sense organs. For McLuhan the pre-print era was an era that relied on the oral transmission of information and on the organ of hearing, whereas the printing press transformed us into “Gutenberg man”, whose previous experience of a multiplicity of senses is homogenised and reduced to a single one, a kind of dictate of visual perception and thinking (MCLUHAN, 125). The antidote to this trend, a negative one for McLuhan, was, in the era before the internet, electrification, which with its newly available media interconnectivity was to turn the individualistic society once again into a “global village”, for “the electric age is not mechanical but organic, and has little sympathy with the values achieved through typography, ‘that mechanical way of writing’ […]” (MCLUHAN, 135).
Although one has to be wary of an overly simplifying view of McLuhan’s association of the revolution of print and reading as primarily linked to visual cognition, even after a more detailed examination of the book McLuhan’s thesis seems problematic to me. If I skip the truly trivial claim that our sight must work for us to see the text we are to read, I come up against the fact that a person must further demonstrate a knowledge of language, including the ability to use this knowledge to decode linguistic signs and their meanings and to understand the wider pragmatic context. For reading, these are many times more important operations than the visual perception of the material on which some signs are printed. For that is how an illiterate person perceives a text, and as a “reader” such a person differs markedly from a literate one. Literacy and the ability to manipulate linguistic content are the primary skills of the human reader. As an extreme, though valid, counterexample to McLuhan we can mention people who cannot use their sight for reading, as is the case with the visually impaired who are literate in Braille. McLuhan attributes to the printing press, to text, to “Typographic or Gutenberg” man new and groundbreaking qualities that transformed European society. But would these qualities really be acquired by an illiterate person who merely ran their eyes line by line over a text that was for them just a cluster of incomprehensible signs emptied of content?
Literacy and text certainly did not cause a revolution in this way, and so the insistence on the visuality of reading as the main means of processing linguistic signs suddenly appears to be a great misunderstanding. It is as if McLuhan correctly identified the symptoms of the literate, Gutenbergian society, that is, the above-mentioned mechanisation and quantification of thinking (and with it the development of logical thinking), but swapped the causes. Visuality and visual perception are so difficult to algorithmise even today precisely because at our ordinary, macroscopic levels we do not see the world in discrete units but as a holistic whole. That the world around us is not discrete at the macroscopic level but holistic was also a problem put before the mathematics and physics of the 17th and 18th centuries. It was solved partly by Cartesian analytic geometry, and finally only with the arrival of differential and integral calculus. From roughly the second half of the 20th century, the same problem of grasping visual perception appeared in the newly emerged field of Artificial Intelligence and later in cognitive science. Researchers in these fields are still trying to program a machine capable of perceiving visual space at least at the level a human can manage. The holism of the visual, however, confronts scientists with the problem of what exactly the software should focus on when processing input data, which implies a certain form of defining goals and an ability to understand the meaning of what is being processed. Only recently have advances in computer vision using new computational methods of machine learning and neural networks achieved noticeable progress, “only” in identifying objects in space. That is not enough for a real understanding of a visual scene, however. Here computer vision runs into the dominant paradigm of cognitive science, which proclaims that symbolic manipulation of data suffices for visual perception and for understanding its content. The new movement of “embodied cognition” responds to the limits of this approach: for a realistic creation of artificial intelligence equal in its abilities to a human, it takes into account the idea that perception and understanding require the inclusion of “embodiment”, for, as it seems, human consciousness depends on embodiment more than was thought. The meaning of the things around us is also created by our being able to imagine in our heads, in other words to simulate, what it would be like to experience certain things.
If McLuhan swapped the causes, what is the other and, in my view, more correct cause of the mechanisation and quantification of thinking after the invention of the printing press? The answer is linearity. Specifically, the linearity and discreteness of text. Whereas for an illiterate person language is an automatic and natural activity, a literate person can problematise language, for they are more aware of the rules by which language is constructed and so are much better placed to reflect on how language shapes thought. The written form of language helps with this by making it possible to freeze the production of language in time and look at it from a bird’s-eye view. Likewise, writing helps the user of a language with the discipline of constructing thoughts, because it requires thinking sequentially, step by step. At the cognitive level of the individual, we thus really do arrive at the conclusion that the spread of literacy and of work with written language contributes to the mechanisation of thinking, and these are also the prerequisites of rational thinking as such, which, at least in the West since the Enlightenment, rests on the sequential, causal derivation of logical conclusions. At the cognitive level, one can agree with McLuhan. The spread of reading written text disciplines and mechanises the mind.
But to be able to speak of a society-wide revolution on the basis of cognitive strategies in thinking, we need to understand how a potentially useful technology spreads on a mass scale so as to have such a far-reaching effect at all. The biological metaphor of natural selection will serve us here. Whereas all people are born with an innate ability to use language orally, literacy is a product of culture. Just as random genetic mutations are preserved and spread in an environment depending on the evolutionary advantage they give the organism, so culturally induced patterns of behaviour can spread more massively in society only if they give people some advantage.
“At the beginning of history and during a substantially longer period of it, the alphabet remained the privilege of an elite.” (FLUSSER, 71), writes Vilém Flusser in the essay Alfanumerická společnost, which maps how verbal and mathematical signs work in society. Before the invention of the printing press, literacy could spread only with great difficulty, because producing books by hand was costly. Books were luxury goods, and only a handful of the total population could afford to acquire them as leisure entertainment. The university system of course used books, but public schooling spread only in the Enlightenment, so education was again intended for a narrow segment of society and was mostly organised around practical trades or a philosophical and theological training. Most people did not think about what role books and literacy should play in their lives.
The printing press changed awareness of the importance of literacy and the influence of text. The democratisation of access to books meant that more people could imagine, on the basis of their own experience, what books and literacy are or could be for. This continued as a spiral. Rising literacy meant a higher demand for various genres. The cultivation of private and more critical reading caused people to begin to recognise the differences between the authors of individual books. The prestige of the ability to write rose in inverse proportion to the prestige of reading. In other words, the less prestigious and the more democratic reading became, the more the prestige of those who produced texts rose. Gradually the concept of authorship emerged. Partly also because people were proficient enough readers to recognise the abilities of individual authors. Society switched not to a visual mode of thinking, as McLuhan claims, but to a verbal one.
History offers yet another precedent in which technological development noticeably began to privilege a certain mode of thinking. In a similar way we can recall the introduction of the digital computer at the start of the second half of the 20th century, when computers were large, expensive and inaccessible. They were used for specialised scientific calculations. Few people thought about what it would be like if they could program, and what advantages it would bring them. It was unthinkable that the wider public could compare whether one program was more robustly written than another, or whether one programmer was better than another. This changed after the introduction of personal computers and the spread of the internet. These technological novelties had the same effect as the arrival of the printing press: they democratised access to information technologies, embedded computers deep in the core of society, and thereby also laid the foundation for a new demand to grow for information specialists, people who can think and communicate no longer only in linguistic codes, whose value, as Flusser argues in his essay, paradoxically declines, but in mathematical and algorithmic codes. Unlike literacy and the printing press, one cannot say that computer technology, before its mass spread, was accessible only to a wealthy stratum, because even people who had financial means in abundance, for example people from the business sector, had no idea what to make of these technologies. Well known are the quotes of leading managers and company owners, among which one can find such memorable specimens as the statement by the president of IBM in 1943 that there is a world market for at most five computers, or a later quote from 1977, a year after the introduction of the first Apple personal computer, when Ken Olsen, co-owner of Digital Equipment Corporation, an important computer company at the time, declared that he saw no reason why anyone would want a computer at home (although it is possible that cloud solutions really will make owning a physical computer unnecessary).
Arguing a posteriori is not very fair to these otherwise eminent experts, because, as the well-known saying goes, hindsight is twenty-twenty. I do not mention these historical examples of inaccurate estimates here to ridicule anyone, but rather as valuable records showing that if even the leading experts of their time could not predict the impact of information technologies a few years ahead, what is the likelihood that an “ordinary” citizen could?
By analogy with the printing press, what was crucial for information technologies was not only the technological progress itself but also its wider adoption by the public, which made this technology the indispensable backbone infrastructure of modern society, and to such an extent that today we can hardly imagine a functioning life without it. The symbiotic relationship of computer and human, however, required new approaches to creating information technology, which resulted in the emergence of a new field, human-computer interaction (HCI), which began seriously studying the psychological, cognitive and later also social aspects of information technologies. Gradually, information technologies changed from a purely esoteric interest of a few experts and autodidacts into a new mass medium in which sociocultural aspects are as important as the technical ones. The more information technologies grow into society, the more a new “language” adapted to working with this technology is required.
The linguistic code is no longer adequate, for it is not a sufficiently precise and formalised language to suit work with a computer. The new code for working with a computer is based on predicate and propositional logic. Rather than with concrete objects, one always has to work with abstractions and generalisations. As Flusser describes, society is undergoing mathematisation, and not only so that it is possible to work with a computer. The field of HCI in a certain way tries to be a counterforce to this trend; it tries to design an intermediary, an interface, between human and machine, so that it is not necessary to submit to mathematisation. Yet working with a computer is only a small piece of this further revolution. It turns out that the mathematisation of the world works very well, especially if we have sufficiently powerful systems capable of providing computing power and data capacities that were impossible until recently. Algorithms are not just a means by which people communicate with the binary logic of the machine; they are a new view of the world: cognitive science speaks of software and algorithms when it speaks of how the brain works; mathematics and theoretical physics use fractals and the unit of the bit to describe how the world works. Computer culture is the metaphor that dominates our imagination in this era, just as the mechanical watch once did in Newton’s time or the four natural elements in antiquity.
It should be pointed out that mathematisation does not necessarily push out creativity. It only dictates what artistic material a creative person can work with. But constraints have always been part of creativity: the sculptor chose a figure and a material, the painter chose the size of the frame, the composer chose a key, the dancer an emotion or a story, and the poet in turn consciously and deliberately limited himself when, instead of an infinite number of ways to put a poem together, he chose the firmly defined genre of the sonnet. One can speculate that creativity without constraints is not possible.
That is why the mathematisation of creativity and creative algorithmisation are not contradictions in terms, but real descriptions of what now drives economic development. New jobs and new fields are emerging that require the ability to algorithmise solutions to complex problems. For these fields natural language is not a necessity. On the contrary, its imprecision makes it an inadequate tool. From verbal thinking we arrive at formal, algorithmic, mathematical thinking.
Just as before the invention of the printing press there were people exceptionally gifted for reading and writing and for verbal skills in general, whose talent could show itself more markedly only when a new technological revolution spread the demand for this talent on a mass scale, so too mathematical skill and formal reasoning were present in society, but only with the arrival of digital computers and their spread into every corner of society did these skills become highly sought after.
The technological revolutions mentioned above have a good deal in common. Their effect on the existing social order is extraordinary, partly also because, as my analysis, which agreed with McLuhan, tried to show, the social acceptance and proliferation of a technology requires the technology to gather social values around itself so that it is socially useful and graspable by wider society. With the printing press, a dialogue with the “user” was not as necessary as with the digital computer, which requires an intermediary in the form of a user interface that mediates the relationship between human culture and the culture of the machine.
The growing role of the user interface designer is no accident. The tech giants are well aware that performance, cloud solutions or advanced algorithms are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for any product that is to be used by people, at least at a minimal level. Designers are put in a role in which they move on the border between the precise technological order and the chaos of the human world. Their work has shifted from a superficial fetishisation of aesthetic appearance to communication. They are interpreters of technology. Their design material is the whole ecology of information technologies and human emotions. Until recently, designers worked mainly in the two-dimensional environment of the bitmap screen. But on the horizon a technology is making itself heard which, for me personally, as an observer from afar, represents a possible third revolution of Gutenbergian scale. In my view it could complete the triad, already begun, of the authority of a particular cognitive skill. We have seen the rule of verbal abilities, and today still that of formal-mathematical ones. What is that potential third revolution? I believe it is virtual reality.
It took several decades before favourable conditions arose for the commercial launch of a truly immersive virtual reality that does not suffer from ailments such as low resolution, uncomfortable hardware (or rather wearables) or a lack of advanced and meaningful software. Now the big players in technology are taking virtual reality seriously. Microsoft and other companies are presenting conceptual and very sophisticated applications for virtual reality aimed at students and the medical field, but also at architects, artists and designers. The last of these deserve attention and a historical comparison.
For verbally gifted individuals, the printing press meant a faster spread of a work from author to reader; the digital computer enabled mathematically talented individuals to arrive more quickly at calculations and solutions of complex problems that were practically incalculable without digital computers. But what does virtual reality mean? And whom will this new technology enable to convey their ideas more quickly?
Virtual reality is first and foremost a visual and spatial medium (even though engaging other senses, for example with a suitable sound accompaniment, certainly heightens the realistic feeling of using VR). Creating for VR thus presupposes a talent for visualisation in three dimensions. This talent is traditionally spread across such fields as architecture, product design, mechanical engineering or theoretical physics, which besides a mathematical education also requires an ability to visualise. McLuhan used the terms “visual thinking” and “visual age” for the period influenced by the development of the printing press. I think he was too hasty. Virtual reality is, for the third time, a technology that changes which dominant style of thinking will rule in society. And it is precisely virtual reality that is a suitable candidate for starting a new age of visual thinking.
The question is whether visual thinking is really so distinct a skill that it is valid to speak of a possible historical period in which this skill dominates on its own. One possible answer is affirmative and at the same time connects all three technological revolutions mentioned, together with the emphases on different cognitive abilities associated with them.
For if we look at the science and practice of testing cognitive abilities by means of IQ tests, the most widely used of them, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), is divided into a verbal and a non-verbal component, where the verbal one is roughly divided into two further parts: one testing language skills and the other arithmetic skills. The non-verbal component, often also called visual-spatial, tests the ability to manipulate three-dimensional objects in the mind and the operations associated with it.
The main insight the layout of the IQ test gives us is the fact that from a statistical point of view it is useful to separate verbal, mathematical and visual-spatial skills, for they are not identical, and one skill cannot satisfactorily replace another without losing valuable information about the skills of the tested subject. This does not mean that these skills are independent of one another or that they do not correlate. The opposite is true, for a person who shows above-average talent in one domain is more likely not to lag behind in the others either. But differences, or rather the ratio in which talent is distributed across these three main cognitive domains, do exist between individuals. And therefore one can say that the manifestation of human potentials depends on the sociotechnical conditions of a given society. The more the economy and culture are influenced by one dominant style of thinking, the more the unequal distribution among people of talent for that style of thinking shows. Assuming that talent for visual thinking is distributed in society at least in the same way as, say, IQ test scores, that is, normally (following the Gaussian curve), it is possible that after the era of men of letters, mathematicians and programmers, the age of virtual reality will bring the dominance of artists, architects and all those who think visually.
On the basis of the two previous technological revolutions, I will venture a prediction for visual thinking and virtual reality. If virtual reality becomes an ordinary part of people’s everyday lives, familiarity with VR will be sufficient economic motivation for ever more detailed and realistic HW and SW to be created for VR. Society’s dependence on VR will increase, and with it the prestige of experts endowed with talents that allow them to create not only specialised applications for VR but complex worlds into which people will increasingly “outsource” their private and social lives. From a purely utilitarian and educational use, VR will gradually become a lifestyle. Aesthetic and experiential values will come to the fore.
Virtual reality differs from the real one in many of its attributes, but one of them stands out: virtual reality is the only place in the world, except perhaps the centre of black holes, where the laws of physics may, but need not, apply. Whoever creates an immersive, hyperrealistic virtual reality is limited in deciding what kind of virtual world it will be only by their (visual) imagination.
But if VR becomes indistinguishable from the real world, does that mean that the moral, ethical, in sum philosophical questions that are an integral part of our human lives will cease to exist? Virtual reality can serve as a great thought experiment in which unresolved philosophical questions will be tested, and it is possible that different laws of physics, different forms of what it means to be human, will cast new light on old problems, generating new problems and questions. Then, however, it seems to me that we will not manage without philosophy. But will it be a human who works on these new philosophical questions, or a new technology replacing virtual reality, our last invention, which will culminate in a fourth technological revolution changing the dominant style of thinking of the age? An age in which it may happen that the phrase “human style of thinking” will be either an archaism or an outright oxymoron.
Conclusion
This essay maps a field of ideas that deal, directly or indirectly, with understanding technological revolutions not only as social and technological milestones, but also as revolutions of a certain kind of thinking. Once the technology has been sufficiently introduced into wider society, this thinking begins, through the function of feedback, to be privileged, which favours people who have the cognitive capacity and the talent to satisfy this demand. As exemplary technologies whose influence the essay examined, I chose the printing press, digital information technologies and virtual reality, which chronologically privileged first verbal, then mathematical-formal and finally visual thinking. Assuming that the distribution of talent for visual thinking follows the Gaussian curve, we can expect that, following the example of men of letters, mathematicians and programmers, a new cognitive elite will emerge that uses visual thinking in its work. The demand for this talent will be stimulated by the growing influence of virtual reality, which I consider a strongly visual-spatial medium.
References
FLUSSER, Vilém, 2013. Alfanumerická společnost. BOSÁK, Petr and Robert JANSA. Proto: grafický design a současné umění. Prague: Tranzit.cz, p. 73-81. ISBN 9788087259221.
MCLUHAN, Marshall, 1980. The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of tyopographic man. [1st American ed.]. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802060419.