Week 4 Discussion
Standage cites two examples of human exuberance in the face of technological innovation:
”The construction of a global telegraph network was widely expected, by Briggs and Maverick among others, to result in world peace: “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.”
”The different nations and races of men will stand, as it were, in the presence of one another. They will know one another better. They will act and react upon each other. They may be moved by common sympathies and swayed by common interests. Thus the electric spark is the true Promethean fire which is to kindle human hearts. Men then will learn that they brethren, and that it is not less their interest than their duty to cultivate goodwill and peace throughout the earth.”
Fast forward to Belafonte’s Tonight Show, and Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the all-seeing eye of television would make racism harder to maintain, heralding a new era of greater social transparency and responsibility. Forward again to Facebook’s aspirations towards ‘making the world more open and connected’. Even Google’s early days are infused with the mantra ‘Don’t Be Evil’.
Repeatedly bundled with the joyous thrill of technological innovation is a delta between intent and unintended consequence. And while these examples are ones of cultural aspiration running away with itself, it does not make the positive intentions any less real. Over and over, we wish the best for the technologies around us. We want them to bring all the benefits they might promise. We still thrill as much at the artificial intelligence detection of disease as much as we did of the promise of peace and goodwill brought by the telegraph. But as the original transmission warns, it isn’t what’s brought. It’s what’s wrought. Our own excitement is wrought with Promethean hubris and inevitable misadventure. It is the most human of problems to create and still fail. King’s hopes for television didn’t make racism harder to maintain, but it did bring forward violence and abuse which took the broadcast out of the home and into the streets. Just what the consequences of a world that’s more open and connected are only starting to be understood. The dueling binaries of fear and excitement are everywhere in the ethics of artificial intelligence.
Standage’s examples seem quaint and harmless in our modern context. But they capture something important that’s still with us. The desire for innovation to build bridges between people. For us to find common ground and language over difference. And for us to build better tools of opportunity. As these communication innovations scale, their complexity increases and so do their problems. Even scale itself becomes a problem, with the telegraph struggling with capacity as much as the internet does today. Bad actors find points of leverage and exploit them. But I remain on the optimistic side of this argument. I still believe in the power of innovation to build bridges, not walls. And most importantly, for the limitless renewable resource of human creativity to still find a way to create good.
From my Midterm Analysis, I am focusing on the use of magnetic tape as a metaphor, and how in holding up a mirror to issues of social justice, Belafonte’s Tonight Show created the 11.30pm spark which became the now ubiquitous twenty-four hour news cycle. NBC’s use and re-use of magnetic tape has been overwritten and passed into history, and without material preservation, also passed into unrecorded memory. Over time the magnetic tape lost its ability to remember, as did we. Yet what NBC didn’t keep was still able to be recovered by home recording enthusiasts. These bootleg recordings became cultural artifacts in rescuing the overwritten. They would save the words of those who sought to draw attention to society’s overwritten. The operational process of recording over the magnetic tape reflects the often violent suppression of issues of social justice and race happening in America. Magnetic tape is itself a metaphor for 1968.
