The human link

We know from media research that the different genres and styles in film and literature are converging, and are being connected and rearranged in order to make new expressions. However, it is not only the “filmatic” or “textual” level of life that has become interconnected; even people have been described as connected to each other and the surroundings, and to a higher degree now than before. I think there is three main reasons for this.

1) The first have to do with the notion of time. When the communicative technologies were restricted to pen and paper, the communicative activities still were binding people together, but the distance between people was defined by the time it took for a letter or a message to reach the receiver. The longer distance between people, the longer time it took to communicate. Now, the relationship between distance and time is somehow “out of sync”. We are no longer bound by the travel of materialised artifacts in order to communicate, and no matter how long the physical distance between us, we can instantly communicate in real time. This is contributing to the notion of the “world getting smaller”, a notion not exclusive for digital (communicative) technology: due to better transportation, the travel time between destinations has decreased dramatically in just a few years. The distance in time, for instance, between my home town and the capital, has been decreased by 33% in ten years.

2) The second reason for arguing that people are more connected now than before have to do with the distribution of meaning. Today, much more than before, we are exposed to the meanings and preferences of each other. (For instance, if it had not been for the technology of blogs, you would not have been able to read my meanings on this subject.) All of us have got a vast number of potential channels to make use of in order to make ourselves heard, and many of us use them in one way or another. This means most of us, at least to some degree, are contributing to an idea of what “the world out there” is thinking about. And further: all this information is making us reconsider our own meanings; at least I know that I do. If I don’t change meaning, I at least become more certain of the opinions I have. When I read others opinions I start to think, and I’m starting to develop arguments about the subject. This way I actually get to elaborate on my stands in life, by means of all the information I receive. This “exchange” of information is binding us together, making us able to elaborate on our meanings and construct new “meaning communities”.

3) The third reason for people today to be considered connected, is that much of our life’s information is stored in more or less centralized databases. Each of these databases store a bit of information about us, and the databases is, increasingly, being connected to each other in order to paint a broader picture about every one of us. The practical effect of this is that we are placed in categories, with characteristics that should apply to all members of a specific category. Obvious examples is the insurance sector, where personal insurance is a question of what medical category one can be placed inside. Different parts of society are starting to collaborate in order to construct the “full” picture of its inhabitants, in order to regulate society “objectively”. This, of course, has some unfortunate side effects, in that the bureaucracy dealing only with categories – and not real people, is taking over the process as soon as the person is categorized. But none the less, we are all increasingly being compared with each other, in order to see who is deviant and who is not.

The knowlege of feeling and looking

It is obvious that different artefacts require different kinds of knowledge; you cannot use a calculator based on experiences from using a radio. Hence, the introduction of new artefacts into a setting often changes what is hold to be relevant knowledge in that particular setting. However, this is not obvious in every context; let us use the paper producing industry as an example. In earlier times, to check the quality of the cellulose in such a factory, the workers went down to the big combs, took a little cellulose in their hands and felt it. They analyzed it between their fingers and actually determined the characteristics of the cellulose by feeling it. They new instantly what component to add if the “feeling” was not right. No one could ever tell the workers what the cellulose should feel like; this had to be learned by experience. The workers had a physical contact with the process in which they made use of certain kinds of knowledge to affect the process.

These days, the workers do not need to get “their hands dirty”. What was previously felt and analyzed through the fingertips must now be “felt” through computer screens. The workers are removed from the actual process of making paper; they might never actually see the product they are making at all; they are investigating it from a distance, through numbers and graphs on the screen in the control room. This, of course, demands a quite different kind of knowledge than before, a kind of knowledge that is more intellectual than tactile and “embodied”¹. The machines are trusted in doing the “feeling” on our behalf; all we have to do is to take action when the machines tell us to. The question, however, is what we lose when the brain (apparently) is all we need.

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¹ The question about wheter or not information has to be “embodied” is a big (and interesting!) one, and I will come back to this in a later blogpost.