Is the Internet Revolution Really Unprecedented?

How much new is there in our contemporary communications revolution, enabled by the Internet, pushed forward by blogs and microblogs? A look into history can be clarifying. And it is surprising how often Elizabeth Eisenstein uses the same phrases that today describe the purportedly unprecedented characteristics of the Internet to tell her history of “The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe”.

The similarity between blog and printing press is to obvious to go unnoticed, and many have extended on this allegory. But Eisenstein’s account highlights details which most advocates of the rise of those who were formerly called the audience will likely overlook. Who would have guessed that crowdsourcing is a practice half a millenium old? But indeed, early printers of maps and globes and natural compendia already asked their readers to contribute their discoveries to following editions, as Eisenstein shows. “After printing, large-scale data collection did become subjects to new forms of feedback which had not been possible in the age of scribes.”

This, of course, is not the collaborative process enabled by the Internet which we see today in the Wikipedia, and which Clay Shirky invests so much hope in. But Eisenstein’s work is fascinating because it allows us to look for the general principles that communications revolutions come with. Enhanced feedback processes, it seems, are one of them.

I have often heard from sceptics that they don’t see any new ideas in blogs. How can a medium be revolutionary if it just spreads the contents of its traditional predecessors, undermixed with urban myths and conspiracy theories, they ask. A historical perspective seems helpful, because the same is true for the printing press: Early printed books did barely contain any new content; in fact, they often served to spread myths and charlatanry, alongside the same old, unscientific theories as before.

Eisenstein claims that there is a benefit in knowing three wrong theories instead of one. From comparison, their inconsistence can be realized – and new, better-fitting theories can be devised. We might think similarly about the Internet. My generation has already grown up with near infinite sources of information at their hands, open for comparison. Surely, most people don’t use these intellectual pastures of plenty, but what can they effect as tools of those who do?

“The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe” had originally come to my attention via a mention in Graeme Kirkpatrick’s “Technology & Social Power”. There, the author enhances Eisenstein’s arguments in connecting it with Habermas’ writings on the emergence of the “public sphere”. He writes that “only through the agency of print [...] does it become possible for people to think of themselves as members of an ‘imagined community’, the basis of modern nationalism”.

The fascinating question that arises is, of course, whether this development will find an equivalent in the social media age. Ala’a Abdel Fattah recently wrote, regarding the current revolutions in the Middle East, that “[f]rom the internet and satellite TV a new pan-Arabism is born”, and Zeynep Tufekci (when rebutting Malcolm Gladwell) touched on hopes for an social media-enabled globalism as a possible force against global problems such as climate change:

New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity that is bigger and more powerful than a handful of corporations and the corrupt, self-perpetuating class of politicians. [...] I say, bring on the hive mind, please let it be global in scale as nothing less will do, and let Facebook and Twitter lead the way.

But is this global hive mind really emerging? Despite great efforts such as Global Voices, it doesn’t seem as if national media spheres were truly converging. I recently did a series of interviews for an upcoming publication, and inspired by Ala’a comment I also asked about the chances for a social media-enabled pan-Africanism. While most interviewees had high hopes, the status quo seems less promising. I’ll quote the great Ethan Zuckerman:

I think that’s wildly optimistic. I see very little conversation outside of individual regions, with the exception of a few cross-continent ties (Kenya to Ghana, for instance.) It’s rare to see dialog between Anglophone and Francophone speakers, for instance, and the conceptual barrier that separates sub-Saharan and Northern Africa remains firmly in place in a digital age. I’d love to see digital media emerge into regional media, and will wait to see that before I indulge in Nkrumist fantasies.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein: The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Amazon.

Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa? (Book Review)

I have been reading up on mobile phone use in developing countries recently for a couple of papers. One of the few books entirely devoted to the issue is “Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa”, edited by Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis Nyamnjoh and Inge Brinkman from the African Studies Centre in Leiden and published in 2009 in cooperation with Cameroon’s Langaa group.

The book takes an anthropological and historical perspective on the role of mobile telephony in a wide range of (sub-Saharan) African societies. It includes chapters on the call-box business in Cameroon, a traditional healer’s use of the mobile phone, and the ‘biography’ of a mobile phone in Tanzania, to name just a few.

One chapter of particular interest to me, and which proved to be highly disappointing, is Thomas Molony’s account of a Tanzanian wholesaler’s non-use of mobile telephony. The author first outlines how traders of perishables in Tanzania use mobile phones to transmit supply and demand information, a field that is well researched in a range of quantitative studies (see Aker, 2008, 2010; Jensen, 2007). He also looks at the efforts farmers had to undertake in 2004, when Molony conducted his research, to access mobile phone networks (a situation that has certainly improved since then).

Despite finding that mobile phone usage was already wide-spread among wholesalers in 2003 (when it was considerable more expensive then today), Molony then singles out one trader who, at that point, refused to use a mobile phone to argue that “the telephone may be considered unimportant because personal relationships are formed during meetings conducted in person”. On this still successful wholesaler, he writes that

while not having a mobile phone may make his jo hectic and he may lose some friends alng the way when he is unable to sell farmers’ consignments to his many contacts in Dar es Salaam, his visits to farmers ensure that he is known localy, and crucially, recommended to emerging farmers”.

While the importance of face-to-face contact for trust-building should not be underestimated, I was disappointed with this conclusion which stands in seeming contradiction to most of the preceding chapter. Moreover, the author ignores much of the relevant literature, in particular Overå’s (2006) very similar, great research on wholesalers’ use of mobile phones in Ghana.

This ignorance of related empirical literature has bugged me throughout the whole book. There is a great deal of references to other anthropological studies, but in the end, a lot of anecdotes still doesn’t make up for the need of quantitative evidence. Another issue is that much of the research the chapter are based on was conducted as early as 2003. In the history of mobile telephony, the six years that are between data collection and the book’s publication in 2009 are a lifetime, and many of the observations might well be outdated today.

“Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa” provides some interesting qualitative research from a great variety of countries and a range of different viewpoints. I also like the fact that it includes at least some chapters by African researchers, who are often greatly underrepresented. However, in the end, I felt that the book lacks a quantitative component to assess the relevance of the phenomena described.

Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis Nyamnjoh, & Inge Brinkman (editors). Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Africa. 2009. Bamenda: Langaa. Amazon.com.

Ants, Genes, and Robots

Have you ever watched an ant trail and wondered how the apparent order in these insects come about? Ants are determinedly running back and forth, carrying food and building materials – somehow, you may have thought, this order must have been created. You might have imagined an ant queen ruling over her kingdom, or ants that are genetically programmed to perform their tasks. Indeed, your imagination might tell a lot about yourself1 – as it does about the French revolutionary Latreille, who thought that the colony has “a single will, a single law” based on the love the ants feel for each other.

As Deborah M. Gordon’s recent book “Ant Encounters” shows, the reality might be even more fascinating than Latreille’s altruistic phantasy. Ant behaviour, she writes, is determined by “interaction networks”: “An ant colony’s behavior is guided by a pulsing, shifting web of interactions, in which the pattern of interactions is more important than the content.”

“Understanding how ant colonies actually function”, Gordon writes in an article for the wonderful Boston Review, “means that we have to abandon explanations based on central control”. Each ant responds only to its immediate surroundings and to its interactions with other ants nearby, yet from this interaction network, coordinate behaviour emerges.

One of the most fascinating parts of “Ant Encounters” is devoted to the question how ants communicate. “An ant uses its recent experience to decide what to do. The pattern of interaction itself, rather than any signal transferred, acts as the message”, writes Gordon. It’s not important what ants tell each other when they meet, but simply that they meet.

The author herself reminds us of the stunning parallel between ant behaviour and the self-organization that forms the human body: “Ant colonies, like genes, work without blueprints or programming”, she writes. Just as in ants, the messages of neurons are not transmitted by one neuron, but a multiple. A single neuron can only send an excitatory or an inhibitory signal, or not fire at all. Yet one excitatory signal is not enough, just as one ant can’t tell another what to do – a whole pattern of interactions is necessary to trigger an effect.

On the other hand, Gordon points out where the scientific strife to create cognitive systems still falls short of its aspirations. Engineers have started to model robots after insects, and ants in particular. But even as robots communicate amongst each other to coordinate behaviour, they are far from living beings, writes Gordon: “[T]he complexity of complex biological systems is not what makes living systems unique. One way that living systems are unique […] is that they cause their own development and activity.” A robot is still programmed to achieve a certain goal – an ant can change its task by simply encountering enough nest mates.

Deborah M. Gordon’s “Ant Encounters” gives a fascinating insight into the organization of an ant colony. Most of all, however, it is a great read because it inspires to question common place understandings of communication and organization, far beyond the world of insects.

Deborah M. Gordon: Ant Encounters. Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior. Princeton University Press. 2010.

Crossposted from the BeTA Lab website. BeTA Lab is led by Dr. Sennay Ghebreab, who teaches my course Information, Communication, Cognition. The lab operates “at the crossroad of the brain sciences and information technology”.

  1. If this intrigues you, you might be interested in Diane M. Rogder’s “Debugging the Link Between Social Theory and Social Insects”, which explores the link between political fashion and the interpretation of insect behaviour in depth. [↩]