Week 1: The Synergy of Change

What was particularly interesting during our discussion of the origins of international communication this week was the synergy of social change and technology. While I’m not a determinist, it’s not far-fetched to say that technology has a significant impact on social change. But in many ways, as we’ve seen, social change can play a greater role in dictating technological advances. Do they become, at some point, so inextricably connected it’s hard to tell which inspires which? Maybe. Particularly in today’s society, where information and connection to the rest of the world are literally at our fingertips. Who is to say that the creation of Facebook won’t result in some newly formed group identity that challenges the idea of the nation-state? There are more people in the world who “like” Michael Jackson on Facebook than populate the Netherlands. That could seem like pretty good ground for a national identity, right?

History led us to this point of instantaneous communication, and it is in history that we can see the most clear examples of social change inspiring technology (and vice versa). Armand Mattelart put it clearly when he wrote in the Mapping World Communication: “as the notion of freedom of opinion became more concrete, a variety of technical inventions made possible the development of new networks of communication.”

When we look at inventions that inspired these “new networks of communication,” the two most obvious examples are the printing press and the telegraph. These revolutionized not only the channels of communication, but also the way in which we communicate.

Language became standardized with the invention of the printing press, which had significant impacts on the premises of “national identities.” The (relative) ease with which people could access information completely changed the scope of how people felt about their information. The masses were no longer reliant on a few powerful people to dictate the terms of their lives and, as Hanson put it in Information Revolution and World Politics, the printing press “facilitated the diffusion of dissenting views,” or in other words, gave rise to the world’s first versions of Jon Stewart.

The telegraph built on the foundation initiated by the printing press. Technology could deliver information faster than a person could physically travel at the time. Because of the ease and speed of this medium, information did not have to be all-inclusive at one time, unlike the printed word of a newspaper. Of course, imperialism was assisted by the telegraph, with governments accessing and controlling their economic interests faster than ever before. And as imperialism and these economic gains made societies grow, technologies had to develop to keep the order. And here is what we discussed: the synergy between technology and social change. One thing inspires the next, which inspires the next.