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The Soft Tool Culture. Who do we think we are!
This site will focus on my academic work through which I plan to explain our modernistic techno-culture enslaved by programmable electronics. This page is my flowery pitch.
I need to talk about how tools are powerful communication media, and how people don't just use tools but incorporate them into their world view. We live in the halo of the reciprocity of our minds and our tools inter-operating. I can then talk about the ultimate tool, software, and how it exists because of who we are, which is largely a product of our own devising. I'm attracted by the idea that humans, no matter who or what we think we are, were invented, including self-awareness - or what some refer to as consciousness. And the linchpin of this manifestation we present to the universe and ourselves is language which travels through media. Humans flex and adapt as circumstantial challenges present themselves while constantly upgrading their ability to deal with and control each other and the physical world through new media, which lately amounts to new soft tools - software driven media and, lately, autonomous agents.
If my subject is anything, it is multidisciplinary, drawing and combining ideas and narratives from several technical disciplines. A specific challenge here is making my case in all those disciplines. Hence the lengthy meander below.
Media
Interesting word, media. Many understand media as newspapers, television and radio, as in news and broadcast media, not to mention Internet-borne varieties, such as social media, podcasts, streams and games. If you talk to a computer techy, media are disks and memory devices. And we're all coming to understand video and sound recordings, and images as so-called media. Telecommunications engineers think ethernet, wireless and broadband. We also have sociologists who understand communication as it works within culture for whom media means books, billboards, photos, email, anything that carries information. They call the content of media texts; think about the text of a photograph, for example. I'm also aware of cognitive science folks who see media as extensions of mind, such as tools or our hands. Point of view is everything.
This brings me to what I refer to when I talk about a medium (the singular form) and media (plural) in general. The short answer is: all of the above. This view reflects my personal history in the above-mentioned disciplines, and my current academic explorations draw on all of them. And I really need to see everything that carries a thought outside the braincase to be understood as a medium so that there is no epistemic boundary to my investigation.
Tools
Tools project the will to be bigger and better than our flexible physiques and plastic brains permit. Tools are imbued with meaning, at once promise and limitation, vessels of knowledge, ideas and intentions of their makers for those who would be extended through them.
Some half-million to a million years ago our early sub-human ancestors found themselves walking erect and using their former forepaws as manipulative organs. With the transformation of the first finger into an opposable thumb the organic foundation was laid for the continual use and improvement of tools. Tools were used, and then they were used to make tools. Slowly but surely an accelerative process got under way; a process almost mysteriously self-propelling, as it were, in the cultural and material environment of [humans].
When simple tools are used, the intended consequences become readily identifiable. Eventually they become organized in more complex groups as aims. The experience of a tool can then stand as the experience of something not present, something hoped for in the future, something deliberately to move towards — though absent — or a thing to be accomplished. In short, a tool is the simplest kind of manipulative sign or symbol. When tools are used co-operatively by more than one creature, there is that marvelous experience of a common aim.
Horace Fries, 1945, p.449
Reflexivity
In considering the transactions that change us, that convey meaning between minds through media, reflexivity, the reciprocity of minds and tools, is instrumental.
The cumulative complexity here is genuinely quite staggering. We do not just self-engineer better worlds to think in. We self-engineer ourselves to think and perform better in the worlds we find ourselves in. We self-engineer worlds in which to build better worlds to think in. We build better tools to think with and use these very tools to discover still better tools to think with. We tune the way we use these tools by building educational practices to train ourselves to use our best cognitive tools better. We even tune the way we tune the way we use our best cognitive tools by devising environments that help build better environments for educating ourselves in the use of our own cognitive tools (e.g., environments geared toward teacher education and training). Our mature mental routines are not merely self-engineered. They are massively, overwhelmingly, almost unimaginably self-engineered. The linguistic scaffoldings that surround us, and that we ourselves create, are both cognition enhancing in their own right and help provide the tools we use to discover and build the myriad other props and scaffoldings whose cumulative effect is to press minds like ours from the biological flux.
Andy Clark, 2008, pp.59-60
So we become who we think ourselves to be. Then, who exactly do we think we are?
Software
Our Earth's watery seas support a world of life, plus all that's needed by those lives and all that they produce, churned by tides, currents and winds, the vast interface with the land and air highly permeable. The seas of media 1) consist of electronics, globally interconnected, with a world of software driving it, churned by successes, calamities, social tides, technological change, and, of course, affluence, the vast interface with humanity highly permeable.
Like any tool, software is a vessel of knowledge and intent, promise and limitation. Unlike physical tools, software is a stored medium with no substance, just data kept somewhere and transmitted elsewhere at need. Importantly though, beyond other stored media through which we share and perceive meaning, software can and does directly impact our physical world - a virtual hammer for driving actual nails. Embodied as syntactical constructs called programming languages, software is the ultimate tool, the pieces of which cooperate through open protocols, carried by networks, which are themselves tools defined in software.
I've coined the term, tool shop effect, to help explain what's going on here. Woodworkers, for example, modify and adapt their tools, and make new ones with the tools they already have. A busy woodshop is festooned with jigs and templates for controlling processes and augmenting existing tools. In a machine shop, it's the same story. Machinists use machines to make other machines and parts, which are used to change the machines that made them. If you buy a cheap 3D printer, the first thing you should do is find out which parts break and print replacement parts of your own.
The tool shop is a generalization of places where process and product, product and process, mingle and feedback on one another. Tools, readily created and discarded or kept at need, mediate in the creation and transmission of knowledge, techniques and patterns to ultimately create products that may well be tools themselves. And so it goes for software engineering, except that the reciprocity of tools and minds, the tool shop effect, is amplified by software being so perfectly soft, a mere construct, a figment. With software entrepreneurs at the helm, we are cast on the programmable sea, enthralled by its reciprocity with our seafaring selves.
There is language and then there are languages
The conception-day gift2) that enables us to discern and convey meaning so creatively is language. Languages are the brilliantly expressive cultural tools we use to encode and decode meaning; language endows the ability to do that. We can evoke language, apparently deliberately, but meaning emerges, seemingly unbidden, from the locus of a yet opaque, non-linear calculus of agency, experience, culture and circumstances. And it works in both directions, turning meaning into some kind of transmittable medium, such as a language, and incoming media into meaning.
I'm struck by how thinking beings can change their world with a single thought created by circumstance. Consider one's feelings of fear versus comfort. The existance of a single fact in the mind, such as the belief that a particular threat is present or absent, causes the immediate environment to be viewed as dangerous versus safe, changing the way people feel and behave. And then something could suddenly happen to upend that circumstance. The entire moment would have instantly lost its danger or become dangerous. Our entire lives are made up of our feelings and thoughts being controlled by our perceptions of current circumstances filtering and colouring everything. Yet, it would seem that able minds can manipulate their own perceptions to defy present circumstances, such as overcoming fears or being predictively wary. Noam Chomsky, no matter his seminal analysis and theories of language, has never professed to understand how brains could possibly perform such feats.
I contend that all tools are inconceivable without language and, therefore, a product of it. And it's the stimulation we feel when creating and perceiving meaning that drives us to communicate incessantly. Meaning is everything and without it there is nothing.
He was a linguist, after all, and it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly's wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning.
Mary Doria Russell, 2007, p.431
Written languages
The advent of writing was significant in the extreme, transforming what we could say into a permanent record for others to consider later and elsewhere. It's not that oral traditions didn't serve; they've existed for millennia and into today. It's that even the earliest writing offered a heightened experience in the realm of meaning-making and a permanence that changed us forever. As things can become what they symbolize, so then written words themselves became the meanings they conveyed, just as spoken words served for millennia. The story I have to tell starts in Mesopotamia.
The writing system [of Mesopotamia] is impressive in itself. It is also the earliest one attested in world history, and was perhaps the most shining and generous contribution of the ancient Mesopotamians to the development and the progress of our understanding, when we consider, right now, to what degree the transition into the written tradition has profoundly transformed our intelligence, by reinforcing and multiplying its capacities. (my emphasis) Jean Bottero, 1987, p.4
Communication and culture
No discussion of language and media can proceed without mentioning the mother of all reciprocities, communication and culture. You can’t have culture without communication to carry it; and meaningful communication is deeply challenged without the explanatory context that culture provides. This mutual embrace of communication and culture is an old saw for those who study the humanities.
One might wonder if there would be a great nothingness if there ever was a moment when neither communication nor culture existed to buoy the other. We actually have no idea what that would be like because to be human is to communicate incessantly regardless. As meaning encoded in media bursts forth at every conceivable opportunity, little cultures form instantly and existing cultures change constantly. Entrenched cultures entrench further or fray at the edges. The instrumental communication that we can neither withhold nor ignore is carried by media, most often as speech and simple tools until relatively recently in human history.
Within a culture, its members are both privileged and doomed by the media and cultural appurtenances they accept and use. In cultures where change is a commodity, striving and struggling under their power to change and improve them. For change's purveyors, a constant drip of change-induced endorphins has always been irresistible. Fresh ideas for improved media and tools at the ready, they create and adapt existing media and their tools to better communicate and to change their various cultures, salient and ambient, pervasive and small.
Homo significans
So we have minds reaching/extended outside their bodily containers to share meaning through media; and external media pouring in through senses stimulating the emergence of meaning.
In constructive models of the making of meaning, the active role of all participants is now well-established. Far more than simply Homo loquens, Homo scriptor or even Homo faber (makers, or toolmakers) we are, above all Homo significans: meaning-makers. We now need to devote more attention to exploring our modes of making meaning with the media involved, and to the subtle transformations involved in all processes of mediation. We must also acknowledge that media do not simply ‘mediate’ experience; they are the tools and materials with which we construct the worlds we inhabit. The recognition and study of processes of mediation underlines the constructedness of reality. Engagement with media may even be fundamental to the construction of consciousness.<wrap right>
Daniel Chandler, 1995, pp.225-226
What now?
I suggest that all of this implies that self-aware life is quite different from just life: driven, as we are, by our natures, however explained, it is the pleasure we find in mediated experiences, especially new ones, that compell us.
Immersed, as we are in, our self-induced mediated experiences, the ultimate emergence of the Soft Tool Culture would seem to have been inevitable. My task is now to tell the story of our journey on seas of media, starting in ancient Mesopotamia, culminating today. Once the power of deliberately creating new media came to us, progress became a matter becoming more than our mere selves, both physically and mentally, through new media. This relentless development of media through which we define ourselves helps explain how it is that humans have changed without evolving genetically since becoming hunter-gatherers. Our biological inclinations are so useful and enslaving, yet their genesis was influenced by a world so different from the one we've since created for ourselves. It's perhaps a concern that this ultra-modern human experience is driven by such deep instincts, because deep down, as a species, we're kinda crazy, greedy and pretty mean, really, seemingly prone to a collective narcissism that could very well kill us off. Wars and the Internet and our relentless poisoning of the ecosphere are examples of this behaviour. That purveyors of new media are very good at deliberately exploiting our biologically-driven inclinations only accelerates our head-first dive.
I figure that knowing who we are and how we came to be like this should be useful going forward.