Tuesday, January 25, 2011

America: Land of Tunnel Vision?

Throughout the world there are many stereotypes of different cultures and nations. Being Chinese and British, I have had my fair share of encounters with such stereotypes. I think because of my affiliation with different nationalities, I never really consider the many stereotypes in place about Americans, although I should be more aware of them. Some of the most common stereotypes about Americans, according to eduPASS.org, are that we are boastful, arrogant, insensitive, snobbish, rude, racist, obnoxious, ignorant of other countries and cultures, and think that we know everything. 
After reading Lawrence Lessig’s Open Code and Open Societies, I found that at least one of these stereotypes may have some evidence behind them. 
Lessig describes to the reader the controversy that occurred between the United States and Canada regarding iCraveTV, an Internet broadcaster based out of Canada which provided rebroadcasted television over the Internet. This free television service, while legal north of the border, is considered illegal in the United States. When some American Internet enthusiasts were able to get their hands on iCraveTV, Hollywood was, to say the least, not very pleased. They filed a lawsuit in Pittsburgh federal court, demanding that iCraveTV, a Canadian site, be shut down because, as long as the site existed, an American might be able to get his or her hands on free, and illegal, television.


Now, the Bill of Rights has provided us Americans with numerous freedoms, such as freedom of religion, right to bear arms, but, most importantly, it can be argued, freedom of speech. From the time that we learned about the Bill of Rights in elementary and middle school, kids, not to be sexist, but mostly boys, have been using freedom of speech as an excuse to say mean comments and basically whatever popped into their heads. But when, say, a girl would throw out an equally mean comment on the playground, the boy would get all bent out of shape and, essentially, deny that freedom of speech was a valid excuse for such utterances. 
As Lessig continues his narrative of the iCraveTV controversy, he brings up a similar idea to that which I just presented. He writes:
“Imagine, for example, a German court entering a judgment against Amazon.com, ordering Amazon.com to stop selling Mein Kampf anywhere because someone in Germany had succeeded in accessing Mein Kampf from Amazon. Or imagine a court in China ordering an American ISP to shut down its dissidents’ site, because the speech at issue was illegal in China. It would take just a second for an American to say that those suits violate the concept of free speech on the net; that they undermine the free flow of information; that they are an improper extension of state power into the world of cyberspace.” (11-12)
Following this quotation, Lessig describes how “free speech didn’t register in this Pittsburgh court” (12). The stereotyped American “tunnel vision” was truly manifesting itself in real life. 

Is it right for us to criticize other nations for “closing” the Internet and monitoring what happens online when we, in fact, do the same thing? Is the example that Lessig provides just support for foreigners stereotyping Americans? 

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Who Controls the Past Controls the Future

Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, I must admit, scared me a little bit at first. The daunting hardcover was approximately 366 pages written entirely on a subject that I had very little prior knowledge on. I was intimidated.
However, as I began to read Wu’s work, I found myself enjoying (!) the book. Sure, some of the technical terms took me a little longer to understand, but I found Wu’s claims and the information that he presented to the reader to be extremely captivating. As I read, there was one claim in particular that struck me more than any of the others:
“It shows, as we shall see, that perhaps the most effective way to gain power over the future is to dictate popular assumptions” (Wu 130).
Immediately, I made a connection to George Orwell’s revolutionary work, 1984; “‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’” (Orwell). The wording of the two quotations is almost frightening in their similarities, yet were written more than six decades apart. Could it be that the world that we live in today is, in fact, the world that Orwell was warning us about? 


I pondered this question while continuing to read The Master Switch and found that Wu had presented numerous examples of technological “battles” in which both of the quotations proved to be true. 
One of the examples that Wu provided in his work to support his claim was actually that which I wrote about in my previous blog post. AT&T’s inability to market such innovative technologies as that of “fiber optics, mobile telephones, digital subscriber lines, facsimile machines, speakerphones” dictated popular assumptions in a different way than one would originally think (Wu 107). By not releasing such technology, Bell Labs was dictating popular assumptions. Withholding information, essentially, has the same effect as providing information and changes the way that people view the world around them. Because AT&T repressed such vital technology, they had the power to introduce and market the inventions to society whenever they believed that the world was “ready” for them. 
For me personally, Wu’s most compelling example was his description of the “battle” between television and FM radio, which occurred during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The notorious David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Company of America at the time, was “the single most powerful man in American broadcasting, the defining mogul of an information industry” (125). Sarnoff was the sort of man who would do anything to protect the RCA, particularly his beloved AM radio. 
When his colleague, Professor Edwin Armstrong of Columbia University, approached him with the revolutionary FM radio, which improved the sound quality of radio immensely, Sarnoff had him end all testing on the FM radio and leave. This action was taken in order to prolong the popularity of AM radio and hinder the acceptance of the better quality FM radio
How did Sarnoff and the RCA accomplish this? By dictating popular assumptions and “focusing on the promise of a new medium: television” (130). 

David Sarnoff


During this time, there were only so many ways that society could learn about new innovations and technologies, the most influential of which was through the few monopolistic corporations that provided the products. Wu writes, “[t]he technology of FM was rarely mentioned in the radio industry’s endless promotion of the latest and greatest. When mentioned at all, FM, lauded as theoretically interesting, was also minimized as a mostly unproved technology, experimental and of marginal utility” (130). As a result of the RCA downplaying FM radio’s value, “[m]any standard histories in fact ascribe the slow development of FM to the rise of television” (131). In fact, it would not be until the 1970’s and 1980‘s that FM’s usefulness would come to the attention of the general public and exceed AM radio in popularity. Also, unfortunately, Sarnoff and the RCA’s hinderance of the FM radio, among other events, drove its inventor, Professor Armstrong, to commit suicide in 1954.
While there are multiple examples that Wu provides in The Master Switch to support his claim, this is not to say that it applies to all aspects of technology in society. The entertainment industry, for example, is one which is extremely unpredictable no matter how studios attempt to dictate popular assumptions. The popularity of a certain entertainment products - be it movies, books or television shows - depend on the people in society. The entertainment industry is focused around “selling something people don’t ultimately need; they have to want it. They have to be inclined to invest time and money...without certainty of satisfaction or desired effect” (221). In this particular industry, the future of a certain studio or publisher has little to do with what the people want today, as their tastes and wants could change overnight, and often do. 
Wu’s claims throughout The Master Switch were all captivating, but this one claim in particular struck me. I suppose that I had never really thought about who dictates what society thinks, believes and wants until I began reading Wu’s work and looking through the lens of this claim. As he writes in his introduction, “just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to” (13). And although I was originally quite frightened of Wu and his work, everything in The Master Switch actually makes sense (I must admit, I may have been the most surprised about that) and can be applied to my daily life. 
So, in response to my question from the beginning of this post, I would have to say no, we have not entered the world that Orwell was warning society about. I do, however, think that we could quite possibly be on our way there. 

Monday, January 17, 2011

Fear of Disruptive Technologies...Where Could We Be?

"Yes, Bell Labs was great. But AT&T, as an innovator, bore a serious genetic flaw: it could not originate technologies that might, by the remotest possibility, threaten the Bell system. In the language of innovation theory, the output of the Bell Labs was practically restricted to sustaining inventions; disruptive technologies, those that might even cast a shadow of uncertainty over the business model, were simply out of the question. 
"The recording machine is only one example of a technology that AT&T, out of such fears, would for years suppress of fail to market: fiber optics, mobile telephones, digital subscriber lines (DSL), facsimile machines, speakerphones - the list goes on and on. These technologies, ranging from novel to revolutionary, were simply too daring for Bell's comfort. Without a reliable sense of how they might affect the Bell system, AT&T and its heirs would deploy each with painfully slow caution, if at all." 
From page 107 of The Master Switch (2010) by Tim Wu

  As a young person who is living in this age of paper thin laptop computers and cell phones with an insane number of capabilities, it is hard to imagine what kind of technology is being developed as we speak (or blog). Perhaps it is because technology has made such huge advances in my lifetime. Personally, I can remember one of my father’s first cell phones, which was equivalent to the size of our landline phone today. To me, it appeared that corporations and firms were coming out with a new, more advanced technologies everyday, each of which made day-to-day life that much easier. 
  It is probably for this reason that reading Tim Wu’s The Master Switch and his section on the monopoly that was AT&T had such a profound effect on me. The emotions which I felt after reading the above passage were those of anger and frustration. As shown in Wu’s writing, AT&T, in essence, hindered the progression of technology because of their own selfish fears. I think that this notion angered me so because it caused me to question what other kind of life-changing technologies have been kept from the general public as a result of greed. If a device as simple and useful as the answering machine was worth hindering for sixty years, as AT&T did, what other, more advanced technologies have been kept from us? Where could we be today if not for the selfishness of firms in the world market?
  I think that, for my generation, it is difficult to imagine a company with the amount of power that AT&T had while at it’s monopolistic peak. Because the monopoly was broken up nearly ten years before I was born, I cannot fathom a corporation with that much of an influence on the way that the United States operates. I think that Wu does a good job of attempting to show their influence to those of us who cannot envision such a company. The passage above continues the theme of disruptive technologies, which is ever-present in The Master Switch. It shows how far monopolies would, at one time, go to protect their revenue stream from competition from newer technologies. It is, however, my opinion, that AT&T managed to shape history, or technological history, at least, because they repressed such life-changing technologies for so long. But, as the saying goes, what’s done is done, and we will never know where the world could be today had such innovative technologies been released at the time of their invention. 

Works Cited:
Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Knopf, 2010.