overview
telegraph
telephone
the press
print images
photos
film
sound
radio
television
power
rail
highways
seas
air
space
impacts
bodies
metaphors
periodisation
related
Guides:
Governance
Networks
Economy
related
Profiles:
Bubbles
|
periodisation
This page considers periodisation.
It covers -
introduction
Journalists and proponents of internet exceptionalism
have referred to "the Age of the Internet" or
promoted notions such as 'Business
2.0' and 'Education 2.0', supposedly somehow unique
and entirely distinctive of our epoch.
Are we living in the Age of the Net, with earlier generations
living in the age of television, steam age, radio age
or epoch of another technology and communications medium?
Does periodisation say more about the person articulating
that period than it says about a technology, economy or
culture. "Sex" for example wasn't really "discovered"
in 1911 or 1964 (despite claims by Virginia Woolf and
Philip Larkin) and a peculiarly French hubris is required
for periodisation that divides history into before and
after Parisian street theatre in mid 1968.
Historians, publicists and literary scholars have typically
deployed four types of periodisation to promote regimes
(eg Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany), bundle attributes
(the Renaissance, the Enlightenment), illustrate a thesis
(the Steam Age, Age of Elecricity, the Time of Troubles,
the Dark Ages, Age of Appeasement or Age of Anxiety) or
bestow approval.
One basis for periodisation is the "merely chronological",
with a count of years from a particular event - eg the
birth of Christ or Hegira - or other time (eg reigns,
centuries).
Such a periodisation embodies a worldview (before and
after Christ or Muhammad) or power relationships (eg centred
on the person of a monarch, with law reports and legislation
being tied to regnal dates).
It may instead represent an intellectual shorthand that
elides diversity and complexity, with 'the Victorian period'
for example often represented as a caricature of sexual
repression and literary stodge that is supposedly different
from the vivacity, even raciness, of the 'Georgians' and
'Edwardians'.
Another periodisation uses a biological analogy, typically
a cycle of birth/emergence, juvenile growth, maturity,
senescence and death or decay.
That periodisation reflects conceptions of nations, regions
and civilisations as spinning on a wheel of fortune (rise
and fall, birth and rebirth), at the mercy of cosmic weather
(a Prague Spring blighted by a cold snap) or progressing
from 'dark' ages through 'middle ages' to 'modern times'
and 'postmodernity'.
A third periodisation model embodies what the author considers
to be the fundamental attribute of a culture in a particular
period of time, with that period having a meaning in itself
and readily distinguishable from earlier/later periods
(which might be of longer or shorter duration).
Those attributes might not have been experienced by or
even had much effect on most people in a particular epoch.
Italian peasants (let alone their peers in Nortern and
Eastern Europe) were not conscious that they were living
in 'The Renaissance', did not engage in a dialogue with
humanists or translate Latin poetry to each other after
a day in the fields. Arguably they were most affected
by the diffusion of double entry bookkeeping, which facilitated
greater control of tenants. we don't, however, refer to
the Age of Paccioli.
A fourth type of periodisation - influential despite or
indeed because of its polemical nature - defines a period
through blessing or condemnation ... the Age of Gold,
Age of Innocence, Decade of Greed and so forth.
glib taglines, frequently applied
Journalists, scholars, politicians and pundits have been
quick to proclaim that we are living in "the age
of the internet".
A cursory Google search will thus throw up results such
as -
-
The Golden Age of the Internet: Enjoy it while you
can
- Learning
in the Age of the Internet
- Job
search in the age of Internet
- Storytelling
in the Age of the Internet
- The
professional service encounter in the age of the Internet:
an exploratory study
-
Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet
- Cyberpolitics:
Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet
- From
lackey to leader: the evolution of the librarian in
the age of the Internet
- Media
Literacy in the Age of the Internet
- Sociology
in the Age of the Internet
- Legal
Reasoning and Legal Change in the Age of the Internet
- Cyberscience:
Research In The Age Of The Internet
- The
Age of the Internet has arrived. Books have become decorations
- Literacy
Theory in the Age of the Internet
- Reconciling
Canadian Content Requirements in the Age of the Internet
- Democratic
Processes in the Age of the Internet
- Cinephilia
in the Age of the Internet
- Identity
in the Age of the Internet
- Performance
Analysis In the Age of the Internet: A New Paradigm
- The
abdication of the Intellectual in the Age of the Internet
- In
the Age of the Internet, Whatever Will Be Will Be Free
- Free
Expression in the Age of the Internet
- Can
Public Consent Still Be Engineered In the Age of The
Internet?
- The
Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology
in the Age of the Internet
- Global
ethics in the age of the Internet
- Networks
of Innovation: Change and Meaning in the Age of the
Internet
- Coming
out in the age of the internet: Identity demarginalization
through virtual group participation
- Informational
Privacy in the Age of the Internet
- Media
Regulation in the Age of the Internet
- Nation
Building in the Age of the Internet: The Phenomenon
of 'NationNets'
- Text-E:
Text in the Age of the Internet
- Social
Interaction in the Age of the Internet
- Newspapers
In The Age Of The Internet: Adding Interactivity To
Objectivity
- Telephone
Thinking in the Age of the Internet
- Organisational
Culture in the Age of the Internet
- Citizenship
in the Age of the Internet
- Office
Lingo in the Age of the Internet
whose 'age of the internet'?
We can ask, if we are living in 'The Age of the Internet',
whose internet and what internet?
To adapt William Gibson's quip
about the future, past ages were unevenly distributed.
Some regions experienced particular ages before others.
The 1930s for example might have been the 'Radio Age'
in metropolitan Germany and the US but much of Africa
and Papua New Guinea remained in the 'stone age', sans
jazz and telecommunications, and have only caught up in
recent decades.
Some regions did not experience a particular age at all.
The Thirty Years War and Russian Time of Troubles in early
modern Europe were for example distant rumbles for the
rulers of China and unheard by clerics in Timbuktu or
hunter gatherers near Uluru.
Essentialist periodisation in characterising an epoch's
start, finish and nature
In the 'age of the internet' - golden
or otherwise - substantial number of people remain offline
(with a range of divides
relating to education, physical disability, the unavailability
of infrastructure or the prohibitive cost of access where
infrastructure is available).
videosphere to noosphere?
Much periodisation regarding electronic media is triumphalist
and teleological, with innovation portrayed as an inevitable
and virtuous progression from barbarism to "the End
of History".
French gadfly Regis Debray for example adapted McLuhan,
Toynbee and de Chardin in suggesting
a new periodisation for the "mediasphere" -
"material forms and processes" through which
its ideas transmitted, "the communication networks
that enable thought to have a social existence".
His periodisation encompasses -
- the
logosphere - "that long period stretching from
the invention of writing (and of clay tablets, papyrus,
parchment scrolls) to the coming of the printing press"
- with reception of information on the basis that "God
dictates, man transcribes"
- the
graphosphere - "from 1448 to around 1968: from
the Gutenberg Revolution to the rise of tv", with
"three successive chapters: reformation, republic,
revolution". The graphosphere is the age in which
"the image is subordinate to the text" and
"the poet or artist emerges as guarantor of truth"
-
the videosphere - beginning in May 1968 and characterised
as "the age of the image, in which the book is
knocked off its pedestal and the visible triumphs over
the great invisibles - God, History, Progress - of the
previous epochs".
Debray
argued that
This
mediological periodization allows us to situate the
life-cycle of socialism, that great fallen oak of political
endeavour, within the last 150 years of the graphosphere;
and to explore its ecosystem, so to speak, through its
processes of propagation. Socialism will not be treated
here in terms of the intrinsic value of any of its branches.
Rather, the aim will be to grasp the common mediological
basis that underlies all its doctrinal ramifications
- from Fourier to Marx, Owen to Mao, Babeuf to Blum
- by approaching it as an ensemble composed of men (militants,
leaders, theoreticians), tools of transmission (books,
schools, newspapers), and institutions (factions, parties,
associations). The ecosystem takes the form of a particular
sociotope, a milieu for the reproduction of certain
kinds of life and thought.
::
|
|
