As time moves forward, you will find a considerable segment of my work trained on the subject of information transmission, and how it, like technology in general, elicits change and breeds new conceptions of reality. Naturally, this fact is no more distinct than what we have seen come to pass from the aftereffects turned out by our culture’s mediums of communication.
There is use here in referencing the wondrous feats of technology that were cleverly applied by John Smith, the English explorer and part of the London Company permitted by King James I to colonize certain lands in America, for what was a simplistic deed in the eyes of Smith was to his Indian captors an extraordinary exploit worthy of nothing less than the preservation of life, a special and intrinsic value technology had, through Smith’s ingenuity, exhibited to the native onlookers once before.
Indeed, let us recall that when John Smith, the head of the Jamestown colony, was taken to an Indian town near Richmond, Virginia, he persuaded his captors to allow him to send a letter to his friends, and this ability of representing his thoughts by written signs added to the awe with which they regarded him. For it seemed marvelous in their eyes that his marks on the paper could serve to give information to his friends at such a distance as he was from them. And when the Indian messengers reached Jamestown and delivered the letter, the colonists, in accordance with one of the requests it contained, exhibited the force of their weapons and the resources of the settlement, which, poor as they were, wonderfully impressed the messengers so much so that they returned with stories that frightened the Indians out of their intention to attack the colony.
A thought-provoking account of technology sparking new thoughts in the minds of its beholders, to be sure, though our particular concentration here will be on our culture’s now fully-normalized image-based mediums of communication. And though our culture has already been long-immersed in the results of television, YouTube, digital video-players and social media, their application in our lives has only been enlarged following the inception of the coronavirus.
The central principle I wish to advance here does not lie in what information expresses— what is being said, or what opinions are being articulated, or what theories are put forward, or what claims might be made. What is of far greater consequence in the world today are the mediums we use to communicate information. This is so because the mediums we utilize not only establish new conceptions of reality, as we have already seen, but also often, if not always, carry with them the effect of altering the structure, texture, context and original point of the information that is communicated.
It is important to understand that not all mediums are equally suited for the same purposes, which is another way of saying that ideas cannot be effectively forwarded from one medium to the next without changing its inherent framework. Indeed, for this is what the spokesman of the Electronic Age, Marshall McLuhan, meant, when he imparted to us that “The Medium is the Message,” which means that our task is not interpreting what the information says, but is to understand the underlying functions of the mediums that are used to disseminate information. And it is what the cultural critic Neil Postman wished us to understand when he observed that specific types of information cannot be recreated on divergent mediums because their form works against their content.
“To take a simple example of what this means,” detailed Postman, in his book1 Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, “consider the primitive technology of smoke signals. While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical argument. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.”
In following up on Postman’s theory, there may be use in exploring the differences between image-based mediums and orality and the written word. As we know, literacy is a learned discipline that must be mastered, serves as the great cultural separation between children and adults, is continuous in its themes and subjects, informative, static, linear, akin to spoken word in its design and intention, which stands in tense contrast to social media and other mediums based in moving video, which require no sort of proficiency to unearth, are equally suited to the three-year-old and sixty-year-old in both their function and content, are fragmented, image-based, lightning-fast in their transmission, discontinuous in their subjects, and always entertaining in their framework.
But modifications to a culture’s disquisition are not always immediately apparent when one form of discourse displaces another. We may take, as a primordial example, what is now coming to pass as a result of the declining use of oral and written communication in favor of digital-video correspondence.
In an article from The Washington Post titled ‘How the Zoom era has ruined conversation,” the deficiencies of video communication were finely illustrated: “Suppose someone is speaking and another person, eager to express agreement, chimes in at the end of their sentence. Over Zoom, this tends to derail the discussion or narrative: Rather than a relatively smooth interruption, as might happen face-to-face, the attempt to talk creates moments of ‘Oh, no, you go ahead.’ Awkward lengthy pauses are common. Then there’s the turn-waiting, known from everyone’s school days as raising your hand.” As put by Rabbi Hannah Goldstein, to the paper, “It’s just this reminder of the fact that we’re doing all of this stuff in a totally unnatural way,” adding that digital conversations are “definitely impacted by the limitations of technology and not being able to tell a story in the way you normally would.”
Such dissimilarities between our mediums have also been put this way: “Ever since New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin was fired for masturbating on a work call (making ‘Zoom D***’ trend on Twitter), similar news has unfolded around the world,” remarked Navin Noronha, in an article for Vice. “An Argentinian politician was caught sucking a woman’s breasts on a Zoom call broadcast to the country’s congress. In the UK, a college lecture was flooded with extreme pornography links by the students. Incidents have also been reported closer to home in India, where bosses allegedly conducted meetings with their employees in vests and boxers. As comedians, we love to poke fun at such events, citing the obvious logical error in trusting technology in the hands of inept humans.” Navin went on to say that, as an outcome of the Zoom app rising in popularity, “one needs to take stock of the risks that also come with modern-day video chatting.”
One might also look towards the tech startup Better.com, a digital mortgage lender startup valued at $7 billion, which, as reported by the San Francisco Gate news website, laid off 900 employees weeks before Christmas through a mass Zoom call. I mention this because it is another qualified demonstration of the effects produced from alterations in cultural discourse.
Indeed, whereas when communicating face-to-face through the spoken word one might be pressed to provide particularized retorts to individual grievances brought to their attention, image-based mediums promote one universal justification to all parties involved, and even recasts such an identic and response as sensible and just. Whereas the spoken word urges a sort of personal engrossment to those one is speaking to, such as eye contact, or a timely handshake, or other forms of situational awareness like conscientiously surveying and recognizing the individualized emotional state-of-mind of each person looked upon, the impersonal nature of video communication makes no such demands. Whereas when utilizing oral communication one is obliged to linger for a time and engage in a dialogue with whom the conversation is centered, or at least feign an intention to do so, a video-call can be terminated at any time with a click of the mouse, absent of any explanation.
Naturally, these sort of alterations to cultural discourse have already been observed through the arrival of social media, one of which is the uniqueness of what is called ghosting, a term for the unexplained and silent mode for ending relationships in the Digital Age. In a 2021 qualitative study2 titled “Disappearing in the Age of Hypervisibility: Definition, Context, and Perceived Psychological Consequences of Social Media Ghosting,” it was discovered that ghosting has a negative impact and can even stunt emotional growth.
“Overall,” the study read, “technology/social media was thought to play an integral role in perpetuating ghosting mostly because of the ease of connecting with others but also because of the element of anonymity and surveillance that it allows. Overall, the perceived psychological consequences of ghosting were generally positive for the ghoster and negative for the ghostee.”
The differences here between ending relationships through orality and through electronic mediums are also not difficult to show. To be sure, for in a culture engrossed in orality and the written word ghosting would be an unthinkable way to interact with one another, our lightning-fast image-based mediums make quick work of normalizing the societal anomaly.
One can also perceive changes in the church house as a result of medium diversity, for it is known that social networks, such as Facebook, often strive to import faith communities to their platforms. In June, 2021, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, at a virtual faith summit, claimed that, “Faith organizations and social media are a natural fit because fundamentally both are about connection.”
Of course, though Ms. Sandberg is accurate in her observance of shared connective traits between the two subjects, the distinction between what religion and social media are designed to link to, she did not say. Indeed, for had the social media figurehead been more informed on the results of our culture’s mediums of communication, she would have conceded that religious content, as with so much other elements of information, cannot be effectively copied from the written word or orality to social media.
In the same book, Postman sums things up this way: “The screen is so saturated with our memories of profane events, so deeply associated with the commercial and entertainment worlds that it is difficult for it to be recreated as a frame for sacred events. Among other things, the viewer is at all times aware that a flick of the switch will produce a different and secular event on the screen- a hockey game, a commercial, a cartoon. Not only that, but both prior and immediately following most religious programs, there are commercials, promos for popular shows, and a variety of other secular images and discourses, so that the main message of the screen itself is a continual promise of entertainment. Both the history and the ever-present possibilities of the television screen work against the idea that introspection or spiritual transcendence is desirable in its presence. The television screen wants you to remember that its imagery is always available for your amusement and pleasure.”
Of course, the outcome of upholding screen-based discourse in place of literary-fostering mediums in culture is probably no more obvious than what we now see transpiring in the classroom, for it is true that a singular technological change can be capable of bringing about total change. In one instance of modification caused by the great transfer from the traditional to the digital, a Spanish teacher from Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, and Engineering in New York was removed from a “live” class after investigators found that she performed an “inappropriate sexual act” during a Zoom lesson. According to a report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city school that was obtained by the New York Post, students were still present on the call during the incident.
My aim in detailing this event is not to imply that infelicitous activity has failed to penetrate places of learning before the widespread adoption of digital instruction. I am merely proposing that digital technology can imitate but cannot replicate the classroom, that its symbolic environment becomes radically altered when favoring certain mediums of communication over others, that it can carry with it a little-noticed propensity to make debased content unlikely to be communicated through an in-person atmosphere of learning more likely to be viewed, that utilizing the technical features of digital systems of instruction in place of the situational awareness cultivated through face-to-face discourse can effect the consciousness and decision-making skills of those who use them.
In November, 2020, the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia published an internal analysis that revealed, in comparing the then-current academic year to the previous one, that the percentage of middle school and high school students who earned F’s in at least two classes rose by an alarming 83 percent. The internal analysis, called the "Study of Teaching and Learning During the COVID 19 Pandemic," showed that children with disabilities suffered even worse, to which they were reported to have a 111 percent increase in getting two or more F grades. As for middle schoolers themselves, the amount of students getting two or more F grades increased by a shocking 300 percent.
“The study was released by the school district under a Freedom of Information Act Request by… a mom who has been pushing hard to get her daughter back to in-person learning,” reported the Washington, D.C. television affiliate WUSA. “April West, mother of Chloe, 12, said her daughter's grades have fallen mostly because of problems with the technology and communication, not the quality of the teaching. She said her daughter has no way of telling her teacher in real time that she can't hear what the teacher is saying.”
Some pondered that the culprit in sparking the calamitous trend might be the protective measure of remote schooling through digital technology that was initiated and expeditiously embraced in March, 2020, following the initiation of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Now,” wrote The Washington Post, “evidence of poor achievement in virtual classrooms is beginning to emerge nationwide: In the Independent School District in Houston, more than 40 percent of students are earning failing grades in at least two of their classes, according to data reported by the Houston Chronicle. Likewise in St. Paul, Minn., where the superintendent recently reported that nearly 40 percent of St. Paul Public Schools high-schoolers have failing marks, local TV station KARE reported.” The Post further detailed a 17-year-old high school junior who achieved predominantly A’s and B’s pre-pandemic: “Then online learning hit. The teen cried every day during the first week this semester because she finds Zoom school nearly impossible to follow: The format is confusing and some teachers talk too fast.”
Naturally, those trained in technology’s discreet facets were not confounded to hear of these sort of challenges confronted in the schoolhouse, a result of which many students, teachers, parents, schools and schoolboards were ill-prepared to confront or admit. For, as I have tried to show, our mediums of communication are seldom capable of harboring the same ideas, a fact to which the field of education is not immune. There is, in other words, a profound difference between the characteristics of content that can be contained in oral communication or the written word and that which is held in the telephone, television, internet or the digital screen.
Perhaps demonstrating some of the differing content supplied by orality and image-sustained mediums here might be of use. One can, for example, disseminate their well-wishes to their best friend on their wedding day through a video-chat service like Skype, Zoom or FaceTime, but we would be mistaken to believe that it would relay the same effect and emotional meaning as our encouraging and joyful words when they are given in-person. In understanding this, we can see that education, too, becomes quite a different business when conducted through digital technology instead literary-cultivating mediums.
To put this as plainly as I can, learning from a teacher through an online Zoom call can inspirit children to value school, if school is like a Zoom call. But we know that the traditional idea of schooling is not like a Zoom call, a truth that has not escaped the mind of those who have reflected on the matter, or those who happen to have taught students before technology’s trapping of the classroom, or former students who can recall a time before the unrestricted infiltration of image-based mediums in the schoolhouse, which is another way of saying that the notion of teaching the youth through electric and digital technology is hostile to the primordial way of learning that was central to the formation of the literate mind.
To be true, one study3 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that virtual school fosters isolation in children and stress in parents. “Parents of children receiving virtual instruction,” as the researchers wrote, “more frequently reported their own emotional distress.” As the study also detailed, “Parents of children receiving in-person instruction reported the lowest prevalence of negative indicators of child and parental well-being…These findings highlight the importance of in-person learning for children’s physical and mental well-being and for parents’ emotional well-being.”
Such differences between screen-based mediums and orality are indeed wide-reaching: Whereas in the classroom the child faces no technical obstructions in beholding the teacher’s lesson, the child aspiring to learn through a screen might be unable to connect to their online classroom, should their access to internet fail. Whereas in the school the child can freely ask their teacher for an answer to their question, the Zoom call student can receive no answer in the face of technical difficulties like a frozen computer monitor, insufficient bandwidth or other technological obstructions. Whereas the schoolmaster’s class is a place of social interaction, screen-based learning is socially isolating. Whereas in the classroom the educator has command over their pupils through their physical presence and cognizance, the screen-based teacher is incapable of gathering what is beyond reach of their microphone and camera. Whereas the traditional learning background rests on the cultivation of language and literacy, the principal discipline found in the screen’s concrete image is emotion.
The point is that the mediums at our disposal carry with them the ability to establish new cultural sensibilities, an example of which is the cultural mindset purporting that there is little distinction between what takes place in the physical classroom and that which might occur through remote learning, that one medium is just as effectual as the next, and that one medium can be put in place of another without altering the structure, meaning, texture or context of the content to which it contains. But this view is in need of amendment, for it has become evident that the traditional idea of schooling cannot be copied into the virtual environment by even the most masterful teachers.
Certainly, for this fact was demonstrated in late January, 2021, when widespread internet outages in part of the East Coast led to many Americans unable to telework and access remote learning classes, to which widespread issues affected Google, Verizon, Zoom, YouTube, Slack, Amazon Web Services and more. “In Northern Virginia, the outages wreaked havoc in online classrooms, bringing the virtual school day to a standstill,” remarked an article from The Washington Post. “In Alexandria City Public Schools, which serves 16,000 and is currently offering online-only instruction, many teachers could not dial into Zoom to lead their Tuesday afternoon classes. And in Fairfax County Public Schools, whose 186,000 students make it the largest school system in the state, students were unable to log into virtual lessons, according to a tweet from the school division. Like neighboring Alexandria, Fairfax is pursuing 100 percent remote learning.”
It has been my aim, here, to show how our mediums of communication vary cultural discourse, and how this fact is especially true in schools, and elsewhere. Some have found it odd that, in a culture in which the effects of our mediums of communication are so wide-reaching, such matters are rarely addressed, if they are even noticed at all. This is so because technology does not court a close examination of its own sequels. But if we recall the words of McLuhan, then my efforts here will not be fruitless. The Medium is the Message. Our mediums form culture.
Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman, P. 7
Thomas, J. O., & Dubar, R. T. (2021). Disappearing in the age of hypervisibility: Definition, context, and perceived psychological consequences of social media ghosting. Psychology of Popular Media, 10(3), 291–302. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000343
Verlenden JV, Pampati S, Rasberry CN, et al. Association of Children’s Mode of School Instruction with Child and Parent Experiences and Well-Being During the COVID-19 Pandemic — COVID Experiences Survey, United States, October 8–November 13, 2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2021;70:369–376. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7011a1external icon.