Stated baldly in this way, this is a totally unremarkable argument. Since electronic communication arose in the mid-Nineteenth Century, people have been grandly claiming that it will usher in a new era of harmony and connectedness (see Marvin 1988 for a fascinating compendium of "electrical revolution" narratives). It takes only a brief look at the history of technological revolutions to make one suspicious of such claims. Consider the following effusion:
How potent a power is [communication technology] destined to
become in the civilization of the world! This binds together
by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is
impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer
exist, while such an instrument has been created for an
exchange of thought between all nations of the earth.
This claim was made in 1858 by Briggs and Maverick regarding the
telegraph (Carey 1989). Such examples of "the rhetoric of the
technological sublime" (to use a phrase that Carey borrows from Leo
Marx) should help us resist the temptation to assume that walls
between people will automatically fall to any technological ram's
horn that comes along.
[l. 89]On the other hand, there is no doubt that communication and information technology has made astounding changes in social organization and in the status of knowledge. Carey himself has shown how the telegraph effected profound changes in "popular ideas" of time and space, economic and social conditions, and philosophical notions of the relationship between transportation and communication. His point is simply that the results of a technological revolution are frequently more subtle than are supposed by proponents of the technological sublime, and frequently more far-reaching. If we proceed with caution, then, we can use some of the changes that have already happened as indicators of larger patterns, in turn enabling us to predict, or at least guess more accurately, what new technologies can bring.
The particular pattern I am interested in here is the breakdown of specialized realms of knowledge in the age of electronic communication. The rise of specialized knowledge out of the warm, intimate "noetic world" of primary orality has been exhaustively discussed by Havelock (1963), Ong (1982), Logan (1986) and others. I won't rehearse their arguments here except to say that these authors attribute most of the characteristics of the modern "western mind," including the specialization of knowledge, to the ability to record thought in abstract, categorizable units that are distanced from the authors. Though some authors challenge the extreme version of what has been called the "cognitive great divide" theory (Bizell, 1988), its basic premise -- that the modern world could not have come about without the distancing, specializing power of printed text -- has in the main held firm. [l. 117]
The second part of this theory, argued most forcibly by Marshall McLuhan, is that electronic communication is reversing this trend. McLuhan's famous phrase "the global village" is frequently taken to mean simply that people can connect easily to others anywhere in the world. McLuhan, however, uses the phrase to point to a much deeper change in social organization and individual psychology. In _Understanding Media_, he argues that the electric media speak the language of narrative and myth rather than abstracted intellectual thought. Under their influence, the children of the television age are growing up with an outlook marked by "wholeness, unity and depth." However, he also calls attention to a profound discontinuity between the retribalized social sphere and the still fragmented academic world. At school, the child "encounters a world organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint" (McLuhan 1964:ix). For the academic world is still organized according to the abstract, linear, classificatory world of print. "We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age (McLuhan 1964:20).
McLuhan is always better at proposing ideas in general terms than at working out their detailed implications. In this essay I would like to examine this discontinuity more closely, using Joshua Meyrowitz's theories of media to provide a conceptual framework in which to explore the question of why the academic world has continued to be dominated by these "old, fragmented space and time patterns." I will also turn to recent explorations of the rhetoric of disciplinarity to characterize this fragmentation more exactly and to provide a basis for speculating on how information technology may extend the "retribalization" of popular culture into the intellectual world. [l. 150]
In _No Sense of Place_ (1985), Meyrowitz offers a detailed analysis of the falling-together of cultural divisions in the television age. He does so by using Goffman's social theories to extend McLuhan's basic analysis of electric media. Goffman (1974) argues that human interactions are governed by social roles, roles which shift according to social situation. For instance, when a doctor is "on stage," performing in her expert role as a professional examining a patient, she plays out a specific set of interactions that emphasise professionalism, objectivity, expertise, and distance. When "back stage," such as at lunch with her colleagues, she may display much more informal behaviours, including both doubts and glib remarks that she would never display in front of a patient. The same applies to waiters while they are serving as opposed to while they are chatting in the kitchen.
Meyrowitz applies this dramaturgical model to media. Goffman relates social situation to physical setting, but for Meyrowitz, it is not so much the literal geography of a social setting -- the eating area as opposed to the kitchen -- that matters, but the pattern of information flow, which is only incidentally related to physical location. A "given pattern of access to social information, a given pattern of access to the behaviour of other people" (37) controls the elements of the social drama. Note, for instance, how we can enter a totally different social information system, with attendant changes in behaviour, just by placing a hand over a telephone receiver and making an unprofessional aside to a spouse or co-worker. We leave the social space of our telephone conversation with, say, a client, and enter another, less formal social space simply by entering another realm of communication.
Meyrowitz goes on to argue that in the past many social distinctions have been maintained because information flow could be controlled. Leaving aside electric media, information flow normally takes place either through face-to-face interactions or through print. Face-to-face interactions are controlled by space: just as waiters can talk about different things in the kitchen than they do in the restaurant, parents can talk about different things in their bedrooms than they do at the dinner table, and men can talk differently with other men on an all-male fishing trip from the way they can at a mixed-gender party. The world of print, on the other hand, is controlled by access to the code. Children are completely excluded from the print world until school age; other social and professional spheres are separated by layers of specialization in the print code, layers that naturally develop. Without special training, the key texts of one discipline are simply unreadable by members of another discipline. [l. 198]
Television changes much of this by making social information available everywhere to anyone who can press a channel changer. Children and adults, men and women, experts and novices, public and private figures, all have access to more or less the same information system. Back stage and front stage have given way to the universally accessible "middle stage" virtual space of television. As a result, argues Myrowitz, the generation of the sixties, the first generation to have grown up with television, saw the breaking-down of barriers between the sexes, between children and adults, between expert and novice, between authority figures and the general public. For better or for worse, society has become vastly more homogeneous.
This breakdown of distinctions between realms of information has not, however, been translated very effectively into the academic world. Despite recent trends to valorize "interdisciplinarity," academic knowledge is still deeply divided by discipline. This division is not simply a matter of differences in terminology, stocks of factual knowledge, or objects of analysis. As Kuhn has argued, it is a matter of differences in shared premises or "paradigms."
What Herbert Simons (1990) has called "the rhetorical turn" in the study of disciplinary knowledge put these differences into a rhetorical perspective by applying the rhetorical concept of "commonplaces." In Aristotle's rhetorical scheme, speakers could reference two different types of inventional resources. The first, the "special topics," referred to the specialized knowledge that characterizes a particular discipline. A political argument, for instance, would be based on special knowledge of subjects such as war and peace, national defense, imports and exports, etc. For Aristotle, however, these realms of specialized knowledge were far less interesting than the more philosophical "general" or "universal" topics such as magnitude, degree, and time. These topics are the foundation of basic logical principles that any trained speaker can use to mold the minutiae of the special topics and the individual facts of the case into a well-formed deductive argument. [l. 237]
The Roman name for these topoi, the _loci communes_ or "commonplaces," captures the sense in which rhetoricians thought of them as metaphorical locations in which ideas were stored and to which a speaker could go for the materials of argument. Rhetorical analysis of modern academic texts suggests that modern disciplines are not just divided by different stocks of knowledge of "special topics." Rather, they are divided by different kinds of arguments which are unique the discourse of each discipline. McCloskey (1993), for instance, documents ways in which writing in the field of economics is not just "about" markets; it is dominated by a way of thinking that uses the idea of "market" as a kind of universal metaphor upon which all manner of arguments are based. It is a metaphor that anyone could use, but for those within the discourse community of economics, it takes on complex and deep significance. It becomes not just another metaphor, but a fundamental building-block of argument.
Similarly, Simons (1990), Bazerman (1988) and others have argued that the structure of a scientific report is not just a matter of superficial style, but rather a complex stock of argumentative moves or commonplaces that serve to reinforce and reproduce a view of the world that characterizes the discipline of science. In short, the *common* topics have become, in their way, as specialized as the *special* topics.
The relative homogeneity of the ancient commonplaces can be seen as a holdover from the old oral world, a world which, as Ong documents, took many centuries to lose its grip on human consciousness. The deeply divided commonplaces of modern disciplines arose as face-to-face communication and print communication increasingly diverged after the Renaissance. This divergence created disciplines with different back stage and different front stage information systems.
These staging areas are separated, following Meyrowitz' argument, by physical space in the one case and typographic space in the other. It is only partially a fanciful pun to equate this sense of "place" as separate stocks of argumentative resources with the literal "places" -- faculty coffee lounges, academic conferences, specialized journals -- which allow discourses to proceed within disciplines without significant interaction with other disciplines.
To return to my original question: why has this distinction persisted in academic knowledge when electronic media have broken down most social distinctions based on separate information systems? Clearly, there is no "middle stage" area in the academic disciplines that corresponds to television. Television, a dramatic medium ideally suited both to entertainment and the maintenance of popular culture through reproduction of mythic structures, is totally unsuited to the complex arguments that typify academic knowledge. Academic knowledge remains, not just print oriented, but dependent on a complex interaction between face-to-face interaction and print. [l. 291]
The academic conference is a case in point. Scholars go to great lengths to meet face-to-face, despite the fact that the main "front stage" activity of most conferences is the bizarre academic habit of reading papers at one another. Why don't scholars fax their papers to each other and save money and fossil fuels? They don't because they also value the back stage personal conversations that flesh out the front stage activity with meaningful social interchange. My point is that both of these social settings are bounded information systems distinguished by what journal one publishes in, what department one works in, what hallways one frequents. Without a "middle stage" area equivalent to television, the academy has remained remarkably resistant to the relative homogeneity celebrated (McLuhan) or lamented (Postman) in the everyday social world.
Information technology has the potential to bring about profound changes in intellectual knowledge because it can provide this middle stage area, an area in which the "specialized" commonplaces of disciplinary discourse can no longer maintain their separateness. It is obvious that most electronic interchanges of information are relatively independent of physical geography. But it is not the ease with which one can exchange e-mail with a colleague in Tokyo that makes networked information interchange so different from previous media. The difference hinges on the fact that, although networked information interchange tends to be spontaneously organized into quasi-social "networlds" in a variety of manners -- the people with whom one regularly corresponds, the listserves, newsgroups and ejournals one subscribes to (see for instance Harasim 1993) -- these virtual worlds of electronic interchange are notoriously leaky.
The reason is that the cross-disciplinary contacts that occur in cyberspace do not happen in clearly demarcated front stage or back stage regions. In one sense, e-mail and related modes of communication are analogous to face-to-face (back stage) conversation, while more formal refereed electronic publishing is analogous to print (front stage) behaviour. Yet both of these forms are essentially textual in nature. They use exactly the same tools of both reading and writing, and frequently one only knows whether one is reading a refereed journal or an unmoderated discussion list by carefully inspecting the masthead (if it has not irretrievably scrolled off the screen). Unlike traditional staging areas, they are marked off only by the social interactions that people choose to perform there, not by any systematic closure of an information system marked by spatial or textual boundaries.
Shoshana Zuboff (1988) has documented the immediate and striking effect that even a simple interoffice conference system has on an organization. In a close ethnographic analysis of a company she calls "DrugCorp," she shows how the installation of an electronic conferencing system almost immediately gave employees a more universal view of the company's operations. They felt integrated into a larger whole, not just specialized parts of an industrial- age machine. Most important, knowledge began to be organized by relevance to the task at hand rather than by department. For instance, when a researcher in the R & D division encountered a problem, he did not go to other R & D people; rather, he entered a message into a conference organized by general subject -- mathematics and statistics -- and received varying answers from across the company. "With that," writes Zuboff, "he not only was able to solve his problem but also felt that he had learned even more about the software package from analysing the differences between these answers" (367). [l. 354]
Hypertext increases further the interconnectivity of network space. As Bolter (1992) points out, print indexing techniques emphasise the systematic retrieval of information within domains of knowledge. They are inherently hierarchical, emphasising categories and subcategories of knowledge. Network space can also be organized hierarchically, but the more natural structure of hypertext is a network rather than a tree structure. The World Wide Web elevates hypertext to a global level, offering the possibility of freely structured connections among documents whose geographical location and whose disciplinary placement are more or less irrelevant.
Nothing in these communications structures necessarily compels people to begin recognizing and using the commonplaces of other discourse communities rather than developing highly specialized lines of argument. Discourse communities have a tendency to be self-perpetuating, as people generally feel more comfortable and at home talking to their own kind and thus tend to reproduce genre distinctions spontaneously. A glance at the groups that naturally form at any large cocktail party will immediately confirm this. Threats to established territorial boundaries can also manifest themselves in reactionary decisions at the management and government level. The interconnectedness that Zuboff noted in DrugCorp, for instance, was rapidly destroyed by a management fearful of the new order of uncontrolled information that it had unleashed. [l. 379]
However, the power of the "bias of communication" (to use Innis's term) lies not in what it compels so much as in what it makes easy. Indexing, for instance was always possible in a manuscript society, but the labour of producing systematic indexes for one-off manuscripts whose pagination inevitably varied from that of other copies was simply too great to make the concept viable. Once print technology made this communications structure easy, it became a standard feature of any academic work. Likewise, interdisciplinary contact and the rise of more shared commonplaces is no less probable because it is not compelled. By breaking down distinctions among information systems, the middle stage space of information technology makes the development of isolated stocks of commonplaces so much more difficult, and interchange among these commonplaces so much easier, that only the most powerfully organized countermovements can even slow it down.
This is not to say that greater use of information technology will necessarily result in the complete breakdown of disciplinary boxes. Nor would it necessarily be good if it were to do so. Kuhn characterises "pre- paradigmatic" knowledge as a chaos of competing premises and non-cumulative tinkering; we have no idea what "post-paradigmatic" knowledge might look like, for we have never had truly non-disciplinary academic knowledge of a modern variety. It is not entirely clear whether the complexity and depth of current disciplinary thought could exist without those very Disciplines to provide a matrix of development; certainly the idea of achieving a unification of knowledge at the expense of taking on the bland uniformity of television is not an appealing thought.
There is no need, however, to push the television analogy this far. Information technology may be capable of dissolving some of the acute differences between fields of study by breaking down the geographic and textual barriers between them, without giving rise to the warm grey soup of McLuhan's "mythic" wholeness and unity. This would be interdisciplinarity in Good and Roberts' (1993) sense of a meeting of expertise from various disciplines in order to solve common problems, rather than a non- disciplinarity analogous to the merging of everyday social spheres described by Meyrowitz. [l. 417]
The residually textual nature of information technology may be sufficient to allow academic fields of knowledge to remake themselves into more integrated spheres of knowledge rather than melt down into total "mythic unity." As noted earlier, television is a fundamentally dramatic and narrative medium unsuited for abstract linear thought or high degrees of specialization. Electronic information interchange, on the other hand, is fundamentally symbolic, requiring if anything a greater rather than lesser degree of ability to process abstractions than does print (Zuboff 1988). This fundamentally abstract nature of the medium may serve to preserve a degree of specialization and disciplinary situatedness because it will maintain at least some of the characteristics of print that have been credited with the creation of the modern noetic world.
However, writing histories of the future is always a dangerous business. Despite the current explosion of the "information highway" version of the rhetoric of the technological sublime, information technology is so new and still so marginal in terms of academic publishing that only the very leading edges of its effects can be glimpsed. Thorough rhetorical analysis of electronic texts as they become more dominant may allow us to track shifts in the disciplinary commonplaces that Simons, McCloskey and others have shown us. But in the meantime, McLuhanesque pattern-watching may give us at least some idea of what we might be looking for. [l. 445]
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