Paul Levinson is an award-winning science fiction writer and, a dozen years ago, set up one of the first online education courses -- "Connected Education" -- with his wife, Tina Vozick.
Levinson has published 5 non-fiction books, including The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (Routledge, 1997: paperback edition, 1998). The Soft Edge traces the evolution of technological media from their alienating abstract origins to their "anthropomorphic" implementation. In his book, Levinson systematically reveals how each technological invention becomes more user-friendly over time. The media's "natural" tendency to become increasingly interactive is the prime buttress supporting Levinson's infectious optimism.
The approach of the fin-de-millennium seems to be an apt time for a talk with Paul Levinson. His new book, Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium, will be available in the spring of 1999. Going beyond the content of Levinson's recent publications, this agent strives to retrieve additional data about the philosophical route that the shape of the future may follow.
IA: Right from the preface, you list some "unintentional consequences" that have resulted from the proliferation and implementation of new media. What are your opinions on the current Y2K crisis? Is all the panic surrounding this phenomenon merely hype? If so, what kind of remedial media do you see required to meet this approaching challenge?
PL: I consider the Y2K crisis a very minor example of an unintended consequence: it is a problem, and it was unintended, but it stems from a glitch or a weakness in the programming. Classic unintended consequences -- the ones which have the greatest impact -- are ones which result from the technology operating just as planned, from a technical standpoint. Thus, when telephones were brought into homes, no one realized that they would end the home as a sanctuary from public information and intrusion; yet the phone did just that, because it worked so well!
To return to Y2K, it's not a question of a remedial medium needed to change this computer oversight; it's a much more minor kind of fix -- a media band-aid, or splint, rather than an additional arm.
II. "The Wild West"
IA: You have made it quite clear that the ascendancy of the alphabetic over the pictographic technologies has contributed extensively to the political rise of nation states modeled after the western world. With the newer iconic technologies coming into effect, do you see a decreased emphasis on an exclusively western worldview?
PL: Good question. Other things being equal, yes, I would see the resurgence of iconic communication as leading to a lessening of a western (alphabetic) worldview. But other things may not be so equal: after two and more millennia of the alphabet, it may be so deeply inculcated into our culture that it will mold the iconic technologies to its prescriptions. Indeed, look how alphabetic the Internet is, even with the advent of icons (and sounds).
If I were forced to hazard a guess, I'd say that most of the world may already be alphabetically hardwired -- in the sense that Chomsky says we're hardwired for "grammatical" (i.e., intelligent, logically-parsed) language structure.
III. "Feedback filters"
IA: Will the resulting feedback-loop between the virtually "physical" interaction of the user and the pictographic communication (i.e. VR worlds) be potent enough to initiate a genuine, "globalized" society? In other words, will we still be browsing the global village of the future with a view filtered by a predominantly North American society?
PL: I would say yes, for the reasons I gave above. But such a North-Americanized society will still be genuinely global, because everyone will be speaking the same alphabetized language. As I say in my new book -- Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium , due out this spring from Routledge -- in the new global online village, there are no barbarians. Everyone speaks the same language; so pictures may be less important.
IV. "In the name of decency..."
IA: Being Canadian, I was not entirely familiar with the US "Communications Decency Act of 1996" until reading about it in your book. Do you think that such an act will gain or lose popularity in the near future? Does this law have a direct impact on American-based Internet service providers?
PL: The Act was found unconstitutional by the US Supreme court in July 1997. But I expect it will resurface, in a new, smoother version of the Act -- one designed to get by the Supreme Court's objections to the first version. (The Court held that the proscription against "indecent" language was too broad, among other things.) If the Act comes back, it will indeed have an impact on American-based Internet providers -- who have not exactly been in the forefront of fights for freedom of press and speech on the Internet. Rather, the vanguard in those battles has come from individuals and organizations like the ACLU and the EFF.
V. "Time and Effort"
IA: Considering the amount of bandwidth and information one can have access to these days, I cannot see servers like Netscape/AOL getting directly involved with an individual's private life. It would take too much time and effort to do a "witch-hunt." Have recent trends, such as American youth gravitating towards right-wing conservatism, had any effect on sustaining the act's legitimacy to this present day?
PL: Right, AOL and others don't want to get involved, which means that they're not likely to contest government regulations too vigorously either. I think the CDA's support doesn't come from American youth getting more conservative but from mainstream adult America and its concerns about pornography -- which always fall on receptive ears in Congress, for reasons I explain in more detail in Chapter 14 of The Soft Edge.
VI. "The Spirit of '93"
IA: Some conspiracy theorists consider writers who have an optimistic attitude towards the current technologies to be themselves a protector of the hidden status quo. Book titles such as Silicon Snake Oil and Data Trash suggest that the hype surrounding the VR community is akin to a slickly marketed sales scam.
The extremes of this approach are best represented in the writings of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. The Krokers have basically accused the "digerati" of siphoning the common user's informational power base in order to (in your words) "protect their eroding turfs" (p.52). For example, I recall a 1993 VR symposium that, financially, was heavily backed by computer corporations and top-notch academic (primarily west coast) institutions.
What are your opinions on this accusation?
PL: My opinion is that the accusation is nonsense -- not because big corps might not like to have this influence, but because the very centrifugal, decentralizing currents that Microsoft and the Internet are generating run directly contrary to this sort of central, under-the-surface control.
Whatever big corps may intend, the enormous growth of information technology has increased the power of individual users. Look at Microsoft: it is still struggling to catch up with Netscape in the browser market. In other words, their very marketing of Windows and the Internet boom it engendered, created a situation in which a start-up could outsell a mega-corp in an initially unpredicted part of the market. And Microsoft's awareness of this now won't be of much help either: a computer -- with its interactive, creative possibilities -- on every desk empowers users in a way that TV, radio, newspapers, and all prior media (with the partial exception of the telephone) never could.
VII. "Changing their tune?"
IA: I enjoyed reading about how Neil Postman confessed that he had never actually attended an online learning session in person. However, I was surprised to see Michael Heim being named as a critic in defense of the old print medium. Admittedly, I had only read his later books before interviewing him (The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 1993; Virtual Realism, 1998). I guess Heim's attitude has shifted from being highly critical of hypertext in his book Electric Language (1987) to being a staunch (yet not blind) supporter of Virtual Reality within the context of info-ecology.
Is it possible that Heim had actually never experienced the long-term benefits of hypertext when writing Electric Language? If so, is it possible that Neil Postman may eventually change his tune after attending some online courses?
PL: Michael Heim (who is actually a friend now) had experience with word processing and lots of online communication when he wrote Electric Language, but not with hypertext. Yes, he has changed his mind a lot since then (the beginning of this occurred, to some extent, when I invited him to give an interactive lecture on my online campus -- Connected Education -- in the late 1980s). As for Postman -- who was my Ph.D. adviser, and is also a personal friend, though we obviously disagree strongly in our views of media -- well, anything's possible. In the 1960s, Postman was a supporter and not a critic of new technologies (see his "Teaching as a Subversive Activity"). So he changed his opinion once, and could do so again. But still, I have problems seeing him reverse himself after he's gone so far down the techno-bashing path.
VIII. "Critical Contradictions"
IA: In his book Technopoly (1993), Postman did admit to writing his book on a laptop. In addition, midway through his book, he noticed that recently developed computer monitors emitted lower levels of radiation. Therefore, he realized that there was a possibility that electrically charged text could gradually become as harmless to the eye as the process of reading a book.
Do you think it may just be a matter of time before most of these critics change their ways and learn to ride the tide of the world wide wave?
PL: I think some critics will and, like Heim, already have. On the other hand, as Kuhns pointed out, revolutions in thinking are not really won, but the old guard simply fades from the scene. Rather than a decisive victory, there are, as time goes on, fewer and fewer supporters of the original view. My guess is that, for better or worse, this will be fate of most late-20th-century critics of the Internet.
IX. "Life after Darwin?"
"Digital Darwins"/Mississippi State University
IA: You tend to support your ideas by Darwinist analogies (DNA, natural selection etc.). Understandably, new discoveries in genetic research and nanotechnology are fostering a renewed inspiration by Neo-/Post-Darwinist interpretations. My question is, if the entire Darwinist paradigm were to shift (or drop) off the face of the earth tomorrow, could the bulk of your media-driven theories be reconstituted from scratch? Are there any other analogies close at hand?
PL: Good question. First, I think it is important to keep in mind that even though new discoveries are extending the Darwinian model (for example, by showing how some traits continue even though they have no immediate adaptive significance -- perhaps because the DNA that gives rise to them also gives rise to traits that do enhance survival), these advances are all still very much within the larger Darwinian, naturally selective model. Thus, my guess would be that were Darwin ever replaced, it would be in the way that Einstein replaced Newton -- Newtonian physics still work beautifully in the "mesocosm," i.e. at sizes and speeds above the subatomic and below the cosmic level.
With that in mind, I am quite comfortable with hitching the fate of my theories about the evolution of media to the Darwinian wagon. Perhaps someone else than I could take my "anthropotropic" theory (I coined that word back in the 1970s, in my doctoral dissertation, "Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media") and render it via a non-Darwinian model. But I can't imagine rendering my theory any other than the Darwinian way -- and, indeed, I can't see the evolution of organisms in any other way (though I'm sure there will continue to be refinements and adjustments, major and minor, to the Darwinian model).
X. "A Transhuman Stream"
IA: You quite frequently use the words "anthropotropic" and "anthropy" to emphasize the subjective approach of your book as a "natural history and future of the information revolution" (hence your subtitle). Does the media's "anthropotropic" tendency to gravitate towards more "human" virtues include that of the "PostHuman" or "TransHuman"? Robert Pepperell has spoken at length about Post-Humanism whereas Michael Heim has experienced "Transhuman Structures" in the virtual arena. Would the epoch of free-thinking machines and assorted digital species be considered a "post-anthropotropic" period in our development or does it end in an ultimate (albeit terminal) humanism?
PL: In as much as anything PostHuman or TransHuman flows from the human in the first place, it would still be "anthropotropic," which I see as an evolution of media towards increasing human consonance. Now, part of being human is to be free-thinking (i.e., we are capable of autonomous thought); if/when we develop digital media (artificial intelligences) that can do this, they -- the digital AIs -- will be functioning in a more human way (that is, more human than a computer that can only do what its programs provide).
This question also relates to my view of nature: though we (humanity) seem to go beyond nature, everything we do is natural -- since we come from nature in the first place (see also my notion of "transmaterial" on p. 197 of The Soft Edge). The human mind is "transmaterial," meaning, in part, that it animates all the material in which our human ideas are embodied; if this techno-material is "animated" to the point where it is capable of independent thought, it is just that much more human.
XI. "Optical Illusions?"
IA: Will optical computer networks surpass digital systems in the near future? If so, will we see an awkward transitional phase oscillating between binary modes of thinking and a newer (Gestalt) mode of perceiving?
PL: Probably on the first, possibly on the second -- but the more important answer to both, for me, is that I'm not particularly interested in the hardware. The effects are what interests me. This is not to say that the hardware is not an important question -- how the kilogram of matter that is our brain does what it does is extraordinarily important. But as a social theorist, rather than a physical scientist, I personally tend to get involved in questions concerning the impact of human thought upon the world (including how the thought is embodied in media). Thus, my main interest in optical technology is what it may do differently, better, or worse than today's electronic media. And, as a subsidiary question, is its performance, in comparison to electronic transactions, more or less like the human brain's?
One other point: if by optical you mean more iconic, then no, I don't see optical as replacing today's binary modes (see my comments to your first group of questions, in which I talk about the pervasiveness of the alphabetic/binary modes of communication and thought). Regarding the philosophical effects, I think the profound break or departure point has already occurred in the shift from analog to digital; the shift from electronic to optical, as far as I can see (nice word in this context), will just be an enhancement of the digital in terms of speed, accuracy, and amounts of data conveyed.
XII. "Engines of Capacity"
IA: Do you think that some current developments in nanotechnology will lead towards unintentioned consequences of the same magnitude that you have proposed for other developments (K. Eric Drexler's seminal "Engines of Creation," 1989, comes to mind)?
PL: Yes, I think nano-tech has an enormous capacity for unintended consequences. The more fundamental we get in our technology -- the smaller the building blocks of existence it addresses -- the greater the capacity for unintended effects. However, via my optimism about human rational control I see the long-term results as potentially highly beneficial.
XIII. "Sub-Atomic Aspirations"
Tiny machines working away in arteries
"Nanotechnology," (c) Microscopy-UK/Lightscape Magazine
IA: Do you share Drexler's brand of optimism regarding nanotechnology? He does go to the outer limits of our desire and imagination... unlimited space and wealth? Is this possible? Drexler seems to know exactly how one can attain such fruits.
PL: I share Drexler's general optimism, but I don't know enough -- specifically and first-hand -- about nano-tech to say that it will be the way to attain unlimited space and wealth.
As to my general optimism: in my essay "Technology as the Cutting Edge of Cosmic Evolution" (1984; reprinted in my Learning Cyberspace, Anamnesis Press, 1995), I talk about what I call "outerspace Keynesianism" -- borrowing from the unlimited energy and material credit of the universe. I think this unlimited reality is within our reach -- unlimited energy and resources of the universe, in comparison to what we have available down here on Earth.
What I'm not positive about, however, is what specific routes and devices we'll use to get this unlimited reality. Maybe many different kinds. As for nano-tech, although it seems promising, too many times in our history a scientific principle has taken hundreds of years, even millennia, to be used effectively in technology. The ancient Greeks, for example, had a quite accurate atomic theory; and we know about the unimplemented inventions of Leonardo, etc.
XIV. "What's new?"
IA: You have a new book, called Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium, coming out this spring. Is this a working title for the book or the definite title? Will advance drafts be available for previewing online and/or offline? Will you conduct online lectures and seminars pertaining to this new book? How will this new book differ from The Soft Edge? Any revisions/updates in mind?
PL: Yep, Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium is the definite title. The book will be published in the UK in March, and in North America in April. And yes, I'll be lecturing and seminaring my head off about it. It differs from The Soft Edge in two main ways:
(1) Digital McLuhan takes 14 of McLuhan's ideas (ranging from famous ones like "the medium is the message" to lesser known ones such as "discarnate man") and shows how they presaged, are fulfilled in and help us better understand the digital age.
(2) Due to that focus, Digital McLuhan is more present- and future- oriented than The Soft Edge, where history dances through at least half the book. (In Digital McLuhan, history is brought in many times but more in the form of brief points of comparison or to establish a context).
XV. "Always a price to pay..."
IA: I would like to talk a little bit about online education. When it comes to tuition, can a monetary value be attached to online education? Is there (or will there be) such a thing as online scholarships/bursaries that function beyond the usual contests?
PL: At present, the monetary value is either
(a) exactly what the tuition would be for an equivalently credited course offline, or
(b) More than the equivalent offline tuition, with the logic that online education offers something more -- both the content and the experience of learning online.
Scholarships online are certainly a possibility -- they would serve the same purpose as scholarships offline. In general, as long as the economics of the offline world continues as is, the economics of online communities will be tied to it (a loaf of bread still costs x amount of money offline; hence, the online teacher has to get paid a given wage; hence, tuition will be set at an equivalent rate). Eventually, we may see a revolution in money and credit itself as more and more business will be totally conducted and consummated online -- but that's still a while away. (But in a self-contained online environment, , for example, students might pay for their courses with services they could render online, rather than with money that comes from and relates to the offline environment.)
XVI. "Paper Connections"
IA: When people virtually "graduate" from your Connected Education course, do they receive a paper certificate?
PL: If the course is part of a degree-granting program -- as, for example, our current MA in Creative Writing with the Bath College of Higher Education in England -- then, yes, the school indeed issues a paper diploma. Again, paper certificates continue to have meaning in the offline world; as long as they do, they will serve a function in all online activities, because the people online also have offline needs and responsibilities.
XVII. "Heim's Word"
IA: In my interview with Michael Heim, I discussed the possibility that advances in holography, nanotechnology, and sensory "integration" could eventually lead to the solidification of the World Wide Web. Could an unprecedented breed of "Exo-Virtuality" (Heim's word) finally render all previous media obsolete? Could a new, "virtual" material replace paper as ultimate legal certification if solidified and mobile?
PL: Star Trek "beaming" -- known as "teleportation" (instant transportation) in science fiction -- is probably a better word (though I like Heim's, too). We first need to understand how far removed that would be from our current evolution of technology, in which information has traveled faster and faster, with ever more full-bodied forms of representation (color, three dimensions etc.), but always a significant chasm away from actual materiality (you can put your hand through a hologram). In effect, the transmission and reception of information has improved and become ever more life-like -- but as a form of communication (representation or re-presentation) not transportation (which is a literal presentation of the material original).
As I pointed out in "Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media" (NYU, 1979), communication and transportation were once one and the same -- to talk to people, you needed their physical presence and had to travel to them.
With the invention of writing, the two become severed -- as Freud says, "writing is the voice of an absent person." In order to re-unite these two -- in teleportation -- we would need a revolution in transportation as well as communication.
I expect that, if and when this happens, it would indeed have to replace all communication systems (such as the Internet), and all transportation systems, as the two re-merge into one.
XVIII. "Homeland"
IA: Could the concept and implementation of "Nation States" be virtually revived within the confines of an online infrastructure? Perhaps --providing the net were to externalize its virtuality -- one would need a kind of "passport" to travel from one webzone to another? Would such a passport need traditional hard-copy documentation (such as paper)?
PL: Yes, to the degree that a nation state reflects a community of similar interests -- for example, belief in democracy -- rather than a geographic location, virtual or online nation states are certainly a possibility. My rule of thumb (actually, then, a "digital" rule) for what works in the virtual is: if the essence of the transaction is informational, it can work online. Since "nation-ness" is at least as informational as it is physical -- because of the community of beliefs -- it qualifies as a potentially successful online entity.
But in order to make this work, there has to be an "externality": the "nation" could be defined entirely in terms of where one "was" online -- say, what positions one took on given issues -- not where one lived, physically. Thus, physical passports would be totally unnecessary. But virtual passports -- what we today call "passwords" -- would be very important, if we wanted to make sure that certain locations on the Web, certain virtual countries, were accessible only to their "citizens."
IA: Would search engines, such as Yahoo, Excite, etc. begin to simulate a kind of "United Nations" or "NATO"? Perhaps Internet service providers would undertake the task or be the nations themselves?
PL: Yes, we could certainly have "leagues of online nations," or nations of nations, in which communities would form cooperative relationships based on similarity of interests and perspectives. Today's search engines might indeed be considered prototypes of these "meta" cybernations.
IA: Is there any evidence of emerging "cybergangs" or beginnings of organized online crime? Will our Global Village soon need bars over the windows?
PL: Alas, yes -- crime online ranges from totally virtual crime (say, hacking, or destruction of sites with viruses) to use of the Web for offline crimes (say, stalking a person online, with the intent of doing the person harm offline). Because of that, we will indeed need a police presence online (and already have it).
But note that this should be deployed only in prevention of crimes, and pursuit of criminals. Pornography, in and of itself, is not a crime (and certainly should not be). Nude photos online are nobody's business except that of the person who appears in the photo. In contrast, putting a virus online which, when downloaded, can erase everything on the hard disk -- well, that sort of activity is everyone's business and we should use whatever means we have to stop it.
XIX. "Child's Play"
IA: I was fascinated by that tale of an Internet romance between a married male and an 11-year-old girl. What really struck me was the fact that the man was in utter denial of her "real" age (and expected certain cognitive abilities). I have noticed that in chat rooms, Instant Messager (IM) sessions and e-mail correspondences, age as well as gender become harder to discern when it comes to the level of cognitive ability. I found it rather humorous that John Shea's target audience (U.S. congress) reacted with a much lower level of apparent cognition than the girl.
Would it be more or less ethical for a democratic government to issue some sort of online Standard Cognitive Aptitude Test in the place of a mere proof of age (for example, AdultcheckID)? Could such a standard based on cognition rather than physical age lead to "healthy" relationships between consenting adults and children?
PL: On balance, yes -- I think adulthood objectively defined in terms of performance on a test is preferable to the current arbitrary age definitions (e.g., 18 is adult).
I say "on balance," though, because I'm not too thrilled with tests for these kinds of assessments. You might well have an extremely bright person -- adult, cognitively -- of any chronological age, who might also be nervous about taking tests and thus might perform poorly on a cognitive aptitude exam.
Nonetheless, I think testing, though seriously flawed, is still an improvement over the way our current world assesses childhood vs. adulthood -- which has nothing to do either with biological maturity (which usually occurs between 12 and 15 years of age) or cognitive capacity (which, according to Piaget, is at adult levels by about 12).
XX. "Faxing Instant Coffee"
IA: You point out that one can e-mail descriptions of instant coffee (including relevant hyperlinks and pictures, audio files etc.) but at present or in the near future, cannot e-mail the real item. If nanobots could re-arrange atoms at the sub-molecular level, would the whole idea of e-mailing matter become redundant? Could one digitally "encode" the basic constituents of the former and "press" them onto a blank molecular template? In 1989, Drexler imagined that these nanobots could reconfigure molecules as soon as 50 years from then.
PL: The answer to this question relates to what I said earlier about communication vs. transportation: yes, if/when teleportation is achieved, it will render all communication, including e-mail, unnecessary. I can imagine not only teleportation but instant cloning, and a shared mentality of all clones, which/who could instantly be remerged into the original. The result would be that our actual physical bodies -- versions of us -- could be sent out, instead of our messages.
Nanobots from Atlantic Unbound
"Digital Culture: In Games Begin Responsibilities"
Will nanobots do this? Possibly -- again, I'm not familiar enough with that field to comment more specifically. Will it happen within the next 50 years? Probably not -- though, again, predictions about future consummations are notoriously unreliable, both negative predictions about what cannot happen within a certain amount of time (see, for example, Hertz's view that radio would never be developed as a broadcast medium because it would take a broadcast transmitter as big as a continent to do it), and positive predictions about what will definitely be the case soon (see, for example, the history of predictions about the video phone -- the aging heir-apparent, I call it, because it's been predicted to replace the telephone since the 1920s).
At present, though, my best guess is that we're at least a few quantum leaps away from the complete re-merging of communication and transportation, or the obsolescence of communication by instant, everywhere-at-once transportation.
XXI. "Platonobots & Socraticons"
IA: Should "human" intelligence really be the goal of artificial entities? What about new abstract forms of intelligence -- something meta-human (and "quasi-Platonic"?} that wouldn't be dependent on direct human interaction for survival? Perhaps an intelligent entity of our own creation would not have to prove its cognitive abilities to the human species? Could it not remain by itself to contemplate the detached framework of its own benevolent consciousness?
PL: Part of the answer to the conclusion of your question is Kantian: if we invented an AI whose intelligence was so different from ours that we could not even recognize it as intelligence, then it would likely be on its own to do its "thinking" -- because that would be going on (even under our very noses) without our knowledge.
But to the degree that we recognized the artificial entity as intelligent, that would mean several things:
a) it would have some similarity to human intelligence, otherwise we wouldn't be able to recognize it as such (see Plato's Meno paradox: we only know that which we already have knowledge of -- we recognize the new as knowledge, to the degree that we already have knowledge that the new has knowledge).
b) to the degree that we recognized it as intelligent, our involvement with it would be almost irresistible. Think about it: how would we prevent ourselves from being involved with such an extraordinary creation? All kinds of motives -- ethical, to prevent harm to these entities; selfish, to benefit from them -- would present themselves.
Thus, whatever our initial goals might be in the development of such entities, my expectation would be -- for the above reasons -- that we'll be intimately involved in their "lives".
IA: Perhaps such an entity would remain aloof to our concerns? Could we still get a certain degree of satisfaction by simply acting as a curious voyeur?
PL: Yes, such an entity might well remain aloof. In a real sense, such entities would be much like our children -- and we might well need to learn, as their "parents," when to back off and let them live their own lives.
This connection relates to what I say about children in The Soft Edge (and in this interview): they deserve the presumptions of free will and rational choice at a much earlier age than our society currently allows. Clearly, a newborn infant, even a three-year old child, requires control by parents. But the older the child gets, the more that control should be modified into guidance, and the less dictatorial that guidance must be. (And I say this as the parent of a 15- and 12-year old.)
The degree to which we get our relationships with our own children more clear -- more free -- will correspond to our ability to deal more constructively with our AI creations, when they eventually come along...
© Hyperactive Co. 1999