I was born into a house with a telephone. It was a massive, ugly, dial-faced beast which lived in the darkness under the stairs, shrieking occasionally from its lair and insisting that anyone who wished to use it had to stand or crouch awkwardly in the hallway. It was not a user-friendly device but rather both guardian and gateway to the outside world, providing and protecting the only route out of the house other than the front door. When you used it, you were acutely aware that you were communicating with someone who was somewhere else. You couldn’t sit and watch telly or nonchalantly read a magazine whilst pretending to listen. Either you were communicating or you weren’t.
As my family were dragged along on the coat tails of technology, we replaced our turn-dial phone for a push button one, then a cordless one and finally several cordless ones. After I flew the nest my parents invested in a fax, several mobile phones and, at last, an Internet connection. The days of discomfort were over. They could now speak to anyone from any room whilst doing anything they wanted. They could chat on the phone whilst receiving a fax and sending an e-mail with a digital photo attachment, should they so wish. Not yet having joined the broadband revolution[1] they have yet to be able to send video-clips but, surprisingly, their lives have not been wrecked by this inability. They have quite enough ways of communicating.
In the space of my relatively short lifetime, the dynamic of communication in the west has been turned upside down. Thirty years ago there were, in domestic terms, more people than channels. Distance communication was still something different, to which people accommodated themselves, breaking routines, moving from comfort zones and counting pennies.
Today each individual has more channels available to them than they could possibly use. The rise of the mobile phone in the late 1990s made distance communication ubiquitous. People became contactable at all times and in all places. You needed never be alone again. No matter where you were, your friends and family were waiting for you at the end of your arm.
The equally speedy rise of the Internet shows even more clearly how in the modern era we have moulded communication technology around ourselves. In 1964 the New Scientist assembled over a hundred people to explore the “likely developments of the next twenty years.” In their discussions they anticipated something very similar to the Internet:
“An immediate situation will develop with private ownership of computers of limited capabilities which also serve as remote terminals to communicate with centrally located computers. The entire content of the large central files will be readily retrievable at a moment’s notice…”[2]
This impressive prediction was followed by the less than inspiring forecast of which fields would be most affected:
“The consequences will be truly profound in many diverse fields, such for example as agronomy, jurisprudence and medicine.”[3]
In 2000, the Cabinet Office’s Performance and Innovation Unit, noted these predictions and went on to remark wryly:
“Had contributors taken account of the fact that what most people are really interested in… is social communication, market interactions (buying and selling) and sex, then they would not have been surprised to learn that the main uses of the Internet would be social e-mail, e-commerce and pornography.”[4]
Within a matter of years the Internet has been developed around our basic interests, rather than other pursuits (agronomy, jurisprudence, etc.) emerging to use the new technology. Moreover, the ever increasing speed and ever decreasing price of communication technology has allowed us to indulge our passions anywhere we like. No longer are we summoned to the cave under the stairs to propitiate the household god of telephony or to the spare bedroom to pick up our e-mails. Communication will fit neatly into the wasted niches of our lives, bringing a moment of friendship, entertainment or information to the dullest of waits. Railway platforms, bus stops, high street shops, and meeting rooms shall no longer be tedious purgatories of solitude or monotony. Wherever I am I can have one of those special one-2-one moments.
If all this sounds great that’s because it is. The continued economic growth of the West in the 1990s was due, at least in part, to the new media companies. Mobile phones were bought (lost and bought again), houses were wired up, people went on Internet courses, retailers saw new revenue opportunities, advertisers saw new channels, jobs were created and people were happy.
It wasn’t just the economy which benefited from the communications revolution. The Internet genuinely has helped people stay in contact with one another. Mobile phones too, whilst being demonised as antisocial and potential harmful, clearly have social benefits. The reason invariably given for the initial purchase of a mobile – for “the wife”, “the girlfriend” or “the children” when they are travelling – is usually a smokescreen, the sensible self-justification for wanting a new gadget. Nevertheless, their regular use at accidents, emergencies, crimes and even adrift in the Lombok Straits near Bali is sufficient justification for their existence.[5]
Perhaps the greatest benefit of the communications revolution has yet to be seen. The long-promised holy grail of the digital revolution – that it will allow data to travel instead of people – has never really come to pass. For years we have anticipated shrinking cities, reduced pressure on public transport and the slow but insistent rise of city-villages and telecommuting. One only needs to register the daily turmoil of the rail system, the endemic congestion in almost all major conurbations and the fact that only 2% of people ‘homework’ to recognise that this particular brave new world is a long way off.[6]
But this failing is at least widely recognised. Last year Oftel warned that Britain was in danger of becoming “the broadband sick man of Europe.” The fact that if it means anything to the public, broadband is about films and entertainment, indicates how little the potential for fast speed connection is understood. Nevertheless, this is being rectified. The report of the Broadband Stakeholder Group last year was the first step towards addressing this issue. [7]
A final reason, albeit the least momentous one, for welcoming the communication revolution is the number of smiling faces it has created. People are at their best and happiest when relating to other people. Knowing that you are in communion in some way with friends and family wherever you are is genuinely valuable. A mobile phone conversation may not have all the intimate, open, friendly associations of a meal but it is better than silence.
To criticise a mobile phone conversation for not being a meal would be obtuse. Nevertheless, the comparison does at least indicate where the impact of the communications revolution is to be questioned.
Communication disembodies. Only when physically present can people fully understand one another, integrating what they hear with what they see and comprehending their interlocutor as a whole rather than an elusive voice. It is this reason above any other that has led to the development of the icons which grace text messages and e-mails. Tone is hard enough to convey accurately when writing a letter. In an e-mail or SMS it is all but impossible.
Communication can also fragment and the more casual it is, the more likely it is to do so. When technophile author Howard Rheingold visited the archaic Amish community in Pennsylvania he left a message on one of their phones only to find out that it was located in a hut in a neighbour’s pasture. When he asked what was the point of having a phone so far away, he was told, “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It’s not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We’re also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it.’”[8]
If this is a concern with the landline phone, how much more is it so with a mobile. It is extremely difficult to turn off a ringing mobile if you are in the middle of a conversation without at least checking to see who is calling. There are plenty of stories of people on trains or in meetings who have spent their time texting each other remarks about companions or colleagues and barely suppressing their mirth. In this way, communication technology, whilst alleviating your own boredom, can disintegrate situations, exclude people, induce paranoia and cause offence.
Another side to the casualisation of contact, is the rise of ‘guerilla communication’. Anyone who has worked in an office pre- and post- e-mail will testify to the wonderful opportunity that technology offers for avoiding people. Why break awkward news, apologise for an error or ask a difficult question when you can pop the question in their inbox and run for cover to avoid the fallout? The same purpose is, of course, served by answer phones but you can never be 100% sure that the person in question isn’t actually going to pick up the phone when you call. E-mail allows you to lob in your communication grenade and be long gone when it explodes. As an office worker and a coward I have thanked God on many occasions for being able to do so, but in the long run the effect is corrosive, loosening my sense of responsibility and eroding my sense of commitment to other people.
The more sinister side of this capacity for guerrilla communication can be seen in some studies on the perils of new technology. In February 2001 an international survey by Ipsos-Reid found that up to a quarter of young female Internet users said they have felt frightened or upset by things said to them during chatroom sessions, with girls twice as likely as boys to have received unwanted sexual comments or repeated requests for face-to-face meetings. Similarly, parental fears about the identity of participants in child-oriented chat-rooms is well documented, with the Home Office last year suggesting that up to one in five children could be in danger from ‘internet abusers’.
Besides this deliberate misuse of technology, the communications revolution has reshaped the human anatomy. Metaphorically speaking, the last twenty years have seen westerners, through their use of communication and broadcast technology, grow enormous ears and eyes. Virtually no province of the globe is invisible to us. Hardly any conversation, even those whispered privately behind the closed doors of the powerful, is inaudible. The advantages in terms of political accountability are obvious.
However, as we have developed bigger eyes and ears, our hands have remained the same size. Today, individuals see better than ever the suffering of different continents and yet as individuals they can do very little more about it than their forbears. Moreover, seeing and hearing is, in the disembodied nature of communication, a very long way from understanding. Viewed from the comfort of my armchair, third world suffering is slightly sanitised: still terrible but usually not terrible enough for me to do something about it. We have become a generation ever hearing but never understanding, ever seeing but never perceiving.[9]
The final and simplest reason for caution is also, in a sense, anatomical. Our eyes and ears may have grown metaphorically larger but we have the same number as before. We would do well to ask ourselves exactly how many channels we can watch/ websites we can visit/ phones we can use/ text messages can we send in one day. The answer is an awful lot but just as the number of our eyes and ears hasn’t increased, neither has the number of hours in our day. The number of channels available to us is overwhelming and our inability to use them can be guilt-inducing, particularly given the ubiquitous advertising messages which suggest that capitalising on the communications revolution is a duty rather than an option.
And for once the advertising is not lying. The government is genuinely concerned about the widening of the digital divide and the repercussions this will have on tomorrow’s labour market. It is very difficult to construct a united and coherent society when those in the upper income quintile are three times more likely to own a mobile phone than those in the lowest, and those aged 16-24 are eight times more likely to be on-line than those aged over 65.[10]
Any Christian response to this need to be very careful. It would be the easiest thing in the world to slip into reactionary Luddism. What Peter Hain, Minister for Europe, wrote about globalisation in January 2002, would serve well as a guide to communication:
“Between the balaclava rock-throwers with their nihilist ideology on the one hand and the Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Drop the Debt on the other is the same spirit there has always been. Two centuries ago as industrialisation got under way, the former would have been Luddites, trashing factory machines; the latter the embryonic labour movement. The divide is also between failure and success. Like the Luddites, the balaclava boys are totally ineffectual and, in the long term, irrelevant.”[11]
The communications revolution will continue apace and to reject what it has to offer is to consign oneself to the history books. The use that the church made of the last great communications revolution, in the 15th – 16th centuries should serve as an example of what has to be gained by travelling with rather than rejecting technical advances.
Nevertheless, the task remains to steer the revolution in a way which is consonant with Christ’s kingdom. We should not forget what we are dealing with: media. And media should (although rarely does) remain media – that through which communication is maintained – and not become ‘message’, the essence of the communication itself.
No absolutist ideology will serve as an infallible steer for the communications revolution. Different use of different media will be appropriate for different people on different occasions. Nevertheless every act of communication entails issues of control and vulnerability, of individuality and community, raising questions which one day will demand answers: why am I using this channel for this person on this occasion? how am I treating them? am I using the medium for my benefit or for ‘ours’? what is the impact on relationship?
Perhaps, a developed theology of communication has something to learn from communion, with which it shares common linguistic roots. The full union symbolised in communion is to be ultimate goal of all communication, which should be about giving rather than withholding oneself. The regularity of communion should stand as an antidote to our tendency towards self-interested guerrilla communication. The goal of full horizontal fellowship, an integration of the weak (and technophobic) with the strong, should never be lost – technology can be used to excommunicate just as easily as to communicate.
At the dawn of the modern communications revolution in 1844, Samuel Morse sent a famous four word message. He was the first human to communicate with someone who wasn’t physically there and he was struck by the implications of this remarkable achievement. Given that in the West most people spend more time talking to people who aren’t there than who are, it is an awesome message that we would do well to contemplate: “What God hath wrought.”
This article first appeared in Third Way.
[1] Broadband is defined by the Broadband Stakeholder Group as ‘Always on [Internet] access, at work, at home or on the move… capable of supporting genuinely new and innovative interactive content, applications and services and the delivery of enhanced public services.’
[2] The World in 1984, New Scientist
[3] ibid.
[4] Performance and Innovation Unit, The Future and how to think about it, 2000
[5] Rebecca Fyfe sent an SOS text message alerting her boyfriend to the break-up of her charter boat in rough seas off Indonesia in February 2001. Once rescued she told media, “Everyone on the boat is going to get a mobile phone now.”
[6] Social Trends, 2001, ONS
[7] The Broadband Stakeholder Group, Report and Strategic Recommendations, November 2001
[8] Howard Rheingold, ‘Look Who’s Talking’, Wired, January 2000; quoted from The R Option, Schluter and Lee, unpublished. See also www.800padutch.com/amish.shtml
[9] cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Whatever happened to compassion?, in The Moral Universe, DEMOS, 2001
[10] Social Trends 2002
[11] Why the Left should stop whining, Peter Hain, The Observer, 20 January 2002
