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Connecting

Media are technologies for transmitting and preserving what the media industry calls 'content': symbols, images, and sounds that have meaning. Meaning is a basic dimension of human life: a world which had no meaning, and made absolutely no sense to us, would be a terrifying world indeed. So media, by circulating meanings, play a role in making our lives liveable: by circulating meanings from one place to another, they connect up spaces, and help build territories. Connecting is the first way in which media help construct the worlds we live in. But how they do this is complex.

Suppose you built a way of connecting people who didn't normally meet that helped them discover things they had in common. Suppose what you built worked fine, and you then raised the resources to convert your discovery into something sustainable. Suppose more and more people started using your platform, linking their lives to the space of connection that you had built. Scale this up a few hundred-million-fold, and you start to get a sense of something that has become commonplace in the twenty-first century.

Welcome to a key paradox of how media operate in contemporary society: simply by connecting up lots of people, and allowing those people to connect to each other, media take on a form of power in society - a power over how society is constructed - that their developers did not necessarily intend to acquire. This paradox has affected all the media technologies of the past four centuries, yet each age faces a distinctive version of it, ours included.

Today's paradox of media power derives from the scale and speed at which media connect up people and things, and the intricacy of how those connections are woven into the fabric of our lives. Think back, once more, to the unease the media deprivation exercise causes for many who attempt it. This brings out media's implications for power and how societies operate, implications that are real: for the people platforms connect, for those who remain unconnected, and for the vast majority of people who just use the connection without influence over how it is organized.

In the contemporary era, it makes sense to think about media not just as a single medium (television, radio, a particular digital platform or app), but as linked infrastructures that make possible a certain way of living. I will call these infrastructures of connection. This concept will help us think of what's both distinctive and universal about the world that media help make today.

Media, as infrastructures of connection, have throughout history faced constraints: the need for a medium to carry the meaning (stone, papyrus, parchment, paper, or even the air, in the case of message by torch relay); the need for substances to mark the medium (from tools to cut into it, to ink or fire); and usually also the need for material means to help the medium cross space (copper wires, radio waves, the moving human body, horses, even pigeons).

Across history, different infrastructures of connection have involved completely different balances of constraint and opportunity. When the carrying medium was heavy, and transport was difficult, media were largely a local affair. Media then worked more to connect people through time than across space. Mesopotamian clay tablets, from as early as 2000 BCE, stored important cultural, political, economic, and astronomical information for later eras. The Incas in South America used complex knotted strings called khipus to record bureaucratic data. The sillok records of Korea's Joseon dynasty, initially handwritten but printed from the early fifteenth century CE, preserved an account of the king's activities for future generations which remained secret until the king's own death. This generated the longest continuous dynastic record in world history.

The predominant challenges of twenty-first-century media are almost the opposite to those faced when writing was invented. It is now so easy to send messages and texts (even of huge size and complexity) across space that it is reliable storage through time which becomes difficult. And then there are human beings' limits. When media transmissions are no longer scarce but overwhelming in their frequency, the issue is how people can keep up with the flood of media messages sent their way, let alone select and preserve what is important to them.

In this chapter, we look further into the history of how media have connected people and things, before considering the complexities of social connection in an age of smartphones and social media platforms. That will give us a starting point for evaluating the different ways in which media might connect us, and their implications for the quality of human life. Perhaps, just as humans began a few decades ago to think of their physical world as an environment, an ecology, that they could help manage better or worse, so now we need an environmental (even ecological) way of thinking about media.

A History of Connection: Some High Points

Media technologies have been connecting human beings for four thousand years. The story is usually told in terms of a progression towards ever more reliable, regular, and frequent media, operating on ever-increasing geographical scales, and with ever greater intensity.

A high point in that history was the invention of the printing press. There was the introduction of the mechanical printing press and moveable type in the fifteenth century by German inventor Johannes Gutenberg, but similar technologies had already been used in China and Korea for hundreds of years. In the European case, printing led to increased circulation of religious texts, including versions of the Bible written in the languages of everyday speech. In many countries, higher levels of literacy emerged alongside new types of 'high-speed' text - the pamphlet, the novel, the newspaper - designed for fast production, wide circulation, and high-speed consumption.

It is common to see in this history of printing technology the birth of the modern era itself. But if media connect people and transmit the meanings they want to share, then they must always involve more than technology. The changing role of written media in Western societies over the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries involved not just printing, but new forms of social and economic organization: the emergence of markets for books; gatherings where people read books together; new institutions of media (newspapers, magazines, the postal system). As media connect us, new social forms build around them.

It would be foolish, however, to ignore the practical basis of media as technologies. At certain points in history, technologies of transmission changed fundamentally. Decisive moments included the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and the laying of land and undersea cables for transmitting messages over great distances from the 1860s. In the early twentieth century, radio and television changed not just what meanings could be communicated, but their speed of transmission. Political leaders became able, through radio, to speak instantly and directly to crowds who were not physically present with them. Television added the possibility of simultaneously transmitting a visual image, enabling distant audiences to feel as if they were present with and looking at the politician speaking to them.

The most dramatic evidence that media were connecting the world in new ways came with the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. Distress signals sent by radio from the boat reached surrounding ships and listening stations on the Canadian East Coast, which then sent news of the disaster to the USA and Europe, from where many of the passengers came. Within hours, there was a spreading awareness of an international disaster unfolding in a shared present. Along with a vivid new sense of the immediacy of news came a huge marketing opportunity for Enrico Marconi, whose radio technology and listening stations made the messages possible.

Media, if we understand them as infrastructures of connection, are inseparable from the history of economic power and political control. The intense interest of governments in information systems goes back at least to the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, but let's stay with the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Marconi came to work closely with the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini as head of the latter's National Research Council. The rise of both Fascism and Nazism is unthinkable without their bold uses of electronic media to reach whole nations through the airwaves.

A few decades later, it was global television that enabled hundreds of millions of people to watch key moments of history; indeed the experience of large populations watching together was part of what made those events into history. Think of the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in 1994, the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997, the victory speech of Barack Obama in 2008. Yet 1994 was also the year when the world wide web became more widely available and a new infrastructure seeped into every life: the internet. There are many places on earth where internet connection is still non-existent or intermittent. But the world has nearly 9 billion mobile devices with built-in internet connection (tablets and smartphones).1 Internet connection is now part of the potential of human life almost everywhere, even if phones without internet...