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Slide Notes:
SLIDE 1:
Medium: The Encyclopedia
A few weeks ago I was wandering around a Value Village and overheard two teens that were examining the small section of antiquated books. I heard one exclaim, “Hey look! Those are encyclopedias, like what was before Wikipedia!” This comment struck me as absurd: yes, encyclopedias are relics – but are they such relics that we need to point out a rare sighting in the modern world? I felt old and thought about teens teaching each other about the vestiges of the naive simplicity of our analogue past.
Context: 1960s era Encyclopedia Sets
To consider the encyclopedia within the context of McLuhan’s tetrad, I situated it as a 1960s era medium in its heyday of being reprinted in mass quantities and sold door-to-door in the western world. My intention is not to exclude the rich history of the encyclopedia, said to have originated over 2000 years ago (Preece, 2016, para. 2), yet as such an ancient medium that has gone through several evolutions and can exist in various forms, it is necessary to identify which form we are focusing on. The creators of these sets are brands such as Encyclopedia Britannica, and World Book Encyclopedia, and the owners and users are middle class families for both curious adults and children, as well as classrooms and school libraries in middle class communities.
Enhance
The Encyclopedia Britannica describes our current perception of the encyclopedia “as a multivolume compendium of all available knowledge, complete with maps and a detailed index, as well as numerous adjuncts such as bibliographies, illustrations, lists of abbreviations and foreign expressions…”(Preece, 2016, para. 3). This resource, purchased by families for their homes or for use in classrooms and school libraries, provided immediate access to organized and verified information, and served as convenient and easily navigable reference material. The prestigious set of books promoted curiosity and was sold on its claim of providing independent, lifelong learning.
Obsolesce
Owning an up-to-date personal encyclopedia eliminates the requirement to physically seek out general information about the world from such experts as librarians, museum curators, educators or other specialists, as the information is readily available at home. As this set of books holds all knowledge, there is no need to memorize it yourself; it is contained where it belongs, organized, categorized, neatly tucked away, but always accessible.
Retrieve
With the rapid development of human life through advances in technology, medicine and science, and the increase in global travel, it is difficult to grasp an informed understanding of the world. The encyclopedia neatly presents the most current information of the material world, which allows readers to feel knowledgeable about their rapidly globalizing environment. By providing this breadth of information, the encyclopedia recalls and allows for the same sense of understanding of place humans held in simpler times.
Reverse
What happens when rather than perceiving the encyclopedia as a starting point for future learning, there is instead a dependence on the medium as though it is the highest authority? The benefits of the medium are flipped, encyclopedia owners and users become too reliant on the written authority and stop extending their curiosity to other sources. Their knowledge is based on what they have read, not on what they have experienced or learned through social interaction.Their view of the world is limited and shares too closely the biases of the written authority of the static encyclopedia that becomes further antiquated each year after it is printed.
SLIDE 2:
Delegation of Research Labour
In comparison to the ever-evolving mass of content now readily available on the internet, the mass-produced printed form of the encyclopedia represents a comically limited set of (outdated) information. However, prior to the accessible in-print encyclopedia, educators were tasked with the laborious and physical act of finding, reading and researching numerous resources to compile comprehensive and accurate lesson plans, on relatively basic topics. The type of information that we can access today in a few seconds through our phones. Just as Latour (1992) explains that the extensive labour required to manually create an opening in a wall, then close that opening, has been delegated to the technology of the hinge (p. 227), hours and years of finding, researching, compiling and updating general information about the material world had been delegated to the encyclopedia franchise. The manual act of organizing and maintaining up-to-date content of personal research had been displaced and came to exist in a comprehensive set of illustrated books.
Delegation of Authority
In addition to the delegation of labour is the delegation of authority: the role of the educator becomes less about their role as expert or authority on a subject since both the educator and their students can refer to the authority of the text. From one perspective, this shift may lead to a lack of confidence in the educator, or a dependency on the text, which can be problematic considering that a single source of information represents only one specific view or one set of biases, as well as the inevitability that the information source will become outdated. In another sense, both the delegation of authority and research labour affords the educator the time to experiment with educational techniques, develop creative teaching methods, study pedagogy and focus on teaching communication skills and problem solving. The technology of the encyclopedia allows the expertise to remain with the real experts of the material world, and allows educators to build their own expertise in their study of pedagogy.
For Example…
As an educator of government employees, I do not rely on the antiquated technology of the printed encyclopedia, but as I work in the realm of estate law, I do rely on legislation, regulations, policies and procedures, and legal precedents. This body of published information serves the same authoritative role as the encyclopedia, and because of its existence, I do not have to spend time debating ethics, creating makeshift orders of agreement amongst parties to stand in for laws, or interviewing and arguing with others to reach consensus. The rules are in place – I simply need to follow them. This means that my role in educating staff can focus on teaching case management strategies, methods of communicating with individuals experiencing intense emotions, interviewing and investigative skills and basic accounting.
SLIDE 3:
Prescription
Latour (1992) explains that “Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms” (p. 232). As the mechanisms, or in this case, the encyclopedia, is created by humans, it is embedded with the subjective perspectives held by the humans who created it. The technology of an encyclopedia is complex in comparison to that of the door groom described by Latour, its content is not simply a physical design, but includes a vast set of knowledge authored by various “experts,” each with their own set of perspectives, ideas and biases. In the same way that this thing, the encyclopedia, holds prescribed “selective attitudes of those who engineered [it]” (Latour, 1992, p. 233), those attitudes are prescribed back on the user of the encyclopedia. When Latour (masquerading as ‘Jim Johnson’, 1988) states “what defines our social relations is, for the most part, prescribed back to us by nonhumans” (p. 310), he is asking us to look at nonhumans with the equal consideration of influence and depth of meaning that we perceive in humans, as these objects have been created by us to delegate tasks we used to do, (often better). The history of our own understanding of the world is embedded in these objects so that when we interact with them, we are also interacting with the inherent layers of meaning, attitude and intention embedded in their design. The encyclopedia reflects a society of people who grew up and existed with this medium as a prominent and reliable source of information, they viewed the world through the lens the encyclopedia in part informed. Similarly today, the internet reflects and mediates our current society while simultaneously our society mediates the design, technology and content of the internet. We cannot ignore the effects these nonhumans actively and constantly interact with and perceive the world. Nonhuman agents are active parts of our lives, to understand our relationship with the world, we must recognize the dynamic connections we have not just with our friends, families and colleagues, but the various objects that surround us.
SLIDE 4:
The Parliament of Things
Latour’s (1988 and 1992) writings on Actor Network Theory invite us to consider the world as a web of interaction amongst objects, both human and nonhuman, to recognize the depth of meaning and vitality that resonates in nonobjects, because we have prescribed them with such, and in turn they prescribe back upon us. In his 2005 essay, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public”, the focus on the subjective influence both embedded and reflected on objects is explored further. He associates the concept of the ‘object’ with the false notion of objectivity: the idea that we can choose to perceive the world scientifically, empirically, without opinion influencing the experience. We know this is impossible, because we are bound to ourselves. Everything we do is through our own inescapable lens, we form our sense of self through the layering of collected experience gathered as we interact with our social and material cultures which further sculpts our perspectives – we are by nature subjective.
Latour links objects with ‘matters of fact’ – if we are inherently subjective, then none of our perceptions can be identical to each other’s, so how can a fact exist, if you and I see everything at varying degrees of difference? Latour explains,
What we are trying to register here in this catalog is a huge sea change in our conceptions of science, our grasps of facts, our understanding of objectivity. For too long, objects have been wrongly portrayed as matters-of-fact. This is unfair to them, unfair to science, unfair to objectivity, unfair to experience (Latour, 2005, p. 9).
Fortunately, a solution is provided: ways to think about the world that incorporate the subjectivity that is us. Firstly, rather than continue believing in the object, he introduces the concept of the ‘Thing’, and describes how the term has a pluralistic and social history, “the Ding or Thing has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them” (p. 13). Secondly, he denounces matters of fact, and asks us to replace this concept with ‘matters of concern’. Concerns are discussed, debated, considered, addressed – they are embedded with possibility, they are agentic, they incorporate our subjectiveness.
In consideration of Latour’s ideas, we can suppose that the encyclopedia is a thing more than it is an object, and that each entry represents a matter of concern, rather than matters of facts, yet we can still see that this medium was created in the spirit of objectivity. It presents as an authoritative collection of facts, follows rigorous organization standards, and maintains a stagnant, instantly outdated design.
SLIDE 5:
Reflection: ANT & Media Ecology
Essentially, Actor Network Theory (ANT), and the notion of media ecology follow similar principles: both require us to consider our effect on the things we release into the world, as well as how the things in the world affect us. Both produce imagery of an intricate web of vibrating connections that join us to each other and everything. Yet although it seems that I can place one theory atop another and the pieces would match up, they feel different. ANT encompasses something akin to a belief system – reading Latour’s work induced a paradigm shift in my thought processes, altering my perception of reality. It is almost as though media ecology takes the structure of ANT and fills in the details – but perhaps this is merely my subjectivity in play: in my brain, media ecology links to McLuhan, who links to his book, The Medium is the Massage, which has been sitting in front of me on this very desk for the last year. I know it well, I quoted McLuhan in my entrance essay to art school 15 years ago. Actor Network Theory is new to me, it feels more simplistic, but that may be because the main connection informing it is my knowledge of media ecology.
References
Johnson, J. (1988). Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer. Social Problems, 35(3), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.2307/800624
[Jean Piaget in his office]. (2020, October 15). https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Piaget-in-his-office.jpeg
Keystone view/FPG/Getty images. (2018, April 5). [Three female students reading a book circa 1950]. https://psmag.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_700/MTU0NjcyOTAwMzIwNzk4MTIw/gettyimages-110170376.webp
Lambert/Getty Images. (2014, September 6) [Elementary school teacher]. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/sunday-review/why-dont-more-men-go-into-teaching.html
Latour, B. (1992) ‘Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts’, in Bijker, W. E. and Law, J. (eds) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 225-58. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/877054/mod_resource/content/3/dd308_1_missing_masses.pdf
Latour, B. (2005). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/96-MTP-DING.pdf
Lum, C. (2000) Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology, New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8:1, 1-7, DOI: 1080/15456870009367375
McLuhan, M. (2013). 75th anniversary reprint laws of the media. ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, 70(4), 449+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A366804193/LitRC?u=ubcolumbia&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=e19e14cc
[Portrait of Albert Einstein]. (n.d.). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Einstein_Head.jpg
Preece, W. E. and Collison, . Robert L. (2016, September 8). Encyclopaedia. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/encyclopaedia
[R. Buckminster Fuller holding a model] (2014, May 7). https://www.dwell.com/article/buckminster-fuller-designs-0c139122
[Set of Encyclopedia Britannica]. (n.d.). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica%2C_1993.jpg
Schaefer, M. T. (2014, May 7). [Dymaxion Map]. https://www.dwell.com/article/buckminster-fuller-designs-0c139122