What Came First, The Chicken or The Egg??? Understanding Ronald J. Deibert

Imagine if AT&T just took over all forms of communication. They took over the accumulation and distribution of everything from wireless devices to cable television to Internet services to even landlines. Lets go on to say that with possessing all that power, and reaching unlimited financial stability, the big shots at AT&T preceded to place limitations on what, where, why, or how we use the technology they provide in an attempt to preserve the hierarchical order that places them at the top. The only way we would be able to communicate to one another without going through AT&T would be through face to face interaction. Globalization as we know it would be redefined and achieved through one institution. That is simply too much power for one institution to possess.

In my last blog, while discussing Johannes Trithemius, I mentioned some of my problems with organized religion using guilt and preying on people’s fears to set themselves as an authority. Needless to say, such an institution, or any institution for that matter, should not have a monopoly on anything let alone having one on something as important as knowledge. Ronald J. Deibert calls this "a monopoly of the production of knowledge." Knowledge is a successive process and is built upon with other knowledge through the various communication mediums. In essence, the Roman Catholic Church controlled a significant means of communications by controlling the technology that is the written word. In today's age, a scenario like the one I mentioned is highly improbable which makes the Church's hegemony over the medieval world that much more significant in the grand scheme of things.

Deibert mentions the assumption that as far back as 35,000 years humans have been able to communicate the spoken word in some capacity. Subsequently, a crude form of writing through representations and images was developed 32,000 years ago. Deibert calls this, "...graphic system of writing duplicating the linguistic one." The development of writing was the next breakthrough, but not until 3500 B.C. This lead to literacy but not until worldwide accessibility to the written word was made possible by the printing press. This process points out that the world has always moved towards globalization from early humans 35,000 years ago. This is still a work in progress today as the human race still finds communication technology to make the world we live in smaller and more accessible with each new invention. Whether it’s writing, printing, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, television, or the Internet, we have found ways to communicate, store, and transfer knowledge allowing us to build on what we already know. Deibert goes on to mention the various social conditions that allowed for the dominant power structure of the medieval world to be created leading cultures to seek change through technology. He asserts that the development of the printing press was an agent in causing social change in pushing towards secularism leading to the developing of centralized state bureaucracies and eventually the nation state as we know it today.

As we discussed in class, this brings to the table the question of culture and technology. Which element leads to the development of the latter? Is it culture or social pressures that lead to the development of technology? Or is technology responsible for creating certain social conditions? For Deibert, the two concepts are symbiotic with each leading to the development of the other. In short, cultures set preconditions for the development of the technology and in turn the technology allows for new levels of sophistication to be reached within cultural conditions. One cannot exist without the other.