Symposium Remarks: Feedback

The title is Feedback, and this may have brought to mind the noise that occurs when you hold a microphone too close to the speaker; what is happening here is that the input is too close to the output, and this generates a continuous loop.

We can also discuss the microphone as a subject, affecting its environment, and the environment, in turn, affecting the subject. This is how media ecologists who examine media as environments discuss media and the effect revolutions in technology have had on our society.

This will also introduce us to another type of noise we will talk about: Semantic Noise.

Semantic Noise occurs when Language is misinterpreted.

An example borrowed from Robert Anton Wilson is the statement “I love fish”.

With this given information, “I love fish”, one person could think I was referring to keeping fish in a tank; another could imagine I was talking about eating fish; while others could even imagine other various ideas about what “I love fish” could mean.

Another way noise could be understood is through voice, or how something is read or spoken; whether it is sarcastically, or sincerely, or off-the-cuff, with all media, including voice, there is always an amount of interpretation of signs, whether it is body language, intonation, context, font, etc.

Noise occurs within the transmission of technological signals as well; TVs have static, MP3s degrade with conversion, and even microphones have feedback.

Claude Shannon, known as the father of information theory, put forth an effort to create a method for noiseless information transmission, but this was found to be physically impossible; this seems to hold true for all understandings of the term noise.

All language operates as a system of signs that refer to something we can interpret or imagine. To reach this point of communication, we’ve taken several evolutionary steps.

Speaking on the evolutionary scale, I’d like to mention linguist Gregory Bateson who observed lions at play. He made note of the distinction between a lion’s nip and a lion’s bite.

The reason play is such a dramatic influence on communication is that it was the first evolutionary sign that referred to an abstract concept. Before play, a bite was simply a bite, and the sign was inline with the action.

A nip is by sign a bite, but a nip is not a bite.

To visualize this, we will need to think a little outside the box for symbols to use.

Here we can visualize the abstraction that occurs between a bite and a nip. The fact that a nip is not a bite is communicated beyond the point of the sign, being that the physical sign of a bite is the same as that of a nip.

I really enjoy this example because I see our sense of learning and creation as play with different materials, whether ideas, mediums, or media.

When it comes to media technologies, media ecologists highlight three innovations repeatedly: Marshal McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and others.

Some might think the written word would be a key point, but instead, media ecologists point to after-image-based communication, to the Greek, then Roman standardization of the alphabet.

 Before standardization, image-based systems were harder to master due to individualistic code and interpretations. This revolution in technology created an environment in which symbols and messages were broken down into basic units that could be concisely learned, allowing for a broader range of messages to be interpreted.

Greeks attempted then, with their new tool, a universal language which provided the foundation for the Early Romans to attempt globalization.

The written word impacted the human mind, intensifying certain concepts and allowing them to inform how humans were organized. The alphabet introduced a separation between thought and feeling, as language was objectified. 

The rise of literary cultures shifted concepts to the individual, where thought and reason occur in a reader, in a writer, or in a thinker in silence, rather than in previous image and oral tradition communities that found this within conversation. This shift valued originality of thought over repetition and rote memory.

The next influential technology, the printing press, produced nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and another rise in literacy and education due to access. 

The printing press's work emphasized orderliness, standardization, and replicability. This produced publics grouped with individual points of view, as minds are shaped by a new media environment.

With these examples, we can see how Marshall McLuhan’s “Laws of Media” repeatedly occur within technological advances.

1. Every Media or technology advances some human function

2. In doing so, it obsolesces some former medium or technology which used to achieve the function earlier

3. In doing so, the new medium retrieves some older form of the past

4. And when pushed far enough, flips into complementary form

The printing press utilized the action potential of the alphabet while the next stepping stone, the telegraph, detribalized individuals. 

This is due to the internet, as an increasing sea of information, which the invention of the telegraph led to. The internet has in a sense, liquidized space and time into a single device.

This also led to the redefinition of “cultural phenomena” as “memes.” Memes within the digital space can be considered a language in itself; a language that is both objective and literary, with text, and that carries within it the ancient traditions of oral-based tribes.

This is due to the dependence on images and the increasingly obscure references these images have.

The democratizing form of the World Wide Web has also increased perspectives and voices that pass on stories in the manner oral-based cultures would, rather than objectively as literary cultures do

This has all led to “tribes” of individuals on the “in” of certain symbols, while others might not understand the image’s or language’s reference.

Languages are becoming increasingly referential and image-based, less globalized, and produce more noise.

For example, I have seen one person post an image ironically, as a joke, while another posted the same image with complete sincerity, saying he was in agreement with the message. This produces a level of Uncertainty, where only the observer or interpreter defines the meaning to be thrown into the output again and reinterpreted, re-observed, as part of a continuous feedback loop.

Now we can loop back around and ask the question: are we, as subjects, as the microphone, too close to the output, with our phones in our back pocket and constantly in check, to produce or interpret anything beyond noise?

To answer this question, I like to return to the idea of play. From what we know of reality, through the rule-play of sciences and the inherent noise in all communication, to me it seems the more we play, whether it’s with words, ideas, or with reality itself, to “better understand it,” the more ALL these things play with us.

Thus, I see no better way to approach anything than embracing noise, as uncertainty and voice, and playing along. 

Thank you for playing along.