| to the Introduction
of the videoconference page.
The following three brief articles present a case study of how video-mediated communication is being developed by members of an aboriginal people: "Online In the outback: The use of videoconferencing by Australian aborigines," by Mark Hodges. (2 pages.) "Downlinks in the outback: A videoconference between Yuendumu, Australia, and San Francisco, California," by Jeffrey Young. (2 pages.) "Protohistoric roots of the network self: On wired aborigines and the emancipation from alphabetic imperialism," by Robert Andreas Fischer. (6 pages.) Technology Review, April 1996, vol. 99, no. 3, pp. 17-19. "Online In the outback: The use of videoconferencing by Australian aborigines." by Mark Hodges Videoconferencing is still considered little more than a novelty in the United States and other industrialized countries. But for several isolated aborigine communities in the remote Australian outback, the technology has become the primary medium for personal and business communications. Unlike the telephone or radio, this medium effectively conveys the extensive system of hand gestures that aborigines use while speaking. And unlike broadcast television, it is interactive and therefore facilitates the extensive consultations that aborigine leaders traditionally employ in reaching ceremonial and community decisions. Since 1993, Warlpiri aborigines in the Tanami region of Australia's Northern Territory have owned and operated a sophisticated rural videoconferencing network. The system, known as the Tanami Network, links four remote Warlpiri settlements with each other and with videoconferencing sites in the cities of Sydney, Darwin, and Alice Springs. Connections to these urban areas provide the Warlpiri with audio and video access to government service providers, other Australian aborigines, business customers for Warlpiri arts and crafts, and indigenous groups on other continents. In the popular network's first year of operation alone, community members logged some 1,200 hours in personal or ceremonial videoconferences and made numerous contacts with government agencies providing services such as adult and secondary education, teacher training, remote health care, and social security and legal assistance. Each of the network's seven sites has a videoconferencing system designed by PictureTel of Danvers, Mass., consisting of a color television monitor, video camera, and electronic console. Because the region's telephone lines are not adequate to carry broadband videoconferencing signals, conferences are transmitted by dish components to communication satellites. The signals are then routed to high-speed telephone lines over which the Warlpiri can hold conferences with contacts throughout the world. The PictureTel system can connect up to 16 participants in a single videoconference, with the capacity to link as many as 240 other conferees through a series of electronic bridges, says PictureTel spokesperson Kevin Flanagan. All the participants see and hear one person at a time, he says, with the order of speakers selected either by a human moderator or automatic voice activation. "The Tanami Network project has shown that videoconferencing greatly improves the frequency and quality of family and community contacts for aboriginal people," says Peter Toyne, a rural telecommunications specialist and an adviser to the network. Regular communication among extended family and friends is especially important in Australian aborigine communities, where social cohesion has been threatened by geographic isolation and the overwhelming influence of Australia's dominant Western culture. The Warlpiris' involvement in the video medium began in the 1980s, when they helped to develop aborigine-oriented programming for a private television station in the Tanami region. In 1990, with the help of the station's technical advisers, 300 community members took part in a three-day trial demonstration of videoconferencing that linked the communities of Yuendumu and Lajamanu. The Warlpiri community later hired a consulting company to specify and install the equipment needed for the Tanami Network. The great majority of videoconferences conducted over the network have been personal or ceremonial in nature. Families from different communities conduct regular reunions, for example, by gathering in front of the television monitor at their local video-conferencing sites. Warlpiris also use the network to stay in touch with relatives far from home. When meeting over a videoconferencing link to make decisions, aborigine leaders can readily see if a quorum of responsible parties is present. Warlpiri artists and craftsmen also are marketing and promoting their arts and crafts through the network. For example, artists in the community of Yuendumu recently used videoconferencing to discuss their work with an audience in London's Festival Hall, and later to "meet" with an academic researcher in North Carolina who is studying Warlpiri art. Perhaps the most intriguing use of the system is a continuing series of videoconferences among the Warlpiri aborigines and indigenous groups on other continents, including the Scandinavian Saami, Alaskan Inupiat, Canadian Inuit, and the Little Red Cree nation in Alberta, Canada. These videoconferences have so far focused primarily on land rights and language preservation--two issues of deep concern among indigenous peoples worldwide. But one recent session allowed an exchange of native dances with members of the Little Red Cree nation. Spurred on by the success of this dance exchange, the Warlpiri hope to collaborate this year with other groups in a global videoconference festival of traditional and contemporary music. Needless to say, such a powerful means of communication is costly. Over the first three years of the Tanami Network's operation, organizers have spent some $1.5 million developing, maintaining, and administering the system. This total included an initial cost of more than $200,000 to set up the system, which the Warlpiri paid for with mineral royalties and community funds. Meanwhile, service providers such as the Northern Territory Correctional Services, various colleges in the region, and the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service bear much of the network's operating costs by paying usage fees of more than $200 per hour. The practice is cost effective because it saves providers the time and expense of sending representatives to meet with clients in such isolated communities. Another videoconferencing network, developed through the Mungindi Project of Australia's Northern Borders Senior Access Program, is serving aborigine students in the northern part of New South Wales state. Less expensive and powerful than the Tanami Network, this system uses videoconferencing software developed at Cornell University to link four remote schools between 200 and 400 kilometers apart, says project director David Watson, a faculty member at the University of New New England in Armidale, Australia. The software, known as CU-SeeMe, transmits low-resolution images over the Internet. The project's purpose is to let secondary students finish their last two years of education at home rather than boarding in distant cities or dropping out of school after the tenth grade. The Mungindi Project not only brings scarce teaching resources to all four schools, says Watson, but it also gives students a chance "to explore community values on topics beyond those available in their own isolated community." Other aborigine videoconferencing systems also in use or under development
include a small network in the Kimberley region of western Australia and
one in the Cape York and Gulf communities of north Queensland. The
aborigines ultimately hope to create independent but interlinked regional
videoconferencing networks throughout the country, says Tanami adviser
Toyne. That prospect was furthered by the federal government's recent
decision to provide a "partial rollout" of funds for establishing a National
Remote-Area Broadband Network. This initial appropriation would create
videoconferencing and other digital communications services in 20 remote
aborigine communities. Through projects such as these, he says, Australia's
aborigines may soon offer the world an effective model for locally controlled
rural telecommunications.
Forbes, Dec 4, 1995, vol. 156, no. 13, pp. (S) 68-70. "Downlinks in the outback: A videoconference between Yuendumu, Australia, and San Francisco, California." by Jeffrey Young 4:11 pm. PictureTel's videoconferencing suite is an antiseptic modem boardroom 36 floors above San Francisco's Embarcadero Center. It's filled with a pair of large video monitors, a big wooden table, and black-and-metal high-tech chairs. A wall of windows looks out on a late afternoon fog blowing into the Financial District, while to the south a clear view stretches out over the Bay Bridge. The monitors come to life as, half a world away, satellite contact is made. On one screen there is an image of tamarind trees that sway gently in a washed-out village landscape. A dog saunters past. A pickup truck rumbles lazily down the road. The video shimmers, as though the camera were behind a window of water. It looks very hot, very dusty. I see my face come up on one monitor, and ask the other viewers what I am looking at on the other TV screen. A male voice comes back across the ether, its digital bits stretched and warped. "We're here in Yuendumu," he says with a thick Australian accent, "150 miles to the west of nowhere." 4:37 P.M. There are two cameras in Yuendumu: one outside, the other in. When the second camera fires up inside the community center in Yuendumu, 170 miles northwest of Alice Springs in the great Australian outback, I find that the voice belongs to Robin Japanangka Granites. He is sitting behind a long table with about a dozen members of the Warlpiri tribe of Aborigines, accompanied by various stray dogs and children who come and go during the conversation. Robin serves as translator and general master of ceremonies. The video gear is owned and managed by the Aboriginal communities of the Tanami region, one of 50 major linguistic groups in the outback. The Warlpiri tribe has embraced videoconferencing, and there are six other video units through the tribe's territory -- an autonomous region of Australia covering about 1,000 square miles. The tribes lease videoconferencing time to the Australian government, which uses the technology to educate health care providers in the outback on the latest medical information, teach classes to schoolchildren, and as an employment network. The tribes paid one million pounds for the facility, and have received 450,000 pounds this year from the government's lease of their technology. These people use the gear daily to allow separated family members to talk with one another; to perform family and tribal rituals that used to require a great deal of travel; to take classes and participate in health clinics; and, perhaps most intriguingly, to display and sell their artwork to galleries and collectors around the world. It is the last matter that I am trying to find out about. But it doesn't take long for me to realize that while I am fidgeting and constantly checking my image in the local monitor, the Warlpiri seem strangely unselfconscious in front of the camera. As Robin introduces me, and we wave to each other across a chasm of space and culture, I can't help but feel that it is I who am out of place in front of all the video gear, not the Aborigines. After all, they are in the village where they have spent all their lives, surrounded by their families; I am in a concrete jungle, hundreds of miles away from most members of my tribe. 5:15 p.m. The quality of the video coming from the outback is poor for someone used to watching network television. The transmission runs on a single 128-kilobit-per-second ISDN line. A still image progressively sharpens, but then any motion in the frame, such as a head gesture or a hand moving, muddies it. As Robin explains, personal contact with anyone interested in their art is very important, especially because the stories are so personal and have been handed down from generation to generation. In a sense, Warlpiri stories are living creations. The social aspects of videoconferencing make it a natural medium for sharing of these stories. Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels is chairperson of the Warlukurlangu Artists organization, a local cooperative that provides canvasses and acrylic paints to Warlpiri artists while managing the sale and exposition of their artwork. In the Warlpiri world, stories "belong" to individual families, Dolly explains, and she says in her work she paints the same story over and over again. A story consists of a painting, songs, dances and storytelling -- all occur simultaneously in a kind of communal social event. Dolly's story includes campsites, emus, digging sticks, and young men who play a trick on a blind man. "The story came from my grandfather's dreamtime," she explains. "Would be big trouble if someone else tried to paint it." 5:54 p.m. Every so often the satellite connection is lost. The image freezes and a few seconds later a message displays "Good-bye, Yuendumu." But just as rapidly, back it comes as the satellite gremlins calm down and reconnect. All of the artists are tribal elders. The reason: Each story can be painted only by a true owner of the story, and it takes a long time to inherit that role. Cookie Japaljarri Stewart is a wizened oldtimer with a face that speaks volumes about deserts and villages and life halfway around the globe. His painting tells an ancestor story of men turning into ants to attack an emu too powerful to be defeated any other way. His explanation is difficult for me to follow. Partly it's the audio quality, but also I stumble over the thick Australian accent laid over a native Tanami speaker's inflections. I start to wonder whether we really are communicating. 6:23 p.m. The session is ending, but I'm still trying to find some common ground. I ask if they would like to see American television. The baseball championship series is on. Local newscasts. Ads. MTV. Eight-thousand nine-hundred miles away, they stare glued to the screen. They want to see more of the ball game. 6:31 p.m. It is time to sign off. I ask the Aborigines if
they would like to see a view of San Francisco from a camera mounted on
the roof of the building. It displays a crisp autumn sunset, a deep
blue harbor, the Bay Bridge. It is rush hour, and the sun is perfectly
positioned to glint off the cars streaming across the upper deck of the
structure. It is a breathtakingly lovely image, and for a moment
there is silence at the other end of the videoconference. Then a
voice pipes up. "Looks just like ants heading to their hole, mate,"
says one man. They all start to laugh. I do, too. Maybe
we have begun to communicate after all.
from --
"Protohistoric roots of the network self: On wired aborigines and the emancipation from alphabetic imperialism" by Robert Andreas Fischer The traditional social organization of the aboriginal people of the Australian continent presents a model of an information management culture that offers a number of striking structural affinities with the emerging networked electronic technoculture. A close reading of the aboriginal cultural text reveals crucial elements for the understanding of the technological information and communication revolution underway in the post-industrial, western, alphabetized nations. Moreover, the dimensions of the social plan elaborated on the Australian continent over a period of time of more than 40,000 years might well serve as a blueprint for the extension of common information and communication modes and codes on a global level. Structural affinities between digital and savage cybernetics are nowadays best illustrated in the emerging strategies of networking by a generation of post-industrial western activists that are firmly rooted in the present and have left behind (or never knew) the apocalyptic 80s. They already include in their praxis the paradigms of the new work material -- but often without a theoretical understanding of their activity. In this sense, the cybernetic model of the traditional aboriginal societies of Australia also serve as a criterion to understand contemporary -- experimental communication on the electronic network. My analysis concludes with the evocation of the constitution of the new individual networked self. I will draw some of the material to illustrate my thesis from my fieldwork with the Warlpiri Aboriginal people of the Central Deserts of Australia in 1991 and 1992, where I concentrated on aspects of the technologization of traditional communication modes (Fischer 1992, 1993). The Warlpiri of Yuendumu have been running a culturally defined project of community-TV since 1982. 1. Alpha-sequential linearity One approach to a cybernetic reading of traditional aboriginal culture goes through an analysis of the general organization of communication from the point of view of the western orality-literacy discourse. Classical western anthropology -- like every mental, intellectual and spiritual endeavor in western society -- is building on its praxis of phonetic alphabetical codification of language communication. This praxis has modeled its intellectual instrument and is determining in the elaboration of its paradigms and achievements. Over the 2,500 years since the phonetic alphabet was introduced in Europe, the structure of its societies has determined a specific mode of problem solving and "intelligence." Western thought under the influence of the phonetic alphabet developed the historical models of sequential linearity that has allowed specific thought patterns along the lines of rational, mathematical-logical, Cartesian, authoritarian, hierarchical, dialectical, vertical structures. This evolution reached its achievement with the project of the Enlightenment and is now undergoing massive changes. 2. Literacy, orality and multimediality The model of alphabetical vertical thinking includes the very mechanisms of its own structure of thinking. It excludes any models that are not built along its same lines. Non-alphabetical societies are therefore given the stigmata of non-rational, non-logical, non-historical cultures. The phonetic alphabetical codification of language-communication is essentially a visual codification. Western societies imprinted (in the true sense of the word !) a negative definition of communication codification on non-alphabetical societies because they are not utilizing the same model of language codification. They were thereby defined as oral societies. The alphabetically induced logic of the western society has equated alphabetical non-literacy with orality as the visual level was occupied by alphabetical coding. So-called orality within non-alphabetical indigenous societies has however never existed. Orality is only a tag non-alphabetical societies have received by alphabetical literate societies. In reality, so-called oral communication is composed of an extremely sophisticated, multi-layered, polysemic codification-system of simultaneous communication signals. Orality is actually multimediality. 3. Cybernetic mothers within Aboriginal information management Nancy Munn describes (1973) teaching-situations by mothers in aboriginal communities of Central Australia. A number of women (three and more) are choosing a specific spot in the landscape surrounding the totemic center that is going to be the topic of the teaching. They gather the children that are going to be instructed around them. They will appear with body paintings related to the teaching topic. While orally reciting and explaining the texts of the topic, a chief-speaker women might utilize simultaneously a hand-sign language that is absolutely formalized and strictly codified. Moreover, she may draw the contents of the teaching-subject with a number of iconographic signs that make up a horizontally adjusted cognitive map of the topic. Munn has studied the iconography of the Warlpiri and reached to the conclusion that it may well be an actual form of written literacy. The polysemic sign-system is comprised of about 150 iconographic elements, that receive a different meaning according to what other signs they are combined with. One interesting aspect of her research is to conclude that until now, most of western research within so-called non-literate societies have not acknowledged what actually is a writing praxis, either because the sign-systems were so much different from the western alphabet that they could not be deemed as "alphabets," or -- like in the case of the aboriginal people -- because they were not used as memory devices, as information storage, as knowledge archival, but "only" in a performatory live-activity. We meet again the ethnocentric project of the western society, who judged different writing systems on the basis of their retrievability-function. Can you talk about writing if there are no traces left of it?! In the traditional aboriginal teaching situations, other levels of information management like signing and dancing can be utilized. We are confronted with a complex information and communication system that includes actual "writing." Within a number of indigenous societies we are thus meeting an information and communication structure that utilizes several information sources simultaneously, without a priority or hierarchy in its application, within a horizontal organization of its elements. The pragmatic disposition of the savage parallel information-processing necessitates a constant effort of creativity in the communication process. While the phonetic alphabetic, in which the multiplicity of information and communication levels has been reduced to the single alphabet -- others would say that it culminated in it -- allows the individuals utilizing it to concentrate on so-called contents, leaving behind the preoccupation with its codifying system, the polysemic multimediality of indigenous communication systems calls for a constant preoccupation with the codes of information themselves. We are meeting here a communication strategy that is now being brought forward by new electronic information and communication technologies in alphabetic industrial societies and is explaining some of the aspects of the shift in western theory to metatextual preoccupations. 4. First wave new tech Nota bene: The first wave of new information and communication technologies in western industrial societies around the turn of the century brought forward a first preoccupation with language on a meta-textual level. Within around thirty years between 1875 and 1910 we witnessed the appearance and general use of the telegraph, electricity, the sound-recording, the telephone, the radio, cinema, picture-printing, the motorcar and the airplane -- as well as a number of minor but determining devices such as the saxophone, the cast-iron piano-frame or X-Rays. The impact of these new information and communication technologies brought forward impressionism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, surrealism, jazz music, dodecaphony, linguistics and anthropology. In the area of intellectual achievements we see a number of strategies and preoccupations that are directly related with the new technologies, such as the writing of Flaubert, Proust, Joyce and Gertrude Stein or the work of Wittgenstein, de Saussure and Pierce. An analysis of the fall of the Austrian empire, the Russian revolution, the British opium-wars or World War One from the point of view of the impact of the new information and communication technologies is still pending. 5. Emancipation-machines With the introduction of industrial-technological information processing systems in western societies, the phonetic alphabet is loosing its predominant position. New communication technologies are bringing forward a preoccupation with the predominant language codification that manifests itself in a reflection on its code. The introduction of digital computing might however be considered as the apogee of the phonetic alphabetic imperialism. Only alphabetic thinking could build this machine. Digital information-processing has now integrated in its organization many of the achievements of the first wave of technological information and communication modes developed around the turn of the century. A decisive moment in this evolution has been the developing of the cathode-ray tube and its integration in computational information processing. This event triggered a completely new generation of visual codes for computational work. John von Neumann mentions as early as 1945 the possibility of a computer working with the principles of televisual information-interfacing (Legendi & Szentivanyi 1983). At the time the EDVAC still functioned with electromechanical parts! We will see that along with new visual codifying interfaces, the acoustical level was very soon also integrated in the system. 6. Non-linear communication The developing of digital computation machines stands at the origin of the integration of the innumerable levels of information interfacing that can be applied in a polysemic, non-hierarchic, non-linear communication situation. Let us mention that the movement aspect of life itself has found applications in electronic information interfacing, as for example in flight simulation or in new entertainment programs in amusement and theme-parks. We can now acknowledge that we are confronted with a situation in which the computer, as quintessential achievement of the alphabetic mind, is pulling the carpet from under the feet of its own mental structure in order to promote an inversion of the vertical, sequential-linear structure of the phonetic alphabetic mind structure in the sense of horizontal simultaneity, diversification, polysemy, multimediality. We are then confronted with information and communication structures that present decisive affinities with traditional information management applied for example by the Warlpiri teaching mothers of Yuendumu in Central Australia. 7. Cybernetics and cellular automata Let us now consider some technological achievements in the field of information processing within the western alphabetic societies that hint at another structural affinity with traditional First Nation communication structures. The same John von Neumann who prefigured with the inclusion of the cathode-ray tube a new surface for information interfacing, very early devised a computing machine that would NOT be a von Neumann-machine, that is NOT a sequential computing machine, but a networked machine architecture. It is generally known that along with his work in the team that designed the first electronical digital computing instrument (1946), von Neumann was interested in the theory of automatons and in specific topics of neurophysiology. In the first discipline he discovered the so-called self-reproducing automatons (cellular automata). He also started to work on probabilistic logistics and the synthesis of reliable organisms from unreliable components. His untimely death prevented him to finish his research within these areas, but he published a number of papers that indicate a direction highly relevant for the discourse of non-linear, networked technoculture. In his "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata" (1966) von Neumann asks how complex a machine must be in order that its results are as complex as the machine itself. Most machines are obviously not. They are often very complicated and can perform only very simple functions. Von Neumann devised a machine that is complicated enough, so that its results are exact copies of the machine itself. He found a solution for this problem in the structure of the human nervous system (1958), which he described as a non-linear, non-sequential processing apparatus. His views, developed before the discovery of the structure of DNS and DNA were to be determining in the circle of intellectuals which defined cybernetics during the 50s and 60s. 8. Cybernetic ontogenesis & the continental brain The social organization of the aboriginal people of the Australian continent finds its roots in a ontological model that extends in different variations among most of the more than originally 300 different traditional linguistic nations. The founding myth of the aboriginal societies is stored and perpetuated in the totemic practices. The elements of the myth have been distributed amongst the humans, in order that these commemorate and nourish its traces on earth. The whole of the continent then is witness of the passage of the founding ancestors. Every stone, hill, water-hole, plain or rock is the result of the influence of the gods within the landscape. The whole of the Australian landscape is the text of the aboriginal ontogenesis. Each of the aboriginal individuals has the task to care for one of these sacred spots and to each of theses sacred spots a part of the general myth is associated. Each of the individuals is the trustee and agent of a fragment of the myth. In order to commemorate some of the events of the ontogenesis however, larger "chapters" of the ontogenetic text have to be "performed." For this task a selected number of fragments have to be assembled and connected. Each one of the information fragments can also perform its task in different chapters of the text. Each complex information unit is polysemically defined. The aboriginal social organization confronts us with a networked distribution of information that presents as well striking similarities with some of the elements John von Neumann defined as cellular automata on the basis of human neurophysiological organization, as well as with aspects currently under development in electronic information-networks. In aboriginal societies the network of distributed information processing covers the whole of the continent. In one way or another, each fragment is connected with fragments from totally different linguistic and totemic formalizational aspects. In different nations, the network structure was enlarged by other layers of information management, such as kinship and the more recent "skin"-system. The complexity of the system is astronomical. It needs a lifetime to become a master of the different levels of ontological subject-definition in an aboriginal society - but then, the aboriginal people consider this to be their task on earth: to be an information processing society. In the chapter on transformation-systems in "The savage mind" (1962), Lévi-Strauss remarks that Spencer and Gillen were fortunate to explore Australia in an early period (1903), because they had access to only a selected choice of data. This allowed them to compile an extremely accurate monography of the Arrente. In later times, with the growing of the available data, specialists abstained from formulating a general theory or a synthesis. "With the expanding of knowledge, it becomes impossible to imagine a system that needs a continuum of three, four or more dimensions." Lévi-Strauss however imagines that it is not impossible to "dream about the day when it will be possible to transfer everything known about aboriginal societies on perforated cards and to prove with the help of an electronic brain, that the whole of the technical-economical, social and religious structures resembles one big system of transformations (1962: 107). French anthropologist Barbara Glowscewski compares (1989) the general organization of the aboriginal nations with the structure of a hypercube, of a cube the angles of which are defined by cubes the angles of which are... Inferring from such considerations, we can advance the thesis that the whole of the aboriginal societies is organized along a neurophysiological model, that the Australian continent "functions" actually like a huge brain. 9. Neuro-Net We are now confronted with information and communication machines that have outgrown the stage of "perforated cards" and the term of the "electronic brain" -- as Lévi-Strauss formulated it in 1962. We now have access to multiple processing machines built on neurophysiological models, themselves analyzed by a previous generation of "electronic brains", that have triggered the new machine-architecture. It is not by chance that John von Neumann found his most rewarding models in neurophysiology. Whereas the classical computer is a sequential von Neumann machine, his probably most advanced research brought forward the concepts of multiple processing. These models are now penetrating the new machine-applications and at the same time provide the models for further applications. Electronic information-networks are multiple processing applications. Within the rather desperate need to structure the until now rather chaotic electronic information management system called the INTERNET, we might well look on neurophysiological models, but also and especially on the traditional social organization structure of the aboriginal people of Australia in order to find practical solutions. 10. Deprogramming of the alphabetical mind and constitution of the networked self Some of these considerations on proto-historic models in indigenous as well as in western industrial societies for the emancipation from the sequential-linear modes of information processing and problem-solving within the frame of phonetic alphabetic imperialism are especially relevant in relation to the problem of the constitution of the self of the networked individual in the context of electronic technoculture. A number of indigenous and non-European industrial nations are managing the transition from a "savage" or more generally polysemic cybernetic models without the experience of the sequential linearity determined by alphabetical codification of language communication. The industrial western society, which is the very society that has developed the new electronic information and communication technologies that allow networked information processing, first has to outgrow its alphabetical past. We are unfortunately experiencing nowadays the same mechanism of technological evolution criticized by Marshall McLuhan, namely that new technologies are merely applied to emulate the preceding generation. Even he had to write a book in order to advocate the end of the book. Shifts of paradigmata are manageable in this sense when we are talking about the explosive motor and jet-propulsion or about film and television, where we assist at merely quantitative / qualitative changes that can be grasped by extrapolation. The shift from mechanical to digital technology is however on a completely different scale, as it involves the proper neuro-reprogramming of the human bio-computer. The new modes of information management cannot be grasped by the alphabetical mind. At the same time, an analytical language of the new media is not available. The utilization of networked, horizontally-distributed, multimedial, connected, non-linear, non-sequential, non-hierarchical information and communication machines implies a simultaneous and constantly renewed invention of the utilization-language itself, beyond the phonetic alphabetical codes. The new information and communication modes put a constant strain on the western individual and its cultural context. Not only has he to critically monitor his alphabetical mind but constantly invent a new mental architecture. The effects of this general deprogramming of the western alphabetical mind result in a general loss of self-definition. The operation of deprogramming of the western alphabetical mind on a technological level entered in a decisive phase during the 60s, with the massive penetration of television. The simultaneous explosion of research in microelectronics and integrated chip design which led to the first mainframes boosted the questioning of the western cultural habitus on a neurological level. At the same time, a number of intellectual models emerged that tried to cope with the disintegration of the individual within the disintegration of its traditional information and communication mode. On the European continent, existentialism was the last of the ego-centered projects of self-constitution. The Frankfurt School and the leftist youth-movements and its different theoretizing in France, Germany, Italy and the US probed a last lease for Marxism, thus clinging to the authoritarian project of the Enlightenment, but not realizing that they were merely the symptoms of the fragmented individual in a fragmented communication context. The breaking down of political "walls" -- in Berlin, the Soviet Union, South Africa -- or the present-day turmoils that agitate the world are the results of the shift of a mechanical to a digital society; the shift from an imperialist alphabetical to an open model. In a redefinition of the structuralist impetus of the 60s, post-structuralist theory provided -- especially with the later work of Michel Foucault -- a methodology to define the new self (see Poster 1989). However, whereas orthodox post-structuralism is still enmeshed in alphabetical logo-centric mode and proposes a close reading of (western) history in order to emancipate the individual from the authoritarian subject of the Enlightenment project, only the analysis of the modes of information and communication management on a global level can provide the background for an adequate statement. The introduction of an electronic information and communication instrument
thus provides a point of view, a mind-frame to analyze societal organization
beyond the boundaries of alphabetical imperialism, including indigenous
and non-European societies. And it is within the tension between
proto-historical indigenous and non-European information and communication
systems and the emancipatory movements and practices of the alphabetical
mind that we can find the models for the constitution of a networked self
for the digital mind.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Fischer, R.A. 1992. "On the emergence of a cybernetic mass-culture and its implications for the making of art," in Heinz Horat (Ed.), Swiss Art, (New York, Hudsons Hill): 259-73. Fischer, R.A. 1993. "The savage media: A media-anthropological evaluation of the technologization of aboriginal communication-modes with special regard to the Warlpiri video-work in Yuendumu" (Zurich, unpublished manuscript). Glowscewski B. 1989. Les reveurs du d_sert (Paris). Legendi, Tamas & Szentivanyi Timor. 1983. Leben und werk von John von Neumann (Zurich, Wissenschaftsverlag Bibliographisches Institut). Lévi-Strauss, C. 1962/1973. Das wilde denken (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp). Munn, N. 1973. Walbiri iconography: Graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a central Australian society (Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press). Poster, M. 1989. Critical theory and post-structuralism (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press). von Neumann, John. 1958. The computer and the brain (New Haven). von Neumann, John. 1966. Theory of self-reproducing automata
(Urbana and London). Manuscript completed and edited by A.W. Burks.
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