Even though it steps outside of the terms of the assignment a bit, I am going to put a narrative of my childhood into conversation with a couple of these readings. I am going to start with how the alphabet soup of the Boyd-Barrett piece rings some pretty hefty life bells.
Slogging through all of the N acronyms (NIEO, NWO, NWICO, NAFTA, NIC) that Boyd-Barrett wields in "Cyberspace, globalization and empire," I am compelled to establish a modest ethos relative to his topic since my early childhood years were framed pretty substantially by the N acronym, "NATO."
Boyd-Barrett's piece sets the historical stage for global Information and Computer Technology (ICT) proliferation by documenting the beginnings of the technology with the Department of Defense. Lining up nicely with the inside time edge of Boyd-Barrett's study (referred to on pg. 21), in 1970 my father worked for AFTAC-TOD (Air Force Technical Applications Center, Technical Operations Division), a subsidiary of the State Department and the DOD. He was an international attache' monitoring nuclear weapons proliferation across the world, and specifically Eastern bloc compliance with the Warsaw pact. He was a telecommunications and electronics specialist. (Read here that he was a Cold War spy.) His job was to protect "U.S. hegemony and strategic interests" (B-B 23).
Boyd-Barrett writes "Microprocessor, computer and networking technologies, developed by US defence (sic) and other federal agencies, partnering with electronics corporations and universities, developed to a point where deregulation of AT&T's telephony (sic) and equipment monopoly had dramatic consequences for technology integration, innovation, networking and commercialization" (25). I guess this is where the proverbial cat gets let out of the bag and the technology leaks out of the hands of the US military. (Perhaps that's what they got for including universities in the loop.)
Much of what I learned that my father did--all after the fact since my father's job was declassified in 1999--resonates off the pages of Boyd-Barrett. My father not only engaged in covert operations, but also responded to "the backlash of covert interventions, including the Iranian revolution" (24). My household as a child was full of books and conversations about the middle east, specifically about the Shah of Iran (a US political ally).
While this life might sound romantic and artfully edgy, it was a stressful life (or became one) as my father's retreat into alcohol and philandering, to cope with his high-powered career, left him unavailable to his family.
Despite the eventual crash and burn of my parent's marriage (and of my father's career), my childhood was idyllic in many ways. We lived for three years on the North Shore of Oahu while my father traveled the Pacific to monitor nuclear testing on atolls; we lived in magical, snowy Oslo while he monitored nuclear deployments in the neighboring USSR*, and we lived in the suburbs of the most exciting governmental city in the country during Watergate.
But there were back door horrors in my childhood that were related to his job as well.
As the child of a prestigious Air Force attache living abroad, when a medical condition I had sustained at birth made it imperative for me to have major surgery, I was transported to a top-brass Army hospital in Germany for a stay that lasted over a month. This was 1970, and the Vietnam war was in full swing. What goes on in an Army hospital during a major American military event?
A lot of maimed and mutilated veterans go on there.
As a privileged and well-traveled American, growing up mostly in the middle class, I have been lucky enough to not know the brutality of war in my neighborhood or inside my nation, but I know it as someone who (as an impressionable child) saw and heard--in the halls and elevators, in the waiting rooms, in the solariums, in the medi-vac air transports--what the human casualties look and sound like. And it is fucked up.
The ideology of superpower superiority comes at quite a cost. The ideology of power over, rather than power with, constructs a world where everything is a competition, everything is a quest for more--more wealth, more power, more territory, more control. It is not ICT's that are the issue, it is the paradigm of power and how it uses the technology.
ICT's, as demonstrated by Castell's, can connect, or, as demonstrated by studies of Boyd-Barrett, they can conscript, co-opt and compete. That competition for domination (Boyd-Barrett uses a version of the verb "compete" almost a dozen times in his article) results in a freaking lot of institutional/governmental power and that ideology of power is used most often to destroy (cultures, civilians, soldiers, landscapes) rather than build--and all under the auspices of the protection of national interests, (protecting the symbiotic relationship between national and corporate interests). World supremacy is so much about greed.
The Boyd-Barrett piece is not about cyber-space media as communication; it is about media as commodity. In other words, globalization, as he writes about it, is not about a more networked world (which insinuates a horizontal communication pathway), globalization is about reinforcing the paradigm of hierarchy and supremacy. ICT's are the commodity for establishing world domination because not only do they have the capacity to control 'semiotic constructions,' but because the best spying is all predicated on having access to the best in telecommunications technology.
Boyd-Barrett writes, "Communication industries contribute to global 'semiotic constructions,' through images of the world, nations, institutions, people and activities, that media create and distribute, or not" (B-B 28).
The construction going on here is the construction of potential totalitarianism, and whoever has the power to buy and control the most ICT's gains the power to take over the world. While the US is predicted to hold its military dominance for the next 15 years (B-B 26), the "attraction of adversaries" as a result of our drone-obsessed-destruction-disposition is likely to create some real security problems for Americans in the second half of the 21st century.
Put simplistically, he/she who communicates best, wins. As scholars of writing and rhetoric (as doers of writing and rhetoric) we know this. But what is important is the structure of how we disseminate our communication: either as a community with all of our interests represented, or as a field of competition where the supremacy of only one team matters. I think the former is the only avenue for peace. At issue here is a Way of Knowing. It is risky to call it feminine, but horizontal communication is certainly more commonly practiced by women. This is reinforced by how women have used and are using the blogoshere (Yoani Sanchez for example) to share information rather than to control it.
Below are the vision and mission statements for the AFTAC TOD (and a link to their site). The site is dated, but this is what the vision and mission were when the organization was operational:
VISION
Become the nation's premier collector and exploiter of technical signatures ... enabling policy makers and warfighters to achieve information superiority.MISSION
Enhance national security: Collect and exploit worldwide technical measurements and deliver timely, accurate information to national authorities and warfighters ... teaming to monitor treaties, counter proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and achieve information superiority. Its overall mission is to conduct nuclear treaty monitoring through seismic and atmospheric data collection and/ or analysis for national command authorities and to conduct information warfare operations for U. S. and allied warfighters. In addition, the unit mission includes an Information Warfare element which conducts telecommunications monitoring and communications exploitation training.*http://fas.org/irp/agency/aftac/intro.htm
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From Hawisher, Selfe and Berry:
"John Seely Brown and Richard Adler (2008) explained the rapid technological changes this way:
'The world has become increasingly ‘flat,’ as Tom Friedman has shown. Thanks to massive improvements in communications and transportation, virtually any place on earth can be connected to markets anywhere else on earth and can become globally competitive. But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become ‘spikier’: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness. A key part of any such ecosystem is a well-educated workforce with the requisite competitive skills. And in a rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills (p. 16)'"(3).So I want to take issue with the Flat World thing. I realize I am not taking issue with Hawisher, Selfe and Berry. I am just responding to the conversation about how ICT's make a flat and spiky world and how ecosystems supply a workforce and provide resources "supporting innovation and productiveness." WHAT? This is more wolf in sheep's clothing stuff. The world is round. A lot of indentured sailors died helping 15th century explorers to prove that (after the Vikings proved it before them).
Also, "ecosystem" is not the right word to use to describe competitive workforces. That is euphemism at its finest and its most dangerous. The rhetoric of globalization (ala Friedman) is creepy and sneaky and dis-embodied, and I think we need to be hyper-aware of how it manipulates language (makes semiotic constructions) to deny the body. Once you deny the body you can exploit the hell out of it. Humans are nothing without their bodies (or the control of their bodies).
In reaction to the popular adage, "Think Globally, Act Locally," poet/essayist Wendell Berry argued (in his article "Think Little"), that people can't think globally, they can only think locally. Berry knows that global thinking is something that governments and corporations do, not individuals. Individuals don't benefit from global thinking. When individuals attempt to "think" globally (projecting out of their physical/spatial selves to wrap their minds around disembodied abstractions), they lose their navigation system, their echo-location/eco-location; they disconnect from immediate information that is crucial to maintaining the agency and autonomy of the present circumstance. This is a great way to enslave people without them even knowing it: make body-destroying addicts out of them (so they can't survive without the commodity you are selling and they lose the agency to resist).
Two weeks ago the 20 year old son of one of my partner Bryan's co-workers texted himself right into an on-coming semi. Tragically, the young man left this world with his cell phone slammed into his chest--implanted right over his heart. It is a chilling metaphor for what happens when the body forgets itself and defers to the incoming/outgoing/oncoming messages of an ICT.
So on the note of that horrifying image, I will wrap up with some local technology trivia as it relates to me and to "Transnational Literate Lives."
When I moved to Eastern Washington as a teenager, areas of Northern Idaho and Eastern Washington still did not even have land-line telephone service, and places that did were often still using "party lines" (this was true of lake Coeur d' Alene in 1976). As a child of the "sophisticated" D.C. suburbs, I thought I had gone back in telecommunications time at least 50 years (because I had). The Inland Northwest ABC affiliate at the time had a show on prime time called High School Bowl that featured local schools doing an amateur version of Jeopardy, and the news on KLEW (Lewiston) looked like it was being produced by those same high school kids (it kind of still does).
I guess my point is this: during the the telecommunications explosion of the late 1980's and 90's (when transnational ICT literacy was gaining "velocity"), and while much of the world was starting to hop on the bandwithwagon, the US still had remote outposts of disconnection that felt like the railroad had just arrived there. And we are just 50 miles away from some of them.
Pullman, thank goodness, was an oasis in that desert of access. There is nothing like a university to invigorate a telecommunications environment. And, as a graduate student in 1988, I got my first PC (an Amstrad from Sears). Fashionable me, I was right on top of this trend:
"In just two years, from 1986 to 1988, the number of personal computers in the world increased by 35,638,216, or 92.8% ("Personal computers by country," n.d.), although these computers remained distributed largely along existing axes of national wealth and development" (Hawisher, Selfe, Berry).
And here I am now--far more literate in ICT's, but just as concerned about what they have the potential to distract us from as I was 27 years ago. I don't miss type-writers though. Not one bit.
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