Where's My "Stuff"

I think it was George Carlin back in the 70s that did a routine about people’s stuff, how we describe our stuff, what we do with our stuff, where we put our stuff and how are stuff defines us as individuals. One overlying theme that I seemed to detect in the writings of Bush, Williams, McLuhan and Englebart was how media systems have interacted with society and developed into the systems that they eventually evolved into. Our collective “stuff” as a society of information and data, images and sounds shaped and molded media systems to determine how they would be used by society.

 McLuhan after all says the medium is the message. He states that the personal and social consequences of any medium, that is, any extension of ourselves, result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology (McLuhan). I took that to be that as new technologies come along we as a society decide how or if we will interact and develop these technologies to better serve us.

 Williams article entitled The Technology and the Society does a good job at briefly documenting the course of history for such technologies as electricity, telegraphy, photography, television and radio. He describes how over the course of time these new technologies interacted with society and even sometimes with each other to develop into social icons. He states that the “effects” of these technologies remains superficial if we don’t look at the notions of cause and effect, as between a technology and a society, a technology and a culture, a technology and a psychology, which underlie our questions and may determine our answers (Williams).  Once again pointing out the connection between how society determines the uses of media. Williams also points to the history of these technologies as were no one simple event or even series of events, but rather they depended on a complex of inventions and developments in electricity, television, photography, telegraphy and radio.

 Bush also deals with the elements of processing data and our desire or need for these processes to work faster. Some of the concepts and ideas that he was talking about in 1945 were an almost dead on look into the future. Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to extract ideas from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual (Bush). This seems to put the idea of society and our collective “stuff” on the shoulders of new media, how we as a society interpret and manipulate these technologies not at the individual level, but rather on the entire race. And how over time we determine or create how they will be used.

 Engelbart in fact uses Bush’s ideas as a jumping off point for his Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework article. In his file system he refers to his “stuff,” thought, fact, consideration concepts, ideas, worries, etc., that are relevant to a given problem area in his professional life as “kernels” of data (Engelbart). He goes on to talk about how and where he can store and arrange these “kernals” to maximize his ability to sort through and index his “stuff.”

 So one theme I found throughout the readings was that of information and data and how it’s ability to be disseminated by society is for the most part shaped by society. And in another theme, but maybe not as prevalent, was that of speed. How can we sort and manage this “stuff” faster and more efficiently. McLuhan refers to it as “electric speed” and Bush states the cathode ray tube rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microsecond is a long time. Engelbart also has issues with his file system through trial and error to make his side notched cards faster and more efficient to better serve his needs.

 In my opinion Bush, Williams and Engelbart appeared to be referring more about the content of our collective “stuff” and how we as a society have manipulated the storing, moving, viewing and listening of our “stuff” to better serve our needs. While McLuhan reminds us that it is not the content of our stuff that shapes those needs but rather the medium itself.