Chaos Theory and the Postmodern Internet

© Fred Abraham , Olga Mitina, & David Houston

Supreme Court Hears FBI Conference-Screening Case: Hearings continued today on the landmark civil rights case now before the U. S. Supreme Court. The FBI argued that in order to prevent computer conferencing networks from becoming sources of organized dissidence and possible revolution, they must have the power to routinely impound tapes for any computer communications system and screen them for the presence of suspect words, such a ”assassination.”

Postal Service Abolishment Proposal: Senator Marilyn Wu of Hawaii urged that the Postal Service be abolished. “All really important mail now gets delivered electronically by computer systems,” she stated. “There is no need why U.S. taxpayers should continue to subsidize an outmoded communication system, merely for the benefit of those few fanatics who refuse to have a terminal in their home.”

Advertisement: Before you decide on a new terminal, you owe it to yourself and your family to come to Basic Furnishings, home of distinctive items for the electronic age.”

From, The Boswash Times, July 7, 1994, Imaginary newspaper used to introduce ideas in The Network Nation (Hiltz & Turoff, 1978).

We want to examine a simple question for which there is no answer. Or maybe the answer is too obvious. We view almost every psychological or social system as “chaotic”, in the sense that forces of convergence toward central ideologies and forces of divergence away from central tendencies resolve themselves in patterns of activity of varying complexity that contain elements of both order and disorder. So the question we pose is, to what extent does electronic communication tend to favor one or the other of these tendencies?

Hiltz & Turoff’s book recognized that communicating via computer networks could be used for good or evil, for expression or repression of human potential and opinion. They hoped that it would represent a forum for free expression and interchange of ideas, and for social progress. Their book was remarkably prescient considering that in the late 70s very few people were using the computer for global communication. The Internet and the World Wide Web had their explosion in the mid 90s. Very recent.

Mark Poster (1989) observed that many social analysts saw electronic communications as creating “enormous social transformations. . . A right-wing contingent envisions a benign automated world of material plenty (Naisbitt, 1982), . . . A left-wing contingent, equally sanguine, foresees radical democracy as the outcome of the new technologies (Masuda, 1981).” Also, according to Poster, many people see daily lives as improved, but many others dispute that claim and point out that there is increasing isolation with the increasing dependency on global communications.

McLuhan captured this latter viewpoint with some of his famous aphorisms: “Every media extension of man is an amputation.” “The medium is the message.” “Electronically imploded, the globe is no more than a village.  . . [which extends] our central nervous system in a global embrace.” (McLuhan, 1967, 1973.) Nevertheless, McLuhan envisions the bright side, and the potential to avoid these hazards. His vision is that we are in a major historical transformation that needs guidance and nurturing. Smart (1992) states that, “McLuhan sets out to reveal the ways in which prominent technological innovations have been associated with significant forms of social and personal transformation. . . . Indeed the stated aim of the work is to contribute to an understanding of the effects of media technologies on human sensibilities and social life, and thereby to help bring about a ‘genuine increase of human autonomy’. As McLuhan (1967) comments, ‘the influence of unexamined assumptions derived from technology leads quite unnecessarily to maximal determinism in human life. Emancipation from that trap is the goal of all education.’” Smart further comments that, unfortunately, we seem to be headed more in the direction of vocational training than toward the liberal education McLuhan was advocating.

Poster (1989) holds that many social theorists (Marx, Weber, Durkheim) make action primary over language as a mode of social change. Poster considers language more primary, but he maintains that:
 

“language and action are interrelated aspects of experience. In fact, language may be considered a form of action and action is accompanied by linguistic expressions. By employing the term mode of information I do not want to suggest that in the social field language is separate from action or that it can be reified and considered as a self-subsisting totality. Quite the contrary: on this issue I follow Foucaults’s formulation of the term discourse/practice, by which he endeavors to bypass the traditional distinction between language and action, ideas and material things.” (Poster, 1989)

This emphasis on interaction, also proposed by Bakhtin (1973) as an interaction between language and context (culture) brings us to two principal theses presented here. One is that these various interactive facets of society have all the characteristics of nonlinear dynamical systems (chaos theory). All the insights and passion of chaos theory could be employed metaphorically to add to the discourse on social theory. The other thesis is our contention that nonlinear dynamics—more than electronic communications—is the most powerful influence on this cultural transformation. The current explosion/implosion of electronic communication has greatly accelerated this process beyond the dreams of Baudrillard, Benjamin, and McLuhan. But dynamics is self-organizational in a special way, in bringing itself into the consciousness of the process of the evolution of consciousness itself (see F. D. Abraham, 1994, 1996; R. H. Abraham, 1994; Hardy, 1998; Kurdyumov, 1990; Schwalbe, 1991).

We should point out that the most powerful and compelling features of nonlinear dynamics is the ability to explain how systems change suddenly and dramatically (bifurcations), and how intentional systems (humans and societies) can control their own bifurcations, their own evolution and growth. This is called self-organization. Here we consider for example, that many control parameters can cause these sudden dramatic changes. For example, the internet and its future incarnations are part of the complex system we call society, culture, or global village, and some of those control parameters that could be responsible for major transformations such as described by McLuhan, Buadriallard, Benjamin, Poster and other postmodern commentators, include the speed and capacity of the internet. Consider the following:
 

“When the WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexed) network was first commercially introduced in 1996, the feat of sending several wavelengths down a single fiber strand was welcome as a proof that optical bandwidth would be as bountiful as its enthusiasts claimed. But as the number of wavelengths on a fiber soared past 8, 16, 32 to 800 already in labs tests of the Avanex (AVNX) PowerMux—with 3300 or more feasible in Lucent’s new AllWave fiber—WDM no longer merely enhances the network. It consumes it. One of Lucent’s 864-strand cables could hold 2.86 lambdas, separately addressable in space and frequency. At 10 gigabits per second per lambda, that Lucent cable could hold 28.6 petabits—or more than 3 petabytes—per second, which is near the total Internet traffic per month just a couple of years ago.” (Gilder & Vigilante, 2000, p. 2.)

Three years ago, one of us, in preparation for teaching at Silliman University in the Philippines, placed some correspondence on his website, without any links to those files, thinking that they would only be accessed by those given the file names. To his surprise, these documents were accessed by others, and were available to anyone who cared to browse for the appropriate words. Think also of how fast today’s search engines work, with metasearchers (like metacrawler) running several engines simultaneously. Those of us who thought that the sheer bulk of internet traffic would preclude government surveillance and enhance privacy and thus democracy and diversity of culture, may not have been aware about the degree to which bandwidth is increasing.

Gilder and Vigilante continue:

“Rendering the bandwidth-conserving economies of packet switching unnecessary, the thousands and ultimately millions of lambdas could each serve as a potential end-to-end circuit at the sole disposal of its current users.”
                                                                                                         (Gilder & Vigilante, 2000, p. 2.)

On the other hand, this bandwidth may enhance social and cultural development and diversity by giving more groups instant communications. These may enable more diverse artistic efforts—family photo albums, personal artistic and photographic work including the animated, museum displays, movies, and interactive drama. The homogenizing replication of art, music, and literature may, instead of prostituting art in the service of commerce the way Baudrillard (simulacra) and Benjamin feared, could be replaced by new creative forms of artistic endeavor. Fractint shares software and art. Collectives of artists share web sites for the display and sale of their art.

However, the major question remains concerning the extent to which power in society becomes distributed rather than centralized. While global capitalism may concentrate the flow of many aspects of commercial decision-making, it also makes the consumer more powerful. There is more instantaneous information at the fingertips than ever before. Foucault (1980) considered power not to be the result of centralized institutions or modes of production (e.g., Marx), but rather there are networks of interaction of knowledge and power (pouvoir-savoir)—localized struggles of micro-politics.

“In his view complex differential power relationships extend to every aspect of our social, cultural, and political lives, involving all manner of (often contradictory) ‘subject positions’, and securing our assent not so much by threat of punitive sanctions as by persuading us to internalize the norms and values that prevail within the social order."    (Surap, 1993, p. 74)

References

Abraham, F. D. (1994). Chaos, bifurcations, & self-organization: Extensions of
neurological positivism and ecological psychology. Psychoscience, 1, 85-118. Also at http://goertzel.org/dynapsyc

Abraham, F. D. (1996). The dynamics of creativity & the courage to be. In W. Sulis & A.
Combs (Eds.), Nonlinear dynamics in human behavior. Studies of nonlinear phenomena in life science, vol. 5. Singapore: World Scientific.

Abraham, R. H. (1994). Chaos, Gaia, Eros. San Francisco: Harper.

Bakhtin, M. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language. (published originally under the name of a friend, V. N. Volshinov, for political reasons).

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other wtitings 1972-1977. Edited by C. Gordon. Brighton: Harvester.

Gilder, G., & Vigilante, R. (2000). Light links and champagne bubbles. Gilder Technology Report, 5 #5, May 2000, 1-7.

Hardy, C. (1998). Networks of meaning. Westport: Greenwood/Praeger.

Hiltz, S. R., & Turoff, M. (1978). The network nation: Human communication via computer. Reading: Addison-Wesley.

Kurdyumov, S. P. (1990). Evolution of self-organizational laws in complex systems. International Journal of Modern Physics C, 1, 299-327.

Masuda, Y. (1981). The information society as post-industrial society. Washington D.C.: World Future Society.

McLuhan, M. (1967). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

McLuhan, M. (1973). Understanding media: The extensions of man. London: Abacus.

Naisbitt, J. (1982f). Megatrends: Ten new directions transforming our lives. New York: Warner.

Poster, M. (1989). Critical theory and poststructuralism: In search of a context. Ithica: Cornell.

Sarup, M. (1993). Post-structuralism and postmodernism. Athens: University of Georgia.

Schwalbe, M. L. (1991). The autogenesis of the self. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 21, 269-295.

Smart, B. (1992). Modern conditions, postmodern controversies. London: Routledge.