The Genes of Culture

For the generous help of the kind one only asks of a sibling, Thomas Wiebe was of invaluable technical assistance. Other siblings—Margaret Wiebe and Frank Wiebe—read large swaths of these volumes. Their assurance that, yes, Chris’s work is not only readable but of interest to people who neither study media nor work in education, was genuinely encouraging.

Finally, we’d like to acknowledge thanks to Margarethe Hubauer, and especially to Michael Sowa for the existence of and then generous permission to use that most joyous image, Koehler’s pig.

These chapters are clearly part of what was originally conceptualized as a larger work; the prologue of volume 1 and the lectures give us a sense of where her tale was leading and what Nystrom intended to address. Studying the underlying patterns associated with large shifts in communications, she sees media not so much as agents of change, but as processes linked to solving the problems that inevitably arise out of prior stages of symbolic development—out of the fact that we communicate through symbol systems. Every “solution” adopted is itself necessarily flawed—and necessarily introduces further change. The result is a range of new challenges, which spark further change—and so on, ad infinitum. So long as humans survive, our history will continue to tell the story of new ways we try to solve the problems that arise out of our imperfect means of communicating.

Inadequacy and imperfection function therefore as both the engine of change and the inevitable result of change. When we deny that fallibility lies at the heart of what it means to be human and cling instead to the illusion of perfectibility, we risk falling prey to fanaticism—whether in a doomed pursuit of heaven on earth, or delusions of a master race, or dreams of some futuristic era of transhumanism arising out of the glory of new media technologies.

We can look at this notion of inexorable imperfection with a sense of gloom that we are destined to ongoing failure. Or we can embrace our fallibility, observing the human comedy of errors in good faith and with the optimism that things can in fact always be made better. While Nystrom embraced the latter perspective, she also recognized, with a sense of foreboding, the dismal possibility that humankind might be so strongly steeped in its own glories—the folly of our success, so to speak—as to lead us to our demise.

We may in fact be perilously close to the end. It all depends on where we take the story from here. My race across the past and territories not my own is not spurred by confidence but by dread. If we cannot get a clear view of what our story has been, and where it stands, and how to correct its course, my mistakes in this matter will not matter much.

Nystrom sought to deepen our understanding of the interaction of narrative and media so as to bring to our attention and help solve the problems arising out of our relationship to our new and ever-consuming technologies. Tools and technologies, she argues, give rise to and are shaped by narrative, which situates their use and foretells their purpose. And where Marx, for instance, tells a story about what Nystrom calls “tools of doing,” of economics and the means of production, her focus stays squarely on “tools of knowing,” on people and the means of meaning.

In Tales, Tools, Technopoly, we get an inkling of where Nystrom was probably going with her unfinished opus. Here, large swaths of history orient our attention to the central problems arising from the development of and changes in human communication. Oddly enough, because of our unique ability to represent, realize, and create “reality” through symbols, we need a way to control, structure, and contain the surfeit of information such representation provides. The Tale of Technopoly she introduces in these lectures is “the tale of technological progress with paradise to be regained, not in some misty hereafter, but here on earth, through the wonders of technology.” The content of this tale is, in large measure, the celebration of consumerism. The activity through which that tale progresses is the process of turning human behavior into technique. In the 1980s, when Nystrom was writing this account, she called our attention to the way all behaviors were relegated to experts—whether in psychology, education, economics, surgery, politics—and made quantifiable. And, indeed, our experts continue to diagnose and quantify our activities so as to determine whether a child should be given a behavior modification drug, whether a patient can get insurance coverage, whether a candidate and will win elections and so on. But today, her arguments against the tyranny of experts are complicated by the fact that we have incorporated their tools into our technologies, thereby making the mechanics of quantification invisible. Today, we look to our phones to find out whether we’ve done enough exercise or slept soundly or—irony of ironies!—used our phones too much. We don’t think about the premises upon which such tracking apps base their “scientific” output. Or even, simply, about how ridiculous it is that we might not be able to determine those things for ourselves.

In their various discussions of Technopoly, both Nystrom and Postman knew they were giving short shrift to the potential benefits of new and developing technologies. Neither were advocates of “back to nature,” or to orality (as the case may be), and Nystrom, in particular, resisted the nostalgia associated with an illusory Golden Age of print culture, where freedom and democracy and economic well-being reigned supreme. Both, however, were acutely aware of the selling power of new technologies—the glib boosterism, the tyranny of cheerfulness braying ceaselessly of improvement, speed, efficiency, productivity and, of course, profit. The way they saw it, new technologies did not need more or louder evangelists.

Both were aware of their own biases towards the written word. And they were also supremely aware of the limited capacity to fully appreciate all the potential consequences that developing technologies might bring. But, again, that was not the focus of their work.

They were committed instead to taking the longer view, the unfashionably darker perspective that would have us take stock of what was being put aside, left behind, forgotten.

For Nystrom and for Postman, the time had come for their human companions on this planet earth to look squarely at the problems brought on by the technologies they were using. These were large, moral, ecological concerns.

Anyone reading these pieces who is familiar with Nystrom’s work will come across bits and pieces they’ve read before—in course notes, conference speeches, published articles. There is little that is remarkable about that. However, the crossover between her work and Postman’s is. Certainly, her concerns with “narrative” overlap with his later publications and speeches (as in End of Education), as do her comments about problems and change (Building a Bridge to the 18th Century), and, most tellingly, her definition and explication of Technopoly (reiterated in his book of that name).

With all of this attention to her written work, it is easy to forget that Nystrom was, primarily, a teacher. For her, to work in education was to give—an act of social good; the intimation that one works for the betterment of all. For students, she was a ruthless critic, but this came out of a generosity that held us to flatteringly great expectations.

Her expectations for the field of Media Ecology helped promote an ethos of scholarship—an ethos that, alas, is rare in communication departments. For Nystrom, Media Ecology was not a sub-field of communications theory, but a meta-field that connected and explained ways of knowing—the function of symbol systems in the various categories of knowledge—from math and English to music and theology. As with Alfred North Whitehead and Susanne Langer, she saw the study of symbol systems as the dawning of a new age of philosophy, which gave rise to Media Ecology as the study of the means through which humans understood the world, created reality, and dreamed of the future.