History of Communication Discussion Questions

1. Godfrey writes that “The purpose of history is to assess the past so that we may more effectively construct the present and the future.” Answer by explaining this quote from our readings and by giving an example from any lecture.

2. What is Lisa Gitelman’s main point about “media as historical subjects?”

3. What is a peer-reviewed source? Give your best definition based on lecture and tutorial.

4.What is the relationship between printing and print culture?

5. How is printing seen as activism?

6. Explain two of the five epochs of Media History from Gutenberg Galaxy? (Marshall McLuhan’s breakdown of media history)

7. What is Oral Culture?

8. How do we see Imagined Communities through Newspapers

9. Describe how dividing the spectrum affected radio?

10. What was the effect of camera obscura and what field did it create?

11. How did the Lumière Brothers contribute to space time compression?

12. What are some of the characteristics of environmental media and

13. What is the importance of Analog and Digital media? What is the distinction between analog and digital media?

14. To what extent are the different methods of mass communication reflective of a model of history?

15. How do people who are excluded from the public sphere react to that exclusion?

16. Based on what you learned in assignment 3, how does writing a historiography lend itself to coming to a deeper understanding of history?

Newman: h ps://lithub.com/so-gutenberg-didnt-actually-invent-the-prin ngpress/
Shadd: h ps://hdl.handle.net/2027/aeu.ark:/13960/t1jh4dk09
“History of Prin ng Timeline.” American Prin ng Associa on, 2019. h ps://
prin nghistory.org/ meline/
Scanlon: https://thediscoverblog.com/
2018/08/28/canadas-earliest-printers/
Douglass: h p://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/
support15.html#menu_links
“7 Reasons Why Your Home Should Have a Radio.” h ps://
chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015313/1929-09-02/ed-1/seq-27/
Download
Parris: h ps://www.cbc.ca/arts/an-oral-history-of-the-blacklm-and-video-network-1.5559797
Druick: Projec ng Canada: Government Policy and Documentary
Film at the Na onal Film Board.
“Canadian Roadshowmen Working with Na onal Film Board to
Distribute Propaganda Pix.” The Billboard
ti
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:
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Murphy: “Film: Toronto’s Black Film & Video
Network.” American Visions
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fi
Readings
Barris: The Globe and Mail
Canada. Royal Commission on Na onal Development in the Arts,
Le ers, and Sciences [Massey Commission]. Part II Introduc on.
Hogarth: h ps://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/ar cle/
view/1233/1211
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humanities
Article
Mediating Climate, Mediating Scale
Anne Pasek
Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5, Canada;
apasek@ualberta.ca
Received: 22 August 2019; Accepted: 8 October 2019; Published: 11 October 2019






Abstract: Climate communication is seemingly stuck in a double bind. The problem of global warming
requires inherently trans-scalar modes of engagement, encompassing times and spaces that exceed
local frames of experience and meaning. Climate media must therefore negotiate representational
extremes that risk overwhelming their audience with the immensity of the problem or rendering it
falsely manageable at a local scale. The task of visualizing climate is thus often torn between scales
germane to the problem and scales germane to individuals. In this paper I examine how this scalar
divide has been negotiated visually, focusing in particular on Ed Hawkins’ 2016 viral climate spiral.
To many, the graphic represents a promising union of political and scientific communication in the
public sphere. However, formal analysis of the gif’s reception suggest that the spiral was also a site of
anxiety and negative emotion for many viewers. I take these conflicting interpretations as cause to
rethink current assumptions about best practices and desirable outcomes for scalar mediations of
climate and their capacities to mobilize a wide range of reactions and interpretations—some more
legibly political and some more complicatedly affective, yet all nevertheless integral to the work of
building a holistic response to the climate crisis.
Keywords: climate change; data visualization; visual culture; media; scale; climate change
communication; affect; aesthetics
1. Introduction
All representations of climate are fundamentally representations of scale (Woods 2017, p. 217). The
physics of global warming, and our difficulty in meaningfully responding to it, lie in negotiating the
cognitive and political differences between one pound of CO2 and several hundred parts per million,
in understanding how small actions accumulate across time and space to create meaningful differences,
as well as when small actions don’t scale, or risk obfuscating much larger forms of inaction. These
leaps between scales demand structures of mediation to represent and convey information beyond the
habitual and phenomenological ways of knowing the world (Edwards 2010, p. 282; Schneider 2012,
p. 186).
The mediation of climate change is therefore always the mediation of its scalar dynamics and so
also an invitation to imagine unconventional forms of causality and collectivity. This dynamic surfaces
in visualizations of climate data, even when they are crafted and presented without any particular
conscious political aim (O’Neill and Smith 2014). Images of climatic scales can be surprisingly
charismatic, traveling across heterogeneous publics that seek to cultivate modes of sensing and
understanding climate across scalar divides (Knox 2015; Pine and Liboiron 2015).
The study of the reception and circulation of the visual culture of climate data is therefore a means
to study climate communication in action, in ways that elude careful control on the part of practiced
climate communicators and their developing orthodoxies of best practices. Scale remains a necessary
challenge and paradox for effective and affecting climate communication, and these dimensions of the
problem are often expressed through aesthetics rather than an emphasis on context or solutions.
Humanities 2019, 8, 159; doi:10.3390/h8040159
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Humanities 2019,
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In this paper I provide a brief overview of the role of scale and data visualization in climate
In this paper I provide a brief overview of the role of scale and data visualization in climate change
change communications, as well as evolving norms and contradictions that have emerged therein. I
communications, as well as evolving norms and contradictions that have emerged therein. I do so
do so through a brief history of charismatic climate data graphics, anchored in case studies selected
through a brief history of charismatic climate data graphics, anchored in case studies selected for their
for their significant and unanticipated public reach. I begin with the early movement of global climate
significant
and unanticipated
public through
reach. I begin
with theuses
earlyofmovement
of global
climate
data stick
into
data into popular
media, narrated
the multiple
Michael Mann
et al.’s
hockey
popular media, narrated through the multiple uses of Michael Mann et al.’s hockey stick graph during
graph during the 1990s and 2000s. I then turn to consider how this model of scale has been contested
the
and 2000s.by
I then
turnlocalized
to considerand
how often
this model
of scale has been contested
and supplanted
and1990s
supplanted
more
affectively-curtailed
approaches
to climate
by
more
localized
and
often
affectively-curtailed
approaches
to
climate
communication
andI conclude
action in
communication and action in recent years, with both positive and negative affordances.
recent
with
both positive
negative
affordances.
I conclude
with
a detailed
formal
analysis
with ayears,
detailed
formal
analysis and
of Ed
Hawkins’
widely circulated
2016
climate
spiral
visualization,
of
Ed
Hawkins’
widely
circulated
2016
climate
spiral
visualization,
which
represents
a
turn
backand
to
which represents a turn back to planetary scaled data and a wider range of affective responses
planetary
scaled
data
and
a
wider
range
of
affective
responses
and
networked
structures
of
feeling.
networked structures of feeling. I argue that this example is cause to rethink current assumptions
Iabout
arguebest
thatpractices
this example
is cause tooutcomes
rethink current
assumptions
best practices
desirable
and desirable
for scalar
mediationsabout
of climate
and theirand
capacities
to
outcomes
for
scalar
mediations
of
climate
and
their
capacities
to
mobilize
a
wide
range
of
reactions
and
mobilize a wide range of reactions and interpretations—some more legibly political and some more
interpretations—some
more legibly
political yet
andall
some
more complicatedly
affective,
complicatedly introspective
and affective,
nevertheless
integral tointrospective
the work ofand
mustering
a
yet
all nevertheless
to the
work of mustering a holistic response to the climate crisis.
holistic
response tointegral
the climate
crisis.
2. Charismatic Data
2. Charismatic Data
Scientific graphs of global temperatures or atmospheric CO2 have over the past few decades
Scientific graphs of global temperatures or atmospheric CO2 have over the past few decades
become increasingly charismatic and mediated through diverse platforms and formal strategies. More
become increasingly charismatic and mediated through diverse platforms and formal strategies.
and more, climate data visualizations are called upon not just to condense datasets and coordinate the
More and more, climate data visualizations are called upon not just to condense datasets and
interpretation of scientific readers, but to move outside of scientific circles, to stand in for community
coordinate the interpretation of scientific readers, but to move outside of scientific circles, to stand in
consensus, and to index the cumulative output of not just laboratory findings, but the physical
for community consensus, and to index the cumulative output of not just laboratory findings, but the
outcome of entire historical periods at planetary scales. Such images have considerable impact, both in
physical outcome of entire historical periods at planetary scales. Such images have considerable
coordinating social and political action, and in constructing new global imaginaries.
impact, both in coordinating social and political action, and in constructing new global imaginaries.
Take, for example, Michael Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes’ “Hockey Stick”
Take, for example, Michael Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes’ “Hockey
graph (Figure 1)—one of the most storied cases of climate visualization (Mann et al. 1999). It takes its
Stick” graph (Figure 1)—one of the most storied cases of climate visualization (Mann et al. 1999). It
name from a simple, linear representation of scalar contrast: Like a hockey stick lying prone, its line
takes its name from a simple, linear representation of scalar contrast: Like a hockey stick lying prone,
runs flat for most of the graph’s representation of time, until a sharp and sudden curve at its end. It has
its line runs flat for most of the graph’s representation of time, until a sharp and sudden curve at its
long been an iconic image, emblematic of climate science and advocacy during the late 1990s and 2000s.
end. It has long been an iconic image, emblematic of climate science and advocacy during the late
It visually signified an abrupt and sudden change in climatic norms, framing the problem of climate
1990s and 2000s. It visually signified an abrupt and sudden change in climatic norms, framing the
change as a pronounced difference in degree, but also, more qualitatively, of kind. It communicates a
problem of climate change as a pronounced difference in degree, but also, more qualitatively, of kind.
scalar shift.
It communicates a scalar shift.
Figure 1. The ‘hockey stick graph’: a millennial reconstruction of average temperatures in the northern
Figure 1. The ‘hockey stick graph’: a millennial reconstruction of average temperatures in the northern
hemisphere from Mann et al. (1999).
hemisphere from Mann et al. (1999).
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In the context of a scientific paper, the image succeeds in communicating a complicated statistical
analysis of temperature proxies, averages, and degrees of uncertainty that are the central finding of the
study. However, as an image in wider circulation, mediated and remediated, it reached new audiences
and was used to enact new strategies of emphasis. It attracted a great deal of press when it was first
published in Nature in 1998 (serendipitously for newsmakers, arriving both during an unusually warm
year and on Earth Day), providing a condensed visual that could effectively communicate the scale
and speed of climate change to non-scientific audiences. It went on to become a key visual in the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report, as well as in the summary of
this report for policy makers (Watson et al. 2001). The image was further displayed prominently behind
speakers during the press conference organized by the IPCC at its release, providing a conceptual and
literal backdrop against which messages of certainty and urgency were framed (BBC News 2001).
The dramatic turn of the hockey stick and its affective message of scalar shifts have been further
mediated by a range of contemplative techniques. Most spectacularly, a similar chart was recreated
during a key moment in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim 2006), this time visualizing
millennial spikes in CO2 concentrations. Rather than statically presented for inspection like other
figures in the film’s lecture, the graph was dramatized by Gore physically scaling the blade of the
hockey stick in a mechanical lift, theatrically emphasizing the irregularity of the spike and its departure
from shared norms and conventions—in this case metaphorically writ as the floor on which a sober
speaker might stand. More privately, the scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock reportedly
keeps a copy of this graph pinned to his wall as a kind of icon of secular concern. Keeping it in the
view of his desk at all times apparently serves him as a constant reminder of the stakes and speeds of
climate action (Lovelock 2007, p. 52).
Because of its prominence, the hockey stick’s scalar message also became a lightning rod for
political disputes, including those levied in good faith and those with a more partisan or ideological
motive. Proving or disproving the hockey stick was and, in some very stubborn circles, still continues
to be a chief arena in which climate change skeptics and deniers go to war. It took an outsized role
in several congressional hearings convened by climate denialist politicians, para-scientific reports
issued by fossil fuel and libertarian think tanks, and the skeptic blogosphere and publishing circuits.1
Like Lovelock and Gore, denialists have singled out the hockey stick as more than just a scientific
summary, but a message about the character of climate change, posed with considerable urgency.
These meditations, mediations, and contestations of the image compose a range of interpretive
strategies for negotiating scale’s affective demands: a shift in norms that demands, but does not clarify,
defensive reaction.
In Mann’s own account, the graph—not his data, but his data visualization—attracted so much
attention, positive and negative, because as an image it is both visually engaging and psychologically
alarming (Mann 2012, pp. xiii–xvi). Its public relevance outpaced its useful but by no means pivotal
contribution to the scientific consensus around global warming that solidified in the late 1990s (Mann
2012, p. 127). Its legacy is and remains one of scalar pedagogy and affect.
A key reason why Mann et al.’s graph circulated so heavily was that it could effectively
communicate the abstraction of “the climate” as a new category of planetary knowledge distinct from
that of regional weather patterns, no matter how historicized. Scale, in other words, is definitional to
the concept of climate that was framed and argued through the mediated history of the hockey stick.
Its millennial-long temporal reach, and sharp vector of discontinuity in recent decades, express climate
as a phenomenon analytically and perceptually dissimilar from scales germane to human experience.
It hails viewers to contemplate time and phenomena beyond their reach. It requires forms of scalar
thinking and action that weigh quantitative and qualitative differences carefully.
1
For a summary of these efforts and an excellent primary source that speaks to the worldview of climate denialism,
see (McIntyre 2010).
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Transcalar engagements are hard to think and enact and the graph itself is silent on this subject.
Indeed, one of the reasons why Mann et al.’s graph is so alarming and enduringly unimpeachable
is that it is a decidedly global abstraction. It records average temperatures across nearly planetary
scales,2 which is a convenient optic and a good short hand for the performance of geophysics, but in
doing so it constructs a temperature that is never actually experienced—a massively aggregate signal
that must be meticulously produced and imagined through the medium of the cartesian grid and the
techniques of statistical analysis. It mediates scale; it does not index it.
This framing of climate is, of course, not without ongoing social complications. The scalar leaps
implied by framing climate above and beyond human experience place the role and responsibilities of
political units of analysis under perceptual strain. This contributes to a framework in which climate
is understood as both the provenance of anthropogenic action, yet not scalarly continuous with the
corporeal or agential capacities of individuals or publics. This suggests, as the following section
argues, that there are emergent models of power implied by all representations of scale and their
configuration of more than human forces and different models of human collectivity. There are a range
of contradictory ways to address this problem and no clear, universal strategy to overcome it.
3. Scale’s Double Bind
In the 1990s and early 2000s, during which the hockey stick graph was elevated and contested,
there was also a shared assumption—and an understandable one at the time—in both environmentalist
and scientific circles that the problem of climate inaction was fundamentally a matter of a public
knowledge deficit. The way to motivate change, broadly conceived, was thus to simply communicate
the science more—to educate, to provide knowledge, in easily understandable terms like iconic data
visualizations, that could recruit the public into the scientific consensus.3 An informed public, it
was further hoped, would be automatically or at least more easily mobilized to elect and pressure
political representatives that would then take the necessary national and international actions to avoid
catastrophic global warming. There was, in short, a model of power implied by this kind of science
communication: correct errors in judgement at the base so that power can be more effectively mustered
at the top. This was the foundational assumption of An Inconvenient Truth and much of the media
coverage about the hockey stick’s proof, demands, and possible illegitimacy.
This presumption has largely failed in practice, at least in the American context. Despite continued
efforts to disseminate and communicate scientific findings, the number of Americans who believe in
climate change today is not dramatically different from the numbers in 2001 (Brenan and Saad 2018).
Currently only 3% of Americans rate environmental issues among the essential concerns facing the
country (Gallup Inc. 2019). More broadly, international political elites and elected governments have
almost universally failed to uphold the treaty obligations and emissions targets that have emerged
from the decadal march of international climate diplomacy. Energy demand and carbon emissions
continue to rise.
In response to this failure of the deficit model of communication, and in response to a range of
culturally and class-specific efforts to articulate climate impacts and concerns, barriers to effectively
raising public belief and understanding about climate change are now widely understood to be more
than informational. As scholars of science communication stress, these figures represent less an absence
of information than a lack of context and social infrastructure through which the data of climate
change can be made meaningful—not merely received and deposited by route (Callison 2014; Doyle
2011a). Structural and gendered commitments to the fossil economy further complicate the reception
2
3
Although the graph has been used as shorthand for global warming, the dataset is specific to the Northern Hemisphere
because of the disparity in datapoints available between the North and South. Its findings hold true of the South, but this
dynamic is surely an interesting topic for further study.
For a useful survey and formative critique of the knowledge deficit model in science communication, see, respectfully,
(Moser and Dilling 2011), (Nisbet and Scheufele 2009).
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of scientific information and contribute to the polarization of climate science and policy approaches in
subcultures and in government (Dunlap et al. 2016; Daggett 2018). As this research emphasizes, the
crisis of climate inaction was and is less about uncertainty than about power and social conflict.
Yet scale and its aesthetics tacitly coinhabit questions of identity and political economy. This is
because climate communication remains in something of a double bind: Global warming requires
inherently trans-scalar modes of engagement, encompassing spatial breadths and time frames that
are not easily accommodated in familiar forms of social life. Climate change media must negotiate
representational extremes that risk either overwhelming their audience with the immensity of the
problem or stripping data of ontological weight and local meaning. As feminist and anticolonial
scholars remind, aesthetic and receptive strategies that linger in these scalar disconnections—the
sublime, the hyperobject, romanticism, or horror—commonly fail to cultivate a sense of responsibility
or engaged, collectivist strategies to “stay with the trouble” of climate (Haraway 2016; Heise 2014;
Shotwell 2016).
The task of visualizing climate is thus seemingly torn between scales germane to the problem
and scales more appropriate to mobilizing political action. Communicating vast geophysical time and
trends—and making them meaningful within the space of daily life—remains an ongoing challenge,
especially when local experiences of climate depart from the narrative of global warming or when
living fully with the knowledge of climate change proves politically and psychologically trying
(Norgaard 2011). It may be hard to reconcile local experiences of weather with the severity of the
hockey stick graph, no matter how sincerely one might believe that they represent an accurate account
of a scalar thing or a concept called climate. One’s answer would likely differ if considering this
question in the Arctic or the Maldives Islands, but this would be no less local a response to this image.
Today, an emphatically global, data-centered view of climate change is increasingly being
abandoned within work coming out of and drawing from the sociological study of climate politics
and knowledge production. A wave of science and technology studies scholars have called these
visualizations to task for the many ways in which abstract, planetary data risks producing an apolitical
flattening of global responsibility, overwhelming and rendering powerless its viewers, or otherwise
ignoring the many different ways in which climate change comes to matter culturally. Notably, there is
a recurring call to attend to the emplacement of climate change within socially-valued local geographies
that are uniquely threatened but could also uniquely motivate local actions which might, in aggregate,
scale up to the level of the climate (Jasanoff 2010; Callison 2014; Doyle 2011a). For these critics and
experts, best practices in climate communication do not consist of the intensified education of a generic
public with more and seemingly neutral global scientific data, but the recognition and elevation of
situated publics that negotiate warming through place-based calls to action.
Science communication as a field of study and practice within STEM, both in response and in
parallel, has begun to make an allied departure from the information deficit model. Recent studies on
the psychology of climate change suggest that quickly pivoting from a focus on global-level crises to
a focus on individual-level solutions is key to conveying the problem of climate change and getting
it to stick (Wolf and Moser 2011). In order to push past psychological defenses and to convince the
unmotivated, science communication experts argue that effective communication must reject gloomy
projections for the future and contain positive accounts of individual agency within its narrative (Shome
and Marx 2009; Mooney et al. 2015; Van der Linden et al. 2015). In practice, this can be condensed to a
formula: “persuasive communications = shared values + a problem or opportunity + a solution or
call to action” (Banse 2013, p. 6). Threats, in other words, must be consistently matched with locally
actionable solutions. Regardless of where the conversation about climate begins or develops, it should
be narrowed at the end to match the scale and concerns of one’s audience.
This local turn in the debate around best practices in climate communication forwards, tacitly and
overtly, contrasting models of power through a downshifting in scale. Strong, positive examples of this
strategy have emerged in recent social movement mobilizations and community self-defense strategies
such as The People’s Climate March and the #NoDAPL resistance at Standing Rock. Mobilizing
Humanities 2019, 8, 159
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coalitionally towards wider climate action, framed through locally determined, intersectional demands,
has proven to be a successful strategy in cultivating both new kinds of media attention and grassroots
political power (Young 2015; Cohen 2016; Estes 2019). The emergence of these movements further
reflects the fact that climate change is now no longer effectively framed as an anticipated threat but
can better be understood as a series of disruptions that are currently and differently experienced by
frontline communities. Accompanying these protest camps, mass mobilizations, and media campaigns
are also turns to reopen questions about definition of the good life, both in terms of individuals and as
supported within larger societal structures.
However, these calls to act locally on climate are not always collective in nature. At its worst, and
perhaps more frequently, the rejection of the global and a stubborn emphasis on solutions can take the
form of sustainability talk run amok, overly emphasizing individual agency and market-palatable but
globally insignificant or unaccountable forms of performative action (Alaimo 2012, p. 559; Steinberg
2010; Lovell and MacKenzie 2011). The visualization of carbon footprints, for example, is a popular way
in which data comes back into this localized picture. Calls to reduce one’s footprint, often in the context
of individual consumer decisions, presume that responsibility for the climate crisis can be quantified
and satisfied as a matter of individual accounts. Tellingly, the concept was popularized by British
Petroleum during its ill-begotten rebranding phase as an attempt to render individual households and
the oil company equivalent in scale and ethical responsibility (Pasek 2019; Doyle 2011b).
The risk, as its been subsequently argued by Timothy Clark, is that this form of climate
communication can produce and rely upon “derangements of scale” whereby minute individualizing
actions are made falsely equivalent to planetary problems, ignoring the larger economic and
infrastructural forces that are much harder to change but that are certainly more causal (Clark
2012, pp. 150–51). This misconstrued sense of scale can risk becoming a form of “soft denial”
whereby the phenomena of global warming is acknowledged, but rendered falsely distant or too easily
manageable (Hoexter 2016). We might say that scale here becomes an act of aspirational mimesis,
where the shape of the macrocosm is imagined in relation to a highly symbolic microcosm, but without
a legible analysis of how these two scales do or do not respond to the other. As with any analysis that
seems to deliberately elide structural questions, this too implies a model of power: one where the
personal governance of presumably homogeneous individual lives is the first and last avenue for the
production of politics.
The soundness of this theory of change notwithstanding, in this context it might seem like the time
of charismatic planetary data visualizations is coming to an end—that there will be no great hockey
stick graphs in the future, and that in the turn to local action the problem of global scales has been to
a large degree evacuated from climate politics, for good or for ill. However, there is some evidence
that this is not the case. The remainder of this paper turns to focus on a particular recent example of
climate data visualization—one that is in many ways a response to these currents and debates and
which might illuminate areas of concern that still elude wide notice and discussion.
4. Scalar Affects and Data Visualization
On 9 May 2016 climate scientist Ed Hawkins posted his first spiral climate gif to Twitter. The figure
takes data from the University of East Anglia’s CRUTEM4 dataset and runs it through a circular
calendar, translating the sharp rise of a hockey stick-styled graph into a widening and quickening
gyre of global average temperatures (Figure 2). As the pace and span of temperature changes increase
towards the turn of the century, and as the Paris Agreement’s 1.5- and 2-degrees Celsius targets are
quickly approached, Hawkins’ spiral dramatizes familiar, and too easily forgotten, scientific findings.
There is nothing new to this information; Hawkins is rather taking old knowledge and knowledge
forms and remediating them in his spare time, bringing together political targets and global data points
into a differently staged image: one that represents scale through change in intensity and speed, and in
the abbreviated real time of the gif’s 11 second loop.
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Figure 2.
Ed Hawkins’
Hawkins’ original
original climate
climate spiral
spiral gif.
gif. An
An animated
animated version
version of
of the
the gif
gif can
can be
be viewed
viewed at
at
Figure
2. Ed
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2016/spiralling-global-temperatures/.Licensed
Licensedby
by Ed
Ed Hawkins
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2016/spiralling-global-temperatures/.
Hawkins
under
a
Creative
Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike
4.0
International
License.
under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The responses to the spiral were unanticipated and voluminous. Hawkins’ gif rapidly went viral,
The responses to the spiral were unanticipated and voluminous. Hawkins’ gif rapidly went viral,
circulating beyond “climate Twitter” to reach hundreds of thousands of viewers in the social space
circulating beyond “climate Twitter” to reach hundreds of thousands of viewers in the social space
of newsfeeds or the public space of conventional news coverage about the spiral in subsequent days.
of newsfeeds or the public space of conventional news coverage about the spiral in subsequent days.
The Washington Post called it “the most compelling global warming visualization ever made” (Mooney
The Washington Post called it “the most compelling global warming visualization ever made”
2016). Several other gifs followed, authored by Hawkins and other colleagues engaged by the concept,
(Mooney 2016). Several other gifs followed, authored by Hawkins and other colleagues
engaged by
covering sea ice volume, CO2 concentrations, and forecasted future temperatures.4 Hawkins’ original4
the concept, covering sea ice
volume, CO2 concentrations, and forecasted future temperatures.
spiral, meanwhile, began to circulate as a new and urgent index of climate change timescales. The 2016
Hawkins’ original spiral, meanwhile, began to circulate as a new and urgent index of climate change
Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games featured a version of the spiral prominently in its opening ceremonies,
timescales. The 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games featured a version of the spiral prominently in
further propagating the image to 1 billion-some viewers. Hoesung Lee, then the head of the IPCC,
its opening ceremonies, further propagating the image to 1 billion-some viewers. Hoesung Lee, then
reportedly reevaluated the organization’s media strategies in light of this success (King 2016).
the head of the IPCC, reportedly reevaluated the organization’s media strategies in light of this
Responses to the animation were wide and intensely felt, though not for reasons that are commonly
success (King 2016).
known or understood. In many ways, the spiral visualizations seem to respond to some of the concerns
Responses to the animation were wide and intensely felt, though not for reasons that are
of earlier climate communication experts and critics; they colorfully bring together political targets
commonly known or understood. In many ways, the spiral visualizations seem to respond to some
and geophysical data, thwarting the inclination of most scientific visualizations to just report the
of the concerns of earlier climate communication experts and critics; they colorfully bring together
physical phenomena. The gifs are also optimized to circulate in social spaces, reaching everyday
political targets and geophysical data, thwarting the inclination of most scientific visualizations to
people, perhaps caught unaware between memes and passing thoughts, thereby rendering climate
just report the physical phenomena. The gifs are also optimized to circulate in social spaces, reaching
change communication a little more ubiquitous and vernacular.
everyday people, perhaps caught unaware between memes and passing thoughts, thereby rendering
Yet, like the hockey stick graph, the scale of the visualization is determinedly global. The data
climate change communication a little more ubiquitous and vernacular.
is a smoothed, semi-empirical mediation of observations (Edwards 2010, p. 188), diffusely modeled
Yet, like the hockey stick graph, the scale of the visualization is determinedly global. The data is
out over the whole of the northern hemisphere. It represents numbers that have never been directly
a smoothed, semi-empirical mediation of observations (Edwards 2010, p. 188), diffusely modeled out
felt by any given body, it erases differences between the hemisphere’s poles and middle latitudes,
over the whole of the northern hemisphere. It represents numbers that have never been directly felt
where climate change is progressing with drastically different speeds and socio-cultural impacts
by any given body, it erases differences between the hemisphere’s poles and middle latitudes, where
(Watt-Cloutier 2018), and, like so many scientific visualizations of climate data, it is silent on questions
climate change is progressing with drastically different speeds and socio-cultural impacts (WattCloutier 2018), and, like so many scientific visualizations of climate data, it is silent on questions of
historical responsibility, borders, or environmental justice at large (Doyle 2011a, p. 37). Moreover,
4
Thesescience
visualizations,
along with updated
versions
the global
average agnostic
temperature
are collected
at https:
against
communications
orthodoxy,
theofimage
is wholly
onspiral,
the subject
of solutions
//www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/.
4
These visualizations, along with updated versions of the global average temperature spiral, are collected at
https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/.
Humanities 2019, 8, 159
8 of 13
of historical responsibility, borders, or environmental justice at large (Doyle 2011a, p. 37). Moreover,
against science communications orthodoxy, the image is wholly agnostic on the subject of solutions
or shared values. It does not specify a ‘we’ to which or from which the data is oriented, nor does it
suggest what a proper response to the data might be, besides aesthetic contemplation and affective
reaction to the animation of scale and speed.
In short, the success of the gif is a puzzle that current scholarship on the mediation of climate
change does not fully explain. A closer examination of the audience reception of these gifs suggests
that questions of scale—or the vexed gap between global representations and local capacities for
action—are still very much at play. Rather than the straightforward communication of scientific fact,
many who engaged with these images sought to share and communicate not just global warming
data, but also the affects and scalar dynamics of this data when newly registered by Hawkins’ visual
technique. This requires an analysis of scalar representations as an aesthetic project, rather than purely
informational or contextual communications.
Climate data visualization, to this end, should be read for its formal structures. In developing
this avenue of analysis, firstly, it should be observed that the principle innovation of the spiral gifs
was not their optimized shareability or circular orientation—these had been done before—but rather
the fact that they move. Hawkins himself acknowledges this (Van Renssen 2017). There is something
dynamic, perhaps even visceral, to data rendered as a moving image rather than a static one. Gore’s
physical animation of the CO2 hockey stick hints at this fact. Removed from conventional x- and y-axes
and their explanatory registers, the viewer of a climate spiral is freed from interpretative work to a
significant degree, able simply to watch and respond to the pace and expansions or contractions of
data in motion.
This allows for a newly kinetic understanding of climate-scaled phenomena. The viewer is able
to register shifts in temperature not only as a crystalized, visual fact, but also and perhaps more
profoundly as a durational, qualitative shift in temporal and spatial pattern. Initially one sees only
the relatively minute changes of the turn of the 20th century and this makes the accelerated tempo
of the subsequent century’s arrival and derivations all the more contrasting. In this way, alarm is
generated experientially and repeatedly as the gif loops, emphasizing the traces of past norms and
differentiating movements in an ever-widening spiral of color and line. To stop abruptly in the present
is to momentarily arrest the image’s momentum, as if in a cinematic freeze frame, hovering ominously
before its anticipated collision with the 1.5- and 2-degree targets. This gives a very different perspective
on the fragility of these targets than the IPCC’s graphing efforts of mitigation pathways have sought to
render legible and feasible beyond, perhaps, what a more realistic assessment of historical and political
trends might suggest (Anderson 2015). The moving image provides a subtle, but powerful, corporeal
solicitation: to think through data not just via visual summary and synthesis, but as an imagined index
of a physical thing, with a palpable acceleration that implies, in turn, the frightening inertia of an object
in motion.
The result, for some, is a visualization of the worsening intractability of climate change rather
than its political call to order. In responses to the graph there is a pronounced tendency to see the
spiraling data first as fact, then as symbol—to move from scientific understanding to metaphor. The
graph’s circular shape, to this end, seems to be often taken as an echo of the shape of the planet itself, its
enclosing atmosphere, or the growing fracture of geophysical and political norms. The Washington Post,
for example, notes that, “the circles are part of one unwinding spiral, which serves as a fitting metaphor
for the long-term course of the Earth’s temperature” (Mooney 2016). This resonance is evident in
several responses to the original Twitter post (Hawkins 2016) which, in addition to the usual climate
denialist contrarianism, include comments such as “It’s a Death Spiral,” “Watch #globalwarming spiral
out of control,” and “WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.” (In my own viewing of the gif I keep returning
to William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/
The falcon cannot hear the falconer/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”). This is all to say that
Humanities 2019, 8, 159
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I am not sure that we can extrapolate a clear model of power here, except for the power that lies in
soberly assessing its lack.
Rather than dismissing these responses as unproductive nihilism, I am interested in examining this
kind of affective phenomena as itself a way of thinking through the dynamics of scale in which climate
change is fundamentally embroiled. Rather than paralyzing or off-putting, for the large public that
circulated the climate spiral, the image was affecting and demanded to be shared. It was a networked
affect—a piece of viral media, but also feeling.
In the context of incredibly inadequate industrial and government responses to climate change,
it seems entirely appropriate that people should seek out and respond to representations of climate that
feel bad—that express a sense of alarm and impending crisis, and that otherwise subtly communicate
the visceral feeling of impending disaster rather than celebrate its potential solutions. The virality of
these images—their impactfulness and social success—can in many ways be read as a response to and
a refusal of the strained positivity of climate communication today. Data visualization, rendered in
motion, represents in kinetic terms the ways in which carbon emissions and global economies move
with historical momentum; that it is an urgent, and exceedingly difficult task to slow the progress
of geophysically scaled processes; and that the goal of climate action today will be to slow and
mitigate—but not avoid, erase, ‘solve’, or wholly undo—global warming as an existential threat to
so many species, communities, and lifeways. In this light, Hawkins’ spirals have perhaps succeeded
in communicating the scalar realities of climate science more than any footprint analysis or policy
document could.
Significantly, I think that Hawkins’ climate visualizations and the story of their reception suggest
a new direction in the debate about how to best communicate and organize towards publics in this
fight. In the corporeal mode of address that moving data elicits, there is a sense not of local specificity
or global abstraction, but of an evocative sense of the planet and the climate as physical entities—of
aggregate global temperatures not as a temporal phenomena, but as a weighty thing whose path
cannot be trivially shifted. This reading of the gif takes up Ursula (Heise 2008, p. 55) invective to
reject an absolutist mandate for local-specificity within environmental politics and to instead seek to
cultivate a “sense of the planet,” which might be sought within the globe-spanning affordances of
contemporary networks of communication (p. 63). Climate is bigger than individuals and localities;
acknowledging this is crucial. It further speaks to what Hannah Knox has described as “thinking like a
climate”: a receptive form of engagement observed between several climate scientists and their data in
which divides between the observer and the observed collapse into relational urgency (Knox 2015).
Reactions of alarm, shared anxieties, and pronouncements of doom show that viewers see themselves
in the system encircled by climate data and are moved by its aesthetics into forms of public feeling.
Above all, the climate spiral example stands as a testament that aesthetics and affect matter, that
formal design elements and the social life of scientific images are tightly bound within questions of
scale, and that these factors should ideally be acknowledged and mobilized rather than preempted
and strong-armed in an effort to emphasize solutions. ‘Bad emotional responses,’ a visual attraction
to the global, and public faith in data’s capacities for storytelling persist in the mediation of climate
change today. Past critiques of the racial, gendered, and social gaps of this framing of the issue remain
essential, but such engagements need not necessarily be in conflict with the contextual and situated.
The challenge, as every good organizer knows, is to provoke emotion first and put it to work second. In
removing scale from climate communication, and by emphasizing only our positive abilities for action,
we risk losing a powerful affective tool as well as a sober assessment of what we are facing as a planet.
5. Conclusions
The role of aesthetics in climate communication has been largely confined to the field of ecocriticism
and related studies of global warming in art, literature, and film—in short, objects of study that are
understood to be interpretive representations of climate within a predominantly humanist tradition
(Siperstein et al. 2016; Svoboda 2016; Davis and Turpin 2015). There are few attempts to apply humanist
Humanities 2019, 8, 159
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analyses of aesthetics and visual culture to scientific representations of climate and climate data.5 Yet,
as evidenced by the climate spirals and, to a degree, the hockey stick graphs that precede it, data
visualization is a rich site of aesthetic and affective responses—responses that can best be evaluated
through tools of formal analysis and reception germane to the arts.
These examples of charismatic data images suggest that climate change communication continues
to be a complicated, unpredictable task, resistant to easy summary in formulas for best practices or
optimized psychological reach. This is in large part because of the paradox of scale that endures
within the political, scientific, and aesthetic problems of climate: Global warming requires inherently
trans-scalar modes of engagement, calling our attention simultaneously towards each other and far
beyond the scope of individual or everyday experiences. We must forget neither side of this equation.
I conclude not with an answer that resolves this tension, but instead a call for pluralism
in approaches to negotiating scalar contradictions. I find encouraging signs to this end in the
continuing experiments with form and visual narrative emerging from communication practitioners,
both professional and informal. Animation is fast becoming a more commonly utilized technique,
now formally recommended to climate researchers looking to share datasets and summaries with
a wider public (Harold et al. 2017). Recent efforts by Antti Lipponen, Kevin Pluck, Robert Rohde,
Neil Kaye, and John Nelson are examples of this trend, including gif, video, and scrolling animations
that dramatize the speed and size of global temperature anomalies, sea level rise, and fossil fuel
consumption on sites including Twitter, Reddit, Flickr, and YouTube. More broadly, during the recent
Global Climate Strike Week, millions of youths and their allies marched with signs that mixed climate
data and collective demands, as well as humour and despair, local grievances and global imperatives,
the personal and the political. Online and offline, in professional contexts and in memes, data and
people are on the move, circulating affects.
Ed Hawkins, meanwhile, has sparked another viral success: “warming stripes” that graphically
mark the global drift in average temperatures through shifting bands of blue and red colours.
The formula has been localized by individuals and groups and transported off the Internet and onto
cars, clothes, murals, and mugs, traveling through everyday spaces and sparking new conversations.
I was astonished to discover one such visualization in a city council meeting in August. Among the
activists and advocates delivering testimony in support of a declaration of climate emergency was a
small group holding aloft a scarf, knitted to display stripes of rising temperatures across scales greater
than a human lifetime. The declaration passed, not by virtue of the scarf, but through the mixed
emotions and collective demands that brought it and so many others into the chamber.
Funding: This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant
number 767-2014-1557.
Acknowledgments: The author is grateful to the organizers and participants of the 2016 Mediating Climate
Change conference in Leeds for all their constructive feedback and comments as well as those offered by her
anonymous reviewers.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
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From
Counterculture
to
Cyberculture
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
Fred Turner
The University of Chicago Press
/
Chicago and London
Fred Turner is assistant professor of communication at Stanford University. He is
the author of Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2006 by Fred Turner
All rights reserved. Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81741-5 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-81741-5 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turner, Fred.
From counterculture to cyberculture : Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth
network, and the rise of digital utopianism / Fred Turner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-81741-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Computers and civilization. 2. Brand, Stewart. 3. Information
technology—History—20th century. 4. Counterculture—United States—
History—20th century. 5. Computer networks—Social aspects.
6. Subculture— California—San Francisco—History—20th century.
7. Technology—Social aspects— California, Northern. 8. Whole earth
catalog. I. Title: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the rise
of digital utopianism. II. Title.
QA76.9.C66T875 2006
303.48!33 — dc22
2005034149
” The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
!
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction 1
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
vii
The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor
Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture
The Whole Earth Catalog as Information Technology
Taking the Whole Earth Digital
Virtuality and Community on the WELL
Networking the New Economy
Wired
The Triumph of the Network Mode
Notes 263
Bibliography
Index 313
11
41
69
103
141
175
207
237
291
Illustrations follow page 140.
[ v ]
Introduction
In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web
swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, economics, the nature of the self—all seemed to teeter on the edge of
transformation. The Internet was about to “flatten organizations,
globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people,”
as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte put it.1 The stodgy men in gray flannel
suits who had so confidently roamed the corridors of industry would
shortly disappear, and so too would the chains of command on which
their authority depended. In their place, wrote Negroponte and
dozens of others, the Internet would bring about the rise of a new
“digital generation”—playful, self-sufficient, psychologically whole—
and it would see that generation gather, like the Net itself, into collaborative networks of independent peers.2 States too would melt
away, their citizens lured back from archaic party-based politics to the
“natural” agora of the digitized marketplace. Even the individual self,
so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others
with whom it might achieve communion. Ubiquitous networked
computing had arrived, and in its shiny array of interlinked devices,
pundits, scholars, and investors alike saw the image of an ideal society:
decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free.
But how did this happen? Only thirty years earlier, computers had
been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social
machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about. In
the winter of 1964, for instance, students marching for free speech at
the University of California at Berkeley feared that America’s political leaders were treating them as if they were bits of abstract data.
[ 1 ]
[ 2 ]
Introduction
One after another, they took up blank computer cards, punched them
through with new patterns of holes—“FSM” and “STRIKE”—and hung
them around their necks.3 One student even pinned a sign to his chest that
parroted the cards’ user instructions: “I am a UC student. Please do not
fold, bend, spindle or mutilate me.”4 For the marchers of the Free Speech
Movement, as for many other Americans throughout the 1960s, computers
loomed as technologies of dehumanization, of centralized bureaucracy and
the rationalization of social life, and, ultimately, of the Vietnam War. Yet, in
the 1990s, the same machines that had served as the defining devices of
cold war technocracy emerged as the symbols of its transformation. Two
decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American
counterculture, computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the
countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion. How did the cultural meaning of information technology shift so drastically?
As a number of journalists and historians have suggested, part of the answer is technological. By the 1990s, the room-sized, stand-alone calculating
machines of the cold war era had largely disappeared.5 So too had the armored rooms in which they were housed and the army of technicians that
supported them. Now Americans had taken up microcomputers, some the
size of notebooks, all of them available to the individual user, regardless of
his or her institutional standing. These new machines could perform a range
of tasks that far exceeded even the complex calculations for which digital
computers had first been built. They became communication devices and
were used to prepare novels and spreadsheets, pictures and graphs. Linked
over telephone wires and fiber-optic cables, they allowed their users to send
messages to one another, to download reams of information from libraries
around the world, and to publish their own thoughts on the World Wide
Web. In all of these ways, changes in computer technology expanded the
range of uses to which computers could be put and the types of social relations they were able to facilitate.
As dramatic as they were, however, these changes alone do not account
for the particular utopian visions to which computers became attached. The
fact that a computer can be put on a desktop, for instance, and that it can be
used by an individual, does not make it a “personal” technology. Nor does
the fact that individuals can come together by means of computer networks
necessarily require that their gatherings become “virtual communities.” On
the contrary, as Shoshanna Zuboff has pointed out, in the office, desktop
computers and computer networks can become powerful tools for integrating the individual ever more closely into the corporation.6 At home, those
same machines not only allow schoolchildren to download citations from
Introduction
[ 3 ]
the public library; they also turn the living room into a digital shopping mall.
For retailers, the computer in the home becomes an opportunity to harvest
all sorts of information about potential customers. For all the utopian claims
surrounding the emergence of the Internet, there is nothing about a computer or a computer network that necessarily requires that it level organizational structures, render the individual more psychologically whole, or
drive the establishment of intimate, though geographically distributed,
communities.
How was it, then, that computers and computer networks became linked
to visions of peer-to-peer ad-hocracy, a leveled marketplace, and a more authentic self ? Where did these visions come from? And who enlisted computing machines to represent them?
To answer these questions, this book traces the previously untold history
of an extraordinarily influential group of San Francisco Bay area journalists
and entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between
the late 1960s and the late 1990s, Brand assembled a network of people and
publications that together brokered a series of encounters between bohemian San Francisco and the emerging technology hub of Silicon Valley to
the south. In 1968 Brand brought members of the two worlds together in the
pages of one of the defining documents of the era, the Whole Earth Catalog.
In 1985 he gathered them again on what would become perhaps the most
influential computer conferencing system of the decade, the Whole Earth
’Lectronic Link, or the WELL. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Brand and other members of the network, including Kevin Kelly, Howard
Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and John Perry Barlow, became some of the
most-quoted spokespeople for a countercultural vision of the Internet. In
1993 all would help create the magazine that, more than any other, depicted
the emerging digital world in revolutionary terms: Wired.
By recounting their history, this book reveals and helps to explain a complex intertwining of two legacies: that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the
cold war era, and that of the American counterculture. Since the 1960s
scholarly and popular accounts alike have described the counterculture in
terms first expressed by its members—that is, as a culture antithetical to the
technologies and social structures powering the cold war state and its defense industries. In this view the 1940s and 1950s are often seen as a gray
time shaped by rigid social norms, hierarchical institutions, and the constant
demands of America’s nuclear face-off with the Soviet Union. The 1960s
seem to explode onto the scene in a Technicolor swirl of personal exploration and political protest, much of it aimed at bringing down the cold war
military-industrial bureaucracy. Those who accept this version of events
[ 4 ]
Introduction
tend to account for the persistence of the military-industrial complex today,
and for the continuing growth of corporate capitalism and consumer culture
as well, by arguing that the authentically revolutionary ideals of the generation of 1968 were somehow co-opted by the forces they opposed.
There is some truth to this story. Yet, as it has hardened into legend, this
version of the past has obscured the fact the same military-industrial research world that brought forth nuclear weapons—and computers—also
gave rise to a free-wheeling, interdisciplinary, and highly entrepreneurial
style of work. In the research laboratories of World War II and later, in the
massive military engineering projects of the cold war, scientists, soldiers,
technicians, and administrators broke down the invisible walls of bureaucracy and collaborated as never before. As they did, they embraced both
computers and a new cybernetic rhetoric of systems and information. They
began to imagine institutions as living organisms, social networks as webs of
information, and the gathering and interpretation of information as keys to
understanding not only the technical but also the natural and social worlds.
By the late 1960s, so too did substantial elements of the counterculture.
Between 1967 and 1970, for instance, tens of thousands of young people set
out to establish communes, many in the mountains and the woods. It was
for them that Brand first published the Whole Earth Catalog. For these backto-the-landers, and for many others who never actually established new
communities, traditional political mechanisms for creating social change
had come up bankrupt. Even as their peers organized political parties and
marched against the Vietnam War, this group, whom I will call the New
Communalists, turned away from political action and toward technology
and the transformation of consciousness as the primary sources of social
change. If mainstream America had become a culture of conflict, with riots
at home and war abroad, the commune world would be one of harmony. If
the American state deployed massive weapons systems in order to destroy
faraway peoples, the New Communalists would deploy small-scale technologies—ranging from axes and hoes to amplifiers, strobe lights, slide projectors, and LSD—to bring people together and allow them to experience
their common humanity. Finally, if the bureaucracies of industry and government demanded that men and women become psychologically fragmented specialists, the technology-induced experience of togetherness
would allow them to become both self-sufficient and whole once again.
For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual
output of American research culture held enormous appeal. Although they
rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political
process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to HaightAshbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan.
Introduction
[ 5 ]
Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision
of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of
the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see
the possibility of global harmony.
To Stewart Brand and later to other members of the Whole Earth group,
cybernetics also presented a set of social and rhetorical resources for entrepreneurship. In the early 1960s, not long after graduating from Stanford
University, Brand found his way into the bohemian art worlds of San Francisco and New York. Like many of the artists around him at the time, and
like Norbert Wiener, in whose writings on cybernetics they were immersed, Brand quickly became what sociologist Ronald Burt has called a
“network entrepreneur.”7 That is, he began to migrate from one intellectual
community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly separate intellectual and social networks. In the Whole Earth Catalog era, these
networks spanned the worlds of scientific research, hippie homesteading,
ecology, and mainstream consumer culture. By the 1990s they would include representatives of the Defense Department, the U.S. Congress, global
corporations such as Shell Oil, and makers of all sorts of digital software and
equipment.
Brand brought these communities together in a series of what I will call
network forums. Drawing on the systems rhetoric of cybernetics and on models of entrepreneurship borrowed from both the research and the countercultural worlds, Brand established a series of meetings, publications, and
digital networks within which members of multiple communities could
meet and collaborate and imagine themselves as members of a single community. These forums in turn generated new social networks, new cultural
categories, and new turns of phrase. In 1968 Brand founded the Whole Earth
Catalog in order to help those heading back to the land find the tools they
would need to build their new communities. These items included the
fringed deerskin jackets and geodesic domes favored by the communards,
but they also included the cybernetic musings of Norbert Wiener and the
latest calculators from Hewlett-Packard. In later editions, alongside discussions of such supplies, Brand published letters from high-technology
researchers next to firsthand reports from rural hippies. In the process, he
offered commune-based subscribers a chance to see their own ambitions
as commensurate with the technological achievements of mainstream
America, and he gave technologists the opportunity to imagine their
diodes and relays as tools, like those the commune dwellers favored, for the
[ 6 ]
Introduction
transformation of individual and collective consciousness. Together, the
creators and readers of the Whole Earth Catalog helped to synthesize a vision
of technology as a countercultural force that would shape public understandings of computing and other machines long after the social movements of the 1960s had faded from view.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as computers became ever smaller and more
interconnected, and as corporations began to employ increasingly flexible
modes of production, Brand and his colleagues repeated this process at the
WELL, in the Global Business Network, through Wired, and in a series of
meetings and organizations associated with all three. In each case, a network entrepreneur (often Brand himself ) gathered members of multiple
communities within a single material or textual space. The members of
those networks collaborated on the various projects at hand and developed
a shared language for their work. Out of that language emerged shared understandings— of the potential social impact of computing, of information
and information technologies as metaphors for social processes, and of the
nature of work in a networked economic order. Often enough, the systems
on which network members appeared became models in their own right of
these new understandings. Even when they did not, members often took
the insights they had gleaned back into their social and professional worlds.
In this way ideas born within Whole Earth–derived network forums became
key frames through which both public and professional technologists
sought to comprehend the potential social impact of information and information technologies. Over time, the network’s members and forums helped
redefine the microcomputer as a “personal” machine, computer communication networks as “virtual communities,” and cyberspace itself as the digital equivalent of the western landscape into which so many communards set
forth in the late 1960s, the “electronic frontier.”
At the same time, and by means of the same social processes, members of
the Whole Earth network made themselves visible and credible spokesmen
for the socio-technical visions that they had helped create. Traditionally, sociologists have depicted journalists in terms set by the professional norms of
newspapers and magazines: as reporters of a consensus achieved among
communities from which they were analytically, if not actually, separated. In
this view, a reporter’s prestige depends on her or his ability to dig up new information, report it in a compelling way, and make it visible to a broad public
(which itself is seen as analytically distinct from either the community of
sources or the community of journalists). Brand and other writers and editors
associated with the Whole Earth publications developed extraordinary reputations as journalists, winning, among other prizes, the National Book Award
(for the Whole Earth Catalog) and the National Magazine Award (for Wired).
Introduction
[ 7 ]
They did so, however, by building the communities on whose activities they
were reporting. Within Whole Earth–sponsored network forums, and
within the books and articles they spawned, representatives of the technological world met leaders from politics and business, as well as former counterculturalists. Together, their conversations turned digital media into emblems of network members’ own, shared ways of living, and evidence of their
individual credibility. Again and again, Brand, and later Kevin Kelly, Howard
Rheingold, John Perry Barlow, and others, gave voice to the techno-social
visions that emerged in these discussions.
As they did, they were welcomed into the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of major corporations, and the hotels of Davos, Switzerland, home of
the World Economic Forum. By the mid-1990s, throughout much of the
mainstream press and in business and government as well, the networked
entrepreneurship of the Whole Earth group and its self-evident financial and
social success had become evidence for the transformative power of what
many had begun to call the “New Economy.” According to a raft of politicians and pundits, the rapid integration of computing and telecommunications technologies into international economic life, coupled with dramatic
rounds of corporate layoffs and restructuring, had given rise to a new economic era. Individuals could now no longer count on the support of their
employers; they would instead have to become entrepreneurs, moving flexibly from place to place, sliding in and out of collaborative teams, building
their knowledge bases and skill sets in a process of constant self-education.
The proper role of government in this new environment, many argued, was
to pull back, to deregulate the technology industries that were ostensibly
leading the transformation, and, while they were at it, business in general.
Proponents of this view included telecommunications executives, hightech stock analysts, and right-wing politicians. Kevin Kelly, a former editor
of the quarterly Whole Earth Review, which had grown out of the original
Catalog, helped to bring them all to the pages of Wired. As the magazine’s executive editor, he argued that the world was a series of interlocking information systems, all of which were working to corrode the bureaucracies of
the industrial era. To Kelly and the other creators of Wired, the suddenly
public Internet appeared to be both the infrastructure and the symbol of the
new economic era. And if it was, they suggested, then those who built their
lives around the Net and those who sought to deregulate the newly networked marketplace might in fact be harbingers of a cultural revolution. In
the pages of Wired, at least, this new elite featured the citizens of the WELL,
the members of the Global Business Network, and the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—all groups well woven into the fabric of the
Whole Earth community—as well as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, libertarian
[ 8 ]
Introduction
pundits such as George Gilder, and, on the cover of one issue, conservative
Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich.
To those who think of the 1960s primarily as a break with the decades
that went before, the coming together of former counterculturalists, corporate executives, and right-wing politicians and pundits may appear impossibly contradictory. But as the history of the Whole Earth network suggests,
it isn’t. As they turned away from agonistic politics and toward technology,
consciousness, and entrepreneurship as the principles of a new society, the
communards of the 1960s developed a utopian vision that was in many ways
quite congenial to the insurgent Republicans of the 1990s. Although Newt
Gingrich and those around him decried the hedonism of the 1960s counterculture, they shared its widespread affection for empowering technologically enabled elites, for building new businesses, and for rejecting traditional
forms of governance. And as they rose to power, more than a few rightwing politicians and executives longed to share the hip credibility of people
like Stewart Brand.
This book, then, does not tell the story of a countercultural movement
whose ideals and practices were appropriated by the forces of capital, technology, or the state. Rather, it demonstrates that the New Communalist
wing of the counterculture embraced those forces early on and that in subsequent years, Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network continued to
provide the intellectual and practical contexts within which members of the
two worlds could come together and legitimate one another’s projects. At
the same time, however, this book is not a biography of Stewart Brand.
Brand certainly deserves a biography, and one will no doubt be written in
the years to come, but this book makes relatively little effort to understand
Brand’s personal history except insofar as it illuminates his role in reshaping
the politics of information. Brand has had a substantial influence in other areas, especially ecology and architectural design, as well as a fascinating personal life, but these will have to wait for other chroniclers. My aim here is to
make visible Brand’s impact, and that of the networks he helped build, on
our understandings of computing and its possible relations to social life.
Within this story, Brand is both an influential actor in his own right and an
exemplary promoter of a new, networked mode of techno-social life; so too
are the journalists, consultants, and entrepreneurs of the Whole Earth network, which is by now far-flung. My challenge in writing this book has been
to keep in view simultaneously Brand’s unique individual talents, the networking tactics he employed, and the increasing influence of the networks
he helped build.
For that reason, I begin with an overview of the broad transformation in
popular perceptions of computing that has occurred over the past forty
Introduction
[ 9 ]
years, and a reminder of the forgotten affinities between cold war research
culture and the counterculture of the New Communalists. I then turn to following Stewart Brand, first into the early 1960s art scene, then to the communes of the Southwest, into the back rooms of Bay area computer science
in the 1970s, and on into the corporate world in the 1980s and 1990s. Along
the way, I pause to examine in some detail the networks and network forums that Brand has built. As these explorations suggest, Brand’s influence
on popular understandings of technology has depended not only on his considerable talent for spotting the forward edges of social and technological
change, but also on the richness and complexity of the networks he has assembled. I conclude by arguing that Brand’s entrepreneurial tactics, and the
now-widespread association of computers and computer-mediated communication with the egalitarian social ideals of the counterculture, have
become important features of an increasingly networked mode of living,
working, and deploying social and cultural power.
Although it is tempting to think of that mode as a product of a revolution
in computing technology, I argue that the revolution it represents began long
before the public appearance of the Internet or even the widespread distribution of computers. It began in the wake of World War II, as the cybernetic
discourse and collaborative work styles of cold war military research came
together with the communitarian social vision of the counterculture.
Lively journey over the airways: A took at what radio in Canada once was and could still be
French, William
The Globe and Mail (1936-2016); Jan 31, 1985; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail
pg. E1
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
If Medium Is the Message, the Message Is the Web: If the Medium Is …
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 20, 1995; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times
pg. A1
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
17
At the Boundaries of Abolitionism, Feminism,
and Black Nationalism: The Activism of
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
jane rhodes
The nineteenth-century African American journalist, lawyer, educator,
and reformer Mary Ann Shadd Cary offers a complex model of female radicalism that constantly transgressed the boundaries between race, gender, class,
and national identity. She played an active role in the intersecting movements
to abolish slavery, elevate the status of women, and build an incipient black
nationalism. But her social and political labors did not follow a simple trajectory. It is impossible to know precisely what structured Shadd Cary’s engagement with these political projects, as she left few records that offer insight into
her interior life. But it is not difficult to surmise that the quest for black
liberation—freedom from slavery and its debilitating legacy—dominated
every fabric of her political and personal being. She was powerfully ambitious,
extremely capable, and driven by a vision of a world in which persons of
African descent could live and prosper. As a bright, strong-willed individual
who made enormous personal sacrifices for this cause, she also felt confident
that she should be a direct, active, and visible participant in these movements.
It was this aspiration that placed Shadd Cary at odds with the people she most
loved. Instead of finding support and endorsement of her efforts, at times she
was criticized and sanctioned for her selfless devotion to social change. For
Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s antislavery activism laid bare the delicate fractures in
free African American communities: the tensions over patriarchy, class posi-
346
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
347
tion, color, and status. At the height of her activism in Canada West, she was
demonized by black and white male abolitionists who were both threatened
and angered by her unwillingness to conform to gendered expectations. The
more political influence she attained, the more she was constructed as deviant
and wicked. As she gained experience and maturity, Shadd Cary became more
strategic, allowing her male counterparts to believe she had no desire to usurp
their fragile power. This training in the heart of black abolitionism provided a
fertile ground for her emergence as a feminist. Unlike Charlotte Forten, for
example, Shadd Cary would wait until after the Civil War to directly channel
her energies into the struggle for women’s rights.
Activism was Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s birthright. She was born in 1823 in
Wilmington, Delaware, to a family of freeborn African Americans. Her father,
Abraham Shadd, was the descendant of a free black woman and a German
soldier who started a family of entrepreneurs on the eve of the American
Revolution. He benefited from having a skilled trade and modest property, as
well as fair skin, in a slave state that severely restricted the lives of free blacks.
In 1837, one black abolitionist described whites in Delaware as harboring ‘‘an
extensive and moral fear of the free colored people,’’ which translated into
harsh black codes and other sanctions. Mary Ann’s father was deeply involved
in the black convention movement of the 1830s and 1840s and was a leader in
the opposition to the American Colonization Society and their agenda to
repatriate free blacks back to Africa. When Mary Ann was ten, the family
moved across the Mason-Dixon line to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where
there were better educational opportunities for black children and some modest relief from racial repression and discrimination.∞
Pennsylvania was a center of antislavery activism, and Abraham Shadd
frequently represented West Chester at abolitionist meetings and conventions.
The Shadd home harbored escaped slaves as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and black and white abolitionists met there frequently. Mary Ann, the
eldest of twelve children, was educated by Quakers and socialized in a household that placed public service and the abolition of slavery in the forefront of
family life. The Shadds’ proximity to Philadelphia also gave Mary Ann access
to the institutions of that city’s black elite, including churches, benevolent
associations, and learned societies. We know little about Mary Ann’s mother,
Harriet Parnell Shadd, or about the day-to-day activities of the Shadd household. But Mary Ann’s early fervent commitment to better the conditions of
black people suggests she was profoundly influenced and inspired by her father’s political work.≤
At the same time, Mary Ann was exposed to the contradictory assumptions
and ideals about gender roles. Free black women of the antebellum era were
348
Transcultural Activism
encouraged to serve the antislavery movement, and to devote their energies to
racial improvement. But they were also expected to conform to Victorian
ideals of womanhood and the notion that women’s most important job was
to establish high morals and virtue through domestic activities, particularly
childrearing. As one scholar notes, ‘‘Rather than achieving fulfillment in public life African American women, like their white counterparts, were expected
to find compensation in the important familial tasks entrusted to them.’’ Black
women entered the public sphere for paid employment as well as community
service, but an underlying presumption was that they not usurp black male
authority and privilege. Black leaders like David Walker and Henry Highland
Garnet linked black liberation to an assertion of black masculinity. Promoting
the notion of black women as the ‘‘weaker sex’’ and limiting their sphere of
opportunity were common strategies for men who endured the daily assaults
of racial discrimination while living in a patriarchal society. These tenets
proved to be intractable for a young African American woman who had aspirations of serving—and leading—her people.≥
In her late teens, Mary Ann embarked on a career as an educator—one of the
only acceptable professional activities for antebellum women. She was seventeen or eighteen years old when she returned to Wilmington, Delaware, to open
a school for black children, undoubtedly motivated by her family’s struggle to
educate their children in a state where such opportunities were scant, particularly for girls. The decision to become a traveling teacher also relieved her
from the responsibilities of caring for her eleven younger siblings. Throughout
the 1840s, she taught black children in often impoverished circumstances, in
Wilmington; Norristown, Pennsylvania; Trenton, New Jersey; and later in
New York City. Free blacks in the North relied on churches, self-help groups,
and white philanthropists to sustain the small network of segregated schools.
Teachers were in short supply, their salaries meager, and the facilities in which
they worked primitive. Many communities resorted to nearly heroic efforts to
establish schools that offered at least a rudimentary education; for many free
blacks, schooling occurred at home or in infrequent gatherings. Thus, Mary
Ann Shadd was part of the ranks of intrepid educators who made a crucial
difference in the life chances of African American children. We know little
about her activities during these years, but by the end of the decade she had
developed into a seasoned teacher with considerable experience in free black
communities along the northeastern corridor. During this time, she established
clear opinions about the best strategies for racial progress and she was poised to
make these public.∂
In January 1849 Mary Ann Shadd inserted her voice into the wide-ranging
conversation on the best ways to address black subjugation and to promote
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
349
self-improvement. Her views appeared in a letter to Frederick Douglass’s
newspaper the North Star, in which she outlined solutions to the ‘‘wretched
conditions’’ of the free blacks among whom she worked. Her ideas blended
black nationalist and abolitionist ideologies that sought to define a political
framework. On the one hand, she argued, black Americans needed to lessen
their economic dependency on whites and to forge independent businesses and
farms. On the other hand, she privileged Western education and knowledge as
essential to racial progress: ‘‘What intellectually we most need, and the absence of which we most feel, is the knowledge of the white man,’’ she maintained. In this early treatise, Shadd articulated a classic racial uplift argument,
which placed the burden of African Americans’ improvement on their own
shoulders. African Americans would never gain the rights of citizenship until
they possessed the knowledge and skills of the dominant culture and behaved
according to Victorian mores, she believed.∑
The most controversial aspect of this letter came in her powerful critique
of black religious leaders, whom she considered to be the main obstacle to
such progress. They were ‘‘a corrupt clergy among us, sapping our every
means, inculcating ignorance as duty, superstition as true religion.’’ Shadd was
equally critical of African Americans’ intense involvement in denominations
that encouraged a doctrine of submission, and that focused on the trappings of
organized religion. In her view, such churches obscured clear thinking and
diminished blacks’ aspirations. Shadd embraced Christian spirituality, but opposed churches that also functioned as educational institutions, particularly
those run by uneducated folk ministers. She was, perhaps unwittingly, launching a class-based critique in which she argued that the masses of poor and uneducated blacks needed to look to the educated black elite as examples. These
positions, while not uncommon among black writers, nevertheless placed her
in opposition to an established black leadership that was deeply entrenched in
the church.∏
Mary Ann Shadd was not satisfied with sending a letter to the North Star,
however. A month or so later, she expanded her theories in a twelve-page
pamphlet titled Hints to the Colored People of the North. With this first
venture into publishing, she joined in the practice of using print culture to
disseminate political ideologies and to build an imagined community of black
intellectuals and activists. David Walker’s pamphlet Walker’s Appeal in Four
Articles (1829) is often recognized as a paradigmatic black nationalist tract
that called for people of color to rise up and destroy their oppressors. Similarly, the nation’s first black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal (1827–
1830), was founded as a platform against slavery and as a crucial institution
for the sustenance of black communities. In the newspaper’s inaugural issue,
350
Transcultural Activism
editors Samuel Cornish and John Russworm declared, ‘‘Too long have others
spoken for us,’’ as they asserted the importance of print communication for
black American autonomy and self-sufficiency. An independent pamphlet
meant that Shadd could issue her ideas freely without the interference of a
newspaper editor or other gatekeeper, if anyone cared to read it.
Unfortunately, no extant copy of the pamphlet exists, so we must rely on
excerpts published in the North Star with the knowledge that its overall texture may not have been adequately represented. The sections reproduced
in the newspaper revealed a strong-willed—what some considered brash—
overview of the status of northern blacks. This was Shadd’s first public proclamation of her identity as an activist: ‘‘My destiny is that of my people, it is a
duty to myself, setting aside the much-ridiculed maxim that ‘charity begins at
home,’ to expose every weakness, to exclaim against every custom that helps
prolong our day of depression,’’ she wrote. This austere manifesto picked up
where her letter to the editor left off—criticizing the leisure activities and
cultural expressions in which many blacks found relief from grinding oppression. ‘‘Negroes and Indians set more value on the outside of their heads than
on what the inside needs,’’ she preached, denouncing the ‘‘processions, expensive entertainments, excursions, public dinners and suppers, a display of costly
apparel, and churches on churches, to minister to our vanity.’’ This was a
classic racial uplift position; that ostentatious behavior played into the hands
of those looking for reasons to ridicule blacks and denigrate their character. In
this text, she began to develop a self-help ideology that would become refined
over the years. For all of her strong language, Mary Ann Shadd was no militant separatist; rather she believed that African Americans’ assimilation into
white American society was the only solution to the crisis of race.π
In each of these texts, Shadd presented herself as an authority on the black
condition based on her ten years of observation and public service. She also
included herself in the community of activists who failed to materially improve the lives of African Americans despite years of conventions and discussion. ‘‘We should do more and talk less,’’ she suggested. However, her unsympathetic appraisal and continued criticism of black clergy were not likely to
attract a supportive following. Indeed, the pamphlet was ignored by its intended audience, the black elite. A friend of Shadd’s, writing to the North Star,
noted that only a handful of the pamphlets had been sold, guessing that it
contained ‘‘too much truth.’’ Although the document had been widely circulated in Philadelphia and environs, the city’s ‘‘able and distinguished writers’’
had not taken notice. Three years later, Martin Delany wrote that he had read
Hints to the Colored People of the North, calling it ‘‘an excellent introduction
to a great subject, fraught with so much interest.’’ Mary Ann may have re-
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
351
ceived individual praise and criticism from this effort, but her pamphlet failed
to bring her notice in the black public sphere. It is also likely that few deemed it
important to pay attention to an unknown woman’s opinions. Indeed, the act
of publishing one’s writing was both a physical and symbolic act—one that
asserted a woman’s desire to leave the private sphere and to ‘‘meddle in the
public affairs of men.’’ To publish a political pamphlet rather than sentimental
fictio…