Communication Mutations & Path to Social Media

You stretch out, half-squinting with sticky led eyelids, and raise your fists to the sky, cursing the alarm and bargaining with whatever deity you subscribe to for a few more minutes. What is the first thing you do when you wake up? Well, there is a good chance you will immediately go on social media and check your email or WhatsApp. Have you noticed how much the new social media and new media, in general, have affected our daily lives and how we’ve been changed by their use? How strange a world it was in which www. yet had to lay its web all over the blue dot.

Does the message remain intact?

Media are not just a means to an end with a singular purpose of delivering a message. Every new development and technical jump changes our perspective and how we view the world, society, and ourselves. It weaves new and interesting stories and changes the rules of engagement with the surroundings. Walter Benjamin, a philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist, explored these changes in his groundbreaking book „The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.“ He had a strange feeling that by introducing photography - which could capture reality better than any painting ever would - strange new juices were starting to flow within the veins of society. He asked how this mechanical way of grabbing the world around us would ultimately affect how we view the works of art. Each new technological breakthrough, followed by a new means of communication, had its own collateral echoes in relations between people and things. 

By changing how we capture, transfer, and receive information, no aspect of our lives has been left untouched. Media are not neutral messengers, but they change the message in the process of transferring it, as Regis Debray, a French philosopher, journalist, former government official, and academic, concluded. Every transference will result in some loss and morphing of what is being transmitted.
 

Media is the message

But Benjamin and Debray are not the only ones who have noticed this. Marshal McLuhan, a mass media theorist, formed a sort of anthropology of media on the pages of his book „Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.“ Here, he considers media to be a way for us to extend our organs and senses into the world but warns that each new extension will demand an inevitable sacrifice. We will need to „amputate“ or „self-amputate“ some senses to adapt them to the new unprecedented conditions. McLuhan summed the story up in the most elegant manner, in just one sentence that marked a milestone in how we think about the carriers of our information. If you take anything away from this text, let it be McLuhan's sentence: „The medium is the message.“ This means that the medium itself will transmute your experiences and deliver an already modified version of reality and experience and that what is being transmitted is (sort of) irrelevant to the process of transmutation.

McLuhan's notion of media was still very much entangled with the human experience, and the man himself was the starting point of his analysis. Still, Willem Flusser, writer, philosopher, and journalist, sees things from a different perspective. For him, media, and not society, is the best point from which to start unraveling this conundrum. Flusser sees the history of the world as a „codified history“ where the stories of history were recorded via specific media, which influenced the stories themselves. Technical apparatuses and the mediasphere of a time and place play a significant role in transferring knowledge and experience, changing them in the process.

Would Nazis have made it without the radio?

Since we are aware that various mass and social media outlets of the day and we, their users, are caught together in a messy web, a need arose to break the strict walls that kept the various subjects safe within the limits of one single discipline. We are only beginning to understand that da Vinci's words were, in fact, true and that “everything connects to everything else.” Therefore, through the work of Mr. Debray, a new interdisciplinary approach arose that would study media in correlation with society, and it was called mediology. It deals with different phenomena in society, but always from the viewpoint of media that allowed, enhanced, or aided its development in any way.

We can, for example, look at the development of Nazism through a prism of how the mass media of the radio gave rise to forming one collective consciousness. Was this the tipping point that allowed the transformation of regular citizens into bloodthirsty machines operating on a fuel of Hitler's oratory excellence? Sitting in front of your radio and listening to the words dripping with hate, knowing everyone you know was doing the exact same thing at this moment, made you feel like you were a part of something bigger than yourself and in real-time at that. Would the Nazies have the same success if they used the written word instead of the radio? Probably not, because a written word isolates you as an individual and allows you to think critically about what you have read, as opposed to the hypnotic powers of a disembodied voice coming through the speaker and enveloping you in its shrowd of collective consciousness.

So, every medium modifies its surroundings in one way or another, but it is difficult to be aware of its power while it is ruling the historic moment. Only after it has passed and some other one has taken its throne can we clearly see the impact it has had. This is why we are not in a good position to analyze the social media or social networks of the day. We are standing too close and may have fallen prey to social media addiction and internet addiction to an extent that reflects on our emotional and mental health. The future histories of media will only be able to assess the effects.

Evolution of media

The cave, language, and “art”

In the dark, damp caves, unarticulated sounds, growls, and screams slowly began to be associated with a particular object or a situation and were then accepted within the group. Language was born. The spoken word is not yet considered a medium because it is still closely related to the body and is not viewed as anything external. However, some disagree and claim that language is a medium that violently pulled humanity out of the collective unconscious and started to transform the purity of experience itself. A sort of stopping of experiencing in favor of recounting the experience, which somehow dilutes it. The ephemerality of sound that could not yet be recorded in any way formed a special kind of vocal society that involved a whole person, and it relied on things that had now been lost while we are speeding down the information highway - body language, facial expressions, and gestures which were an essential part of verbal cultures’ communication.

The elusive sounds also moved to the flat two-dimensional medium. The „artists“ in the dawn of mankind left their mark on the cold rock walls. Why would they do such a thing? Maybe they intuitively felt that their time on the planet was short, their voice fleeting, and they felt the need to be remembered, to leave something more permanent behind. They were aware of the brevity of life in a world where old age was something a few got to experience. Their drawings can not yet be considered art because they formed a part of a greater experience; they told stories, showed gratitude for a good hunt, or protected the group from evil spirits. They were inextricably linked to the magic and mythical.

From verbal to written

Spoken words have depth and layers of meaning, which are taken away when words find their place on animal skins, papyrus, or paper. There, locked in ink traces on rough pages, they sacrificed multiple worlds of meaning that the voice could convey for a chance at permanence. Try writing a word, any word. This letter combination is a singular way to note down what we are referring to. Now try saying this word. Try again, but use a different intonation. And once more...You can make tons of variations of the same word and give it a whole new meaning by changing the intonation and shade of the voice or by yelling or whispering it.

The pictures from the cave walls also moved onto clay tablets or walls of man-made structures and formed the first „letters.“ Pictograms, ideograms, and hieroglyphs preceded the phonetic alphabet we know today. While the pre-phonetic symbols of recording experience relied on pictures that would serve basically as storybooks that a privileged few could read, representing one word or syllable, the phonetic alphabet chose one abstract sign that could represent an equally abstract sound. Most languages could easily be translated into this code with tiny variations and additions (McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 2008). In 800 BC, a universal alphabetic sign system emerged. In the eyes of media theory, this was the first real medium that catapulted society onto the road of rapid development and accumulation of knowledge. It sparked the bonfire of progress, which has been exponentially growing to this day.

Although already in use, the phonetic alphabet took some time to change the face of society. In its infancy, it was associated with only a particular theme and confined within the walls of monasteries. All themes were linked to the religious background, and books were copied, spending long, labor-intensive hours by candlelight. The rough pages that told the stories of saints and sinners, and good and evil, got replaced by a lighter and easier-to-produce papyrus, and the letters got rid of all unnecessary trimmings, making the alphabet easier to copy and learn. The army adopted the skill, and writing finally allowed control over vast areas, aided by road construction so that messages could be delivered faster, breaking space down in equal parts. Work, private life, and emotional life started to follow the linear logic of writing and fragmented.

The printing press and centralization

As the ages progressed, the need arose to speed up the expansion of knowledge. In the 15th century, the printing press was invented, now considered the first actual mechanization of human labor. Letters found their way onto led molds, allowing the books to be copied much faster and with never-before-seen precision. Gutenberg’s invention did away with the verbal culture’s social coherency. Although the printing press opened the door for new knowledge and ideas to spread in the exact words of the author and for the concept of authorship to take full swing, it tore the person from the community. 

Reading makes you an individual locked in their own thoughts with the ability to step back and think about what they’ve read. In the vocal culture, reactions were instant and intense, but typographic culture allowed for „action without a reaction.“ Different types of cities were also born, with one center that could control the edges with much more precision (McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 2008).

Photography

The first photographs were not yet done by an electrical or digital medium. They were done by a process called heliography (rough translation: sun-writing) that exposed a polished plate coated with bitumen to light and a camera obscura device. They took a few hours of exposure and somehow served as a transience zone that eased our way into the electrically driven world we know today.

If the written word was the one that isolated us and tore us away from the unity of the tribe, photography did just the opposite. Even if its primary characteristics were completely in tune with those of typography and it could represent our surroundings in one uniform and iterative way, it also signaled the onset of freedom. It allowed science to depict that which could not be explained in words, brought back the importance of gesture, and changed the course of art because realism was no longer necessary to show reality as it is. Artists could start retrieving back into their subconscious and explore the vast opened spaces of their minds. Photography changed social relations by allowing ordinary people to see places they would have never had the chance to visit and, in time, created a world of illusions and media stars.

Electricity 

Can it be that the typographic culture was just a stepping stone, eventually leading to our present situation when we are again a part of a tribe, just a much larger global one this second time around? The new social media and digitalization that are now ingrained in our mental, emotional, and work lives would not have been possible if not for one very important discovery - electricity. Our brain also uses electrical impulses to control every single function, movement and thought. No wonder Dr. Frankenstein needed electricity to make his monster come alive.

It was a long road from seeing lightning in the sky to being able to control this powerful force to our advantage, and it all started with frog legs that Luigi Galvani hung out of his window and made them twitch by running electricity through the (dead) muscles. Many followed, such as Alessandro Volta, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, Michael Faraday, Hans Christian Oested, James Clerk Maxwell, and Heinrich Hertz. We owe tremendous gratitude to these men who laid the foundation for discoveries such as engines, transformers, radar, radio, and laser, says the Nobel prize winner Leon Lederman, in the „The God Particle“.

Ultimately, all of this accumulated knowledge led us to the present day, in which we have the whole world at our fingertips by pressing a button. Once electricity joined the media game, it allowed us to extend into the micro and macro to witness the division of a cell or the birth and death of a star or a galaxy. Also, the second it was possible to transfer information via electricity, we entered a new era of communications, and the world, once separated and fragmented, was whole again.

Digitalization and the Internet

The real new media came soon enough, with a velocity of electrical impulses that annulled and tamed the time and space. Yeah, sure, if you wanted to send a message to your hypothetical cousin residing in the Orion belt, it would take some time, but for the electron, the distances on our small planet are not impressive. Discoveries of the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, and television culminated in the internet. 

When was the Internet invented? On October 29, 1969, the first step towards the radical interconnectedness of the internet was taken. Stanford and UCLA connected their computers for the first time, acting as the first hosts of what would one day become the Internet. The story goes that the first message colleagues tried to exchange was supposed to be the word “Login”, but the link broke on the letter “g”. Still, it happened, and they connected. The email was invented in 1971; the first spammers appeared in 1978, 1982 the first emoticon, '85 brought the first virtual communities, '90 the first search engine and shared the first photo, and a year later, the first webpage was here. 1994. brought the first safe e-comm transaction, '95 crypto, '96 first social media called Six Degrees, and Wi-Fi came in  '97. Google was there in 1998, Wikipedia launched in 2001, MySpace in 2003, and Facebook in 2004, but only for college students. YouTube and Twitter followed in 2005 and 2006, respectively, while Instagram came here in 2010, as well as Pinterest and Snapchat in the following year. In 2011, Microsoft also bought Skype, and Twitter tried video. 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp, and in 2016 TikTok became the most popular network, and Chat GPT launched in 2022. 
 

Just as words trapped on paper once produced an intense center that could easily rule its margins, electrical speed erased the difference between the center and the periphery. Information doesn't proliferate from one single point anymore but is spread out through hyperspace in the form of a net, mixing, crossing, and interfering with one another.

The only constant thing we know is change. But every time it hits, the blow is delivered from point blank, as it is now when we’re transitioning from a social media world into one dominated by AI. We are never ready to accept all the implications of the new. Today, we are located in an unsure place where the line between fiction and reality is blurred. Our world and society are defined and dependent on new social media, which is not quite real, nor is it an illusion. They are a kind of simulated environment, a hyper-real realm that learns and creates worlds simultaneously through AI interference.

Everything has become a visual on our flickering screen. These real/unreal pictures are the means through which we define ourselves and our identity. Although interconnected, we are also sort of imploding on ourselves as the algorithm serves us only cherry-picked elements of the world that it believes will grab our attention the most (we don’t necessarily need to like these; shock, outrage, or virtue signaling will do just fine, too). As philosopher Jean Baudrillard claimed, the picture of society precedes its real relations. He grimly claims that, ultimately, pictures and symbols are all that is left. Just empty signs circling other signs, equally drained of meaning; their only purpose is to keep circulating and for us to pay attention and consume them as we once did with material commodities.

A voice, picture, text, or even a touch can be broken down into 1 and 0. They can be transformed, modified, translated, or transmitted, and the depth of our experience can ultimately be reduced to this simple Yes/No system. For a moment, we can become nothing. Just a bundle of information speeding through hyperspace - weightless, bodyless, and silent. We have never been more connected to everyone else but have also never felt so alone and detached. You will likely feel more pitty looking at a picture of a starving child that circled the globe to get to you than when faced with the reality of a beggar in your surroundings. We carry our metaphoric heart on our digital sleeves. Once again, our reactions are instant and undiluted as with the verbal culture, but fleeting, weak, and somewhat more raw and disrespectful to the tribe– because the speed of information is too fast to get too attached to any particular one and because we’re protected by anonymity.
 

Conclusion

A picture, social media comment, reel, or story that might have shocked you just a moment ago will soon be replaced by a new one already prepared for your consumption. Every single piece of information can find its place in this confusing web, no matter its nature. The unrelated mosaic’s purpose is for you to receive it and then move on to the next one. You no longer create your own world but consume it, which is not necessarily bad. You have access to more knowledge and opportunities than ever before in human history and have an unprecedented chance to shape your life aided by our digital tools and information. Welcome to the new era of information society and social media consumption! So, what is the future of social media? Will we be more social than ever without actually socializing at all? Or will we start reverting to face-to-face communication as we grow out of our digital infancy and learn to use social media as welcome tools and not addictions? No one knows. Remember to do a social media fast now and then and be anti-social for a bit. Stay cool, stay curious and beautiful, and enjoy living in your real and digital skins.