TOY, MIRROR, and ART: THE METAMORPHOSIS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE Paul Levinson (http://www.sff.net/people/paullevinson/) [from Philosophy, Technology, and Human Affairs, ed. L. Hickman (College Station, TX: Ibis, 1985,) pp. 162-175; first published in et cetera, June 1977; republished in Technology and Human Affairs, ed. L. Hickman & A. al-Hibris (Mosby, 1981)] (c) Paul Levinson 1977, 1985. All rights reserved, for individual reading only, no further reproductions without author's permission. [Note: An version of this paper updated in 1995 will replace this version shortly--Paul Kelly 07/26/03] The varied produce of our technological media -- the amalgam of television shows, movies, books, recordings, etc., known collectively as "mass," "popular," or "technological" culture -- has been the subject of considerable recent study and controversy. Arguing primarily from aesthetic and sociological perspectives, champions and critics of popular culture have alternately praised and condemned it as aesthetically democratizing and degrading, socially stabilizing and stultifying, and so forth.[1] Curiously missing from such discussions, however, is any serious analysis of the technological basis of popular culture. While theorists usually acknowledge that it is technology that makes most popular culture possible, they have apparently been content to view the connection as axiomatic and undeserving of further research.[2] Thus, an otherwise comprehensive summary of "Theories and Methodologies of Popular Culture" in a recent Journal of Popular Culture issue discussed everything from structuralism to cultural geography and popular culture, with barely a mention of technological underpinnings.[3] The omission is even more remarkable when one considers that Marshall McLuhan, one of the first to write seriously of popular culture, was also one of the first to point out that technological media are much more than passive conveyors of information and content.[4] It is perhaps understandable that subtleties in the technological shaping of popular culture have gone unexplored, since the broad outlines of the relationship are so obvious. There seems little profit in pursuing, for example, the fact that without the invention of the motion picture camera there would be no film industry, and without the technological achievement of the phonograph, no popular recording culture. Yet upon closer examination, such simple connections begin to display an increasing number of complications. Why, to stay with the same example, did film attain a cultural prominence forty years before music recording, when the motion picture camera was in fact perfected shortly AFTER the phonograph? While differences in societal receptivity, economics, and the like were no doubt in part responsible, it seems plausible that certain elements in the very mechanics of film and record production may have stimulated the first and inhibited the second as they arose in cultural impact and esteem. Film, as the first product of the nineteenth century electrochemical revolution to achieve artistic notice in the twentieth, might be a good place to begin an inquiry into the technological determination of technological culture. In tracing the changing usages and perceptions of film from its first appearance in society, we may be able to discern a relationship between the level of technological sophistication in film and the type of popular culture each technological level engendered. To the extent that such observations are generalizable, they may suggest a series of principles that describe a step-by-step development common to all technological culture, from new medium to widespread influence. Such principles may also have some bearing on the aesthetic controversies concerning culture, helping to explain how and why some technologies facilitate more "artistic" creations than others. The inquiry may also have some implications for the evolution and appliance of more "practical" technologies, and elucidate the distinctions and similarities between technologies used primarily for work, and those used for entertainment. STAGE ONE: TECHNOLOGY AS TOY Writing of the inception of film technology in A Short History of the Movies, Gerald Mast describes an interesting pattern: The first film makers were not artists but tinkerers. . . .Their goal in making a movie was not to create beauty but to display a scientific curiosity. The invention of the first cameras and projectors set a trend that was to repeat itself with the introduction of every new movie invention: the invention was first exploited as a novelty in itself. . . .[5] A survey of early "talkies" like The Jazz Singer, first efforts in animation such as Disney's "Laugh-O-Gram" cartoons, and indeed the supposed debut of the motion picture itself in Fred Ott's Sneeze, supports Mast's observation of technology's supremacy in the beginning stages of technological culture. In each instance elements of plot, characterization, and what little content there is, play a subservient role to the exposition of the new gimmick, and perform in effect as low-key vehicles for a highly visible technique. The enjoyment in these primal forms lies in a fascination with the process -- not the product of the process, but the process itself -- in seeing and hearing a man sing on film, for example, rather than caring what the man sings on film. Thus, in the medium of film, at least, new technologies have made their entrances like the brash new kid on the block, in a flexing of muscle and raw technique that transcends and for all purposes becomes the content. In a sense, then, the most important content -- or popular culture -- of a new medium is the medium itself. McLuhan has explored the concept of technology-as-the- content-of-technology, suggesting that out-moded or postfunctional media often serve as the content for newer media. (Plays and books, for example, become the content of the new medium, film, and film becomes in turn the content of the newer medium, television.)[6] McLuhan goes as far as to say that usually invisible technologies only become visible when no longer in use -- a proposition that at first seems to contradict Mast's contention, but may in fact serve to complement it. For incipient media are as out of the mainstream as obsolescent forms -- it's the familiar equation of childhood and old age -- and as such occupy equivalent if opposing positions in the medium development cycle. Thus, McLuhan's model may be reduced to a basic expectation that the discernibility or observable impact of any medium will vary INVERSELY with the usage or functioning of that medium in the overall society; that is, the workings of technology, like the blades of whirring fans, are most visible both before and after they reach the peak of their function, and the triviality and trickery of prepubescent media are as nonfunctional and hence ostentatious as the ritual pomp and funeral exhibition of media in demise. The role of neonate medium as societal plaything is perhaps best documented in the history of film. But it is also readily apparent in the trajectories of most other communications media, and indeed in the invention and implementation of many technologies, used for entertainment and otherwise. William Orton's celebrated refusal to inexpensively buy up Bell's early telephone patents on grounds that the new device would never be more than an "electrical toy";[7] the corporate decision to initially promote the phonograph as a "novelty" music box in spite of Edison's early assertions that his new invention could perform more practical tasks;[8] the amateur crystal set radio fad of the 1920's and the gawking at televisions in department store windows in the 1940's; the continuing popularity, in our own time, of computer "games,"[9] as well as the propensity of programmers to couch computer terminology and printouts in cute phrases and configurations; and, most recently, the Citizen's Band or "CB" radio "craze"[10] -- all testify to the tenacity with which the novel medium is perceived and tends to be employed as a toy. Moreover, examples of technologies not specifically concerned with communication, but nonetheless at first utilized for peripheral amusement, are even more varied and abundant. The Chinese discovery of gunpowder and the principles of rocketry, and their use solely as holiday and children's entertainment; the initial application of Newtonian mechanics to devise intricate dolls or "automatons" in the eighteenth century;[11] the debut of ether as a giddy party drug well before its medical properties were exploited[12] -- all suggest that the "toy principle" may far exceed the province of popular culture and communications media. It is even tempting to suggest that all new technologies may gain first admittance into society as court jesters and Trojan horses, with their physical presence clearly visible, but their potentialities poorly understood.[13] But if practical technologies indeed begin as playthings, what forces are needed to transform the playthings into practical technologies? That this transformation is by no means inevitable is documented by various curiosities of history, such as the failure of the Aztec civilization to use the wheel other than in children's toys, and the Chinese confinement of their gunpowder, rocket, and to a large degree their printing inventions to use on only ceremonial occasions. Abbot Payson Usher, the technological historian, sees this problem as central to an understanding of technology. "The history of invention," he writes, "is a study of the circumstances that have converted the simple but relatively inefficient mechanisms of early periods into the complex and more effective mechanisms of today."[14] Usher views economic needs and perception of technological potentials as the most important of these circumstances, but numerous other factors have been linked by theorists to the development, and nondevelopment, of specific technologies. Victor von Hagen, for example, points out that any Aztec attempt to use the wheel in more practical ways would have been foiled by Mexico's steep- walled landscape,[15] or the lack of a physical environment conducive to the technology of the wheel. McLuhan emphasizes the importance of compatible MEDIA environments, proposing that the Chinese ideograph was the main impediment to Chinese use of the printing press for mass communication, since ideographic writing is not well suited for reproduction on mass, movable type.[16] And Friedrich Hayek contends that the massive application of invention to industrial tasks in the nineteenth century -- aptly characterized by Alfred North Whitehead as "the invention of the method of invention"[17] -- was made possible by the uniquely invigorating climate of free capitalism.[18] It is thus fairly plain that the ignition of technological growth has often come from outside the specific technology itself, in a combination of supportive social, economic, media, and even physical conditions. It also follows that while the toy phase may be prerequisite to subsequent technological development, its existence by no means GUARANTEES that development: lacking the proper environment, the technological toy may long endure in a case of "arrested" development. (For a far-fetched example, the confinement of "ESP" phenomena to largely show-business and "magic" roles in our own society may constitute a failure to exploit a potentially useful "mental" technology due to lack of proper attitude on our part. Future historians may regard this failure in the same way we regard the Aztec "failure" with the wheel.)[19] In the case of the popular culture technologies of the past hundred years, however, the emergence of new communication toys has almost always led to their more extensive use as practical media and/or mass art. The lesson of the toy principle for popular culture, then, is that mass art forms don't spring full- blown from the head of new technologies, but rather pass through a series of development stages beginning with a naive, raw, almost "contentless" flexing of hardware. That there is little "mass" about these incipient mass media is obvious in the bygone kinetoscope parlors of primitive film and the ear-horns of early victrolas -- devices that doled out entertainment on a purely personal, one-to-one fragmentary basis, characteristic more of the individual experience of toys that the mass experience of popular media. And yet with surprising regularity, these primordial media evolved into technologies and cultures of universal impact. STAGE TWO: TECHNOLOGY AS MIRROR OF REALITY In the history of film, it wasn't long before Edison's kinetoscopic oddities faced stiff and ultimately overwhelming competition from the Lumieres' presentation of "actualities" on the screen. Rather than photographing sneezes and what amounted to other filmic gag-lines, the Lumieres pointed their cameras at real-life events -- workers leaving a factory, a baby's meal, and the famous train entering the station. Although the novelty of movie technology undoubtedly played a major role in the appreciation of these early "documentaries," the cries and jolts of audiences upon viewing L'Arrive d'un train en gare in 1895 (approximately six years after Ott's nasal acrobatics) clearly indicated a new focusing on content -- in this case, a real train chugging into a real station, at an angle such that the audience could almost believe the train was chugging right in at THEM. The superficial amusement and curiosity characteristic of the earlier gimmick films were replaced with the deeper emotions of fright, sorrow, and relief -- emotions that one would expect in a replication of a real-world interaction. In effect the adoption of reality as film content distracted from the technology and artificiality of the film experience, directing attention to the non-technological content -- the events depicted on the screen -- and in turn enhancing the believability of the content, i.e., belief that the events of the film were "really" happening. The co-option of reality in media thus becomes a self-fulfilling loop, in which the very mirroring of actually tends to disguise the mirroring process and promote the actuality. It is perhaps the spiraling power of this media loop that accounts for the riveting impact of media technology once it leaves the infant toy stage and attains the succeeding reality/mirror phase. Just as Whitehead realized that the most important invention of the nineteenth century was invention itself, so his one-time collaborant Bertrand Russell saw the most important development of the twentieth century as the suspension of disbelief.[20] The public's willingness to respond to an electronic transcription of a voice as if it were a live voice, and to a photochemical likeness of a face as if it were a real face, soon enabled communications technology to effectively recapture or substitute for the real world on a massive scale. And it was this mirroring of the real world, with the attendant prominence of content and invisibility of technique (qualities which media theorists from McLuhan to Jacques Ellul have long seen as the defining traits of mature technologies)[21], that became the modus operandi of communications media. The telephone, of course, shortly confounded William Orton's assessment and became a major artery for both business and personal conversation. And while the phonograph's transition from toy to reality transcriber may have been less dramatic than that of the telephone, it was nonetheless profound. By 1893, the attempt to sell the phonograph as a "novelty" had run its course, and Edison, regaining control of his invention, planned for the introduction of popular music records.[22] This signalled a shift in phonographic emphasis from technique to content, the content in this case being the reality of a past musical performance retrieved and captured on the record. Television and radio, after even briefer tenures in the toy stage, began functioning as rather mature transcribers of reality -- where they for the most part continue today. For in the broadcasting of film, video tapes, or recordings, television and radio perform as much of a reality transmission as when actual events and live performances are broadcast. The non-reality component, if it exists in the film or recording broadcast, is in the original film or recording, NOT in its transmission on television or radio. In fact, film and recordings on television and radio satisfy all the requirements of the stage two "reality" mirror: the film is the reality/content and the film/content is paramount in the audience's awareness, even as the underlying transmitting technology of television goes unnoticed. The audience suspends its disbelief and pretends it's seeing a FILM rather than a televised BROADCAST of a film. (*NOTE ADDED IN 1985: Increasing use of the personal computer for word processing, data management, and telecommunication shows that it too is now functioning in the mirror stage.) Conveyance or interaction with reality is apparently the second and terminal phase of development, not only for most communications technology, but for most other applications of technology as well. When such curios as rocketry, electricity, and phosphorescence were finally harnessed for practical purposes -- when the little toys finally grew up -- they extended our physical control of the real world and, as Fuller, Hall, McLuhan, and many others have pointed out, in effect acted and continue to act as surrogates for our arms, legs, hands, and bodies.[23] There thus appears to be some merit to the proposition that communications media differ form other technologies only in specific application and content, sharing essentially the same developmental patterns and dynamics. There does appear, however, to be at least one interesting difference in the development of film and most other technologies. Whereas, as indicated before, the transformation of most techniques from side-show toys to mainstream appliances seems to have been sparked primarily by forces and attitudes outside of technology, the growth of film from gimmick to replicator was apparently in large part dependent upon a new technological component. As described earlier, the "toy" film played to individuals who peeked into individual kinetoscopes; but the "reality" film reached out to mass audiences, who viewed the reality-surrogate in group theaters. The connection between mass audience and reality simulation, moreover, was no accident. Unlike the perception of novelties, which is inherently subjective and individualized, reality perception is a fundamentally objective, group process -- tested in the social consensus, as George Herbert Mead and social psychologists have long stressed -- and as such is strengthened and even predicated upon mass experience. The creation of a group audience for simultaneous and reinforcing perception of the reality-surrogate film required that a new technology of film PROJECTION had to be devised and hooked into the existing communication chain. This suggests that technological determinism may have played a greater role in the development of film culture, and perhaps of all popular culture by extension, than it did in the appliance of more practical technologies. In addition, film (and recording) seem to be distinguishable from most other media and technologies in one other significant respect: as implied earlier, it is film and recording that now provide the wellspring of imagination and originality for television and radio broadcasting. This nonreality is not the pre-reality of technological toys, but the post-reality of media that have mastered the straight transcription of the real world and have gone on to something beyond -- the rearrangement of the real world to create fantasy, eloquence, and art. To accomplish this feat, a technology must progress to yet a third phase -- a phase that can copy reality, dissect it, and put it back together again in new and intriguing ways.[24] STAGE THREE: TECHNOLOGY AS MIDWIFE TO ART The present discussion began with an inquiry into the relationship between technology and popular art, and a specific question as to why film and recording, which were first introduced into the culture at approximately the same time, developed into popular art forms at such different rates of speed. Thus far, however, the discussion has had little to do with popular art -- talking on the phone certainly doesn't constitute an art (at least, not for the average speaker), and, as indicated, what aesthetic content there is in radio and television derives from the content of the film, play, record, script, and not from its broadcast. The connection between technological process and technological art, then, remains yet to be defined. Once again, the history of film might prove instructive. An oft-told story has it that George Melies, another French film pioneer, was shooting his camera at pedestrians and vehicles on the Place de l'Opera in Paris one fine spring day in 1898 (in the "actuality" fashion of the Lumieres), when his camera jammed. Thinking his film ruined, Melies nevertheless cleared the aperture gate, reset the film, and started shooting again -- taking the film home for development just for the amusement of it (apparently one of the essential ingredients of many great discoveries). When the print came out, and Melies projected it, he received a little surprise: there, at the spot in the action where the camera had stopped and then started, was a magical transformation: men turning into women, children into adults, and a passing bus instantly materializing into a hearse! The film, in other words, gave no discernible indication that the camera had stopped and started with several seconds elapsing; all that was apparent was the continuous "reality" of a bus suddenly changing into a hearse! Melies had inadvertently hit upon the potent intervention of editing.[25] The edit of course proved to be the key in the transformation of film from reality transcription to popular art: the discovery that disparate pieces of film, shot at different times and places and reflective of different realities, could be spliced together so as to project what would be accepted as one continuous new reality, freed film from dependence upon literal reality.[26] Film no longer need be wedded to the natural rhythms of time and space to create a natural, flowing experience; the editing room could create its own rhythms, which were equally "natural" and palatable to the perceiver. Within less than twenty years, Griffith and others exploited this opportunity to mold, bend, shape, fracture, and reconstruct realities to the dictates only of the writer/director/editor's imagination. Film now had a life of its own. From Altamiran cave paintings to Victorian literature, the ability not only to retell but refashion reality in the retelling has been a hallmark of "art."[27] It is not surprising, then, that film's transcendence of reality touched off its explosion as a popular art form, which by the 1920's had become both global and golden. Conventional film history, of course, traces the employment of editing and its artistic vistas to the chance tinkering of Melies and his followers; but the serendipity of film editing can perhaps be better understood as not so much the personal fortune of Melies, as the serendipity of film's original TECHNOLOGY. The mechanics of film were never INTENDED to allow for an alteration of reality -- celluloid was used for its flexibility in projection, not for its amenability to splicing -- and the "chance" discovery of editing was thus a chance uncovering of a hidden capacity already present in the technology of the medium. In this specific sence, then, the popular art of film can be seen as a direct outgrowth of its peculiar technology. The development of technological art thus appears dependent upon the special capacity of a technology, first designed as a toy and second used as a reality-substitute, to transcend reality and make new ones. This toy/mirror/art or prereality/reality/post-reality dialectic of technological development bears some interesting resemblances to several well- known models of human development, including Piaget's sensorimotor, concrete, and formal (abstract) stages of intellectual growth;[28] McLuhan's oral, written, and electronic eras of comminication;[29] Freud's oral, anal, and genital stages of psychosexual development (which Walter Ong has intriguingly compared to McLuhan's stages of communication, e.g., written and anal are retentive and reality-oriented)[30] ; and Arthur Koestler's Jester, Sage, and Artist as the three unfolding expressions of human creativity.[31] Note how technology as toy displays the subjectivity of the oral, the nonseriousness of the joke, the flexing of muscle for its own sake characteristic of sensorimotor activity, and the emphasis upon technique or delivery common to humor, oral communication, and sensorimotor behavior. Technology as mirror stresses accuracy, objectivity, and prominence of content of "knowledge" as befits both the sage and the scribe, as well as the literal transaction with reality basic to concrete operations. And technology as art, combining elements of the previous two stages, is both serious and subjective, capable of the emotional intensity of the genital stage (the multi-dimensionality of electronic communication) and the abstraction and restructuring of reality -- the triumph of form over content -- of the formal stage of intellectual functioning. Most technologies, however, perhaps too well-suited to the second stage mirror task, simply lack the ability to make the artistic jump. Thus the telephone is purely a medium of reality communication, and still-life photography, for all its aesthetic aspirations, remains essentially a medium of literal replication.[32] Other technologies such as radio and television possess the ability to restructure reality and create art, but are limited by convention and economic pressures to simple reality-mirroring of previously created filmic, theatrical, or musical art, as discussed earlier. (The quick switching of video cameras and perspectives on talk shows like "The Tonight Show" often create ambiences that don't exist on the set, and thus may constitute a bona-fide "art-form" PRODUCED -- rather than merely transmitted -- by television. Experimentation with video editing, computer character generation, and so forth may also be a source of potential art. *NOTE ADDED IN 1985: Rock videos are also an excellent recent example of primary video-produced rearrangement of images, or art.) The case of phonograph/recording technology is even more unusal. Initially, the hardware used to record was hopelessly reality-bound -- sound was stored and reproduced first on electric wires and then on discs, neither of which allowed for splicing, alteration, or rearrangment once the recording was made. Thus lacking the hidden potential of celluloid film, rubber records continued for better than forty years as a glorified Xerox operation for musical performances. It wasn't until the addition of a completely new tape technology in the 1940's -- a spliceable medium which was initially introduced for remedial purposes, so as to make more accurate replications -- that recording attained a faculty for reality alteration or art. Magnetic sound tape not only allowed for easy editing, but for overdubbing, multi-track sel-synching, and a general reshuffling of recorded sounds to make for imaginative new combinations. Thus, within twenty years of the introduction of tape recording, artist/producer/songwriters like Phil Spector, the Beatles, and others turned recording into the popular artform of the generation -- a two billion dollar industry that has at times surpassed even film and television in combined profits and cultural impact. (Note that the twenty years from inception of tape technology to Beatles parallels the twenty years from Melies to Griffith in film.) The differential in the rise of film and recording as popular art-forms can thus now be explained as follows: both were initially conceived as toys, and both were quickly adopted for reality transcription; the same technology that enabled film to adequately replicate the real world enabled film to reconstruct the real world, so film soon evolved into a popular art; but the technology that enabled recordings to adequately replicate its real world contained no such double advantage, so recording remained a simple transcription device until the addition of a new mechnaism capable of reality alteration. It is thus apparent that, as suggested at the outset of the present discussion, the relationship between technology and technological art is no simple cause-and-effect matter. Indeed, the addition of a new component to an already- productive technology cannot even always be depended upon to enhance the medium's capacity for art: as suggested in the earlier reference to the first "talkie" films, the introduction of sound technology to the silent film in effect REDUCED the medium to the state of a toy -- setting the whole technology back to stage one by creating a new medium, as it were. In this regard, some critics insist that film to the present day has never recoverd from the introduction of sound -- that speech and dialogue have been used at worst as a toy and at best as an unimaginative, literal exposition of plot (some of the work of Orson Welles and perhaps Robert Altman might be an exception), to the detriment and even destruction of lofty artistic styles developed during the silent era.[33] Moreover, the connection between technology and popular culture is further complicated by the tendency of various technologies to operate, not singly or in isolation, but in conjunction, often cross-influencing one another. Edison, it is said, invented the phonograph to perfect the telephone, and a motion picture process to enhance the phonograph.[34] The role of phonetic writing as a prerequisite to the mass usage of the printing press has already been alluded to (see Note 16, above). And the rise of music recording culture, though clearly a product of its own technology, was augmented by, of all media, the television: when television co-opted radio as a medium of live entertainment in the early 1950's, radio was forced to rely much more extensively on recorded music to attract its listeners, and thus provided a sustaining forum for a recording technology already ripe for popular art. (In a similar fashion, the FCC's decision in 1965 that all FM radio stations must broadcast programs different from their AM radio affiliates hastened the development of the LP record as an artform -- for many FM stations turned to what was previously considered "noncommercial" album music, thus giving the LP a much needed public forum.) This type of technological interaction of course demands an eventual analysis of the economic and social factors that mediate the technologies. A complete discussion of technology and art inevitably invites some consideration of aesthetics -- yet the complexity of the technology-to-culture equation makes an aesthetic of technological art and culture rather difficult. Criticisms of technological art have often been insensitive to gradations in technological process, and have been frequently directed at immature media that are physically incapable of, and make no pretense to, any type of technological "art." Thus, Ortega Y Gasset, for example, condemns "modern art" as, among other things, "play and nothing else," and "of no transcending consequences"[35] -- qualities that, in the perspective of the present discussion, can be seen as more properly belonging to the technological toy than to technologic art. This confusion of technological stages -- an error of premature judgment and "mistaken identity" born of an inability to see technology as an evolving, developmental process -- was recongnized by Susanne Langer, whose assessment of filmic evolution aptly complements Mast's observations on novelties that served as the springboard for the present analysis. Langer writes: With every new invention -- montage, the sound track, Technicolor -- its [film's] devotees have raised a cry of fear that now its `art' must be lost. Since every such novelty is, of course, promptly exploited before it is even technically perfected, and flaunted in its rawest state, as a popular sensation, . . . there is usually a tidal wave of particularly bad rubbish in association with every important advance. But the art goes on.[36] The problem, of course, is that while stages of technological culture are indeed distinctive and successive, they by no means are mutually exclusive -- the recent popularity of "Sensurround" gimmickery and "wildlife sage" reality-mimicry in the movies suggests that, having attained the CAPACITY for technologaical art, film need not necessarily always PRODUCE art. Instead, technologic evolution, like its biological model, allows for the co-existence of earlier and later designs, with an assortment of aesthetic ramifications. But if an awareness of media evolution cannot provide a definitive aesthetic for popular culture, it can at least offer a useful yardstick for making such judgments. Moreover, it perhaps at last reveals a common ground between the crtitics and champions of popular culture -- the first looking at the caterpillar, the second at the butterfly, of the same technological process. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS The ways in which technologies engender and encourage mass culture and art are complex and multi-faceted, yet have often been oversimplified or taken for granted. Although a physical invention must lie at the root of every technological art, very rarely if ever do inventions have immediate mass cultural impact or flowering. Instead, new technologies usually make their first appearance in the culture as novelties, gadgets, gimmicks, and toys. The content here is dominated by, and an exposition for, the technique; the perceptual experience is personal, subjective, and highly individual rather than "mass"; and the toys usually perform on the sidelines of the overall society. Due more often than not to shifts in societal attitudes rather than developments in technology, the novelty item eventually (though not always) becomes a more practical device, used for various types of literal transactions with reality. The content in this phase attains a high prominence while the visible technology recedes; the perceptual experience is markedly social, objective, and "mass," as the entity of "audience" comes into play for the first time; and such transcribers of reality usually occupy significant and often central positions in the society. At this point, the evolutions of practical and artistic technologies are virtually indistinguishable -- the difference being that practical technologies remain at the reality level, while artistic media progress to yet a third stage. To achieve this artistic jump, a medium must have the capacity not only to replicate reality, but to rearrange it in imaginative ways. Performance at this level entails a blending of features from the previous two stages: technological art is nonfunctional and subjective like the toy, yet nontrivial and (in most cases) group oriented and content dominated like the reality-surrogate. In the case of film, the supra-realism ability was inherent in the original realism technology, so the development of a popular film art was relatively swift. In the case of music recording, the capacity for reality alteration came only with the nonpurposeful addition of a new technological component, so the rise of a popular recording culture was correspondingly delayed. In yet another case, radio and especially television have the capacities for technological art, yet function as aesthetic parasites in relying upon other media for creativity and art. It is thus apparent that the technology for transcending reality, and its two antecedent stages, are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the fostering of mass culture and art; the remaining conditions probably lie in the interaction of various technologies both among themselves and with more abstract, non- technological elements of society. NOTES AND REFERENCES (1) Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, (New York: (Basic, 1975), summarizes many of the extant criticisms and defenses of popular culture. (2) A few theorists have argued that technology is not the necessary basis of popular culture, citing such nontechnological cultures as the oral folk music tradition; see Ray B. Brown, "Popular Culture: Notes Towards a Definition," in Side Saddle on the Golden Calf, George H. Lewis, ed. (Pacific Palisades, Cal.: Goodyear, 1972), pp.5-11; and Bruce A. Lohof, "Popular Culture: The Journal and the State of the Study," J. of Popular Culture, 6, No. 3 (1972): 438-455. Since even folk music, however, has become increasingly dependent upon the technology of electronic instruments and recording, it seems fair to say that such cases represent a diminishing series of exceptions to the technological rule. (3) Vol. 9, No. 2 (1975): 353-508. (4) Principally in The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1962), and Understanding Media, 2nd ed. (New York: Mentor, 1964). (5) New York: Pegasus, 1971), p.15. Unless otherwise indicated, examples of film history to be cited in the ensuing discussion come from Mast's account. (6) In the McLuhan schema, technology once liberated from function often becomes not only "content" but "art." "The machine turned Nature into an art form," McLuhan writes, by making humans less dependent upon natural processes (an agriculture strictly limited by the seasons would be one such example) for survival. (See Understanding Media, p. ix.) Note that the art here in not the direct product of a technology at work -- as in film montage, for example, produced by the technology of editing -- but rather the peculiar result of a technology not at work. A fine recent example of this unusual type of art genesis appeared in a New York Times travel piece that seriously described New York City's increasingly nonfunctional subway system as a "delightfully elevated tour de force," and "a scenic delight," featuring "track-wheel music." (See Stan Fischler and Richard Friedman, "Subways," 23 May 1976, Section 10, pp. 1, 22.) With ridership diminishing and service reduced, the mechanics of the subway system are now apparently capable of being appreciated not for what they do (or don't do), but for what they "are." (7) Matthew Josephson, Edison (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), p. 141. Moreover, Orton, President of the Western Union Telegraph Company, was apparently steadfast in his low regard for the "talking telegraph." According to an amusing little article aptly entitled "Three Great Mistakes" by S. H. Hogarth in the November, 1926 issue of Blue Bell, Orton counseled his hapless friend Chauncey M. Depew to pass up a chance to purchase one- sixth of the new Bell telephone enterprise for a mere $10,000, because, in Orton's view, "the invention was a toy" with no "commercial possibilities." Meanwhile, John Brooks relates that use of the telephone in England was delayed for at least a decade due to the conviction that it was only a "scientific toy." (See Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 92.) (8) Josephson, p. 172. Among the more practical applications of the phonograph envisioned by Edison but slow in implementation were recording of letters and books for the blind, preservation of lectures and public addresses, and permanent transcription of telephone conversations. (9) A recent New York Post article reports that sales of home computers are "spreading like wildfire," and mostly to "techno- fetishists" who play a variety of visual and intellectual games with computers. David Ahl, editor of Creative Computing who was interviewed in the Post story, sees the current computer phase as consistent with a more general pattern of media development: "When the principle of radio was first developed," Ahl explains, "it was the amateurs who developed the first sets . . . .it's the same here [with computers]." Peter Keepnews, "The Latest Do-It- Yourself Fetish: Computers," New York Post, 9 June 1976, p. 47. (10) Although C.B. was first introduced by the F.C.C. in 1958, it was relatively unknown by the general public until the fanfare in the mid 1970s. Predictably, C.B.'s first burst into public awareness has been accompanied by a jargon of code-names and pass-words, both accoutrements of gimmick usage. And perhaps most significant is C.B. enthusiast and writer Michael Harwood's assertion that the messages relayed on Citizen's Band "are often inconsequential" -- clear evidence, again, of new technology overpowering content, or being operated just for the fun of it. See Michael Harwood, "America With its Ears On," The New York Times Magazine 25 April 1976, pp. 28,60, ff. (11) Siegfried Giedeon provides a colorful account of "invention in the service of the miracle" from Alexandrian religious plays to mechanical ducks that defecated in the 18th and 19th century courts of Europe, in Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Norton, 1948), pp. 32-35. See also Robert S. Brumbaugh, Ancient Greek Gadgets and Machines (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1966), who points out that "the Greeks invented the steam engine, but to them it was only a toy" (p.4). Brumbaugh then documents the Greek invention of numerous other mechanical devices used primarily to amuse and amaze. (12) Rene Fulop-Miller, Triumph Over Pain, trans., by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1938), pp. 95-97. (13) Cyril Stanley Smith argues along similar lines in "On Arts, Invention, and Technology," Technology Review 78, No. 7 (June 1976): 36-41, pointing out that practical metallurgy began with the making of ornamental necklaces, wheels first appeared on toys, lathes were used to carve snuff boxes a century before their use in heavy industry, and metal casting was first perfected for making bells rather than cannon -- all of which suggests to Smith that technology may originate more from playful and aesthetic impulses that practical need. (14) The History of Mechanical Inventions, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University, 1954), p. 117. (15) "The wheel, had the Mexicans had it," von Hagen writes, "would have done them no good as all is up and down, and high valley is walled from high valley almost throughout the length and breadth of the land; its heights are only passable to foot traffic," The Aztec: Man and Tribe (New York: Mentor, 1961), p. 18 (16) The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 185. In a similar way, Roger Burlingame explains the failure to actualize most of Leonardo's inventions as due to a lack of "collateral" technology. (See "The Hardware of Culture," Technology and Culture 1, No. 1 (1959,), p. 16.) (17) Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 136. (18) "That the inventive faculty of man had been no less in earlier periods," Hayek explains, "is shown by the many highly ingenious automatic toys and mechanical devices constructed. . . . But the few attempts towards a more extended industrial use of mechanical inventions, some extraordinarily advanced, were promptly suppressed . . . the beliefs of the great majority of what was right and proper were allowed to bar the way of the individual innovator. Only since industrial freedom opened the path to the free use of new knowledge . . . has science made the great strides which in the last hundred and fifty years have changed the face of the world." The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1944), pp. 15-16. (19) Of course, not everyone agrees that application of technology to practical tasks is socially desirable. Lewis Mumford, for example, sees preindustrial, "esthetic" inventions as more fundamentally human, and more beneficial to society, than "utilitarian" appliances; he thus views pre-19th century incipient technologies not as "arrested" development at all, but as the finest expressions of the human inventive impulse, and laments their absence in our modern culture. See The Myth of the Machine, vol. 1: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), pp. 252-253. (20) Russell as cited by McLuhan in Understanding Media, p. 68. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first indentified "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (1817; reprint ed: London: Oxford University, 1907), vol. 2, p. 6. (21) See William Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets (New York: Harper Collophon, 1971), for a comparison of the work of McLuhan, Ellul, and other media theorists. For more on the narcotic capacity of media mirrors to disguise their operation, see McLuhan Understanding Media, "The Gadget-Lover," pp. 51-56. (22) Josephson, pp. 330-333. Edison's interest in the popular record was apparently due not only to foresight, but to the pressure of rival inventors -- most notably Emile Berliner, whose "flat-disc" record in the 1890's took a sizeable bite out of Edison's "novelty" phonograph market. (23) See, for example, R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon (Carbondale, III.: Southern Illinois University, 1938), pp. 38-39; Edward Hall, The Silent Language (New York: Fawcett, 1959), p. 60; and McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (24) This distinction between pre-reality and post-reality technology will perhaps run contrary to conceptual frameworks that distinguish primarily between reality and non-reality, and are thus prone to view both toys and art as a same technological expression belonging to a single non-reality or non-practical class. Thus Mumford, as suggested earlier, views preindustrial technologies as the source of both games AND the most genuine art (see Note 19 above), and indeed later argues that art attempted by post-industrial technologies is in effect a contradiction of terms, or an "anti-art." (See The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970], pp. 361-368, et passim.) From a rather different perspective, Freud has equated the artist, child, primitive, and psychotic, in his "Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," reprinted in On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 44-45, and Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Vintage, 1918). And McLuhan's description of post-operative technologies as art, and their similarity to the pre-functional technological toy (see Note 6 above), suggests at least one type of art which may be analogous to the toy. For the most part, however, the evidence of popular culture as well as intuition points to keep divergences between technological toys and art. While both Fred Ott's Sneeze and the movie Chinatown, for example, are indeed non-practical, the first merely distracts from the real world through razzle-dazzle, whereas the second subtly restructures reality through imperceptible technique; the sneezing nose in the first is diversion, the bandaged nose in the second is commentary and symbol. Thus, the discussion which follows will accept Susanne Langer's observation that while both games and art are nonutilitarian, art is serious and gamesoGsot. Philosophy in a New Key, 2nd ed. (New York: Mentor, 1951), p. 42. (25) There is apparently a sliver of suspicion that the Melies anecdote may be apocryphal. Eric Rhode, for example, in his recent History of the Cinema, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 34, prefaces his recounting of the episode with a weighty "it is alleged that . . . ." One the other hand, Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, writing much closer to the source in The History of Motion Pictures (New York: Norton, 1938), p. 11 -- as well as Lewis Jacobs' "George Melies: Artificially Arranged Scenes," first published in 1939 and reprinted in The Emergence of Film Art, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969), p. 11 -- present the Melies story without qualification. In any event, the specific manner in which the editing principle was discovered, whether accidental or other, is not as important as the fact of discovery itself -- which, as the discussion will shortly emphasize, was an all but inevitable if unintended consequence of the particular technology of film. (26) It is Edwin S. Porter, not Melies, who is usually credited with being the first to physically splice the film for story construction, as in Porter's The Great Train Robbery made in 1903 [SPECIAL NOTE TO WBSI PARTICIPANTS: and remade more recently by our own Michael Crichton...]. (See Jacobs, pp. 20-21.) Melies' technique of stopping the camera, rearranging the scene, and starting to shoot again was a cruder method of rearranging or "editing" reality. (27) Langer refers to this supra-reality quality as "semblance," and defines the "artist's task" as follows: "to produce and sustain the essential illusion, set it off clearly from the surrounding world of actuality, and articulate its form to the point where it coincides with forms of feeling and living," Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner's, 1953), p. 68. See Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World: 1949), for a discussion of film art as montage or creation of new realities through editing. (28) See Howard Gardner, The Quest for Mind (New York: Knopf, 1973), pp. 51-110, for summary of Piaget's model. (29) See both The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. (30) Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University, 1967), pp. 92-110. (31) The Act of Creation (New York: Dell, 1964). (32) As Stanley Milgram pointed out, "The English language is blunt about the nature of photography. A photographer TAKES a picture. He does not CREATE it." "The Image-Freezing Machine," Psychology Today, 10, No. 8 (January 1977), p. 52. (33) See, for example, Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley, Cal: University of California, 1968), foreword and pp. 229-230; and Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966). (34) Josephson, pp. 161, 385; also Mast, pp. 25-26. (35) The Dehumanization of Art (1925 reprint ed.: Princeton: Princeton University, 1968), p. 14. (36) Feeling and Form, p. 412.