I have this theory that technological advances do not represent significant breaks in history.

Mark Poster believes that the internet is a defining characteristic that indicates that we have moved from a ‘modern’ world to a ‘postmodern condition’. He has very good arguments to support that. Others suggest that the appearance of globalisation represent that break. I agree with both ideas to the extent that a break in the continuity of historical narrative has in fact occurred. In fact, historical narrative has actually been broken. Meta-narratives in general are pretty suspect these days. However, I disagree that technology or economics are the sole causal factor.

It’s a socio-linguistic thing. It occurs in conjunction with technology, but technology is developed in a social context and shaped in a feedback loop with societal factors – primarily linguistic ones. Likewise, politics and economics are both functions of language. Finance capital is linguistic in that trade represents an exchange of value and of meaning. Meaning is negotiated communicatively between human beings, and operates in a societal context. Economic superiority indicates a heightened vocabulary and grammar, and one that is closely guarded in much the same way that the priesthood of scribal society guarded the arcane vocabulary and grammar of religious superiority. Globalisation is an effect of ‘free’ markets – but freedom is selective and those who benefit from those freedoms are the ones who already have the edge. Freedom of speech, as Stoppard points out, benefits the articulate.

Homo Digitalis may indeed live in a condition of multiple freedoms – free trade, free speech, free movement, free choice (from a purely consumerist perspective), but does not have freedom from these things.

Linguistic advances are both causal and caused by shifts in technology, politics, economics and other factors, but it is at the point that the human lexicon changes – and the communicative mode that enables it (be it verbal, scribal, print, electric or digital) – that historical breaks occur, and evolutionary shifts in the species can be identified.

Listening to: ‘The Green Room 001: Eco_Nation’ – Various Artists (Loop)