Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation

Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation, by Ronald J. Deibert

1. Medium Theory, Ecological Holism, and the Study of World Order Transformation

The poverty of the many existing, mostly speculative analyses of the "information revolution" reveals the inherent difficulties of assessing sweeping changes as they unfold. Without the confidence of hindsight, and with no God's-eye vantage point, theory becomes an essential, though necessarily context-bound, tool by which to bring order to the apparent chaos that floods from abrupt ruptures in social and political institutions. Given the lack of attention International Relations scholarship traditionally devotes to communications, my first steps in this direction must be across disciplinary boundaries--a potentially dangerous expedition, though one that also offers the prospect of shaking loose dogmatic assumptions riveted in place by prolonged and artificial disciplinary closure. ₁

At the same time, it is important to recognize that approaches lifted from other fields are likely to suffer their own peculiar deficiencies. We should be careful to avoid cross-disciplinary hero-worship for its own sake. At the very least, it is unlikely that any theory devised within a particular discursive field with its own set of problems can be transplanted wholesale to another without significant modification. To accommodate my own specific problematique, the rudimentary insights of Innis, McLuhan, and other medium theorists will be embedded in an evolutionary approach called "ecological holism." Although the label is new, the approach itself actually synthesizes and expounds what is already implicit in the work of many medium theorists--that is, an open-ended, nonreductionist, thoroughly historicist view of human existence that emphasizes contingency over continuity both in terms of the trajectory of social evolution and the nature and character of human beings. As will be made clear below, while this approach differs in significant ways from mainstream International Relations theorizing, it does find resonance in the work of at least one prominent theorist--namely, John Ruggie--and has important commonalities with others as well.

In this chapter, I begin with an overview of the extant literature on communications within the International Relations field. As will be revealed below, there is a dearth of scholarship that takes communications as its central focus. Moreover, what little exists is either flawed in significant ways, or is improperly designed for my central task: an examination of the relationship between changes in communication technologies and social and political change at a world-order level. I then outline the central tenets of medium theory, and offer a profile of some of the main contributors to this approach, including the issues to which they have applied their insights. Using the various criticisms of medium theory as a backdrop, I then put forward a substantial elaboration and modification of medium theory, tailoring it to the specific concerns of the study, and situating it more clearly within the International Relations field. The analytical scheme used to organize the research in the ensuing chapters will emerge from the modifications made to medium theory.

International Relations Theory and Communications

There is no distinct "school" or "paradigm" of communications within the field of International Relations. In fact, there are few International Relations theorists of communication at all (the one important exception being Karl Deutsch). Individual theorists may allude to communication or information in their studies, but rare are the cases where an overtly communications approach is adopted. Although the communications/International Relations nexus remains underdeveloped, some distinct themes or issue-areas can be identified where the interaction between the two is given more than passing notice.

To the limited extent International Relations theorists have dealt with communications explicitly, the focus has primarily been on content to the exclusion of technology--the inverse of the theoretical perspective to be employed here. For example, considerable work has been done on propaganda as an instrument of foreign policy, noting the way a state will manipulate messages to garner international support or undermine foes. ₂ Other studies working in the content vein have focused on media representations, or the "framing" of international events, and the way these representations may influence domestic opinion and thus foreign policy outcomes. ₃ These particular approaches were common during and after the Vietnam War, when the novelty of "the first televised war" captured the attention of many scholars. ₄ An important subset of this approach includes the many studies that examine the relationship between content and situation. In this group we would find studies on communication during crises; ₅ intercultural communications; ₆ communications in negotiations and bargaining; ₇ and wartime and/or diplomatic communications. ₈

A further subset of the content-based approaches includes those that deal with control. Work in this area typically examines the way ownership of media creates an ideological bias that circumscribes and shapes debate to further the interests of capital or the state. ₉ For example, the Gramscian school of International Relations theory emphasizes the relationship between control over media and cultural hegemony by transnational elites. ₁₀ Another common focus of control-based approaches is on how flows of information deepen and solidify structures of dependency between the information-rich North and the information-poor South. ₁₁ Policy proposals designed to rectify this imbalance, such as that for a New World Information Order, were a direct outgrowth of the conclusions reached by these theorists. ₁₂ Control-based studies thus tend to emphasize the way communication flows threaten "cultural sovereignty" or state autonomy while extending cultural imperialism. ₁₃ Although the focus of these analyses is on control of the medium, the intent is to show how such control determines content, which is the ultimate concern. From this perspective, new communication technologies are important insofar as they enhance the efficiency and scope of such control, and hence the potential penetration of hegemonic ideologies. But they are ultimately seen as subsidiary variables within an overarching global-capitalist mode of production, rather than as transformative in their own right.

Not all of the work on communications by International Relations theorists deals exclusively with content; the pioneering work by Karl Deutsch on communications flows is an important exception. ₁₄ Deutsch, who is probably the figure most identifiable with the communications/International Re lations nexus, constructed a formidable and innovative body of work unique for the central role he assigned to communicative interaction in the explanation of political behavior. When opening any of Deutsch's many works, the reader cannot help but be struck by a sharp contrast: while Deutsch crafts elegant historical interpretations, rich in detail, as backdrops for his analysis, when his attention turns to explanation, however, an overarching, almost obsessive compulsion for statistical rigor predominates. His concern for the quantitative is so strong that Deutsch's formal analysis of communication is thus restricted to the one part of the communication process that can be measured: flow. For Deutsch, communication flows determine the level of national and international integration. Concentrated clusters of communication patterns--measured in terms of the density and flow of postal or telephone exchanges, for example--distinguish separate communities. The unevenness of this distribution helps explain why nationalism is so prevalent in world politics. The flip side of this equation--and the explanation for integration, according to Deutsch--is that the density of the flow determines the scope of the community. As flows increase, parochialism dissolves.

Deutsch's work is perhaps best situated as one important part of the modernization genre of scholarship that flourished among political scientists, development theorists, and sociologists between 1950 and 1980. ₁₅ These theorists acknowledged that the properties of media were important, but only along one narrow dimension: the extent to which they enhanced the flow or efficiency of communications. Such flows were seen as the tools by which local identities might be dissolved and then displaced by a more solidified, national identity as part of a more general state-building project. Hence, increased literacy among a population was seen as a key to general political development, as was the creation and maintenance of a centralized "mass media" system. In focusing on the potential development of a pluralistic security community in Europe and elsewhere, Deutsch and his colleagues were simply extending this modernization paradigm beyond national borders.

The main problem with Deutsch's analysis is that it adopted a naive view of the assimilative tendencies of increased communication. Extrapolating from Deutsch's hypotheses, one would expect a single community of humanity as communication becomes more dense, from tribes to nations to regions to supranations. Yet the opposite is as often the case. Increased communication flow does not, by necessity, lead to common identities. ₁₆ Flow by itself tells us little about the nature of the interaction. In other words, increased intercultural communication can easily lead to hostile backlashes rather than to seductive integration. Although students of Deutsch continued his approach into the 1970s and beyond, the utility of a purely quantitative analysis of communication flows is limited. ₁₇

As in the field of communications proper, the overwhelming majority of studies on international relations and communications focus on some aspect of message content. In these studies, the specific message being transmitted is thought to be the important variable; changes in the medium through which the message is imparted are abstracted from the analysis. Those that do not deal exclusively with content focus instead on communications flows, as exemplified in the work of Karl Deutsch. In both of these cases, the medium itself is viewed as neutral and invisible. Changes in the technology of communication are also ignored.

Medium Theory

Medium theory flips this abstraction, so to speak, focusing exclusively on the intrinsic properties of the medium itself. Most important from this perspective is the way large-scale changes in modes of communication shape and constrain behavior and thought independent of message content, and in doing so help to restructure social and political institutions. According to this perspective, media are not simply neutral channels for conveying information between two or more environments, but are rather environments in and of themselves. ₁₈ To put it simply, medium theory holds that communication "is a sphere where the technology involved may have an immense significance for the society in which it occurs, and perhaps radically affect the concurrent forms of social and economic organization." ₁₉ Unlike content-based analyses of communications, medium theory is necessarily historical in its approach, contrasting different media environments across time, and tracing changes in the technology of communication for their effects on the evolution of social and political order. ₂₀

Although medium theory is associated primarily with twentieth-century scholarship, many of its core propositions can be unearthed in classic texts dating back to ancient Greece. In the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter, Plato has Socrates raise strong objections to the newly emerging written form, arguing that it destroys memory and weakens the mind, even though, ironi cally, Plato's own analytic epistemology was strongly conditioned by the effects of writing on mental processes, as Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and Ernst Gellner have argued. ₂₁ Moral injunctions against the expression of ideas in specific media can be found in the Old Testament, where the Second Commandment prohibits the iconographic depiction of God. ₂₂ In the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau takes up a common theme in medium theory--the transition from primitive orality to writing--arguing that writing transforms the meaning of words and diminishes their vitality by suppressing dialects: "The more a people learn to read, the more are its dialects obliterated." ₂₃ What each of these perspectives shares is the central proposition of medium theory: that the medium of communication--far from being an empty vessel or transparent channel--has a significant influence on the nature and content of human communication.

Probably the most famous (or infamous, depending on specific viewpoints) practitioner of medium theory is Marshall McLuhan, as one of his well-known aphorisms, "the medium is the message" attests. In a series of highly publicized books written during the 1960s, McLuhan brought attention to the central principles of medium theory, mostly through his idiosyncratic style of writing, which was peppered with one-line aphorisms and gross generalizations that became catch-phrases of the decade. ₂₄ As Lapham notes, "Seldom in living memory had so obscure a scholar descended so abruptly from so remote a garret into the center ring of celebrity circus." ₂₅ Indeed, few scholars can rival McLuhan for achieving such popular notoriety--a rise McLuhan himself seemed to relish as proof of his own proclamations. Appearing in Woody Allen films and popular television shows, and professing to speak in the disconnected, pastiche mode of the "electronic age," McLuhan saw his role in therapeutic terms: he was to be the oracle of a new world on the verge of being born. Not surprisingly, the self-imposed transformation from bookish literary professor to postmodern electronic guru alienated many still ensconced in the tombs of typographica. In an ironic twist of his theorizing, McLuhan's meteoric rise may have had the unfortunate consequence of obscuring the message beneath the messenger.

Clothed in the "mosaic" form of argumentation McLuhan preferred ("mosaic" in contrast to the linear-style of reasoning which McLuhan believed to be a product of the Age of Typography), McLuhan's message took as its starting point some of the more basic themes of medium theory, reweaving them into electronic age prophecy. Like other medium theorists, McLuhan believed that changes in modes of communication have impor tant consequences for society--that there are deep, qualitative differences between one communications mode and another, differences that are in turn reflected in the nature of the communications epoch. For McLuhan, history can be divided into four such communications epochs, each of which corresponds to the dominant mode of communication of the time: oral, writing, printing, and electronic. McLuhan's unique contribution was the argument that in each of these communications epochs, different media act as extensions of the human senses with consequences for both cognition and social organization. For example, "oral societies" live primarily in an "ear culture," while writing, and to a greater extent print, makes the sense of sight dominant. Following McLuhan's sensory classification, the electronic revolution returns us to the world of primitive orality, to village-like encounters, but now on a global scale: hence, "the global village." ₂₆

One of the more popular, but confusing aspects of McLuhan's analysis is his binary distinction between "hot" and "cool" media. ₂₇ "Hot" media extend a single sense in high definition; "cool" media are low in definition, requiring audience participation. For McLuhan, examples of the former include print, radio, and film, while examples of the latter would include colloquial speech, telephone, and television. ₂₈ Though clearly the distinction is debatable (by most accounts, print is a less passive medium than television in terms of audience participation) like many of McLuhan's "probes" it had the unfortunate consequence of directing debate about medium theory away from its core propositions to McLuhan's more spectacular but incidental contributions. "McLuhanesque" slogans--such as "the electric light is pure information" or "electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West"--became so associated with medium theory that by the time of McLuhan's death in 1980 few outside of the communications field were aware of the approach. ₂₉

Although he was clearly the most famous, McLuhan was merely one among a number of other scholars working along medium theory lines in the 1950s and 1960s. The interaction among these theorists was strong. Many of them met regularly at the University of Toronto--constituting an informal group now referred to as the "Toronto School of Communications." ₃₀ Generally considered the founder of this "school" was the Canadian economic historian Harold Adam Innis. ₃₁ Innis had established himself as an expert on trade in Canadian staple resources before turning to the history of communications. ₃₂ McLuhan's analysis was significantly influenced by Innis's approach--so much so, in fact, that McLuhan had once described his own work as merely a "footnote" to Innis's scholarship. Although both shared a notoriously dense and complex writing style, Innis's work was more conventional in academic terms. Furthermore, Innis and McLuhan operated at different levels of analysis. ₃₃ While McLuhan directed most of his concerns to the effect of media on sensory organization and thought, Innis concentrated primarily on large-scale social organization and culture, or, to cite one of Innis's more famous titles, on Empire and Communications. ₃₄ Heyer outlines the central themes in Innis's medium theory:

History is perceived as a series of epochs separated by discontinuity. Each is distinguished by dominant forms of media that absorb, record, and transform information into systems of knowledge consonant with the institutional power structure appropriate to the society in question. The interaction between media form and social reality creates various biases, which strongly affect the society's cultural orientation and values. ₃₅

Two prominent aspects of Innis's work are his views on space/time biases of different modes of communication, and on monopolies of knowledge. Innis argued that different media often exhibit an inherent bias toward either time or space, and that these biases are reflected in the character of civilizations. Durable media that are difficult to transport--such as stone, clay, or parchment--have a time-bias; these societies tend to be tradition-oriented, giving emphasis to custom and continuity over change, and with a strong attachment to the sacred. Furthermore, time-biased civilizations often lead to hierarchical social orders with elite groups, such as Egyptian high priests or the medieval Catholic clergy. Space-biased media, such as papyrus or paper, are lighter and more portable and tend to support expansionist empires characterized by large administrative apparatuses and secular institutions. Using a form of dialectical analysis, Innis argued that both types of civilizations have a tendency over time to ossify into rigid and unresponsive regimes. A reaction occurs at the fringes of society, where marginalized groups take advantage of new technologies of communication, which in turn results in the ascendancy of a new order.

Clearly, Innis was very much a part of the early-twentieth-century tradition of civilizational analysis, associated with Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Pitrim Sorokin. ₃₆ As with these theorists, Innis's work has been criticized for a kind of cyclical determinism, whereby history is viewed as having a master logic that manifests itself in the unending rise and fall of civilizations. Certainly one could take a "strong" reading of, for example, his space/time bias categories and see in them a kind of reductionism at work. However, a more generous reading of Innis's work would highlight his emphasis on social and historical context, on the way different media have potentialities for control according to the way they are employed in different circumstances. For Innis, the emphasis is on the interaction between this social context and medium form, rather than on the mode of communication in abstraction: "A medium of communication has an important influence on the dissemination of knowledge over space and over time and it becomes necessary to study its characteristics in order to appraise its influence in its cultural setting." ₃₇ From this reading, Innis's space/time biases are seen more as shorthand designates for the constraints imposed on certain types of communications by particular media, rather than programmatic statements on the nature of communications itself. Above all, Innis was concerned with understanding civilizational transformation through the lens of changing medium technology--a hitherto novel focus that required significant conceptual innovation to alert readers that communication media are not mere empty vessels.

As noted in my introduction, medium theory did not generate a widespread academic following initially, possibly as a result of its introduction by Innis and McLuhan. Innis's relatively early death foreclosed the possibility of his completing the more comprehensive project suggested by his two preliminary works, Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communications. As a consequence, he is known mostly through second-hand interpretations. In the case of McLuhan, his idiosyncratic style probably did more to obscure the theoretical basis of his work. Quite intentionally, McLuhan chose to ignore the social science conventions of the day and suffered a predictably dismissive response from academia. However, his "mosaic" style of writing may be more resonant with contemporary postmodern audiences as evidenced by the McLuhanesque renaissance that appears to be gaining momentum. ₃₈

Nonetheless, medium theory has proved to be a useful tool for a wide variety of scholars working in different issue-areas, many of whom offer a more conventional academic style of analysis than either of the two. A contemporary of Innis and McLuhan and a member of the informal "Toronto School," classicist Eric Havelock has studied the transition to alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece, analyzing its impact on classical epistemology. ₃₉ In a similar vein, social anthropologists Jack Goody and Ian Watt have studied the transition from primitive orality to writing for its impact on both cognition and social organization, as has Walter Ong from a more general perspective. ₄₀ Historian Elizabeth Eisenstein has undertaken an extensively documented analysis of the cultural and scientific changes associated with the shift from script to print in medieval Europe. ₄₁ And though less often associated with the formal approach, many of the central propositions of medium theory can be found in the work of cultural anthropologists like Lewis Mumford and Ernst Gellner, who emphasize the role of technology in social change. ₄₂ While most of these theorists touch on large-scale historical changes associated with innovations in communication media, none have focused exclusively on the issue with which I am concerned here: world order transformation. The next section provides an overview of the modifications and elaborations that I make to medium theory in order to accommodate it to this problematique.

Theory and Epistemology

As alluded to above, no theory is without its warts, and medium theory is certainly not exempt. In order to accommodate this particular approach to my own set of questions, some retooling will be necessary if only to overcome some of the more confusing aspects of McLuhan and Innis's notoriously difficult styles. The elaborations and revisions to medium theory that follow can be grouped into two categories, both of them having to do with the question of causality. The first is with respect to the relative emphasis placed on communication technologies as independent variables; the second has to do with clearly articulating the exact nature of the effects that arise from a change in the mode of communication. I will consider each of these in turn.

Toward a Nonreductionist Medium Theory

A recurring criticism of medium theory is that it tends toward a form of monocausal reductionism and technological determinism. Certainly McLuhan bears the brunt of this criticism, though other medium theorists are not immune. Not unusual would be Carey's harsh indictment of McLuhan for a thorough "technological determinism" that closed down new ap proaches to communication technology, and left us with only "a soggy conclusion rather than with detailed scholarship." ₄₃ Book reviews of medium theorists are particularly repetitious, so much so that one gets the impression that reprimanding medium theory on this score is a formulaic device. Thus Havelock's work on the Greek enlightenment is castigated for "clinging to a simplistic reductionism" that "seems to want to make alphabetic literacy the sole cause of the change " ₄₄ In Eisenstein, one reviewer detects "a certain reductionist streak" and "a tendency to overestimate printing as against other forces of change." ₄₅

Indeed, a cursory glance at McLuhan's work in particular might offer substantiation for these criticisms, especially given his penchant for poetic hyperbole--a style of writing that does not lend itself well to caveat. Superficial illustrations of technological determinism are not hard to find in books conceived as aphoristic "probes" rather than scientific treatises. In fact, McLuhan's work is constituted by them. In describing his project, McLuhan once admitted that "I don't explain--I explore"--a revealing quote that begs the question of the grounds on which such analysis should be held accountable. ₄₆ While a strong argument could be made that a charge of technological determinism is probably beside the point of much of McLuhan's work, the charge itself should be taken seriously in any analysis, such as this one, that attempts something more conventional than bullet-like, aphoristic probes.

Figure 1 offers a picture of the technological determinist/monocausal reductionist model of change. Though no one particular medium theorist can be said to subscribe fully to such a simplistic model of change, some employ language or semantic inflections that are at times consistent with such a picture of the interplay between technology and society. Eisenstein's use of the word "agent" to describe an inanimate technology--the printing press--is a case in point. ₄₇ Moreover, this base/superstructure model is a familiar one across a variety of theoretical perspectives (orthodox Marxism being the prime example) where single overarching "master" variables are held as determinant. ₄₈ When critics of medium theorists reprimand them for technological determinism they are implicitly invoking this flawed picture of causality. Any attempt at revising medium theory should confront the many interrelated pitfalls inherent in such a simplistic model of change.

The most serious flaw in this model is that it tends to view the introduction of a new technology of communication as an autonomous force with certain definite and predictable results irrespective of the social and histor ical context in which it is introduced. Specific social phenomena are seen as invariably tied to a specific technology, as if the technology itself had the power to generate behaviors and ideas de novo. Thus, technological determinists tend to put forward such reductionist claims as "the printing press created individuality" or "the Reformation is the child of the printing press"--claims that clearly fall apart upon closer investigations that reveal the multiplicity of factors in their development. By attributing "generative" causal powers to the mode of communication, the technological determinist model tends to slight the extent to which the technology itself emerges out of a particular context and is itself influenced by social, cultural, and historical forces. This relative neglect of contextual factors is especially misleading not only because it tends to privilege the technology over other factors, but also because it produces faulty projections for the introduction of a similar technology in different cultures and contexts. Furthermore, the picture of causality employed sets up a strong binary opposition between the "material" and the "ideal," with social forces and ideas placed in a subordinate, derivative position to the material instrument of technology. And because social consequences are seen as arising out of, or generated by, the technology itself in this way, the technological determinist model portrays historical change as a radical disjuncture, with the technology as the hinge--a view of epochal change now widely discredited among historians. ₄₉

To avoid these pitfalls, we must underscore the "social embeddedness" of technology. We must place greater emphasis on the historical and social context in which technologies are introduced, an insight most forcefully made by social constructivists of technology. ₅₀ These theorists trace the way social needs develop toward which certain innovations are applied. The most comprehensive of them show how social forces in conjunction with available material resources and technical knowledge mold the construction and invention of new technologies. In doing so, they dispel the illusion maintained by the technological determinist that technologies enter society and generate specific social forces and/or ideas de novo. As I will show in chapters 2 and 5, the emergences of printing and hypermedia respectively were not sudden, "out-of-nowhere" developments. In both cases, social needs drove technological innovation. The creation of new technologies was, in turn, dependent on the existing stock of scientific knowledge (broadly understood) as well as the available material resources. Technologies are always, in this sense, socially constructed.

But despite its strengths as a corrective to the technological determinist model, the social constructivist position has a tendency to fall into the opposite trap and slight, if not ignore altogether, any independent effects attributable to the technology itself once introduced. It is important to remember that although social forces may give direction to technological innovation, they are not completely determinant; once introduced a technology becomes part of the material landscape in which human agents and social groups interact, having many unforeseen effects. These are the effects the medium theorist is most concerned with. As I will show in part 1 of this study, one of the more enthusiastic early supporters of printing technology--one of the main social groups responsible for its rapid spread--was the Roman Catholic Church. But the same bishops and monks who actively encouraged the establishment of local printing houses never anticipated the way heresies, like the Protestant Reformation, would thrive with the widespread availability of this new technology. The full effects of printing went unforeseen by the very actors who encouraged and shaped its early development. So, while social constructivists of technology underscore the way social forces shape technological innovation, they tend to overlook the possibility that technological innovation, in turn, could have an impact on society itself. But if technological determinists give a misleading portrayal of these unforeseen effects and social constructivists slight them altogether, where does that leave us?

The way I suggest we articulate this process is by reflecting on and amplifying one of the more prominent metaphors in medium theory--media as environments--and by the use of a Darwinist evolutionary analogy to describe the processes by which marginal forces on the borders of society are brought into the center by the unintended consequences of technological innovation. ₅₁

In classical Darwinian theories of evolution, environmental changes strongly condition the differential survival and reproduction of species. ₅₂ Although species are vitally dependent on their environment, the environment itself cannot be said to engage in the selection process by acting on species; rather, innovations and genetic mutations produce a variety of physical characteristics which, in turn, are selected blindly according to their "fitness" or match with the environment. Not to be confused with nineteenth-century "Social Darwinist" views of progressive development, ₅₃ evolution from this perspective assumes no inherent direction or purpose but is a contingent, open-ended historical process.

Similarly, a change in the mode of communication (environment) will "favor" certain social forces and ideas (species) by means of a functional bias toward some and not others, just as natural environments determine which species prosper by "selecting" for certain physical characteristics. In other words, the properties of a communications environment--the unique ways in which information can be stored, transmitted, and distributed in that environment--"favor" the interests of some social forces and ideas over others. These social forces and ideas flourish or thrive, while others are placed at a significant disadvantage and tend to wither over time. Unlike both the technological determinist and social constructivist positions, unintended consequences loom large from this perspective. We would anticipate, in other words, that some social forces and ideas that were marginalized in one communications environment may resonate strongly once that environment changes. Likewise, those actors and groups that initially gave support to, and drove the early development of, a new technology of communication may find themselves at a disadvantage once the full characteristics of the new communications environment take root.

This Darwinist evolutionary analogy is particularly useful because it moves away from the technological determinist view of technologies "generating" specific social forces and ideas. It affirms that the genesis of social forces and ideas ultimately reflects a multiplicity of factors that cannot be reduced to a single overarching "master" variable. Instead, it focuses on the existing stock of social forces and ideas, asking which will likely flourish or wither depending on their "fitness" or match with the new communications environment. It "flips" the picture of causality, so to speak. From this perspective, a new mode of communication is not an "agent" but rather a passive, structural feature of the technological landscape in which human beings interact. It imposes certain constraints or limitations on the nature and type of possible human communications, while facilitating other types, but it does not impose thought or behavior in any crude one-to-one fashion. It is an environment. And like natural environments, when it changes some species will be favored while others will be disadvantaged, not because of an active intervention on the part of the environment itself, but rather because the functional properties of the environment either reinforce or constrain the characteristics and interests of the species within it. The perspective is historically contingent, insofar as the type of effects that ensue from a change in the communications environment depend entirely on the extant social groups, institutions, and ideas of the time in question.

To extend the analogy, there are two quite distinct "species" upon which the selection process bears in a changing communications environment, which brings me to my second modification to medium theory.

Two effects: Distributional Changes and Changes to Social Epistemology

When a communications environment undergoes fundamental transformation, two different types of effects can be discerned. Consider the following quote by Goody:

Systems of communication are clearly related to what man can make of his world both internally in terms of thought and externally in terms of his social and cultural organization. So changes in the means of communication are linked in direct as well as indirect ways to changes in the patterns of human interaction. ₅₄

Goody is alluding to the dual effects of any change in communication technologies. I call these two effects distributional changes and changes to social epistemology respectively.

On the one hand, a change in the communications environment has specific tangible, distributional effects on the social and political infrastructure. In Innis's formulation, "Inventions in communication compel realignments in the monopoly or the oligopoly of knowledge." ₅₅ This effect depends on two assumptions alluded to above: first is the most basic proposition of medium theory, that specific communications environments have a certain "logic" or "nature" not in any determinist sense, but only in the sense of "making human communications of certain types easier or more difficult." ₅₆ The second assumption is that society is made up of discernible social forces that, while not necessarily "rational" in the Homo economicus, utility-maximizing sense of the term, are nonetheless motivated by certain historically and culturally varied interests and goals. By "social forces," I mean actual social groups, actors, and various forms of social organization--all normative or goal-driven social behaviors. The methodological task becomes clear when the two assumptions are married: identifying those social forces whose interests, goals, and logics of organization are likely to "fit" with the new communications environment, and those whose do not. Typically, those social forces whose interests, goals, or logics "fit" the new communications environment do not just survive in the same form as before. They are empowered by the new means of communication at their disposal. They find a "niche" and flourish, and, as a result, become a more prominent feature of the world political landscape. Likewise, social forces that may have thrived in one communications environment may find themselves at a significant disadvantage once that environment changes.

But the question naturally arises: Why cannot social forces merely adapt or control technologies to their own ends? One obvious reason is that the properties of a communications environment might be at such fundamental odds to the core interests, or raison d'être, of particular social actors or groups that they have no choice but to resist vigorously (often with little success) the further spread of that environment. But part of the reason also relates to the relative inflexibility of social forces. Because social forces acquire a certain "path-dependency" or institutional inertia based on the shared habits of thought and action of the multitudes of individuals that comprise them, they cannot easily adapt to new circumstances. Their institutional incumbency, as Gould calls it, "reinforces the stability of the pathway once the little quirks of early flexibility push a sequence into a firm channel." ₅₇ Likewise Spruyt notes how "transaction costs, set belief systems, and standard operating procedures mitigate against frequent overhaul" of social forces and institutions. ₅₈ Human beings tend to be creatures of habit, and social forces comprise many habitual individuals all of whom have limited lifespans and thus relatively short time-horizons. The consequences of today's short-term choices--such as promoting the development of a new technology that will make specific tasks simpler or more efficient (cheaply reproducing bibles, for example)--are not usually understood in terms of their long-term implications or unintended consequences. As I will outline in later chapters, this certainly describes the predicament of the Roman Catholic Church vis-à-vis the printing press. These distributional changes--changes, that is, in the relative power of social forces--are perhaps the most direct consequence of a change in the mode of communication.

On the other hand, to return to Goody's remarks above, a change in the communications environment affects not just social organization, but also the "internal" world of ideas and ways of thinking. ₅₉ Communication environments, in other words, also select ideas, social constructs and modes of cognition. To take but one specific example often cited by medium theorists, the introduction of writing encourages abstract thought because words and ideas can be manipulated and compared to a greater extent than they can in oral societies. ₆₀ Here we are concerned with the way communication technologies influence what Ruggie labels a transformation in social epistemology. ₆₁ Social epistemology refers broadly to the web-of-beliefs into which a people are acculturated and through which they perceive the world around them. ₆₂ It encompasses an interwoven set of historically contingent intersubjective mental characteristics, ranging from spatial or temporal cognitive biases, to shared symbolic forms, to various group identities, or to "imagined communities," which are unique to a specific historical context, and differentiate one epoch from another. ₆₃ Among French social theorists and medievalists it is referred to as mentalités collectives--the shared mental predispositions of a population in time--and it plays a crucial role in their interpretation of cultures. ₆₄

In highlighting changes to social epistemology, medium theory has a close affinity to sociology of knowledge or social constructivist approaches. ₆₅ At its most basic, what these perspectives share is the belief that a wide range of social, economic, and political factors shape the genesis and structure of human thought and behavior, and thus the contours of social epistemology. Medium theory adds a materialist dimension to these perspectives by focusing on changes in communication technology. A common example of an argument linking technological innovation and social cognition in this way is Lewis Mumford's treatment of the impact of the clock on Western society in Technics and Civilization. ₆₆ Prior to the clock, the measure of time was determined organically, that is, by the sun and the seasons; beginning in the fourteenth century, the measure of time was reoriented by the clock with important social ramifications. The clock "dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences " ₆₇ As Mumford goes on to explain:

When one thinks of the day as an abstract space of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter's night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments. Abstract time became the new medium of existence. ₆₈

Mumford's social construction of time nicely illustrates the type of interpretive approach that should be employed when attention turns to the effects of the mode of communication on social epistemology. Effectively exploring the link between communication technology and social epistemology moves us considerably into the realm of semiotics and the study of symbolic forms. This move necessitates a much richer type of interpretive analysis than the methodological strictures of more positivist-oriented theorizing allows: thick, as opposed to thin, description in Clifford Geertz's formulation. ₆₉ We must be able to tap into and unearth the constitutive social norms of a period, the unconscious boundaries and biases that frame experience, the symbolic forms that give meaning to behavior for a people. ₇₀ These social norms and symbolic forms are crucial because they provide what might be called "the metaphysical underpinnings" of the constitutive features of world order. If only by unconscious biases and orientations common to a people, "social epistemology" is implicated in the architecture of world order. Medium theory, as used here, does not argue that the mode of communication generates these symbolic forms and cognitive biases; rather, it argues that changes in the mode of communication will "favor" or allow for the selection among the extant symbolic forms and biases of a society, thus giving rise to a new social epistemology--rethreading the webs of significance, in other words.

It is important to emphasize that the "fitness" between elements of social epistemology and a new communications environment is largely an intergenerational as opposed to an intrapsychic process. In other words, it does not mean that each individual person will suddenly abandon long-held metaphysical presuppositions and cognitive biases as a result of their exposure to a new communications environment. New technologies of communication do not carry within them mysterious magical properties that overpower those with whom they come in contact. Nor do they come equipped with their own special social epistemology. "Individualism" as a symbolic form is not invariably tied to the printing press (although, as I hope to demonstrate below, the former flourished in the environment of the latter). Rather, it means that in a particular communications environment, particular elements of social epistemology will have a better chance of finding a "niche" and thus surviving and flourishing over time. In other words, an increasing portion of those acculturated into a new communications environment will come to see a particular symbolic form or social construct as more "natural" and "reasonable"--more consistent with their overall communications experience--and it is through this intergenerational "selection" process that it will flourish over time.

Treating changes to social epistemology in this way--that is, as a kind of "selection" process in which specific ideas, symbols, values, and beliefs flourish or wither depending on a chance "fitness" with the communications environment--bears a close resemblance to an approach developed by biologist Richard Dawkins, and taken up by others, called "memetics." ₇₁ Dawkins and other practitioners of memetics believe that the basic principles of "descent with modification" that Darwin outlined apply not just to "genes" but to the processes of cultural evolution as well--to the relative survival of different cultural units that Dawkins called "memes":

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propogate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propogate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propogate itself, spreading from brain to brain. ₇₂

Although Dawkins and other practitioners of "memetics" have not, as far as I know, conceived of a selection mechanism that includes changing modes of communication, there is an obvious compatibility in the approaches. And Dawkins's lengthy list of typical "memes" (tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, etc) brings up an important analytical point: the ideas, values, beliefs, symbolic forms, and social constructs that comprise the social epistemology of a time would obviously blanket a wide spectrum of diverse traits. Tracking down every single one of those that flourish and wither with a change in the mode of communication would surely be a formidable task. So for analytical purposes I have broken them down into a manageable (though not necessarily exhaustive) set. In the chapters to follow that focus on changes to social epistemology (4 and 7), I examine three specific elements: individual identities, spatial biases, and imagined communities. As I hope to demonstrate, changes in all three of these elements (the way "the self" is conceived, the way space is ordered, and the way group identities are imagined), are crucial in providing what might be called the "metaphysical underpinnings" of world order. As I also hope to show, changes in modes of communication have an important impact on their evolution.

In sum, changes in modes of communication have an important effect on the nature and character of society and politics. These effects vary in terms of the social and historical context in which the technology is developed. New technologies of communication do not generate specific social forces and/or ideas, as technological determinists would have it. Rather, they facilitate and constrain the extant social forces and ideas of a society. The hypothesized process can be likened to the interaction between species and a changing natural environment. New media environments favor certain social forces and ideas by means of a functional bias toward some and not others, much the same as natural environments determine which species prosper by "selecting" for certain physical characteristics. In other words, social forces and ideas survive differentially according to their "fitness" or match with the new media environment--a process that is both open-ended and contingent.

There are two conceptually distinct ways in which these effects operate: distributional changes and changes to social epistemology. Distributional changes refer to changes in the relative power of social forces, while changes to social epistemology refer to changes among elements of the prevailing mentalités collectives. These two conceptually distinct effects will in turn provide the basis for the analytical scheme to be employed in the chapters to follow. The study is divided into two parts, both of which are comprised of three chapters:

the first chapter in each part provides a historical and descriptive overview of the development of a new communications environment--printing in part 1 and hypermedia in part 2 (chapters 2 and 5);
the second chapter examines the distributional changes that result from the change in the mode of communication (chapters 3 and 6);
the third chapter examines the changes to social epistemology that result from the change in the mode of communication (chapters 4 and 7).

Ecological Holism and Medium Theory

Having made these substantial modifications and elaborations to medium theory, I am now in a better position to articulate more clearly the metatheoretical assumptions on which this study rests. The nonreductive, evolutionary medium theory approach outlined above must, by necessity, encompass a much wider perspective on the dynamics of human/technological interaction than the simple monocausal picture portrayed in figure 1.

Figure 2 depicts what I call an "ecological holist" picture of human existence. This figure essentially unearths and clearly articulates the cultural materialist underpinning that is at least implicit in the writings of Innis, and perhaps most explicit in the work of those medium theorists with a social anthropological background like Goody, Mumford, and Gellner. It is significantly influenced by the work of the French Annales school of historians, represented by Braudel, Duby, and Le Goff. Each ring in the figure refers to a conceptually distinct component of human existence, none of which are reducible to the others. The lines separating each component are not rigid, but blend into one another at the margins.

At the center are the basic inherited neurophysiological adaptations and traits shared by the species as a whole. Not to be confused with crude classical realist speculations on a fixed and determining "human nature," nor with the neoclassical "rational" actor assumptions, ₇₃ these dispositions are confined to certain morphological or neurological properties shared by the species as a whole. The mere fact that they are so general as to be able to accommodate the vast diversity of cultures that have existed throughout history means that they will have little bearing on our analysis. ₇₄

The first ring refers to the web-of-beliefs, or what I referred to earlier as "social epistemology." To reiterate, it includes a historically contingent web of intersubjective values, beliefs, cognitive biases, and symbolic and linguistic forms into which a people are acculturated. This web-of-beliefs is not species-wide, but variable from culture to culture or epoch to epoch. It forms the broad epistemic lens through which a people interpret and act on the world around them. The web-of-beliefs blends into the next ring, which is composed of formal and informal institutions, ranging from states and cor porations and organizations on the formal side to habits of actions and general modes of organizing human interaction and subsistence on the informal side. ₇₅ Situated between the material environment and institutions is technology. In its narrow sense, technology refers to applied knowledge, but here the term is used in its more common sense to encompass both practical or applied knowledge (formally, technology) as well as the material instruments or artifacts of technology (formally, technics), such as the printing press. ₇₆ As a material artifact, technology is constrained by the available resources of a time and place; but as a tool it is always conditioned by and emerges out of existing social institutions, knowledge, and skills--what we earlier referred to as the "social embeddedness" of technology. In ontological terms, technology should not be seen as merely an appendage to human society, but a deeply intertwined constitutive feature of human society. In Mazlish's words:

The evidence now seems strong that humans evolved from the other animals through a continuous interaction of tool, physical, and mental-emotional changes. The old view--that humans arrived on the evolutionary scene fully formed and then proceeded to discover tools and the new ways of life that they made possible--no longer appears acceptable. ₇₇

The last ring refers to the material or geophysical environment, including demographics, disease, climate, and natural resources, all of which have a loose constraining effect on the broad trajectory and character of social evolution. ₇₈ For millennia theorists have speculated on the impact of these broad material factors on the nature of human societies, and there is a strong tradition of "natural" theorizing reaching back to the ancient Greeks. ₇₉ For the time-frame of most analyses, however, these basic material factors can be assumed away as relatively insignificant. But in studies that focus on the longue durée, they take on more importance. ₈₀

Although the figure may give the appearance of stasis, it is important to emphasize that ecological holism is fundamentally historicist in outlook, meaning that human existence is seen as a continuously evolving interplay between environmental and technological conditions, formal and informal institutions and practices, and intersubjective values and beliefs. From this perspective, "rationalities," identities, nations, and states--though potentially stable in their basic contours over relatively long periods of time--are none theless products of historical contingencies and thus subject to change as nature and society evolves. ₈₁

It is also important to be clear that change from this perspective is not the unfolding of predetermined patterns, or teleological processes, but rather "the grand aggregation and multiplication of the actions of individuals and groups in concrete historical circumstances as these individuals are responding to a multiplicity of biological, psychological and social needs." ₈₂ Thus chance or contingency play an important part in the nature and direction of social evolution. From an ecological holist perspective, conceptual, technological, economic, or other changes in human patterns of interaction can alter the human developmental path in unexpected ways that defy more linear notions of change. In this respect, ecological holism runs contrary to those theories that argue for the existence of recurring "long-cycles" or progressive "stages of development" through which all societies are assumed to pass. ₈₃ It is informed by a "Darwinist" view of history--that is, one that sees no unfolding logic to history, but only "descent with modification." ₈₄

Of course, fundamental change in the basic structures of human society is not continuous but episodic given the relative stability and endurance of human institutions, ideas, and habits. In Gaddis's words, "conditions can persist for years with so little alteration that people come to accept them as permanent." ₈₅ In the past, there was a tendency among some social theorists to look for a single "master" variable that could be seen as driving all episodes of fundamental change, whether it be the mode of production or technologies of destruction. But according to the ecological holist perspective advanced here, the specific source of fundamental change at any one time in human history cannot be stated on a priori grounds, and typically reflects a multiplicity of factors--both material and ideal--that happen to converge in the form of a sudden transformation in human patterns of interaction. ₈₆

Medium theory can be seen as a subsidiary approach embedded in an ecological holist perspective, isolating those changes that are encouraged and facilitated by a change in the mode of communication. This focus should not be taken as an assertion of the fundamental primacy of communications over other spheres of human existence, but merely a heuristic division of scholarly labor. Technological changes in communications media are one among many other important innovations that produce novelty in social interaction. Yet because communication--like production and security--is so vital to human existence, these changes will likely have far-reaching implications. Thus while in this study I am focusing on the rela tionship between changing modes of communication and world order transformation, the focus itself should not be equated with a kind of "master narrative" to history centered on communications.

Ecological Holism, Medium Theory, and International Relations Theory

It should be clear from the overview that the tenor of medium theory is clearly aligned with the "historical sociology" side of the International Relations field, as opposed to the more ahistorical approaches Robert Keohane identifies as "rationalist." ₈₇ Robert Cox points out that rationalist approaches, which he calls "problem-solving," are suitable to "periods of apparent stability or fixity in power relations." ₈₈ Surprisingly, these approaches represent the majority of the field today, even though we appear to be in an era of fundamental transformation. As Gellner remarks: "The great paradox of our age is that although it is undergoing social and intellectual change of totally unprecedented speed and depth, its thought has become, in the main, unhistorical or ahistorical." ₈₉

The two dominant approaches in the field today--neorealism and neoliberalism--are ahistorical not because they are unable to amass "historical" details in support of their claims, but rather because they seek essentially to escape history by grounding their theories in fundamental presuppositions-- be it the anarchic structure or the desire to maximize utilities--which are posited as universal (i.e., timeless, contextless) foundations. ₉₀ In Adler's terminology, they are both examples of what he calls theories of "being"--"a prevalent notion that sees everything in nature and society as static and mechanistic, including change." ₉₁ For neorealists especially, the main components of the international system are treated as if "suspended in space"-- "time has little to do with them, and movement and change are linear. " ₉₂ Even those cyclical theorists like Robert Gilpin who appear to give a more dynamic treatment to the international system by allowing for differential growth still present change as merely the rearrangement of rationally motivated "units" under the universal constant of a constraining anarchic order. ₉₃ Likewise, neoliberalism offers what Wendt calls a "behavioral conception of both process and institutions: they change behavior but not identities and interests." ₉₄ For all their apparent differences over the question of relative versus absolute gains, neoliberals and neorealists are alike in assuming the natural order of world politics to be one of unitary rational actors in an anarchic setting. ₉₅

The alternative to theories of being, according to Adler, are theories of "becoming"--those that see human existence "as a permanent process of change and evolution, even that which appears to be static"--a category that obviously includes ecological holism. ₉₆ There are few examples of the type of full-blown historicism characteristic of theories of "becoming" in the International Relations field, although that is changing. Increasingly, a number of scholars see their work as falling outside of either the neorealist or neoliberal camps, and what might be termed a "historicist" school of International Relations theorists can be identified in the field. ₉₇ The common denominator of this school is a shared view of human institutions and practices (including states, nations, identities, and interests) as products of historical contingencies and thus subject to change over time. Historicists see politics not as a cyclical, recurring phenomenon (as neorealists clearly do) but rather as an open-ended process.

Historicists can be differentiated in terms of the relative weight they place on the "material" versus the "ideal" as explanatory variables--a distinction that harkens back to Marx and Hegel respectively. For example, Robert Cox's "historical structures" approach, which explicitly articulates an open-ended evolutionary theory that takes into account material environments, institutions, and intersubjective values and beliefs, ultimately falls toward the "material" end of the spectrum because of the overriding importance attached to the mode of production as a determinant variable. ₉₈ Likewise, Daniel Deudney's ongoing reconstruction of materialist geopolitical theories--which explores the relationship among broad environmental conditions, changing technologies of destruction, and world order formation--also falls toward the "material" end because of the weight given to military technologies. ₉₉ Toward the "ideas" end of the spectrum fall the social constructivist theories of Wendt, Kratochwil, and others, which focus on the historical malleability of interests, identities, and institutions. ₁₀₀ These approaches tend to concentrate purely on the interaction between social epistemology and institutions to the exclusion of environmental or technological factors. They lack the "grounding" of the more materially encompassing theories outlined above, and tend to downplay or ignore material factors as causally significant variables in politics.

As shown in Figure 2, ecological holism can be seen as an attempt to overcome this binary opposition between "material" factors and "ideas," which are seen not in either/or terms, but as part of a single whole. Ecological holism takes as its starting point the basic materialist position that human beings, like all other organisms, are vitally dependent on, and thus influenced by, the environment around them. However, it recognizes that because human beings have the unique ability to communicate complex symbols and ideas, they do not approach their environment on the basis of pure instinct (as other organisms do) nor as a linguistically naked "given," but rather through a complex web-of-beliefs, symbolic forms, and social constructs into which they are acculturated and through which they perceive the world around them. As Luke describes:

The ways in which people apprehend their environment is (pre)formulated by the statements about ideas, "reality," objects, facts, relations, and so forth that organize a particular field of reference. The human subject in any given historical era apprehends her or his world, the self, and the relations between self and others on the basis of historical discursive practices that name, locate, and organize concrete and abstract knowledge and experience. ₁₀₁

There are few examples of ecological holism in the field today, though Ruggie's work on historical transformation is a clear exception. In "Territoriality and Beyond," Ruggie states the ecological holist position that "material environments, strategic behavior, and social epistemology" are "irreducible to one another." ₁₀₂ Other examples that are perhaps less explicitly illustrative include the work of Ernst Haas and Emanuel Adler, who share the view that "politics is a historical process that changes with physical changes and the evolution of meanings." ₁₀₃ In their empirical work, both Haas and Adler have focused on a more narrow time-frame in which "physical changes" can be treated as a "given" for the purposes of analysis. Thus Adler's work on "epistemic communities" bears a strong resemblance to the social constructivism of Wendt and Kratochwil--the major difference being the latter are not explicit about the extent to which material, geophysical factors are part of their ontology. ₁₀₄ Of course, the differences between ecological holism and social constructivism are minimal compared to their similarities, especially in contrast to mainstream rationalist approaches, which treat interests and identities as relatively fixed. However, ecological holism provides a more comprehensive picture of human existence, one that is vital for an examination of the type of large-scale historical changes undertaken here.

On Methodology

Obviously, the version of medium theory I have put forward is incompatible with a positivist methodology. Most important, the emphasis on historicity and radical contingency in social evolution clashes with the idea of laws standing apart from history, and thus, by extension, the use of the deductive-nomological or covering-law model of inquiry. But the covering-law model is not the only available methodology for the type of analysis in which I am engaged in this study. In recent years, theorists have begun to explore the use of historical narrative as a mode of explanation. ₁₀₅ This mode seeks to link occurrences along a temporal dimension, tracing the variables and contingencies that were important in taking the evolutionary path down one road as opposed to another. Of course, narrative explanations are not confined to human personalities or what has often been called disparagingly the "history of events." As Donald Polkinghorne put it, "the narrative scheme organizes the individual events it addresses using a framework of human purposes and desires, including the limits and opportunities posed by the physical, cultural, and personal environments." ₁₀₆ Nor do historical narratives preclude clear analytical schemes or logical protocols to increase the verisimilitude of their accounts. The use of counterfactuals is crucial to this mode of explanation, as are structured, focused comparisons. ₁₀₇ So in the pages to follow, my arguments establishing the importance of changing modes of communication will rely not just on as much empirical evidence as can be gleaned from primary and secondary sources, but on logical arguments as well, pointing to "what might have been" had there been no change in the communications environment at all. Most important, though, in looking to the past in a structured, focused way, I have also constructed an analytical lens through which to interpret changes that are occurring today. In the long run, it is the relative utility of the latter that will ultimately prove to be the most important measure of this study.

Note 1: I use the word "artificial" quite literally here, meaning produced by human art and effort, to emphasize that disciplinary boundaries are, after all, heuristic conventions and not reflections of any "natural" divisions in the world itself. In Cox's words, "academic conventions divide up the seamless web of the real social world in separate spheres, each with its own theorizing; this is a necessary and practical way of gaining understanding." However, as Cox continues, "It is wise to bear in mind that such a conventional cutting up of reality is at best just a convenience of the mind." Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Orders," p. 204. Back.

Note 2: See, for examples, Thomas C. Sorenson, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Z. A. B. Zeman, Nazi Propaganda, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); J. A. Emerson Vermaat, "Moscow Fronts and the European Peace Movements," Problems of Communism (Nov.-Dec. 1982): 43-56; Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Hans Speier, eds., Propaganda and Communication in World History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980); John Martin, International Propaganda: Its Legal and Diplomatic Control (Gloucester: P. Smith, 1969); W. Phillips Davison, "Political Communications as an Instrument of Foreign Policy," Public Opinion Quarterly 27 (1963): 28-36. Back.

Note 3: William Dorman and Mansour Farhang, The US Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Alan Rachlin, News as Hegemonic Reality: American Political Culture and the Framing of News Accounts (New York: Praeger, 1988); Robert M. Entman, "Framing US Coverage of International News: Contrasts in Narratives of the KAL and Iran Air Incident," Journal of Communication 41 (Autumn 1991): 6-27. For "frame analysis," see Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). Back.

Note 4: Michael Arlen, Living Room War (New York: Viking Press, 1969). Back.

Note 5: Karl Deutsch, "Mass Communication and the Loss of Freedom in National DecisionMaking: A Possible Research Approach to Interstate Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution 1 (1957): 200-211; John W. Burton, Conflict and Communication: The Use of Controlled Communication in International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1969); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Jacob Berkovitch, "Third Parties in Conflict Management: The Structure and Conditions of Effective Mediation in International Relations," International Journal 40 (Autumn 1985), pp. 736-752. Back.

Note 6: J. M. Mitchell, International Cultural Relations (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986). Back.

Note 7: Oran Young, The Intermediaries: Third Parties in International Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Charles Lockhart, Bargaining in International Conflicts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Raymond Cohen, Negotiating Across Cultures: Communication Obstacles in International Diplomacy (Washington: United States Institute of Peace, 1991). Back.

Note 8: John R. Wood and Jean Seers, Diplomatic Ceremonial and Protocol (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Raymond Cohen, Theatre of Power: The Art of Diplomatic Signalling (London: Longmans, 1987); James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Back.

Note 9: For a useful overview, see Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1989). Back.

Note 10: See Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism, and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also, Comor, ed., The Global Political Economy of Communication. Back.

Note 11: Hamid Mowlana, Global Information and World Communication: New Frontiers in International Relations (New York: Longmans, 1986). Back.

Note 12: Thomas McPhail, Electronic Colonialism: The Future of International Broadcasting and Communication, 2nd ed. (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1987). Back.

Note 13: See Kaarle. Nordenstreng and Herbert. I. Schiller, eds., National Sovereignty and International Communication (New Jersey: Ablex Publishing, 1979); C. J. Hamelink, Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications (New York: Longmans, 1983); and John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Back.

Note 14: Deutsch, The Nerves of Government; and Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication. Back.

Note 15: See, for example, Edward Morse, Modernization and Transformation in International Relations (London: Collier Macmillan, 1976); Walt Rostow, Politics and the Stages of Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); and George M. Foster, Traditional Cultures and the Impact of Technological Change (New York: Harper, 1962). Back.

Note 16: Walker Connor, "NationBuilding or NationDestroying?" World Politics 24 (April 1972): 319-355. Back.

Note 17: Donald J. Puchala, "Integration Theory and the Study of International Relations," in Richard L. Merritt and Bruce M. Russett, eds., From National Development to Global Community: Essays in Honour of Karl W. Deutsch (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), pp. 145-164. In pointing to the flaws in Deutsch's treatment of communications, I am not implying that his scholarship as a whole is unworthy of continued study. Quite the contrary. Recent work among epistemic community and social constructivist theorists on cognition and value change demonstrates the utility of going beyond Deutsch. See, in particular, Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, "Governing Anarchy: A Research Agenda for the Study of Security Communities," Ethics and International Affairs. (Volume 10, 1996). Back.

Note 18: Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 15. Back.

Note 19: Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Back.

Note 20: Normally, medium theorists are concerned not with the comparative effects of discrete media operating contemporaneously (though this is certainly not excluded) but rather with largescale changes in modes of communication that signify epochal changes in human history. Back.

Note 21: See Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 79-81; and Ernst Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). As Gellner says on page 87, "Mankind entered the age of Plato when the authority of concepts became a theory, when the Transcendent became manifest as such, and when the paradigmatic incarnation of the concept was no longer, or not exclusively, found in ritual, but rather in writing. Ritual had once underwritten the Word, but the Word itself now became a ritual." [italics in original]. Back.

Note 22: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." As Postman explains, "It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture." (Italics in original). See Neal Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p.9. Back.

Note 23: As cited Heyer, Communications and History, p. 44. Back.

Note 24: In addition to other works cited in this study, see especially McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; and McLuhan, Understanding Media. Back.

Note 25: Lewis Lapham, "PrimeTime McLuhan," Saturday Night (September 1994), p. 51. Back.

Note 26: See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam Books, 1968). Back.

Note 27: See McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 36-44; For a collection of critical responses, see Gerald Emaneul Stearn, ed., McLuhan: Hot and Cool (New York: Signet Books, 1969). Back.

Note 28: See Understanding Media, pp. 36-45. Back.

Note 29: "The electric light is pure information" is taken from Understanding Media, p. 23. "Electric Circuitry Is Orientalizing the West" is from Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 145. Back.

Note 30: For a collection of articles that discuss the "Toronto School," see Ian Angus and Brian Shoesmith, eds., "Dependency/Space/Policy: A Dialogue with Harold A. Innis," Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 7, no. 1 (1993). Back.

Note 31: See especially Innis, Empire and Communications ; and The Bias of Communications. Back.

Note 32: Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954); and Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956). Back.

Note 33: Heyer attributes the formulating of this distinction to James Carey. See Heyer, Communications and History, p. 126. Back.

Note 34: Innis, Empire and Communications. The following overview of Innis is indebted to Heyer's informative treatment in Communications and History. Back.

Note 35: Heyer, Communications and History, p. 115. Back.

Note 36: See Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West. [Translated by C. F. Atkinson] (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932); Pitrim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (Boston: Porter Sargeant, 1957); Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934). For an overview, see Stephen K. Sanderson, ed., Civilizations and World Systems: Studying WorldHistorical Change (London: Altimira Press, 1995). Back.

Note 37: Innis, The Bias of Communications, p. 33. [emphasis added] Back.

Note 38: On the McLuhanesque renaissance, see Lapham, "PrimeTime McLuhan." A recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary produced by Toronto's media guru Moses Znaimer on the "TV Revolution" prominently featured interviews with McLuhan. The popular cultural critic Camille Paglia has also drawn significantly from McLuhan. See Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). Back.

Note 39: Havelock, Preface to Plato; Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Back.

Note 40: Jack Goody, Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jack Goody and Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963): 304-345; Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958); Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); and Ong, Orality and Literacy. Back.

Note 41: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, [Volumes 1 and 2] (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Back.

Note 42: Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: HBJ Publishers, 1934); and Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book. Back.

Note 43: James W. Carey, "McLuhan and Mumford: The Roots of Modern Media Analysis," Journal of Communication 31 (Summer 1981): 168. Back.

Note 44: John Halverson, "Havelock on Greek Orality and Literacy," Journal of the History of Ideas 53 no. 1 (1992): 160; 162. [italics in original]. Back.

Note 45: Michael Hunter, "The Impact of Print," The Book Collector (1980), p. 341. Back.

Note 46: As cited in Paul Levinson, "McLuhan and Rationality," Journal of Communication 31 (Summer 1981): 179. Back.

Note 47: Eisenstein, The Printing Press. Back.

Note 48: Tilly explains the reasons for this tendency in the social sciences in the following way: "It would be astounding to discover that a single recurrent social process governed all largescale social change. Perhaps the hope of becoming the Newton of social process tempts social scientists into their repeated, fruitless efforts at discovering that philosopher's stone." Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, p. 33. Richard Rorty describes this search for master variables or ultimate foundations as attempts to "escape from history." See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). More on this search for "ultimate foundations" and attempts to escape history will be said below with regard to the mainstream International Relations field. Back.

Note 49: See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, [translated by Robert Wallace] (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982); See also, Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, especially section entitled, "For an Extended Middle Ages." Back.

Note 50: For an overview, see Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). Back.

Note 51: McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage; and Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, pp. 16-23. Back.

Note 52: My views on Darwinian theories of evolution are derived mostly from the following sources: Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1977); Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1991); Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1993); and Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). Back.

Note 53: See Robert Carnerio, ed., The Evolution of Society: Selections from Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), for the writings of the principal "Social Darwinist," Herbert Spencer. Back.

Note 54: Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, p. 3. Back.

Note 55: Innis, The Bias of Communications, p. 4. Back.

Note 56: Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience, p. 40. Back.

Note 57: Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus, p. 69. Back.

Note 58: See Spruyt, The Sovereign state and Its Competitors, pp. 25, 83, and 179 for elaboration. Back.

Note 59: I put "internal" in quotation marks because what I am talking about here, as will be made clear below, are inherently intersubjective phenomenon. Back.

Note 60: See Havelock, Preface to Plato; Ong, Orality and Literacy; and Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book. Back.

Note 61: Ruggie, "Territoriality," p. 157. Back.

Note 62: Note that the term "webofbeliefs" refers not just to specific beliefs that can be held or discarded by individuals, but more importantly the space of possible or probable beliefs that distinguish a population, including unconscious assumptions and cognitive biases. It is also important to note that this notion of a "webofbeliefs" is not incompatible with a basic "materialist" outlook, and should not be confused with an airy idealism. John Dewey explains in general (and gendered) terms how this process of acculturation into an intersubjective body of meanings bears on the young individual: "The conceptions that are socially current and important become the child's principles of interpretation and estimation long before he attains to personal and deliberate control of conduct. Things come to him clothed in language, not in physical nakedness, and this garb of communication makes him a sharer in the beliefs of those about him. These beliefs coming to him as so many facts form his mind; they furnish the centres about which his own personal expeditions and perceptions are ordered." Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, pp. 86-87. Back.

Note 63: See Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen, eds., Historical Social Psychology (New Jersey, Hillsdale, 1984). "Imagined Communities" is taken from Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). Back.

Note 64: See Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination. Back.

Note 65: See, for examples, Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harvest, 1936); Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). For an application of social constructivism to international relations, see Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction of power politics," International Organization 46 (Spring 1992): 391-425. Back.

Note 66: Mumford, Technics and Civilization. Back.

Note 67: Ibid., p. 15. Back.

Note 68: Ibid., p. 17. Back.

Note 69: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), epseically part I, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture." Back.

Note 70: This practice of unearthing unconscious boundaries and biases of thought is, of course, most often associated with the work of Michel Foucault. See especially, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970); and The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, [Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith] (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). Back.

Note 71: See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); and Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), especially chapter 12, "The Crisis of Culture." Back.

Note 72: Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 206. Also cited in Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 345. Back.

Note 73: For classical realist speculations on a fixed and determining human nature, see Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946); Reinhold Niebuhr, "Human Nature and the Will to Power," in H. Davis and R. Good, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics (New York: Scribner's, 1960); and Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954). On "rational" actor assumptions, see Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Kenneth Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Back.

Note 74: That said, however, it is important to note that some cognitive traits are presupposed in my theoretical formulation. For example, the mechanism of selection in medium theory for elements of social epistemology assumes that human beings have a tendency to avoid contradictory cognitions about social reality. It is on this basis that I can infer that certain social constructs will flourish or wither depending on their "fitness" with a particular communications environment. People will tend to assimilate social constructs, in other words, that are more consistent with their overall communications experience. That is not to say, however, that such general specieswide traits are responsible for the actual construction of specific social ideas or institutions. As Stephen Gould aptly put it, "the statement that humans are animals does not imply that our specific patterns of behavior and social arrangements are in any way directly determined by our genes. Potentiality and determination are different concepts." Gould, Ever Since Darwin, p. 251. Back.

Note 75: On institutions, see Robert Keohane, "International Institutions: Two Approaches," International Studies Quarterly 32 (1988): 379-396; Friedrich Kratochwil, Norms, Rules and Decisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and John Gerard Ruggie and Friedrich Kratochwil, "International Or Back.

Note 76: For discussion, see Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization; and Daniel Deudney, Pax Atomica: Planetary Geopolitics and Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Back.

Note 77: Bruce Mazlish, The Fourth Discontinuity: The CoEvolution of Humans and Machines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 5. Back.

Note 78: See Stephen K. Sanderson, "Evolutionary Materialism: A Theoretical Strategy for the Study of Social Evolution," Sociological Perspectives 37, no. 1 (1994): 47-73. Back.

Note 79: See Daniel Deudney, "Bringing Nature Back In," in Daniel Deudney and Richard Matthew, eds., Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environment Politics (New York: SUNY Press, 1997). Back.

Note 80: One of the starker examples in this respect is the impact of the "Black Plague" on the restructuring of human society in the late Middle Ages. See Ruggie, "Territoriality"; and Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978). Back.

Note 81: This view closely resembles Robert Cox's "historicalstructures" approach, which: "sees human nature and the other structures that define social and political reality—from the structure of language through those of laws, morals, and institutions, and including the state and worldorder structures like the balance of power—as being themselves products of history and thus subject to change." Robert Cox, "Production, the State, and Change in World Order," in Czempiel and Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, p. 38. Back.

Note 82: Sanderson, "Evolutionary Materialism," p. 50. Back.

Note 83: On "longcycles" in world politics, see George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1987); and William R. Thompson, "Ten Centuries of Global PoliticalEconomic Coevolution," (Paper prepared for delivery to the workshop on Evolutionary Paradigms in the Social Sciences, Batelle Seattle Conference Center, University of Washington, Seattle, May 13-14, 1994). On progressive stages of development, see Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth. Back.

Note 84: On an explication of "Darwinist" views of history similar to my own, see Richard Rorty, "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin," in D. Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences: 1870-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1994): 54-68. Back.

Note 85: John Lewis Gaddis, "Tectonics, History and the End of the Cold War," in John Lewis Gaddis, ed., The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Back.

Note 86: Sanderson, "Evolutionary Materialism," p. 53. Back.

Note 87: Keohane, "International Institutions," pp. 379-96. Back.

Note 88: Cox, "Social Forces, States, and World Order," p. 210. Back.

Note 89: Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 12. Back.

Note 90: For similar views of the ahistorical tendencies of neorealism and neoliberalism see Emanuel Adler, "Cognitive Evolution: A Dynamic Approach for the Study of International Relations and Their Progress," in Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 43-88; Wendt, "Anarchy," pp. 391-396; and Richard K. Ashley, "Three Modes of Economism," International Studies Quarterly 27 (1983). Cf. Waltz, Theory of International Politics. Back.

Note 91: Adler, "Cognitive Evolution," p. 43. Back.

Note 92: Ibid., p. 44. Back.

Note 93: See Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics. Back.

Note 94: Wendt, "Anarchy," p. 392. Back.

Note 95: For an overview of the "relative vs. absolute gains" debate, see Robert Powell, "Anarchy in International Relations Theory: The NeorealistNeoliberal Debate," International Organization 48 (Spring 1994): 313-344; and David A. Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Back.

Note 96: Adler, "Cognitive Evolution," p. 43. Back.

Note 97: My use of the term "historicism" follows that of Robert Cox, who draws from Giambattista Vico in seeing history as an openended evolutionary process. See Cox, "Social Forces, States, and World Order," p. 213. In this sense, it is defined in complete opposition to Karl Popper's use of the term in The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon, 1957) to single out theories that see history in lawlike terms. Back.

Note 98: See Cox, "Social Forces, States, and World Order"; Robert Cox, "Multilateralism and World Order," Review of International Studies 18 (1992): 161-180; and Cox, "Towards a PostHegemonic Conceptualization of World Order." Back.

Note 99: See Deudney, Pax Atomica; and Daniel Deudney, Global Geopolitics: Materialist World Order Theories of the Industrial Era, 1850-1950 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1989). Back.

Note 100: Wendt, "Anarchy"; Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions; and Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). Back.

Note 101: Carmen Luke, Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood (New York: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 29. Back.

Note 102: Ruggie, "Territoriality," p. 152. Back.

Note 103: Adler, "Cognitive Evolution," p. 47; and Ernst Haas, "Words Can Hurt You: Or Who Said What to Whom about Regimes," in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Back.

Note 104: In a footnote ("Anarchy," p. 398, fn. 27), Wendt concedes that some constructivist approaches may be "oversocialized" when dealing with "presocial but nondetermining human needs," but he goes no further in elaborating if and when other "material" factors beyond neurophysiological adaptations, like climate and population for example, would enter into the picture. Back.

Note 105: See, for example, Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 500 onwards; Donald E. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (New York: SUNY Press, 1988); and Janice Thomson, Mercanaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: StateBuilding and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 5. Back.

Note 106: Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, p. 20; See also John Gerard Ruggie, "Peace in Our Time? Causality, Social Facts, and Narrative Knowing," Proceedings of the American Society of International Law (1995). Back.

Note 107: For discussion, see Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Back.

Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation