New media do not make old media obsolete; they assign them other places in the system. Thus because printing now reproduced the rhetorical-musical performances at tournaments as literature and fictions of the authors, the physical techniques of these tournaments appear (according to Gumbrecht’s thesis) to have been transmuted into silent, measurable disciplines.36 Equally, it was only as a development within typography that the intrinsic value of handwriting emerged, the individuality of the hand taking the place of seals on letters and documents and which became the domain of a state system of post and police. The first state postal systems of early modernity were, after the fashion of the Roman imperial system, still reserved for military and diplomatic networks and protected from interception by a cryptography whose rise began with Vieta’s algebraic encoding of alphabetical and numerical signs.37 On the other hand, the territorial states, controlled extensively by post and firearms, opened up their networks to a private traffic which they also monopolised through their sovereign right of posts. When commercial correspondents were included in the public postal network after 1600, newspapers and journals came into being; when the transport of persons was also included after 1650, the post-coach networks were established as a scheduled service.38 However the oft-quoted structural transformation from the aristocratic to the middle-class publicness, whose travels and letters, printed pamphlets and newspaper critiques are supposed to have undermined the old power system of Europe, never took place.39 Even without its consistent control through secret cabinets and print censorship the middle-class publicness remained an artefact of mercantile states, whose new post office provided half the budget and half the war chest.40 Only in the intimacy of family circles did the “addiction to reading” of the so-called public 41 promote a record rise in national-language belles-lettres which compensated for the “loss of sensuality” 42 with virtual effects on readers’ senses, thus presaging future media technologies.43
This mediatisation of the printed word presumably had its basis in a routine light reading which was no longer a privilege of the elite, as in Saint Ambrose’s time, but which paved the way for democracy through compulsory schooling and general literacy. But precisely this effortless reading triggered a new systemic problem. Because, unlike parchment codices, printed books are storage devices having no possibility of erasure, there was, around 1800, (to quote Fichte) “no branch of knowledge on which a surfeit of books is not available”.44 As a result literature and science had to revamp their transmission and receiving techniques: away from the literalness of quotes from the scholarly elite, and rhetorical mnemonics, towards an interpretative approach which reduced the quantity of printed data to its essence, in other words to a smaller quantity of data. The consequence for the communication system that is science, since Humboldt’s reform, was lectures without textbooks, seminars as exercises in interpretation and the rise at universities of a philosophy whose absolute “spirit” preserved only the “remembrance” of all previous forms of knowledge and of its own textbook, thus becoming the hermeneutic “silhouette” of the totality of books.45
In the real world this mediatisation of writing amounted to its industrial revolution. In place of Gutenberg’s enumerable combinations came, in practical terms too, a calculus of infinites: endless paper machines replaced, as of 1800, the discrete formats and moulded sheets; pulp papers from America’s seemingly inexhaustible forests, this material basis of all mass print material since 1850, took the place of rag. And finally the typewriter and have, since 1880, levelled out the difference between writing and printing 46, thus opening up the floodgates of modern literature.47 It was Mallarme who first offered the solution of reducing literature to its lexical meaning, the twenty-six letters, and thus not competing with other media at all.
B. Technical Media
Unlike writing, technical media do not utilise the code of a workaday language. They make use of physical processes which are faster than human perception and are only at all susceptible of formulation in the code of modern mathematics.
1. Telegraphy and Analog Technology
Self-evidently there must always have been technical media, because any sending of signals using acoustic or visual means is in itself technical. However in preindustrial times channels such as smoke signals or fire telegraphy which exploited the speed of light, or bush telegraphs and calling chains making use of the speed of sound were only subsystems of an everyday language. The beacon signal from Troy to Mycenae with which Aeschylus introduces the literary genre of tragedy announced in one single bit the fall of the besieged fortress although that depended on prior arrangement.48 On the other hand it remains questionable whether a form of telegraphy which according to Polybios was capable of encoding the Greek alphabet into five times five light signals and thus transmitting random sets ever saw service.49
Information rates which exceeded all performance limits of writing were first achieved as a result of the necessity for command flow in conscripted mass armies and wars waged with standardised weaponry. It was one and the same to Lakanai, the politician who presented the revolutionary France of 1793 with an elementary school system and a literary copyright law who one year later persuaded the national assembly to build optical telegraphy lines. As the official reason for this revolution the argument was pressed into service that, in large nation-states, only Chappe’s optical telegraph could make possible that democratic election process which Rousseau had, as we know, picked up from the city-state of Geneva. With Napoleon however, a less public but exclusive use of the optical telegraph network gave rise to a strategy which finalIy released wars from the stone age of command flow. Independently-operating divisions were able to fight on several fronts at the same time because newly-created general staffs imposed their cartographic knowledge by telegraph on the actual ground.50
Telegraphy thus separated literary publicness and military secrecy at the same historic moment, since publicness was transferred from elites to entire populations. A new elite of engineering schools and general staffs finally discovered in the 1809 war their new, to all intents and purposes, secret medium of electricity. With the move of telegraphy from optics to direct current, not only did the human and therefore unreliable, relay stations disappear, but also Claude Chappe’s grand total of 98 signs. The Morse code with its dots and dashes and pauses put an economy of signs into practice which Leibniz had previously come up with in expressly typographical theory in the form of his binary code.51 The electric telegraph, optimised on the basis of letter frequency and charged by the number of words, was the first step on the road to information technology.
In terms of organisation and technology too, telegraphy had world-wide repercussions. For absolutely the first time, information was decoupled, in the form of a massless flow of electromagnetic waves, from communication. Remote telegraphic control via landline made possible a systematic railway network.52 Railways made possible an accelerated traffic in goods and persons 53 which, from the time of the American Civil War onward, was also subject, for military purposes, to telegraphic command.54 However, in the form of goods and people traffic, the post lost two of its traditional functions. It was forced to become a pure information technology based on the principles of house numbers and letterboxes, prepayment with stamps and the world postal union.55
This detachment from the ground whose distances (as in synchronous mathematical topography) are, in contrast to all pre-modern postal systems, no longer calculated because only absolute speed counts, brought internationality: from the stock exchange reports of world trade and the telegraph agencies of the world press, to colonial empires which, like the British Empire, were founded on a “fleet in being” and consequently on a global undersea cable monopoly.56
Technical repercussions of telegraphy as information time made discrete, were consequential inventions which paradoxically also processed precisely the continuous signal sources. Of these I shall pass over the analog medium of photography which requires a treatment of its own and mention only the telephone, gramophone record and film.
Bell’s telephone, the most lucrative single patent of all time, came about in 1876 not by any means in its familiar function, but in the course of an attempt to transmit several messages over a single telegraph cable at the same time. In exactly the same way only a year later Edison’s phonograph emerged as a spin-off from an attempt to increase the throughput rate of telegraph cables. And finally Muybridge’s scientific serial photographs which, in 1895, after the invention of Maltese cross and celluloid paved the way for cinema, were triggered by electric telegraph relays.
Film and gramophone, these mass-reproducible competitors to Edison’s phonographs, made it possible to store optical and acoustical data as such. Because analog media underbid, first mechanically and subsequently electrically, the perceptual thresholds determined by Fechner, they can recognise in speech phonemes and musical intervals – which is where the Greek analysis as their being the final alphabetical elements stopped – complex frequency mixtures which are open to a further, and since Fourier, mathematical, analysis. The modern fundamental concept of frequency 57, which since Euler governs probability calculation, music and optics alike, has replaced the arts with technical media. This physics in the simulation process of the real is no longer partnered in the reception process by a language-based mnemonics or pedagogy, but by a sensory physiology which has guaranteed the media their world-wide and, thanks to Shannon’s measure of information, calculable success.58 At the same, time a knowledge gap between unconscious media effects on the one hand, and the innovatory thrusts on the other, (which since Edison’s first laboratory are also plannable) has emerged which, despite the participation of women in telegraph, telephone and typewriter operations 59 is inimical to the general development of literacy and absolutely rules out communication on communication.
A prominent role in this turning-point, whose significance is probably equalled only by the invention of writing 60, was taken by Maxwell’s electromagnetic field equations and their experimental substantiation by Heinrich Hertz. Since Christmas 1906, when Fessenden’s radio transmitter broadcast low-frequency random events as they occur as amplitude or frequency modulation of a high frequency, there exist non-material channels. Since 1906, when de Forest developed, from Edison’s light bulb, the controllable valve, information is open to any kind of amplification and manipulation. The valve radio, developed as wireless telephony for breaking the imperial cable monopoly, first of all made the new weapons systems of the first World War, the aeroplane and the tank, both mobile and dirigible by remote control 61, and after the end of the war, was applied to the civilian populations.62
In the guise of a “secondary orality” 63, bypassing the written word, radio had the effect of standardising unwritten languages, primarily through world-wide short-wave broadcasting 64,thus transforming colonised tribal associations into independent nations.65 In the same way the telephone, in its progress from the direct dialling system via frequency multiplex to satellite links, has made possible the non-hierarchical networking firstly of cities and ultimately of the “global village”.66 Yet the publicly accessible wavebands remain, despite their critical overcrowding 67, only fractions of a frequency spectrum which, from long-wave broadcasting to the decimetre radar, exercises governmental or military control functions and taps all public wavebands for the secret services.68
The electrification of sensory input data through transducers and sensors enabled the entertainments industry to couple analog storage media firstly with one another and secondly with transmission media. The sound film combined optical and acoustic memories; radio, before the introduction of the tape-recorder, largely transmitted gramophone records; the first television systems, prior to the development of electronic cameras, scanned feature films. Thus the content of entertainment media always remains another medium which, in this way, they serve to promote.
But all these couplings of technologies which are already individually standardised, even though they gave birth to aesthetic forms from the radio play and electronic music to the videoclip, have one decisive deficiency: there is no general standard which regulates their control and reciprocal translation. This is precisely the point at which the heroes and heroines of Benjamin’s theory of media came to the rescue in the form of editors in film studios and sound engineers for tape with their celebrated but strictly manual montage techniques.69 The rendering obsolete of this human intervention and the automation of a general standard was reserved for digital technology.
2. Digital Technology
Digital technology functions like an alphabet but on a numerical basis. It replaces the continuous functions into which the analog media transform input data, which are generally also continuous, with discrete scannings at points in time as equidistant as possible, in the same way that the 24 film exposures per second, or at a much higher frequency since the Nipkow screen television did before. This measurement, followed by evaluation in the binary number system, is the precondition for a general media standard.
According to the scanning theorem of Nyquist and Shannon, any and every form of signal, provided it is frequency-range-limited intrinsically or through filtering, can be bi-univocally reconstructed from scanned values of at least twice the frequency.70 The quantisation noise which necessarily arises in the process can also, in contrast to the physically-determined noise of analog systems, be minimised to any degree simply because it obeys the laws of a digital system.71
It was in 1936 that Turing’s universal discrete machine stated the principle of all digital technology. Extrapolating or reducing the equally discrete typewriter 72, it consisted simply of an endless paper tape, the idea of which goes back to 1800. On this “paper machine” for data storage, a write/read/erase head for data processing could write the binary signs 0 and 1 while a transport device for data addressing made it possible to access the neighbouring signs right and left. Turing proved however that this elementary machine, because by contrast to the noisy Laplace universe it knows a finite number of states, is equal not only to any mathematician but solves all (in Hilbert’s sense) decidable problems of mathematics through simulation of any other correctly-programmed machine.73
Thus the Turing machine concluded in its universality all developments for the storing, indexing and processing of both alphabetical and numerical data. In the alphabetical field these developments had led from lists and catalogues, via the card indexes from which around 1800 Jean Paul’s literature and Hegel’s philosophy had sprung 74, to the Hollerith machine of the American census of 1890.75 In the numeric field a parallel development had led from Schickart’s calculator for the four basic types of calculation, via Jacquard’s programmable looms 76, to the pioneer of computers, Babbage, whose differential engine of 1822 reduced the time-consuming developments of series in trigonometry and ballistics to recurrent difference equations while his later planned analytical engine was intended to make the whole of analysis calculable with conditional jump commands.77 To achieve the alphanumeric universality of Turing machines, alias computers, however, the two development strands had to be brought together by Boole’s logical algebra and Goedel’s theorem of incompleteness, making statements and axioms as manipulable as figures.
The Turing machine of 1936 was infinitely slow, its paper tape infinitely long and therefore inexistent. By contrast the computer, its technical successor, is a miracle of economy of time and space called forth by the exigencies of the second World War. At the same time that Shannon was demonstrating that simple relays connected in series or in parallel can automate all operations of Boole’s algebra 78, Zuse was building the first computers for Luftwaffe research from telegraph relays while the cryptography department of the Wehrmacht rejected his offers of automation.79 At the end of 1943, by contrast, the British secret service came up with computers based on overmodulated tubes for Turing’s war-deciding cryptoanalysis of precisely that secret VHF radio traffic which had made the German blitzkrieg possible.80 Finally, in 1945, John von Neumann designed the now customary architecture of sequential but microsecond-fast computers for the planned American uranium bomb whose rate of explosion set new standards in the measurement of time.81
Von Neumann’s design postulated the following three system elements: