Has the IMAGination

been under a SPELL?

September 4, 2003

Focusing on the technology and cultural histories of photography to gain an understanding of how progressive and evolving machinery may alter its cultural perceptions and to have an understanding of how cultural consciousness changes technology is significant to my work in digital storytelling.

Simultaneously, I study history and women in new media. To understand where we are, we have to know where we have been. As a woman artist and as an individual raised in John O’Hara’s Pennsylvania Protectorate, I am well aware of social strata and of social and cultural stereotypes. The issue of gender in words and images, the tools with which I work, drew my attention to Leonard’s Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image.

Shlain, also the author of Art and Physics, excels at marrying science and art to discuss the science of art and the art of science. He uses his physician’s knowledge of neuroscience and his understanding of history and culture to explain that he believes male tyranny resulted from the development of literacy 5000 years ago. Specifically, Shlain believes patriarchy, or male domination, became prevalent because of the left brain’s domination of the right brain through the development of literacy and print technology. It is a fascinating theory that deserves considerable discussion, particularly now, when culture is becoming more visual and when communications mediums are converging.

His views on the role of culture in forming our views about media, and specifically mediums of communication, are also fascinating to consider for anyone involved in understanding and working in new media.

“Among the two most important influences on a child are the emotional constellation of his or her immediate family and the configuration of his or her culture. Trailing a close third is the principal medium with which the child learns to perceive and integrate his or her culture’s information. This medium will play a role in determining which neuronal pathways of the child’s developing brain will be reinforced.” (3)

What’s more, as Shlain explains on the next page: “written words and images are entirely different ‘creatures.’ Each calls forth a complementary but opposite perceptual strategy.”

In considering what he says in those statements, I felt a sense of hope because I related it to the teenagers of today, who are growing up in a visual culture. Will today’s teens be tomorrow’s gender peacemakers because new media is causing us to utilize culture’s undervalued right brain? It is, I think, an intriguing question to ponder.

Shlain argues that the computer, which relies on electromagnetism and photographic reproduction, furthers an “Iconic Revolution” that could equalize hemispheric lateralization in the human brain, which would end patriarchy. He is not the first to look at new media in terms of left brain/right brain information processing. Marshall McLuhan and Bruce P. Powers, citing the work of Robert J. Trotter, also focus on the issue in The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. Shlain is a pioneer in looking at it through gender.

Substantiating findings of Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote The Second Sex and Gerda Lerner, feminist historian author whose works I studied as an undergraduate, Shlain revisits hunting/gathering societies to look at evolution of the brain, which lead to physical changes in the female body, which caused what he says is the development of what we now call culture (12).

"Culture was ladled into the baby’s brain through the agency of a stunning evolutionary innovation – language. The advent of speech fissured humans away from the hominids. In early species, changes in behavior were primarily a function of the waiting for beneficial mutations to affect chromosomes, a process that took millions of years. Using speech, one member of a clan, learning a lesson that would enhance survival, could pass it on to the others within hours instead of eons. Further, the clan could preserve wisdom in the net of language for successive generations yet unborn. Culture was the solution to the brain size problem imposed by bipedalism. The new corporate brain called culture hovered like a friendly poltergeist over each tribe of hunter-gatherers.” (12-13)

Shlain says symbolic thinking – language – may have begun with “that most basic of all human gestures—pointing” (13), which lead to more advanced gestures. In turn, the limitations of communicating via gesture lead to evolution of the tongue and the origination of speech. Speaking fostered division among the hunters/killers (males) and the gatherers/nurturers (females).

As the brain evolved, it acquired an extra pound of neural tissue, a phenomenon that occurred mainly in the neocortex. Simultaneously, because evolution rewired one lobe to accommodate speech, the functions of the brain split, Shlain explains (17).

So, the nonverbal and emotional – the creative – right brain is the older of the two lobes.

"The right hemisphere integrates feelings, recognizes images, and appreciates music. It contributes a field-awareness to consciousness, synthesizing multiple converging determinants so that the mind can grasp the senses’ input all-at-once.” (18)

McLuhan and Powers explain:

"Certainly is the field of the qualitative (the synchronic): the spatial-tactile, the musical, and the acoustic. It has been called the mute part of the brain because its language abilities are minimal, but there is considerable evidence that the right side analyzes by configuration and by metaphor. It does not think in sequence but rather in terms of seizing the relationship between unlike parts of the environment. The right brain perceives the essence of an object through shape and ‘feel’ rather than naming classification.” (52-53)

Meanwhile, Shlain says the left brain is concerned with doing and its features are linear, much as we write and read a print book because words personify action in that we use them to categorize – to discriminate.

“The left lobe knows the world through its unique form of symbolization—speech … Speech gave the left brain the edge to usurp the sovereignty of the mind from its elder twin” (21).

As the brain, the eye has opposite but corresponding functions through its two different types of cells—rods, which, like the right brain, identify reality all-at-once, and cones.

“The specialization of visual functions within each human eye correspond to the lateralization of the cerebral hemispheres and the bifurication of the human sexes. The holistic vision of the rods assisted the right brain in gathering and nurturing. Tunnel vision was primarily subordinated to the unique demands of the hunting left brain. Women have more rods in their retinas than men, and as a result, have better peripheral vision. They can see better in the dark and take in more at a glance than men. Men have more cones than women, allowing them to see one segment of the visual field in greater detail and with better depth perception than women.” (26)

Handedness also became specialized. Herein, to understand what Shlain is saying, it is important to remember that the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain manages the left side. Attributes of the left hand, controlled by the right brain, include protectiveness, whereas the right hand, under the management of the left brain, is associated with action, such as spear throwing and reaching.

“These two mirror-image strategies, gather/nurture and hunt/kill, are combined in each of us. In society at large, there are females who manifest predominantly masculine traits, and there are males who display feminine traits. The lateralization of brain, eye and hand affects how each person perceives, manipulates, symbolizes, and, ultimately, thinks about the world. Herein lies the secret of our success. Each man has a gatherer/nurturer aspect to his personality, psyche, and mind, just as each woman has hunter/killer aspects to hers. Every individual has encased in his or her skull both a feminine brain and a masculine one. Any particular society can accentuate one or the other of these two ways of interacting with the world, depending on the demands of the environment or the shaping influences of its inventions.” (27)

Fast forward to the invention of television and what Shlain calls the “beginning of yet another massive shift in global consciousness: the combining of two ‘feminine’ influences, photography and electromagnetism” (407).

I stopped to ponder this observance, realizing that I had never thought of photography as a feminine influence and writing as a masculine practice. Am I able to believe what the author is saying, I asked myself. Give him the benefit, I decided. “Hear” him out.

“Comprehending television required an entirely different hemispheric strategy than that used in reading. Viewers called forth their pattern-recognition skills to decipher the screen’s low-definition flickering mosaic mesh. The retina’s cones need bright light to scan a static page of print, but television brings the eye’s rods into play. They see best in dim surroundings and can detect the slightest movements. As people watched more and more television, the supremacy of the left hemisphere dimmed as the right’s use increased. For 750,000 years families had gathered around lit hearths whose flames supplied warmth, illuminated darkness, encouraged camaraderie, and encouraged storytelling. Campfires had been an essential ingredient for the evolution of oral epics. In 1950, a new kind of fire replaced the hearth; and it encouraged a different set of social qualities.” (407-408)

Television, he says, reversed the solitary endeavors of reading and writing. This is interesting to think about because it relates to theories advanced by Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy and by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation. We are using long-established mediums, in this case, oral storytelling, to create the new media community.

Television also modified our biological information processors, says Shlain, noting that electroencephalogram (EEG) brain wave patterns of readers differ significantly from those of television viewers. Viewing television, he explains, creates identical slow alpha and theta waves, which denote a passive, receptive and meditative state of mind while reading a book generates beta waves, which are those created when a person is concentrating.

“Corroborating evidence concerning the perceptual differences between these two modes comes from sophisticated brain PET (position emission tomography) scanners that demonstrate the circuits in the left hemisphere lighting up when the subject is reading (while the right hemisphere remains relatively dark). When the subject looks up from his or her book and begins to watch television, the right hemisphere switches on and the left begins to idle. Task-oriented beta waves activate the hunter/killer side of the brain as alpha and theta waves emanate more from the gatherer/nurturer side. Perhaps Western civilization has for far too long been stuck in a beta mode due to literacy, and striking a balance with a little more alpha and theta, regardless of the source, will serve to sooth humankind’s savage beast.” (408)

Television resurrected the power of the image and the shift from left-brain to right-brain information processing significantly affected the women’s rights movement, Shlain argues, noting that not many people saw this happening in our society.

“The victory of television images over printed words was so sudden that society had little time to adjust. The bulwarks of written-word-based authority were repudiated. The black-and-white literalness of the Bible, the gray work ethic of corporate capitalism and the bloodless white lab coat dispassion of science were all scrutinized and criticized as never before. The right brain, suppressed for so long, burst forth with an exuberance not seen since Dionysus cavorted with his retinue in the forests.” (412)

I can hardly believe I am about to write this. After all, I probably do not watch an hour of television in a week and I have been among those who call TV a vast wasteland. In reality, I know there is quality programming available through the United States Public Broadcasting Corporation, for example, but I am too busy reading books and writing stories for print publications. Nonetheless, I believe Shlain’s theory on literacy in the Iconic Revolution has merit. I feel that he has a point when he talks about the biological evolution involved with visual literacy causing what appear to be cultural problems.

“In recent years, homogeneous print cultures that had boasted high literacy rates prior to World War II have discovered that an alarming percentage of their populations have become functionally illiterate. Educators are aghast; finger pointing and accusations are traded back and forth in the media. Most involved in the debate are unwilling to consider that in the age of the image, literacy will inevitably decline. While this is a source of concern, it must be balanced with awareness that intelligence is not declining. Human society lived for 2,995,000 years without the benefit of writing, and there is considerable evidence that many preliterate cultures behaved in a more humane manner toward one another and toward their environment than the literacy-based cultures that followed.” (414)

Wow. We are learning to process information differently is I think what Shlain is saying. Are we moving toward a balance? I would like to think so. Moreover, I would like to believe that the use of the computer as an educational tool will advance a new literacy. I believe it is possible, given the research done by George P. Landow in Hypertext 2.0 The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.

The personal computer further elevates the status of the icon, Shlain says, noting that the computer’s capability for interactivity between machine and viewer created a dialogue as compared to the monologue one receives from the television screen. This, by the way, is changing with the influx of digital interactive television, wherein one is able to mingle with television programming.

“The computer was originally designed to aid scientists, most of whom were male. Since the 1970s, therefore, males have rushed in droves to learn what their fathers and grandfathers contemptuously dismissed as a skill for women and sissies—typing. Unlike all the scribes of past cultures, men now routinely write using both hands instead of only the dominant one. The entry into the communication equation of millions of men’s left hands, directed by millions of male right brains tapping out one half of every computer-generated written message, is, I believe, an unrecognizable factor in the diminution of patriarchy.” (417)

The cursor is another revolutionary element affecting information processing, he notes, explaining that the mouse frees the need of the right hand to remain
“ within the confines of the lane markers on lined paper while writing. Computer literates use a hand-eye coordination more spatial than linear: the mouse scurries across the corpus callosum, and invites right-brain pattern skills to participate in the maneuvers necessary to generate the written word.” (417)

Additionally, Shlain says word processing software add another right-brain talent.

“ The geometrical moving about of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and whole passages increased the right hemisphere’s influence on the composition of writing. And there are no pages to turn in a computer, which further discourages linear thinking.” (417)

He is saying that as much as television inadvertently enhanced the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s, the computer is doing the same for us in the 21st century. Having been involved in online community now for several years and having studied media culture and new media involvement since January 2003, I believe his observation has merit. Therefore, I am hopeful that Shlain is accurate when he concludes:

“Reading and writing are such valuable tools in world culture that virtually all governments want their citizens to acquire them. The benefits of alphabet literacy are magnificent and life-changing. Even when we become aware that literacy has a downside, no reasonable person would throw the baby out with bathwater and recommend that people should not become literate. Instead, we seek a renewed respect for iconic information, which, in conjunction with the ability to read, can bring our two hemispheres into greater equilibrium and allow both individuals and cultures to become more balanced.” (429)

It is not a pipedream.