Erkki Huhtamo
From Cybernation to Interaction: A Contribution to an
Archeology of Interactivity
"We are not destined to become a race of baby-sitters for computers. Automation is
not a devil, a Frankenstein", the British industrialist Sir Leon Bagrit uttered in 1964, in
one of his noted radio lectures on automation.1 Whatever Sir Leon may have thought
about children and devils, his statement is a time-trace, a textual keyhole to peer into
another technological era. Amidst the current vogue for "interactive media" or
navigating "the Net", the metaphor of baby-sitting a computer seems alien. The same
might be said about the topic Sir Bagrit was addressing: automation, or "cybernation".
In the 1960's these concepts were widely debated as markers of a technological
transformation, which was felt to be shaking the foundations of the industrialized
world. "Automation" and "cybernation" have long since ceased to be hot and
controversial catchwords in public discourse.2 Does this mean that such concepts, as
well as the context in which they were moulded, have become irrelevant for our
attempts to understand technoculture, including fashionable phenomena like
interactivity?
This article argues against such claims. One of the common features of many
technocultural discourses is their lack of historical consciousness. History evanesces
as technology marches on. This is not caused merely by some "postmodern" logic;
rather, it is a reflection of the dominance of the "engineer approach" to culture. For
an engineer the past is interesting only as long as it is useful for constructing new
hardware and software. This attitude is echoed by the copy of the sales manager. Only
the things that give "maximum performance", in practical use and in sales, are worthy
of attention; the rest is obsolete. The history of the computer provides an example. A
few years old personal computers are only good for the dump; images of their
forefathers, the mainframe computers of the 1950's, might just as well be from an old
science-fiction movie. Did they really exist?
The engineer approach doesn't suffice to give a full account of the ways in which
technology is woven into the fabric of culture. First, it does not explain how the users
themselves have conceived their personal relationships to technology. As Sherry
Turkle has so convincingly shown, their attitudes are complex mixtures of differents
incredients (cultural, ideological, social, psychological) that make up personal lifehistories.3
Second, cultural processes are multi-layered constructions. The
"progressing" layers (as exemplied by the spectacular advances in computer hardware)
always exist in relation to layers which obey other logics. Technological discourses -
1 Sir Leon Bagrit, The Age of Automation. The BBC Reith Lectures 1964, New York:
Mentor Books, 1965, p.33.
2 Neither automation nor cybernation figures in the glossary or the index of
John A. Barry's Technobabble (Cambridge, Mass.: 1991), a study of computer
jargon.
3 See Turkle's books The Second Self. Computers and the Human Spirit (London:
Granada, 1984) and Life in the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
the conglomerations of fears, desires, expectations, utopias... - do not always develop
in pair with hardware. There is no necessary sychronicity between the "features" of an
invention, the ideas of its creators and the meanings actually given to it in some
cultural context.
The discursive aspects of culture are reiterative. Certain formulations keep coming
back, again and again, always adapted to new situations. For their protagonists in the
1950's and 1960's, automation and cybernation represented a radically new and
progressive relationship between the human and the machine. As Sir Bagrit put it, "[i]t
is not a question of machines replacing men: it is largely a question of extending man's
faculties by machines so that, in fact, they become better men, more competent men".
Very similar metaphors have been used in other times and places; recently they have
been applied to interactive computing by its spokesmen, for example Seymour Papert,
in his description of the "Knowledge Machine", the (hypothetical) ultimate interactive
computer, which would unleash the children's faculties for learning.4
Parallels can also be found on the "apocalyptic" side. Jacques Ellul, whose influential La
Technique (1954) was translated into English as The Technological Society in 1964,
warned against the effects of automation: "Man is reduced to the level of a catalyst.
Better still, he resembles a slug inserted into a slot machine: he starts the operation
without participating in it."5 For Ellul, it was not a question of "causing the human
being to disappear, but of making him capitulate, of inducing him to accomodate
himself to techniques and not to experience personal feelings and reactions."6
Recently, in his populist attack on interactive media and computer networking,
Clifford Stoll has re-enacted the fears of "capitulation", claiming that "[c]omputers
teach us to withdraw, to retreat into the warm comfort of their false reality. Why are
both drug addicts and computer aficionados both called users?"7
In spite of their different emphases, Bagrit and Papert, Ellul and Stoll draw essentially
similar conclusions: intercourse with the machine leads either to extending man's
capacities, or to his de-humanization and alienation. The machine is either a friend or
a foe. This observation merely shows that underneath the changing surface of machine
culture there are tenacious and long-lived undercurrents, or "master-discourses" that
get activated from time to time, particularly during moments of crisis or rupture.8
4 Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine. Rethinking School in the Age of the
Computer, New York: Basic Books, 1993, especially Ch.1.
5 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson, New
York: Vintage Books, 1964, p.135. Ellul's idea about the fateful infiltration of the
"technique", albeit in the connection of mechanization, was interesting preceded
by George Orwell. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) he wrote: "The process of
mechanization has itself become a machine, a huge glittering vehicle whirling
us we are not certain where, but probably toward the padded Wells-world and
the brain in the bottle." (Cit. Of Men and Machines, edited by Arthur O. Lewis Jr.,
New York: Dutton, 1963, p.259.)
6 Ellul, The Technological Society, p.137-138.
7 Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil. Second Thoughts on the Information Highway,
New York: Doubleday, 1995, p.136.
8 See Simon Penny: "Machine Culture", SISEA Proceedings, edited by Wim van
der Plas, Groningen: SISEA, 1991, pp.184-191. For an extensive treatment, see
Interesting as observing such "mytho-logics" is, it is also extremely important to show
how such tradition-bound elements (often manifested as polar opposites) function
when (re-)activated in specific historical contexts, thus pointing out the interplay
between the unique and the commonplace.
This article looks for a perspective on computer-mediated interactivity through the
"eyes" of the early discourses on automation and cybernation. Instead of taking
automation as granted, it will take a second look at some of its early manifestations,
and the ways it was conceived by its champions and adversaries. The main attention
will be on the modes of organizing the human/machine relationship. The article can be
read as a contribution to an "archeology of interactivity". It makes an effort to "map"
contemporary interactive media by relating it with other manifestations of the humanmachine
encounter and by tracing some of the paths along which its principles have
been formed.
From Automata to Automation
In his lectures on automation, Sir Leon Bagrit tells the following anecdote: "I was
talking to a man recently who said that automation was not new, that he had it in
1934. I said, 'How very interesting. What did you do?" and then he said 'Oh we had
automatic machines even then' and he was convinced that this was automation."9 The
early spokesmen for automation made it clear that a distinction exists between
"automatic machines" and "automation" as a general principle. An automatic machine is
basically any machine with a sufficient self-regulating (feed-back) mechanism to allow it
to perform certain functions without human intervention. The classic example is the
tradition of the automata, the often anthropomorphic mechanical curiosities that had
been constructed and admired over the centuries. Automation, however, "is a
process which substitutes programmed machine-controlled operations for human
manipulations. It is the fruit, so to speak, of cybernetics and computers."10
The Spanish inventor Leonardo Torres y Quevedo may have been the first to take the
conceptual step from the "useless" automata towards automation. In 1915 he
presented the idea that automata could be turned into a "class of apparatus which
leaves out the mere visible gestures of man and attempts to accomplish the results
which a living person obtains, thus replacing a man by a machine".11 In an interview in
Scientific American Torres claimed that "at least in theory most or all of the operations
of a large establishment could be done by a machine, even those which are supposed
to need the intervention of a considerable intellectual capacity".12 The practical
possibilities appeared gradually, reaching early maturity in the 1940's, with the
development of the first computers, advanced servo-mechanisms with automated
feed-back functions and new theories (cybernetics, information theory) explaining the
functioning of such systems. The word "automation" seems to have been coined in
Bruce Mazlich, The Fourth Discontinuity. The Co-evolution of Humans and Machines,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.
9 Bagrit, The Age of Automation, p. 42.
10 Daniel Bell, Preface to Bagrit, The Age of Automation, p.xvii.
11 Cit. A Computer Perspective, by the office of Charles and Ray Eames, edited
by Glen Fleck, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973, p.67.
12 Cit. A Computer Perspective, p.67.
1947 at the Ford Motor Company, and first put into practice in 1949, when the
company began work on their first factories built specifically for automation.13
Automation emerged in the context of military and industrial applications, and also
became prominent on the vast field of administrative applications which came to be
known as A.D.P. (automatic data processing). In his overview in 1967, John Rose
listed four categories of applications: control (from various industries to traffic and air
defence), scientific (from engineering design and space travel to economic research
and military logistics), information (from accounting and tax records to medical
diagnosis and retrieval of information) and others (including pattern recognition and
problem solving).14 Although some of these applications could be deemed inheritors
of earlier mechanized operations (A.P.D. was arguably a further development of the
mechanical "business machines" of the 1920's and 1930's), the spokesmen for
automation drew a sharp line between mechanization and automation.15
For Marshall McLuhan, "mechanization of any process is achieved by fragmentation,
beginning with the mechanization of writing by movable types".16 According to
Siegfried Giedion, full mechanization was characterized by the assembly line, "wherein
the entire factory is consolidated into a synchronous organism".17 In the mechanized
factory the manufacturing process was rationalized by dividing it into manageable
"portions", which followed each other in a strictly predetermined order. Each task
was accomplished by a worker coupled with a specialized machine tool. To facilitate
and control the process, various methods were developed for the scientific study of
work. The result of the physiological studies on optimal body movements, proper use
of human energy and the worker fatique was seen by many as increasing the
subordination of the worker to the mechanistic principles of the machine, instead of
easing his task. This was also Charles Chaplin's interpretation of mechanization in
Modern Times (1936). The human and the machine were hybridized as parts of a larger
"synchronous organism". According to Anson Rabinbach's apt characterization, the
worker was turned into a "human motor".18
13 A Computer Perspective, p.148.
14 John Rose: Automation. Its uses and consequences, Edinburgh and London:
Oliver & Boyd, 1967, p.2.
15 The literature on automation is too vast to be listed here. Among the more
interesting, albeit forgotten, books are Donald N. Michael, Automation, New
York: Vintage Books, 1962; S. Deczynski, Automation and the future of man,
London: Allen & Unwin, 1964; Automation and Society, edited by H.B. Jacobsen
and J.S. Roucek, New York: Philosophical Library, 1959; W. Buckingham,
Automation, New York: The New American Library, 1963. The literature on
cybernetics is also essential; see particularly Norbert Wiener, The human use of
human beings. Cybernetics and Society, New York: Doubleday, 1954 [1950].
16 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, London:
Sphere Books 1969 [1964], p.371.
17 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization takes Command. A Contribution to Anonymous
History, New York: W.W.Norton, 1969 [1948], p.5.
18 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor. Energy, Fatique, and the Origins of
Modernity, New York: Basic Books, 1990.
The champions of automation pointed out that instead of slaving the worker,
automation makes him the real master. According to Sir Bagrit, "[a]utomation...by
being a self-adapting and a changing piece of mechanism, enables a man to work at
whatever pace he wants to work, because the machine will react to him."19 McLuhan
elaborated the divide between mechanization and automation further by subsuming
automation into his synthetic vision about the cultural significance of electricity:
"Automation is not an extension of the mechanical principles of fragmentation and
separation of operations. It is rather the invasion of the mechanical world by the
instantaneous character of electricity. That is why those involved in automation insist
that it is a way of thinking, as much as it is a way of doing."20 Automation thus became
almost "automatically" one of McLuhan's new "extensions of man". Others, like the
sosiologist Daniel Bell, saw automation as a token of the passage from industrial to
post-industrial culture.21
The demarkation line between mechanization and automation was never as clear as its
spokesmen wanted to make one believe. This can be discerned even from Sir Bagrit's
scruples about using the word: "I am dissatisfied with it, because it implies
automaticity and automaticity implies mechanization, which in its turn implies
unthinking, repetitive motion, and this...is the exact opposite of automation".22 Sir
Bagrit prefers the word cybernation, because "it deals with the theory of
communications and control, which is what genuine automation really is".23 The word
cybernation had been used before, for example by Donald N. Michael, to refer to
"both automation and computers".24 Although Michael justifies the use of the new
word (derived from Norbert Wiener's concept cybernetics, coined in the late 1940's)
on purely linguistic and textual grounds, the choice can be easily interpreted as a
strategic move on an ideological battleground: a make-believe attempt to clear the
table of the crumbs of the past.
The Computer as a "Familiar Alien"
The machine as a physical artifact is always surrounded (and sometimes preceded) by
the machine as a discursive formation. The "imaginary of automation" was greatly
19 Bagrit, The Age of Automation, p.39. It is significant that in a sense Bagrit
simply reversed the situation by speaking about "the slave services of
automation", remaining strictly within the traditional polar opposition of
master and slave. (p.45)
20 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p.371-372. The idea of automation as
"thinking as much as a way of doing" seems to derive from John Diebold's
report Automation: Its Impact on Business and Labor, Washington, D.C.: National
Planning Association, Planning Pamphlet No. 106 (May 1959), p.3. Cit. Donald
M. Michael: "Cybernation: The Silent Conquest", in Of Men and Machines, edited
by Arthur O. Lewis Jr., New York: Dutton, 1963, p.79.
21 See Bell's introduction to Bagrit, The Age of Automation.
22 Bagrit, The Age of Automation, p.41-42.
23 Bagrit, The Age of Automation, p.42.
24 Donald M. Michael: "Cybernation: The Silent Conquest", in Of Men and
Machines, p.80 (original emphasis). Michael uses the formulation "we invent the
term". Marshall McLuhan uses it as synonymous with automation in
Understanding Media, p.370.
moulded by the popular meanings attached to such "familiar but alien" artifacts as
industrial robots and mainframe computers. The fashion for "things automatic" spread,
however, to other, more accessible fields, such as household machinery and
education (teaching machines), which, at least nominally, "brought automation to the
people".25 The "automated housewife" and the "automated Socrate" are just two of
the many discursive manifestations of this process.26 The discourses on automation
also merged with other discourses, like those related to consumerism and modernity,
which held sway over the popular mentality in the industrialized world after World
War II. The media, including the press, the cinema and the novelty of the time,
television (itself a piece of semi-automatic technology), played a major role in this
dissemination. A case in point is an adverting text for the Bendix washing machine
from 1946:
"It's Wonderful! -how my BENDIX does all the work of washing! because it washes, rinses, damp-dries
- even cleans itself, empties and shuts off - all automatically!"27
The imaginary around the robot is too wide a topic to be covered here.28 As a selfregulating
artificial system the industrial robot was, with the computer, the ultimate
symbol of automation. Its roots went, of course, further back into the mechanical era.
In a typical 1950's fantasy, the cover story "Amazing Marvels of Tomorrow", published
in the Mechanix Illustrated magazine in 1955, the robot has two roles. First, there are
the "Robot Factories that are completely automatized without a single human
workman inside".29 Second, there is the "Robot Kit, Make Your Own Robot": "The kit
25 A pioneer on the field of teaching machines was the Harvard professor and
Behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner. His largely forgotten writings about the
teaching machines he experimented with from the 1950's on have been
collected as The Technology of Teaching, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1968. Main influence for Skinner's machines were the testing-scoring machines
devised in the 1920's by the lone pioneer Sidney L. Pressey, who spoke about
an "industrial revolution in education" (The Technology of Teaching, p.30).
26 The phrase "automated Socrate" was coined by Desmond L. Cook. The
historical predecessor for "automated teaching" is often considered to be
Comenius and his "autopraxis". For more, see the useful handbook by Walter
R. Fuchs, Knaurs Buch vom neuen Lernen, München/Zürich: Th. Knaur
Nachf./Droemersche Verlagsanstalt, 1969.
27 The advertisement is reproduced in Ellen Lupton: Mechanical Brides. Women
and Machines from Home to Office, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993,
p.19. Another example is a publicity photograph analyzed by Adrian Forty. A
housewife in a party dress stands by as her electric cooker prepares a complete
meal. Forty comments: "No mess, no sweat - the cooker, it seems, produces
meals of its own". Here the ideology of modernity means the complete
replacement of work by elegantly designed fully automated machines. The
advertisement also implies the complete elimination of tactile relationship to
work and tools. (Adrian Forty: Objects of Desire. Design and Society, London:
Thames & Hudson, p.211.)
28 There are many books about this topic. Particularly useful are Robots Robots
Robots, edited by Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman, Boston: New York
Graphic Society, 1978, and Robotics, edited by Marvin Minsky, New York:
Anchor Press/Doubleday (An Omni Press Book), 1985.
29 O.O.Binder: "Amazing Marvels of Tomorrow", Mechanix Illustrated, March
1955, p.72. The text provides a typical example of the vagueness of the
has complete tools and parts for building your own metal robot, with an atomic
battery guaranteed a century. Hearing and obeying all orders, the robot can be your
servant. Or lonely people can train them to play checkers and cards, and even
dance."30 Other pieces of domestic automatic hardware mentioned in the fantasy are
the "Meal-o-Matic" in the kitchen and the "Dream-o-Vision", an automatic "dream
record" player.
Also the early imaginary about the computer was greatly influenced by popular media.
An important aspect of the media's appeal is the "surrogate presence" it creates, giving
access to such spheres of life, which are denied from direct experience. For the
general audience the computer was for years an emphatically "non-tactile", out-ofreach
object, locked behind the sealed doors of the control and engine rooms of the
society. Its first public appearances took place in television shows, newspaper
cartoons and popular science stories.31 For example, there were game shows on TV
featuring huge room-sized "giant brains" for whom a human (often a grandmother or a
child) was allowed to pose questions. The computer would answer in some way,
either with blinking lights or by spitting text through a tele-type writer. Another
variation was the chess game between a human master and a computer. The
motivation behind these "appearances" was to cash on the novelty value of the
computer (and automation), but also to humanize it to a certain degree. The "human
face" was needed because most of the actual operations the early computers
performed were so unexciting, or even hostile and destructive.
The media made the computer a "familiar alien". For example, it was frequently
implied that the computer was in some way "alive", but even the "signs of life" were
doubly mediated, first by the media, and secondly by the computer's operators and
programmers. The stereotyped little men in white coats standing by the huge machine
(seen in countless cartoons) represented at the same time a human presence and a
distanced, mystified scientific priesthood.32 Like priests, the operators and the
programmers were dedicated to the "secret knowledge" about the computer and
acted as mediators: both delivering questions to the computer and interpreting its
answers. This atmosphere has been beautifully described by Robert Sherman Townes
in his short story "Problem for Emmy" (1952), told from the point of view of an
assistant operator for a mainframe computer, Emmy:
"When a problem was finally selected it was sent to the mathematicians - perhaps better, The
Mathematicians. In keeping with the temple-like hush of the Room and our acolytish attendance on
distinction between automation and mechanization: "You had the forerunners
of this in your 1955 pilot plants, which were completely mechanized." (my
emphasis)
30 O.O.Binder: "Amazing Marvels of Tomorrow", p. 210.
31 As far as I know, a complete "mental history of the computer" is yet to be
written. There is plenty of material about the popular reception of the
computer which has been used hardly at all. The early computer "appearances"
on TV and in the cinema that I refer to I have seen at the Computer Museum in
Boston.
32 This role surfaced again in the early 1990's in the helper figure in a virtual
reality demonstration. He reset the system, calibrated the glove and the
goggles and even interpreted the blurry scenes "from the outside", standing
firmly beside the "virtual voyager".
Emmy, there was something hieratic about these twelve men. They sat in two rows of six white desks,
with small adding machines and oceans of paper before them, bent over, muttering to themselves,
dressed in white (no one seemed to know quite we all wore white), like the priests of a new
logarithmic cult."33
Cartoons often emphasized the misunderstandings and communication breakdowns
between these "priests" and the computers. In one typical example, we see two
operators standing by a mainframe. One of them says to the other: "Do you ever get
the feeling it's trying to tell us something?" In another cartoon a similar looking pair of
operators is reading a tape output from the computer: "I'll be damned. It says, 'Cogito,
ergo sum.'" Even the short story by Townes, mentioned above, deals with
unexplainable reactions from the computer, ending in a mysterious message: "WHO
AM I WHO AM I WHO AM I..." While these examples may simply reflect the public
perplexity and the mystified position of the computer, they may also refer to real
problems perceived in the relationship between the human and the computer, and
thus in the idea of automation. John G. Kemeny has remembered:
"[Computers] were so scarce and so expensive that man approached the computer the way an ancient
Greek approached an oracle. A man submitted his request to the machine and then waited patiently
until it was convenient for the machine to work out the problem. There was a certain degree of
mysticism in the relationship...true communication between the two was impossible."34
There were many popular discourses that stated outright that this kind of "true
communication" was not needed anymore. Yet, there were also many instances of
resistance to the idea of full automation. This became clear, for example, in reactions
to the idea of the auto-pilot. Even Sir Leon Bagrit noted that "[i]t is interesting to
notice that we will often accept a limited degree of automation - the automatic pilot in
an aircraft, for instance - but we are reluctant to see the human buffer - in the shape of
the pilot - go completely."35 This feeling was echoed for example in an anecdote retold
in 1975 by Sema Marks:
"This plane represents the ultimate in technological sophistication. All controls are handled automatically
by our master computer. There is no human pilot aboard. Relax and enjoy your flight, your flight, your
flight..."36
Lev Manovich has recently emphasized that the very idea of automation as independent
of a human agent is based on a misunderstanding: "It is important to note that
automation does not lead to the replacement of human by machine. Rather, the
worker's role becomes one of monitoring and regulation: watching displays, analyzing
incoming information, making decisions, and operating controls."37 Manovich sees
33 Robert Sherman Townes: "Problem for Emmy", in Of Men and Machines,
edited by Arthur O. Lewis Jr., New York: Dutton, 1963, p.90.
34 Cit. Les Brown & Sema Marks, Electric Media, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1974, p.114.
35 Bagrit, The Age of Automation, p.43.
36 Cit. Brown & Marks, Electric Media, p.98.
37 Manovich, The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Virtual Reality,
Doctoral Thesis, Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester, College of Arts and
Science, 1993 (unprinted), p.202. I would like to thank Lev Manovich for giving
me a copy of his thesis. The "monitoring and regulation" functions would fit
here a new kind of work experience, "new to the post-industrial society: work as
waiting for something to happen.38This observation leads him to claim that the real
predecessor for this kind of a human-machine relationship is the experience of
watching a film rather than working on a mechanized assembly line. For Manovich, the
paradigmatic figure of this new work situation is the radar operator waiting for
another dot to appear on the screen. It could, however, also be the "automated
housewife" sitting by her automatic washing machine, adjusting its washing "program",
and staring at its "screen" from time to time.
From the "waiting operator" to the "impatient user"
Curiously, Manovich overlooks the role of variations within the new mode of work
he has identified, particularly the significance of the differences in the rate of the
communication between the human and the machine system. According to Manovich,
"[i]t is not essential that in some situations [the user's] interventions may be required
every second...while in others they are needed very rarely."39 This aspect could,
however, be considered extremely significant - not only as a question of quantity but
also that of quality - when we start tracing the gradual shift towards interactive media.
Ideally, an interactive system is characterized by a "real-time relationship" between the
human and system, or by "the mutual and simultaneous activity on the part of both
participants, usually working toward some goal, but not necessarily" (Andy
Lippman).40 In an interactive system the role of the human agent is not restricted to
control and occasional intervention. Rather, the system requires the actions of the
user, repeatedly and rapidly. In his prophecy about the "home computer revolution"
(1977) Ted Nelson gave a description of the emerging "impatient" user, a direct
counterpoint to the "waiting operator" of early automation: "We are now going to
see a new kind of user: slam bang, sloppy, impatient, and unwilling to wait for detailed
instructions."41
Thus an interactive system is not based on waiting, but on constant (re)acting.
Interestingly, Harvard professor B.F. Skinner's description of the goals of the
mechanical teaching machines he designed in the 1950's and 1960's already
approximated this idea:
"There is a constant interchange between program and student. Unlike lectures, textbooks, and the
usual audio-visual aids, the machine induces sustained activity. The student is always alert and busy."42
well also to the figure of the "automated housewife", staring at the "screen" of
her automatic washing-machine.
38 Lev Manovich, The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Virtual Reality,
p.209.
39 Manovich, The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Virtual Reality,
p.207-208.
40 Cit. Stewart Brand, The Media Lab. Inventing the Future at M.I.T., New York:
Penguin Books, 1988, p.46.
41 Ted Nelson: The Home Computer Revolution, published by the Author, 1977,
p.24.
42 B.F.Skinner, The Technology of Teaching, p.37-39.
The human-machine relationships characteristic of mechanization, automation and the
more recent interactive systems don't have to be seen as absolutely clear-cut and
mutually exclusive. Indeed, interactive media could be seen as a kind of synthesis
between the two earlier models of the human-machine system: it adopts from
mechanized systems the constant interplay between the "worker" and the machine,
sometimes to the point of their "hybridization". In the case of video games, virtual
reality systems and various interactive artworks (for example, Jeffrey Shaw's Legible
City and Revolution), even aspects of physical exercise are re-introduced into the
human-computer interaction. This "positive", active physical hybridization could,
however, be traced to pinball machines, and other mechanical coin-op devices, as
well.43 Computer-based interactive systems, however, incorporate innumerable
automated functions.44 As a consequence, different behavioral modes, including that of
"waiting", can be included as built-in "options" of the system (either in hardware or
software).
The procession towards today's interactive systems has taken place gradually with the
development of more immediate and versatile computer interfaces, faster processing
speeds and larger memories. This technical development, with Ivan A. Sutherland's
interactive drawing program Sketchpad (1963) as one of its early milestones, has been
well documented.45 It is, however, important to remember that this development has
also been related to the broadening range of applications of computer systems. Early
mainframe computers that were mostly used for complex mathematical calculations
hardly required interactive features. These became necessary with the development of
new uses for the computer, such as simulation, visualization, word processing and
gaming.46 They were also connected with the gradual spreading of the computer away
from the administrative and industrial context into many different spheres of social
life, including the private user. This development was already understood by Sir Leon
Bagrit in 1964:
"It is now possible to envisage personal computers, small enough to be taken around in one's car, or
even one's pocket. They could be plugged into a national computer grid, to provide individual enquirers
with almost unlimited information."47
43 The serious literature on coin-op machines is scarce. See, however, Lynn F.
Pearson, Amusement Machines, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire: Shire,
1992.
44 Karl Sims' recent computer installation Genetic Images combines an
interactive interface (a line of monitors, with foot-triggered sensors) and a
connection machine (to calculate generations of genetic images, based on the
user's choices). Sims thus highlights the co-presence and the interplay of the
interactive and the automated features of computing.
45 See Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought. The People and Ideas behind the Next
Computer Revolution, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.
46 This early history, including the development of Spacewar, the first
computer game, is covered in Stewart Brand's II Cybernetic Frontiers, New York
and Berkeley: Random House and Bookworks, 1974.
47 Bagrit, The Age of Automation, p.58. This proves that Seymour Papert is not
right in his belief that Alan Kay was "the first person to use the words personal
computer". (Papert, The Children's Machine, p.42.) Considering the popularizing
nature of Bagrit's lectures, it is probable that even he got the idea from
someone else.
Beginning from automation, Bagrit thus saw not only the coming of the personal
computer, but that of the Internet as well.48 Almost at the same time, Marshall
McLuhan also observed the interactive and communicative potential immanent in
automation: "Automation affects not just production, but every phase of consumption
and marketing; for the consumer becomes producer in the automation
circuit...Electric automation unites production, consumption, and learning in an
inextricable process."49 With such views, the early idea of automation as a rather
straightforward way of rationalizing and controlling industrial production and the
handling of statistical data was already opening up to embrace more heterogenous
worlds. McLuhan foresaw "the creation of intense sensitivity to the interrelation and
interprocess of the whole, so as to call for ever-new types of organization and
talent".50
Conclusion
"Those who had long worshipped silently now began to talk. They described the strange feeling of
peace that came over them when they handled the Book of the Machine, the pleasure that it was to
repeat certain numerals out of it, however little meaning those numerals conveyed to the outward ear,
the ecstasy of touching a button however unimportant, or of ringing an electric bell however
superfluously."51
These words from E.M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops" (1928), which
might be mistaken for a description of the priesthood of a mainframe computer in the
1950's, are by no means completely out of place in the world of interactive computing.
The fact that computers have become ubiquitous, portable, and networked, and,
indeed, even turned into media machines themselves, has not completely dispelled the
feeling of awe towards them. New techno cults have been created in the 1990's,
whether in the form of a "lanierist" virtual reality priesthood or that of the "techno
pagans". The 1950's image of the human as a "baby-sitter" for a computer may have
been turned upside down, the computers themselves now frequently serving as babysitters,
but the notions and sentiments which guided the development of the
computer decades ago are still in many cases current.
This article has argued that looking at "obsolete" phenomena like the early discourses
on automation and cybernation may give us insights about the nature of the
technologies surrounding us today. The now ubiquitous discourse on interactivity may
seem to have appeared suddenly, and very recently. The catch-word "interactive
media", not to say anything about "interactive shopping" and "interactive
48 More than ten years later Ted Nelson elaborated in his self-published The
Personal Computer Revolution: "Before now, most computer systems have not
been set up with ordinary people's use in mind. A certain class of experienced
user was anticipated and so only these people used the system. [...] But that's
about to change. Interactive systems will start appearing on little computers for
every purpose." (Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, p.24)
49 McLuhan: Understanding Media, p.372-373.
50 McLuhan: Understanding Media, p.378-379.
51 E.M. Forster: "The Machine Stops", in Of Men and Machines, edited by Arthur
O. Lewis Jr., New York: Dutton, 1963, p.283-284.
entertainment", figured seldom in public before the 1990's.52 Magazines with
"interactivity" in their title, have only began to appear within the past 2-3 years.53 It is,
however, important to see that the "cult of interactivity" has been in the making for a
long time. Even though today's powerful media machineries have the power to "make"
things (instead of merely "presenting" them) almost overnight, these "things", including
"interactive media", are not created out of nowhere.
Interactivity is part of the gradual development of the computer from ideas which
were first discussed around automation - a phenomenon which at first sight may seem
to be its polar opposite. However, we should look even further, to earlier forms of
the human/machine relationship. This article has only hinted at such phenomena as
mechanical coin-op games and teaching machines as important predecessors of at least
some aspects of interactivity. At the same time, however, we should resist the
teleological temptation of presenting the whole history of the human/machine
relationship as leading towards our present idea of interactivity. This is certainly an
illusion created by our observation post, and also by the cunning of history. The fabric
of history consists of innumerable threads. It will present completely different visions
for other "presents". We should resist the temptation of looking at things in the past
merely as an extended prologue for the present.
Thus, 1950's ideas about automation are certainly interesting not only from the point
of view of interactivity. Another discourse closely related to it was the early
development of artificial intelligence. After being eclipsed for a long time, it is gaining
new vigor again, but this time in the quite different looking disguise of artificial life
research. This may provide another good excuse to go back to the "basics", ideas
around cybernetics and automation in the 1950's and 1960's. Indeed, this is already
happening.
© Erkki Huhtamo 1996, 1999
52 It seems significant to me, that neither the word "interactivity" nor
"interactive media" figures in John A. Barry's study of the computer jargon,
Technobabble, published in 1991 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991).
53 Interactivity (1995-) and Interactive Week (1994-) are two examples. The first
edition of Tim Morrison's compendium The Magic of Interactive Entertainment
(Indianapolis: SAMS Publishing, 1994) appeared in 1994, followed by a second,
updated edition already in 1995.