Experience is relative to environment
People frequently tout a knowledge of history as the best way to avoid its repetition, but I can’t help but think about how often we’ve been wrong. Mostly we are pretty terrible at predicting the future. That’s because we are predicting it based on what exists today and as soon as something new rolls around tomorrow, everything we considered “normal” is thrown all out of whack and our predictions no longer apply.
Totally. This was something, incidentally, I mentioned in the comments of at least a couple of blogs back during the Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton supporters repeatedly touted her greater political experience as a reason she’d be a better candidate than Barack Obama. But what became very clear over the course of the primary was how much had changed—in the world (specifically in technology), and therefore in politics, too—in the handful of years since the Clintons had seriously been out stumping. The strategies they’d used previously to such heralded effect didn’t work anymore, at least not nearly as well. This is just another instance of the buggy-whip makers’ problem, which is just another way of saying that experience is relative to environment. The more the environment changes, the less valuable your experience is. Depending on how the environment has changed, experience can even be dangerous.
As happens so often here, I’ll mention now that this is the reason I think what Marshall McLuhan was trying to do is so important. As he says in Chapter 7 of Understanding Media: “It can only be repeated that human history is a record of ‘taking it on the chin.’” His hope was that we could learn to roll with the punches, not by using simple hindsight and trying to apply the policies and methods of the past to a present where they’re increasingly less relevant, but by looking at the underlying structures of those policies and methods. In the same way that Newton’s groundbreaking accomplishment was to extrapolate a uniform set of laws from a collection of similar-but-not-really-the-same events, McLuhan’s ultimate goal really was a sort of physics of history, a way of tackling its diverse factors (economics, technology, language, culture, etc., etc.) with a common approach.
As for the specifics of that common approach, I’m on much less sure footing (that is, beyond saying that McLuhan’s Laws of Media is a trippy-ass book, and as brain-boggling and rewarding as the rest of his stuff). I submit, though, that we might be able to do some useful thinking about prediction based on the ideas from the beginning of UM. And I will leave you, my many, many five or six readers, waiting breathlessly for us to get into that in another post.
