Communication Technologies
The differences between communication technologies and the possibilities they harbor are substantial: while manuscript cultures seek to establish inventories, records, and narratives of statecraft, print enables registration and mass mobilization of “imagined communities.” Digital media, on the other hand, require registration in order to participate in a virtual flow of aesthetics and information that transcends time, space, and narrative structures. Each technology thus constrains the possibilities of Buddhist discourse and sentiments as well as Buddhist practices and social formations.
Communication technologies shape the parameters of discourse and enable specific social formations. They facilitate diverse forms of circulation of information and thus also provide parameters of social agency through their specific modes of production, access, and circulation to knowledge, prestige, and networks.
From this premise, we can glean comparisons about access to knowledge and circulation of information, intended audiences, authority structures expressed and forms of social control enabled, potential forms of mobilization, resistance and networks generated, as well as values and religious, social, and political privileges empowered.
Multiple information technologies often coexist as the emergence of newer ones only partially displaces older ones and the social institutions they represent. We can discern a stratigraphy of knowledge production that is mediated by particular communication technologies and the social discourse and formations they enable.
For instance, manuscript cultures don’t entirely cease to exist, but they do become increasingly obsolete and “fossilized” or come to be seen as an “essentialized” representation of a classic civilization. The knowledge they convey often comes to be seen as “classical” representations of a distant or greater truth, to be curated in special collections, libraries, and museums. We can look at this process as a way in which social history uses communication technology to construct periodization of the Pali Imaginaire.
Lastly, we’ll pay attention to how communication technologies become the tools for constructing not just the present, but eventually also become tools for recording and defining history, as ways of inscribing the past into the present moment.