The Invention of Culture

Matterlart’s look at criminology in his chapter “The Emergence of Technical Networks” (from Mapping World Communication) begs the question: what is culture’s role in communication networks? Mattelart states that a new need to process information came out of the need to manage large numbers of people and goods, needs which were helped along by such communication networks as the telegraph and the railroad. This need for classification “obsessed those in charge of both the judicial and the penitentiary systems” (p. 25). This “need” is nothing more than a new cultural paradigm; the networks caused both communication and culture to evolve. But if culture can evolve like technology, does that mean that it can also be created like technology? 

Daya Thussu’s chapter “The Historical Context of International Communication” (from IC: Continuity and Change), as well as other articles and books, shed some light when they address the first major technical network created by Gutenberg’s printing press. Not only did moveable type inadvertently alter the political world by assisting the rise of the nation-state, but it also put culture in print for the first time. Ideas – from science, to religion, to poetry, to philosophy – could be written down and dispersed widely. You can now invent thoughts and share them with a wide audience. One could argue that without the culture being put into a tangible form, it would not have become such a powerful idea in the West. We would see this staunch belief in “culture” being correct or incorrect during colonization. The printing press invented modern perceptions of culture, and this new invention would then be morphed and utilized to different ends around the world. 

Without culture and the need to disseminate it, I would argue that communication networks, both informal and technical, would not exist today. But like any invention, culture too must adapt to new technologies and its resultant networks. Mattelart’s discussion of criminology should be valued for the very reason that it clearly shows this intimate give and take between technical networks and culture. The networks bred a new culture, which bred new networks (ex. INTERPOL) and thus further transformed the culture of criminality. Culture is the invention that invents itself and the world around us constantly, and Mattelart wanted to make sure we understood its importance not only in networks, but in the entire field of International Communications.