DESCRIPTION
Ronald Diebert’s Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia reads like discarded background material for writers of the Matrix. In that movie’s future, humans, strung out on arrogance and technological know-how, create artificial intelligence. They embed it in machines which quickly become smarter than their makers, and we’re all familiar with the hellish dystopia that Neo confronts in the real and virtual world.

But whereas the screenwriters forecast a bleak future burned by technology gone evil, Diebert offers a rosier picture, at least for all entities transnational. Instead of fretting over killer robots, Diebert considers iPods. He doesn’t literally, since he published his book in 1997—practically the Stone Age in digital music history, but he does talk about technologies like iPods. He seems to ask the old chicken-or-the-egg question, but with a twist: Did Steve Jobs invent the iPod or did social epistemologies and forces converge to first invent Steve Jobs? His answer, of course, is a qualified, evidenced, and nuanced “it’s both.”

Diebert bemoans international relations’ collective overlooking of medium theory. Traditional focus on content, similar to traditional focus on nation-states, is rapidly becoming outdated. Rather, he argues, international studies must come to grips with hypermedia and its implications for international studies. He doesn’t exactly sound the death knell of the nation-state system, but he clearly believes hypermedia has begun to usher in an era of transnationalism and multiple identities.

Printing, Parchment, and Hypermedia studies the ebb and flow of political power and authority as a function of changes in modes of communication. Diebert proposes “nonreductive evolutionary medium theory,” which is his spin on medium theory thought up by Harold Innis and made famous by Marshall McLuhan. Medium theory studies methods of storing, transmitting, and distributing information in different media environments throughout history. The “nonreductive evolutionary” component addresses causality; he applies an almost Darwinian evolutionary analogy to changes in modes of communication. “Ecological holism” examines distribution and social changes, which heuristically produce environments. By “nonreductive” he announces disbelief in “technological determinism.” Diebert would not buy the recent New York Times article that attributed the demise of music conglomerates and compact discs to iTunes and the iPod. Diebert recognizes that the iPod didn’t appear out of thin air, and he assigns appropriate value to context and process.

The “hypermedia environment reflects a complex melding and converging of distinct technologies into a single integrated web of digital-electronic-telecommunications,” writes Diebert. But hypermedia has shifted world order in more ways that rapid transmission and digitization. It has evolved power. Its “unprecedented capability to blur territorial and political lines, will have an effect on all spheres of human interaction, from economic production and political security to knowledge and culture.” To study hypermedia, Diebert looks to the past at a historical transformation brought on by changes in modes of communication. In Part I he writes about the printing press. In Part II he explores the implications of hypermedia. After examining both sections in turn, this review weighs his contributions and offers criticism.

PART I: PRINT
Diebert points to the printing press as the catalyst for the transformation of political authority from medieval feudalism to modern sovereign state system. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church maintained a monopoly over written communication, which underpinned its authority. It further used the “multimedia” of religious art and imposing church architecture to feed its message of power. But the “rise in secular literacy from the end of the twelfth century, the replacement of heavy expensive parchment with lighter cheaper paper, and the arrival of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century provided an environment for political change,” wrote Judith Bannister in her review of Parchment. These changes disadvantaged the church and fueled the rise of other social forces and ideas, namely the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, social pressures demanded more efficient communication in areas outside the church. “To the detriment of the Catholic Church, this new communications environment favored the Protestant Reformation and scientific humanism, the rise of centralized state bureaucracies and an urban bourgeoisie, and empowered the emerging nation-states.”

Diebert reads a “message” into the historical fact of mass-printed pamphlets: cheap reproduction led to mass distribution and subversion of monastic papacy, which heretofore had a monopoly on literacy and God. Literacy rates grew faster in Protestant regions than in Catholic regions. Leaders of the Reformation exploited the power of this mode of communication, which allowed for the success and historical importance of the movement. Diebert hypothesizes in a counter factual that the Reformation wouldn’t have had the same endurance had it not been for printing.

Social abstractions such as “contracts, constitutions, and newspapers” gained ground, largely because of humanity’s burgeoning sense of individual identities. Modern, centralized states arose with the rise of the urban bourgeoisie. Further changes included changes in social epistemology, spatial bias (“linearity” of political space), and scientific humanism.

PART II: HYPERMEDIA
Diebert carries over his framework from Part I to Part II. As he looks at the contemporary world, he offers a key insight: no innovation today exists independently. Just as cellular phones, blogs, optic fibers, and e-mail are interconnected, so are the many power structures in hypermedia. Diebert sees the interlocking elements of nation-states unraveling. As it becomes increasingly difficult to define “states,” finance and trade are being quickly deregulated. He sees world order moving away from mass identities, linear political boundaries, and territorial spaces toward multiple identities, non-territorial communities, and overlapping boundaries.

As he explores the “transnationalization” of firms, global localization (adjustment to local markets), and local globalization (global village), he is careful not to assign causality to technology or the media, a product of technology. “[C]hanges in the mode of communication do not generate new symbolic forms, social constructs, or cognitive biases de novo, but rather the elements of social epistemology present in society will tend to flourish or wither as a result of a fitness between those elements and the new environment.” Multinational corporations with production facilities all over the world conform to hypermedia. Traditional nation-states do not. Diebert does not go so far as to proclaim the death of nations just yet, but he does point to shifting values that make such formations increasingly unstable. NGOs, already an established feature in world politics, offer an example of a heterogeneous entity that flourishes in hypermedia. Still, if there is “one clear ‘winner’ in the hypermedia, it is the collective interest of transnational capital.” The flexibility and agility necessitated by changing world order demands the crossing of boundaries and threatens nationalism.

CONTRIBUTION
There’s no question that Diebert’s arguments for the inclusion of hypermedia in international studies are reasoned and sound. Clearly, the most pressing implication is that “the theoretical tools and concepts International Relations theorists have inherited and employed for centuries to study world politics will be in need of revision.” He argues that scholars need a new method of framing power relations. Since “the elements of international politics which mainstream rationalist approaches presuppose to be ‘natural,’ ‘essential,’ and ‘unchanging’ are, in fact, the products of historical contingencies and thus subject to change over time,” these reformulations are all the more pressing.

CRITIQUE
Parchment deserves criticism as well. The work is admittedly a theoretical text, but even so, the jargon overwhelms. Diebert demands such extensive knowledge of theory (without accompanying explanation) as to render the text more obscure than it otherwise could be. Furthermore, he compares processes that took 1500 years (from the 6th to 19th centuries) to those that have taken place in 50. No one doubts the mind-boggling pace of modern innovation, but it seems premature or at least imperfect to draw similar conclusions about events that are inherently incongruent. By that token, if he wants his arguments to hold water, perhaps he should issue a revised and updated edition of his book every year, month, day, second…

Finally, what might be called “arrogance” undermines his logic. He makes several offhand references to “primitive orality” in simpler cultures. His dismissal of “mere orality” as a mode of communication glosses over some qualities that might not have counterparts in the latest technologies. Some aspects of oral history, for instance, might be lost if (when?) hypermedia subsumes it. The future doesn’t necessarily have to be Matrix¬-esque to be cause for concern. Diebert at one point explicitly deals with fears of “Big Brother” by holding up “electronic” and “international” scrutiny as a check against it. But if even the all-knowing academic is quick to dismiss parts of human culture as
“secure” or “primitive,” there’s not telling which kind of damage might be wrought by hypermedia.