Attempts to retrace the history of information-technical efforts to overcome the depths of geographical space over thousands of years have proved futile.

The divorce of the involuntary physical union of message and messenger that is seen as being typical of electric telecommunications in fact goes back to well before the discovery of electricity, at least to the first optical "telegraphy networks", systems that dramatically accelerated message transfer in comparison with messengers on horse-back. Even more important than the savings in time was the high degree of data security achieved in the presence of bandits and enemies of the state (which has always been one of the main concerns of intelligence services).

Naturally enough, the introduction of an extensive network of optical "wing telegraphs" was motivated by military needs for fast and reliable message transmission. "... its first practical application can be dated back to the time of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. Following their vain attempts to develop electrical telegraphy, the French brothers Claude and Ignace Chappe developed a system of message transfer based on a chain of visually linked "relay stations" in the form of towers fitted with pivoting wings, which could be moved to represent letters and numbers on the base of a special code." The availability of the first achromatic lenses at that time meant that considerable distances could be bridged by each stage. "In 1794, the first line was established from Paris to Lille, and after improvements had been made to the code, a national network based on Paris was established and extended to the conquered territories in the following war". 1

French telegraphy station for optical message transfer, copper engraving (circa 1790). 2

The subsequent invention of electrical telegraphy met with bitter hostility on the part of the adherents of optical telegraphy systems. The arguments put forward at that time are still part of the ongoing debate on open media and communications.

In addition to direct communication from sailor to sailor, mechanical semaphore stations 4 were also employed at sea (including wind speed indicators for coastal shipping).

"On the Austro-Hungarian Adriatic coast there are seven stations where semaphore signals based on the international semaphore code are received, e.g. from the beacons and lighthouses of Trieste and Cape Salvore (Istria) .... The list of beacons published by the Hydrographic Service of the Austro-Hungarian Navy lists eleven semaphore stations along the Adriatic coast." 5

Similar signalling systems, called by the same name, were employed for the railways.

According to Norbert Wiener, information is a separate entity along with mass and energy. According to information theory 6 it is a measure that is assigned to the signs used to convey a message. Normally the logarithm to the base 2 is employed, which produces the bit as the "pseudo unit" of information. To that extent information is a purely technical measure that is linked merely to the probability and not to the meaning of a message.

Communication is a cybernetic system. The message transfer model employed for "Winke Winke" is a standard test set-up, a discrete transmission channel in which a selection made from a finite stock of elementary symbols can be transmitted from one point to another.

Diagram of a transmission line after Shannon.

Our interest here is in the interference source, namely noise. 7

Just as the mere movement of energy causes noise, the signal edges and impulses in a signal chain are slurred wherever there is a change in the signal carrier medium (from excited particles of air to oscillating electrons, from the metal of the aerial to air ...). These erosion processes are specially pronounced where information changes its aggregate state, i.e. from electrical to mechanical, from a light impulse to modulated high-frequency radiation, and above all from digital to analog.

The basic principle of telegraphy, and especially electrical telegraphy, that is, the system established by Morse in 1843, namely breaking down the message into a sequence of information, current and zero-current, i.e. 0 and 1, corresponds perfectly to the technology of sound sampling, the digital resolution, storage and retrieval of analog sound. Sound is divorced from its physical source and thus made ubiquitously transferable and reproducible.

Module IV

"The future lies in the stars. The pace of developments in space is enormous and they are bound to impact communications on Earth. More and more satellites will be posted in space; the Norwegians will be able to watch Spanish programs, the Indians admire BBC documentaries, and the Austrians sit back and enjoy the Australian dwarf-throwing champion-ships. Television stations all over the world will divide up free channels on the satellites among themselves. The future of communications is for people with a satellite reception unit!" 8

This vision dates back to 1989, when the Austrian PTT de-regulated the use of private satellite reception units and thus "set the scene for a new age of the media in Austria". At that time the necessary equipment (a dish with a diameter of 60-150 cm plus converter and receiver) was to be had for between 2,700 and 3,600 dollars (plus a fee of 11 dollars for the licence from the PTT and a monthly charge of just under 2 dollars). The programs of the American news channel CNN were available via Intelsat, but only if you had a decoder and were willing to pay 250 dollars a month (the SDI visions of a certain R. Reagan having died a natural death in the meantime).

Since 1991 at the very latest we have all known that the future lies - if not in the stars - then at least in a near-earth orbit. The media-tailored production known as the Gulf War showed how electronic space, as the real battlefield of the war, moving far beyond the deserts of the Near East, had left behind its global and planetary dimension to occupy an orbital dimension.

The trajectory of the Scud rockets launched by Iraq was monitored by US satellites and transmitted in real time to a computing centre at the Pentagon, where the navigation data required for the Patriot ground-to-air missiles were calculated and communicated via satellite to the missile bases in Israel and Saudi Arabia, where the missiles were then launched and controlled. A routine scenario of global telecommunications! What was also shown was an interesting phenomenon in terms of growing media compatibility.

No commentary was required. The images from the video cameras mounted on the remote-controlled missiles were fully compatible with television technology, as if they had been fitted - just like the on-board cameras used in Formula 1 broadcasting - especially for the purpose of transmission and distribution by mass-media. In the meantime the real data of war recorded by the computers have been profitably recycled as computer games.

The compatibility (= interchangeability) of the technologies leads to compatibility (= consistency) of the images. 9

At the data interface linked to the info highway, our perception of different media (radio, cassette, record, CD, television, video, diskette) fuses in the presence of a single terminal, a uni-medium - media compost in a state of terminal compatibility. On the technological side, there is now just one common carrier medium, with standard encoding systems and transparent transmission protocols, and on the side of the user a whole complex of functions is now compressed into a screen, loudspeaker and remote control. The media, the protagonists of the abrupt cultural and social restructuring of our post-industrial society, have become a toy of themselves .

With the introduction of interactive television, this medium will cease to exist in the form with which we are familiar. It will become a passive medium, a form of videotheque with remote ordering, a control box (and compliant agent) for teleshopping, telegames etc. Individual access to pause, forward wind, rewind and repeat will rob the medium of its inviolable and inexorable dynamism (a new image every 40 ms, or 2,160,000 images per day). 10

What will then be lost is its independent function as a source of political information and culture as well as presentation of a selected programme (of entertainment). The familiar stability of the media derived from their mutual delimitations, from the various material properties of their different carriers, and from the influence of those properties on the information carried (mediated). If this information is broken down (sampled) in mutually accessible (processable) codes (and can thus be written in (modulated) on one and the same common carrier), the various media lose their distinct contours and merge into each other. They become unstable, permeable; the information diffuses and seeps away.

The points at which such deformation occurs are preferred culmination centres of information, options for intersection, correspondence, fluid nodes in a hypermedia network. What we are faced with, therefore, are correlating fields of variables connected by dynamic links, complex systems characterized by participatory control of the interrelationships, of behaviour - in short, a new type of media.

Of course, the digital message no longer travels along railway tracks or by plane, but along copper wires, optical waveguides, or high-frequency electro-magnetic waves. The resultant concept of global or orbital simultaneity only applies in the context of those mechanical vehicles, however.
An electro-magnetic wave propagated at the speed of light takes a good 250 ms to travel from the earth to a satellite and back 11 (not including delays at the interfaces and transponders). At a metronome rate of 120, that is the equivalent of a quaver. In the same period of time an average processor handles almost 10 million instructions. The resulting phase shift and interferences represent the variance between target and actual value at which the cybernetic system begins to oscillate. 12 There the divorce in the local co-incidence of cause and effect becomes a main design parameter which can penetrate the hermetic surface tension of the medium.

In the Renaissance, the concept of personal identity was based on the physical experience of space and time, related to what the subject found within his or her own skin. In the case of telecommunications the scale has changed; one is always as big as the medium which permits one to be telepresent (represented). A non-linear, probabilistic relational field, of the type created by the electronic, telematic space of Internet, on the other hand, derives its identity from the process of interaction between the individual elements. The size, the volume of such a space does not depend on the geographic expanse of the telnet links created, on whether you are connected to someone on the other side of the world or to your neighbour. It is the number of users with on-line status that is decisive. Vertical hierarchical structures are transformed into horizontal networked parallel realities.The real parameter for the size of electronic space is the speed of propagation of the electro-magnetic waves. The perspectives of Renaissance geometry are being replaced by the metrics of time.
Metrics [from the Greek metrikè téchne, the "art of measuring"] - in mathematics the structural property of a space through which the distance (interval) between two points in that space is measured.