Control: Technology and the Direction of Human Communication
The main ideas from this week’s studies are about the Four Major Eras of technology and social change and how they correspond with each other in a society. The Four Eras include; Tribal/Oral, Civilizing World/ Scribal Phase, Modern Era/ Modernity, and Postmodern Era. The idea of these four eras and how they developed through different “machines” and technology, known as a medium comes from the Joshua Meyrowitz’s Media Evolution and Cultural Change. In this chapter, he discusses his “Medium Theory”, which is a theory that Meyrowitz developed to examine how means of human expression and communication affect the meaning of human communication. In simpler words, medium theory looks at how different mediums, also known as, forms of communication, affect how humans communicate. Makes sense, right? These medium forms have a strong effect in encouraging new forms of social organization and undermine old ones. Meyrowitz develops his theory by offering names of philosophers, scholars, mathematicians, and engineers who engaged in medium theory, although they did not know it at the time. Although Marshal McLuhan is most commonly known as the father of media theory and changes of forms of communication on human communication, Meyrowitz offers Socrates as the first medium theorist (469–399). Socrates claimed that written communication was drastically different than oral communication and that reading would “alter humans’ use of their memories, decrease interactive dialogue in favor of extended monologues, and lead to new forms of communication that were not tailored to specific audiences” (Meyrowitz, 53). Meyrowitz goes on to claim other scholars as the first medium theorists and provides examples of how certain medium have been altering human communication since the first forms of reading and writing. Medium theory can be traced all the way back to the beginning of human communication, and the rough outline of the theory begins during the Tribal/ Oral Era.
In the Oral Era, the sense of community and society was at its beginnings and was reserved to small communities and tribes. People were born, grew up and died in one place. It would be rare for them to stray far from the community and communication to outsiders was limited due to a fast range of languages that varied from community to community, no matter how close or far they were settled from each other. Politics, education and hierarchies had not yet been developed. Elders made the big decisions because they had the most experience. Kids were taught songs, rhymes and stories to remember and maintain their knowledge, values and customs. There was no sense of individuality, which resulted in little differentiation between people. It wasn’t until reading and writing that individuality, hierarchies, politics and education would come to existence and cause the evolution to the Scribal Era.
The Scribal Era was the time period in which the world began to see civilization. Writing and reading became more popular and were able to separate the educated from the uneducated. Those who could read and write could experience more and gain more information, which ultimately lead to their positions of power and knowledge control, creating a hierarchy in society. The Scribal Era came to an end with the development of the first mass media technology, the printing press.
Around 1435, Johannes Gutenberg developed the first mass media tool, the printing press. The printing press enabled mass production of books which eventually lead to a rapid spread and standardization of knowledge and language. The printing press can be considered as the medium that changed human communication forever. Not only did it lead to more technologies for mass media, but it leads to the civilization across all of Europe. Because all the books were printed in the same language it made it so that everyone read and began to speak the same language. This lead to the development and increase of travel, trading and the free markets. People could interact with other communities outside of their home, they could ask questions, work together and develop even more technology and knowledge about the world. The standardization of language and education leads to a connection across Europe and leads to the idea of a nation. Mass media helps to spread common knowledge and is the leading way to receive news today, whether it is social media, television or the newspaper. The printing press allowed for the spread of common knowledge and inspired The Enlightenment period in which science and intellectualism would spark an array of technology and development.
Each medium has a different effect on the way humans communicate. Reading will have a different affect than spending all your time on social media, but they both have a way of influencing how people communicate with one another. Without medium, we may still be in a modified Oral Era of communication and societal development. Medium changes cultural and will continue to sway human communication in both positive and negative ways.
