If we consider the fundamental mode of the existence of a communication medium as an in-between space where a subject and an object interact, the history of communication media are older—much older than we commonly think. Almost as soon as our prehistoric ancestors made tools of wood, bone, and stone to help them
physically adapt to natural conditions, there emerged meson, a between space of interaction and mediation. A simple stick, notched to indicate the number of deer in a nearby herd, or some rocks or logs arranged to mark the importance of a given territory, were communication media by which humankind enlarged their sphere of
communications. The purpose is an exchange of information, making things and ideas
―move.‖ With their world becoming more and more complex, early humans must have needed more than nonverbal gestures or the shared memory of the group to recall important things. They needed a so-called extra-somatic memory, a memory outside the body. Thus an increase in communication led to the development of communication media to exchange, store, and retrieve the growing volume of information. The
microchip of today is one such medium, a direct descendant of a notched stick or a file of rocks in old days.
According to Marshack (1999: 5-14), the art of the Old Stone Age also served as communication media. He cites archaeologists, who do not look at bone tools, figurines, and the famous cave paintings as merely for a ritual magic or an ―art for art‘s sake.‖ The re-examination of those objects, some of which dates back to the end of the last Ice Age, has revealed that those could have constituted a systematic attempt to record
information. The use of fired clay tokens, which were between one and three
centimetres in size, could also have been for keeping records of economic output and trade in several Old World societies, beginning about twelve thousand years ago, and continuing to the fourth millennium BC, before the emergence of writing. Moreover, it was not only writing or drawing on a certain ―surface‖ that was capable of keeping records and functioning in an efficient and comprehensive manner as a communication medium. The quipu, which fulfilled this purpose among the Incas of ancient Peru, is the most illuminating example (Ascher and Ascher 1981). It was a series of cords of
different length, thickness, and colors that were knotted and braided together. Each of those elements constituted information, for instance, the record of crop production, taxation, a census, and a variety of other kinds of information. Being a light, portable medium, the quipu was suitable for administration over distance and indeed was
extensively used by the Inca Empire. It is a classic example of a ―space-biased medium‖
(Innis 1995).
Writing systems, whether ancient or modern, are technologies in the sense that they are methods for arranging verbal ideas in a visual space. Bolter (2001: 15-16) argues that there are good historical as well as etymological reasons for broadening the definition of technology to include skills or means as well as machines. According to him, the Greek root of ―technology‖ is techne, and for the Greeks a techne could be an art or a craft, or ―a set of rules, system or method of making or doing, whether of the useful arts, or of the fine arts.‖ Bolter reminds us that Plato calls the alphabet itself a techne, in his dialogue the Phaedrus. It is now widely accepted that writing, a technology of arranging verbal elements in a space to be ―seen,‖ began with
accountancy. The earliest writing of all, on Sumerian clay tablets from Mesopotamia, concerns lists of raw materials and products, such as barley and beer, lists of labourers and their tasks, lists of field areas and their owners, the income and outgoings of
temples, and so forth—all with calculations concerning production levels, delivery dates, locations and debts. To quote an expert on early Sumerian tablets, writing developed ―as a direct consequence of the compelling demands of an expanding economy.‖ In other words, some time in the late 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and
administration in the early cities of Mesopotamia reached a point at which it outstripped the power of calculations and memory of the governing elite (Robinson 1999: 11), and this was exactly the same demand as the one which gave birth to the computer. In the development of writing, letters first represented the thing, the quantity or the number, and then, the idea. In the same process, the computer initially calculated huge numbers, and then proceeded to store and process knowledge.
The first truly phonetic alphabet was able to accurately and unambiguously transcribe the spoken words of any language, using only twenty to thirty signs or letters.
The Greek alphabet first came into use around 700 BC. Within 300 years the Greeks had developed from dependence on an oral tradition based on myths, to a rationalistic, logical culture which laid the foundations for logic, science, philosophy, psychology, history, political science, and individualism. The alphabet, Logan (1986: 17-20) believes, served as the operative ground for this rich development, which was characterized by the classification and abstraction of ideas. He emphasizes that alphabetic writing is based on ―visual image‖ and ―matching.‖ The very word idea is indicative of the revolution in thinking that took place with literacy. This word, which is not to be found
in Homeric Greek, has been derived from the word eidos, indicating ―visual image.‖
The alphabet, Logan sees, has unique power of separating the visual faculty from the other senses and giving dominant play to the visual. The pervasive use of uniform elements—the phonetic letters—encouraged the additional visual matching of
situational elements which formed the ground for Greek logic, geometry, and rationality.
Logan observes that the idea of truth itself, the correspondence of thing and intellect, is based on ―matching.‖ To be written down the spoken word should be broken up into its constituents of semantically meaningless phonemes, and represented by meaningless letters. The written word is therefore an ―abstraction‖ of the spoken word, which in turn is an abstraction from the holistic living experience. As a consequence, McLuhan and Logan (1977: 377) insist, the alphabet has served as a model for abstraction, division and separability, and objectification. They see that, with the alphabet, the Greek
developed the notion of objectivity and detachment, the separation of man from nature, the separation of the individual from his society, the doctrine of the autonomous, and the seat of rational thought. From that time on, according to McLuhan and Logan, the West went on to develop analytical thinking, which breaks down everything that they
encounter in their lives—for example, time, nature, and the human body—into units subject to analysis.
Basic principles of the alphabetical writing—breaking up the words into perfectly abstract and arbitrary signs—have sometimes been seen as parallel to those of current digital media. For instance, Levinson (1997: 11-17) argues that the alphabet is the first digital medium, which has been critical in the success of the diffusion of
Moses‘ monotheism. According to him, Ikhnaton, the Egyptian heretic Pharaoh, decreed a new monotheistic religion more than three millennia ago but his practice barely
survived his lifetime. In contrast, the monotheism of Moses just a century later took permanent root and went on in its Christian and Islamic transformations to convert the greater part of the world. For Levinson the difference is that, while the Pharaoh‘s was picture-based ―analogical‖ hieroglyphics, Moses used the alphabet, in effect a ―digital‖
medium, which is a far more efficient and abstract technology of communication.
Grasping this fundamental characteristic, Derrida (1997: 300) argues that the alphabet is a ―trader,‖ something like a currency. He finds that the movement of analytic abstraction in the circulation of arbitrary signs is quite parallel to that within which money is
constituted. Money replaces things by their signs, not only within a society but from one culture to another, or from one economic organization to another. That is, Derrida
maintains, why the alphabet is commercial, a trader. Just as money gives a ―common measure‖ to incommensurable objects in order to constitute them into merchandise, so the alphabetic writing transcribes heterogeneous ―signifieds‖ within a system of arbitrary and common signifiers: the living language. According to Derrida, if the sign has led to the neglect of the thing signified, then the forgetfulness of things is greatest in the usage of those perfectly abstract and arbitrary signs—money and phonetic writing.
Literacy, which is based on the technology of writing, is therefore abstract, sequential, classificatory, visual, and exactly repeatable. With literacy words have become things, or manufactured products; while in orality words are events, or occurrences (Ong 1982: 72-73). Literacy thus encourages a sense of closure, while orality nurtures addition and aggregation. Ong maintains that sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates. It is because sight situates the observer outside what he views at a distance, contrary to sound, which pours into the hearer. Ong tells that when you hear, you gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: you are at the centre of your auditory world, which envelops you, establishing you at a kind of core of sensation and existence. Sound is thus a unifying sense, which registers all the interior structures of a human. For Ong interiority and harmony are characteristics of human
consciousness and knowledge is itself ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony. The centering action of sound affects man‘s sense of the cosmos, and, for oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its centre. Ong insists that orality is therefore a form of communication closer to human world: only after print and the extensive experience with maps, human beings came to think primarily of something laid ―out‖ before their eyes. Ong‘s phenomenology of sound concurs with Merleau-Ponty‘s phenomenology of perception (2002), which sees that vision is a ―dissecting‖ sense.
Though the most efficient way of recording, storing, and exchanging
information, writing was the most privileged space of communication until the Middle Ages. No matter whether it was on papyrus, parchment, or paper, only those who were powerful enough to obtain the so-called ―craft literacy‖ could produce, access, or control written information. But after Gutenberg the mass production of books became available, and this Print Revolution brought about far greater influence than the early printers had expected. At first, printers tried to reproduce writing as it appeared in earlier manuscripts but soon they realized that a less ornate and more standardized style was desirable. The art and craft of ―calligraphy‖ declined, and a new world of
mass-produced knowledge based on ―typography‖ replaced it. Though it was a new medium, print started with what was done by older forms: the first wave, known as incunabula, included many of the older manuscript titles until texts on new science and philosophy soon became a major part of the printing industry (Eisenstein 2005: 12-40). With this innovation in the production of books, craft literacy waned fast, and this brought about revolutionary changes in almost every areas of human life.
For the subsequent two hundred years or so there have been dynamic
interminglings among humans, technology, knowledge, and industry, all of which later called as the outgrowth of Print Revolution. Ong (1982: 121) sees that print made the transformation from aural to visual more complete than writing alone. Postman (1987:
44-63) puts a great emphasis on that print brought about rapid silent reading, which was a rarity in the Middle Ages. According to Postman, as the new practice of silent reading became widespread, individuals came to be capable of acquiring knowledge on their own, and from there began the true foundation for individualism, capitalism, and modern democracy. This move also accompanied and facilitated marked changes in books themselves, which are now commonly taken for granted but in fact innovated the way for knowledge to be obtained, organized, and stored. The index is a case in point:
indexes were very rare in manuscripts, in which auditory recall helped to orient readers to texts. In the printing era, however, indexes helped to give rise to the book as a work of reference, which could be consulted at one‘s own convenience without having to be mastered in its entirety. The quintessential expression of this trend was the rise of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and grammatical texts. All contributed to the
―standardization‖ of knowledge, to be ―processed‖ and ―produced,‖ and paved the way to the electronic media of the present day. As Mumford (1963: 135) points out, the reproduction of written texts by ―mechanized‖ printing press marks the first assembly line in history.
However, information was not separable from its physical carrier until the advent of harnessable electricity for communications. The book, as well as manuscripts, passed from place to place in much the same fashion as did clay tablets or tokens, and the quipu. They ―physically‖ carried information: to move the information, one moved the medium. Communication over distance was tied to the available means of
transportation. It was only with the advent of the telegraph that messages could travel faster than messengers. This leap, from what is called a ―transportation‖ model of communication to a ―transmission‖ one, was nevertheless without precursors. Talking
drums, smoke signals, and the use of polished metal to direct sunlight (heliography) were early ways of sending messages without messengers. The ancient Greeks
developed a system of torch signals between towers several miles apart that could relay the letters of the alphabet. In Europe, just before the invention of the telegraph, ship-to-ship and ship-to-ship-to-shore semaphore inspired the construction of a land-based system, which consisted of towers that used mechanical arms to signal letters of the alphabet.
It was the dots and dashes of Morse code that enabled a definite move to the
―transmission‖ model of communication. Words began to be transformed into electrical impulses so as to travel through a network of wire; it was thus the telegraph in the 1840s that brought about what we literally call the ―wired world.‖ The telegraph first emerged as a powerful instrument of continental communication in the United States and, thanks in part to the development of transoceanic cable technology, became a global system before the end of the nineteenth century. It functioned as a background director of commerce, forwarding orders, coordinating shipments, and reporting transactions. The telegraph brought diverse regional centers of buying and selling under a unified price and market system, and led to a consideration of the creation of standard time zones.
The telegraph also worked hand-in-hand with the railroad. It was mutual benefit that made their partnership; telegraph companies found it convenient to use already established rights-of-way, and the railroads benefited as well through the telegraph‘s ability to monitor rail traffic and to warn of breakdowns. Moreover, as a new medium to influence on the old, the telegraph transformed the content of the newspaper and
journalistic practices into a ―telegraphic‖ style (Carey 1989: 201-29). Most of all, the telegraph much anticipated the telephone with its electrification of information, and the current digital communication media, with its use of binary code.
The telephone, the next major electric communications medium, emerged in the third quarter of the nineteenth century to overcome several limitations of the telegraph. As it was based on voice transmission, the telephone did not require skilled mastery of the Morse code or literacy to read the code into words. The telephone tried to do what was already the preserve of the earlier medium—the telegraph—but in ways that bypass some of the problems and complexities of its predecessor; in its early operation the telephone was as much complementary to the telegraph as competitive.
The early use of the telephone was prevalently in the urban context of business and government, the same areas in which telegraphy got its start, for the rapid two-way exchanges that could speed up business decisions. The telegraph still played an
indispensable role, facilitating the sending of detailed and often quantitative information that could be collected at a specific point for later action. In a word, the telegraph
favoured a linear logic of one thing at a time, while the telephone was an immediate and interactive medium. An interesting point is that the earliest users of the telephone were concerned with the simplicity of two-point communications, between two buildings of the same firm or between the home and office of an executive, until the 1890s, when significant growth in residential services came about (Fischer 1992).
For Marvin (1988: 209-13) the telephone was revolutionary in another way.
She looks at several experiments in what has been known as ―proto-broadcasting,‖
which means transmitting information over the telephone to multiple subscribers who listened ―on-line.‖ It started with church services and sporting events, and the famous Telefon Hirmondo in Budapest ―proto-broadcast‖ concerts, plays, children‘s fare, and stock market reports in this way. Though less successful, some imitators in North America used telephone to ―broadcast,‖ in conscious attempt to compete with the newspapers for more rapid reportage of current events, especially election results. Thus, several decades before broadcast radio became widespread, its potential was being tested by the telephone. By the end of the nineteenth century the ―wired world,‖ largely through the telephone and the telegraph, had extended the scope of previous
communication far and wide, distributing information faster and with less effort. News was packaged differently and had a new emphasis, as did popular entertainment.
These developments in communication media went hand-in-hand with a century-long transition to a predominantly industrial economy and urbanization. The decades that marked the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century saw the bicycle, automobile, and airplane emerging as significant modes of transportation. The sense of space they fostered, coupled with the experiences of the increased speed of railway and steamship travel, led to World Standard Time, the creation of time zones. In the sphere of art, Cubism and Futurism responded to or celebrated changes in space and time. Cubism broke up and repositioned space by simultaneously putting multiple perspectives onto one plane. Futurism celebrated the accelerated pace of life propelled by the new technologies. This was also a time of major public works, such as bridges, canals, and tunnels. Urban electrification integrated rail transportation with the city, as streetcar and subway lines took hold in major cities of the world. This in turn promoted further urban growth, creating suburbs and commuters.
Another key element prefacing the transition to twentieth-century industrial mass society and culture was a new awareness of people, places, and things fostered by the technology of photography. From the mid-nineteenth century photography
Another key element prefacing the transition to twentieth-century industrial mass society and culture was a new awareness of people, places, and things fostered by the technology of photography. From the mid-nineteenth century photography