The Beginning of Media

1. The Beginning of Media Speech, Symbols, Tokens & Writing

2. Why study history? • To make the familiar strange • To understand the social and technological scaffolding supporting present-day society • To identify recurring dynamics • To see what makes us human--communication--and how changes in communication change what it means to be human

3. History as linear progress • Typical history = discrete events as linear progress:oral  writing  print  electronic • But gesture, oral communication, iconic representation, and hand-written script (“old” forms of communication) remain the foundation of much of our social world

4. History as archeology • Archeological approach: analyze the selective accumulation and sedimentation of technologies • “Technologies” = embodiments of habit which we then inhabit with our bodies (J. MacGregor Wise) • revolving door • inscription of moon phases or seasons • telephone

5. Questions to ask of history • What media technologies were available in a particular historical context? • How did new media transform the “older” media environment? • Who used the available technologies? What were they used for? Who controlled them? • What forms of knowledge production and distribution did they facilitate? • What forms of social organization did they make possible?

6. Before writing (~45,000-3,000 B.C.) • Oral communication (performance) • Ritual inscription • Tokens Two key shifts toward abstraction: 1. oral representation inscription 2. iconic representation  phonetics

7. Writing: social implications • inscription  communication at a distance • record-keeping  sense of history • abstraction  reflection, analysis • literacy  democratization of knowledgebut also: new literate elite; bureaucratic control • media technology as arena of struggle

8. Oral communication • sound is evanescent (can’t be stopped) • spoken words = powerful, dynamic events • naming facilitates control • but evanescence limits thought and memory •  need for interlocutors, mnemonics, and formulas (e.g., epic, song, ballad)

9. Oral culture • limited spatial extension • cyclical sense of time • rigid social hierarchy • community, not individuality • stasis, not change

10. Oral vs. written culture • “Sight isolates, sound incorporates.” (Walter Ong) • “sight situates the observer outside what he views” • “sound pours into the hearer” • Oral culture: unifying, centralizing, interiorizing, aggregative, conservative • Written culture: analytic, dissecting, abstract, dynamic

11. The advent of symbolic communication (=humanness?)

12. Symbols (45,000 BC-present)

13. Early human symbol use celebration, ritual, and magic record-keeping, prediction, and instruction? in any case, expression

14. Tokens (8000-3200 BC)

15. Token-based societies hunting/gathering  agriculture pooling & redistribution of community resources need for complex organization and control beginnings of tribute and “government” tokens also status symbols (sound familiar?)

16. Other “ancient” accounting systems Chinese ku-wan (gesture pictures) notched or painted sticks (Native Am) Inca quipu

17. The transition to writing 1: abstraction symbol of token (mark resembling imprint)  trace of token (imprint on clay)  physical token (sheep token)  physical object (sheep)

18. The transition to writing, contd. symbol of sound (phoneme)  symbol of idea (ideograph)  symbol of token or object (pictograph)

19. Pictographic writing • around 3300 BC: tablets begin to replace tokens in Sumer • eventually gives rise to cuneiform writing, Egyptian hieroglyphics

20. Ideographic writing (3100-1800 BC) • Babylonians build on Sumerian and Akkadian pictographic writing, combine ideographs with syllabary • develop abstract scientific and philosophical treatises, laws • Chinese still uses ideographic writing

21. Phonetic writing (1800 BC - present) • Phoenecians revise Sumerian writing, develop symbols for sounds • Phoenecians introduce writing to Greeks (~1000 BC) • Greeks modify phoenecian alphabet, develop dynamic written culture and new levels of philosophical abstraction, artistic literature (~800-300 BC)

22. The transformation of writing media • stone and chisel • clay and sylus • papyrus and brush • parchment and quill • paper and pen

23. Writing and social change • “thought gains lightness” (Innis) • oral performance of common values written codes and sacred texts •  new status elite: scribes • new spatial extension of control and coordination: agricultural tribute-based civilizations • new sense of time: history “begins”

24. Writing and social change • writing  new forms of control and stratification • but also, democratization of knowledge production, circulation, and storage  wider debate, new ideas, political and cultural change (Greek libraries) • later technologies (printing press, telecommunications, electronics) will also have this dual effect

25. Image credits 1 Tokens and clay envelopeDenise Schmandt-Besserat, “Accounting With Tokens in the Ancient Near East”(http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc/numerals/dsb1.html#figure_1). 2 Garment care symbols Rowent, USA (http://www.rowentausa.com/)Ironing example drawn from Andrew Robinson, “The Origins of Writing,” in Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society, 3rd ed. Edited by David Crowley and Paul Heyer (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999). 3. Marketplace icons Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) 4. Species timeline Washington State University World Civilizations course (http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vwsu/gened/learn-modules/top_longfor/timeline/timeline.html) 5. Lascaux cave painting Conseil Régional d'Aquitaine, France (http://www.cr-aquitaine.fr/main.asp).