Today’s topic is the Dominant Media Theory. First, a few announcements. New university rules this term prohibit smoking in lecture halls during class and no food, shall I say pizza, deliveries while class is in session. Moving on ….
Enrichment reading recommendations are
The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley and
The Silent Language by Ed Hall. Great books. Not required, just great related reading.
For our purposes media is the way one or more people communicate with others. Here within the Department of Communications we study both the content (sometimes called the message) but also the medium. Scholars differ as to which is more important and which one drives the other. At this point, we will look at it from the vantage of the medium first and the implications these changes have had on the messages transmitted and the society as a whole because of these changes in the medium.
Our earliest ancestors had no language, as we know it today. They did communicate. In addition to physical contact, they had grunts, growls, yelps, and other sounds. Perhaps not the widest range of sounds, but it got a point across a bit. Scientists tell us that the brain devises concepts before it can figure out how to express them. Likewise, our early ancestors developed a verbal language to assist them in hunting because it often took more than one person to capture larger animals. Language was also useful in selecting the right fruits and vegetables. In these early days, they found that the group – call it tribe or clan or political party – can do more than a single person can. We have been doomed to civilization ever since then.
Now before you go thinking that these are primitive societies, quite complex social structures were built with an oral language alone. Consider the Homer epics that we all studied in high school were passed down for generations from one person to another without ever being written until Homer got all the credit. What was limited was how large a group could be before variations crept into the language. This group over hear (point right) started a language that they taught to (point back right) another group which in turn taught it to (point to the whole left side) two other groups. Since these groups did not interact completely every day things changed. Consider the variations in speech just within the people in this room from Atlanta drawl to Bay State clipped and no one understands those from Long Island.
One measure that many people use to measure languages is the complexity of their temporal relationships. Think back to your English class and the verb tenses you learned: Past, Present, Future, Future Perfect, &c. English has very few compared to French. Other languages have only a “now.” Some have no words for the future. Language adapts to the needs of the people using it.
As most of you have already figured out when things exist in an oral form only they shift over time. Great for rumors, bad for laws. This leads to the next stage medium, writing.
Writing developed to allow one generation to pass on what it knew to another later generation. It also allowed something to exist today and tomorrow, small things like laws. Early writing was picture based such as the cave paintings that were not too far removed from the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Early Babylonian clay tablets were a bit more portable but tended to stay in the same place until they broke. All written languages evolved over time to meet the demands of the society that created them with the exception of Korean that was devised completely by one of their Kings.
Writing along with its spelling and punctuation change over time. Some are technology based others are a reflection of changes in the language itself. These will show up as we move forward with medium evolution.
As we see, language allows a society to grow only so large before it fractures. A form of writing allows a larger society; but the general-king must be at the head of the army or at the very least, the eldest-son-the-king-to-be must head the army.
Two developments shape the next stage, an easy to transport medium for writing and a way to put multiples of this together to form something more. Today we call the first one “paper” and the second is called the “codex.” Now the king can stay in their capitol or castle and dispatch orders to the troops as well as receive reports from them. Laws can easily be copied and propagated to every settlement within the realm. Uniform administration. Histories no longer depend on memory. Tax rolls and beer recipes can be written for future reference. Bibles were written and copied over and over.
Have you noticed what’s happening as we come forward in time?
At each change of Dominant Media, more and more people are involved in creating the content and that content is spread to an ever-widening audience. This is the key to Dominant Media. From here on it just gets faster, more people are involved at every stage, and the distribution gets wider and wider. A side benefit is that education levels rise, as more people are required at all levels.
At some unknown date in China and later in 15th century Europe, the printing press was devised. Now the time consuming, error prone copying of manuscripts and Bibles can be created in one place and widely distributed. Like every change in the Dominant Media, this it enforces additional standardization in the mediums that went before it as it incorporates them into the new Dominant Media. A classic example of this is the variations in Latin glyphs (that’s a fancy term for letterforms, how you know an “A” is an “A”.)
A side note for those who favor the content analysis path is that about this time the Spanish captured several Moor libraries and discovered the works of many Arab, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman writers. The western world was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Algebra, and many other works and concepts that helped form the basis of the civilization we are in now. These previously cloistered works were now distributed throughout the western world thanks to the printing press.
End of Part 1