What Greek philosopher thought writing would harm a student's memory? Was the poet Byron's daughter the first computer programmer? Who plays more video games, women over 18 or teenage boys?
In Alphabet to Internet: Media in Our Lives, Irving Fang looks at each medium of communication through the centuries, asking not only, "What happened?" but also, "How did society change because of this new communication medium?" and, "How are we different as a result?"
Examining the impact of different media on a broad, historical scaleâamong them mass printing, the telegraph, film, the internet, and advertisingâ Alphabet to Internet takes us from the first scratches of writing and the origins of mail to today's video games, the widespread and daily use of smartphones, and the impact of social media in political uprisings across the globe. A timeline at the end of each chapter places events in perspective and allows students to pinpoint key moments in media history.
Now in its third edition, Alphabet to Internet presents a lively, thoughtful, and accessible introduction to media history.
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In most conflicts pitting an oral culture against a written culture, the literates win a lopsided victory. Non-literates are sometimes credited with a more romanticized culture, such as the Native Americans who encountered the arriving European immigrants, but time and again, they ended up enslaved or dead. The Vikings, who made limited use of runes, and Mongols did well in their day, but the peoples who left writing behind them have influenced the future far more than the efficient warriors who once shook worlds.
Media historian Harold Innis credits writing with the establishment of ancient empires: âThe written record signed, sealed, and swiftly transmitted was essential to military power and the extension of government. Small communities were written into large states and states were consolidated into empire. The monarchies of Egypt and Persia, the Roman empire, and the city-states were essentially products of writing.â1
Today, in literate societies, individuals who lack literacy in the language of their community are disadvantaged. The remaining non-literate communities in remote corners of the world have no more power than the literate world grants them. The few pockets of oral culture that survive do so by the sufferance of the literate. They manage well enough without writing as long as they are left alone by the always more powerful possessors of writing.
Writing, the use of symbols to express thought and set information down, is as old as recorded history because, of course, that is how history was recorded. Speech and gesture preceded writing, but distance limited their reach. Cave paintings preceded writing, as did engraved marks on bones and antlers, but the meaning of their messages is mostly lost to us today. Native American smoke signals were limited. African drumsâthe original telegraphâmay have preceded writing, but, remarkable as they could be, what they transmitted and how far they could send a message were also limited. However, the scratches on Sumerian jars, Babylonian clay tablets, Egyptian stone and papyrus, Chinese silk and Indonesian lontar leaves started a process that continues with the public library, the newspaper on your doorstep, Internet blogs, tweets, and whatâs on TV tonight.
A few people, Socrates among them, disparaged literacy. Still others would control what the public should be allowed to read. Yet writing continues to be our principal form of communication beyond the range of conversation.
Of writingâs many advantages, a few stand out:
Writing stores much of humankindâs transmittable knowledge. Humans, of course, are the only animals able to store knowledge outside the body.
Knowledge no longer needs to be limited to memory. With stored writing, our potential knowledge has no limits.
Written information in a fixed form can travel across any distance. It can be organized thoughtfully and shared widely.
Written information can travel from generation to generation for centuries without change. We can and do build upon what we already know.
The literate own an immensely powerful toolâor weaponâdenied to individual illiterates and to oral societies.2
Oral Cultures
Writing and reading usually are done alone, solitary and silent activities, but in an oral culture, to communicate means to be in the presence of a listener, an audience. Oral cultures pull their members together to communicate information. To communicate by writing, no listener is present. The listener is imagined and is separated from the writer. Writing splits thought from action, as Marshall McLuhan noted.3 Without writing, the literate mind could not think as it does, said Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest and one of the foremost authorities on oral and print cultures: âMore than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.â4 When introduced into an oral society, Ong wrote, writing alters much of that society, including its culture, economics, politics, and social behavior. Once again, humankind adapts to its communication tools.
Media historian Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote, âBy its very nature, a reading public was not only more dispersed; it was also more atomistic and individualistic than a hearing one. Insofar as a traditional sense of community entailed frequent gathering together to receive a given message, this sense was probably weakened by the duplication of identical messages which brought the solitary reader to the fore.â5
To move comfortably in a world of abstractions is one of writingâs gifts to us, but only at a cost. Did we pay for that gift with the coin of memory as Socrates predicted? Bards and other members of oral cultures have a tradition of memory that astounds those of us who learn to memorize from written text. It was said that medieval minstrels could hear an hourâs recitation just once before repeating it verbatim. Yet today, having the gifts of paper and printing, indeed having computer flash memory encased in a bit of plastic, we donât care.
Knowledge in an oral culture is handed down to the next generation by parents and storytellers. Wisdom is passed to the younger generation by the elders. An oral culture bases itself upon two-way, restricted information. It has a human dimension, a human limitation. Members speak of a âhammerâ or a âsaw,â not of the more abstract âtool.â6
Writing began the shift away from the wise old elders, who could not possibly tell all that writing has stored. What we have instead is a written culture so extensive that no human being can absorb its totality. Who can, for example, recall every scrap of information in an encyclopedia or, for that matter, in a textbook for a college introductory course? No one is expected to, because the book is there. (Today we can add âor was there,â for fewer readers need a book printed on paper if an online source is there.)
Written language undergirds most of civilization, yet there have always been societies without writing. Most of the ancient world remained illiterate. And oral cultures continued to serve people. In considering the advantages of a written culture, we should remember that the praise that always accompanies literacy comes from the literate. A degree of self-satisfaction should not be overlooked.
The European religious upheaval marking the Reformation spread Gutenbergâs invention of printing through a largely illiterate population. According to one estimate, German-speaking regions in Martin Lutherâs day had as many as 90 percent illiterates and semi-literates.7 However, the printed word could still reach them by being read aloud by the literate few. Oral learning continues today as part of the literate world. In places where most people are illiterate, a literate priest or teacher can read aloud. Learning what is written by rote recitation, such as at many Muslim madrassas for young pupils, has old roots.
The Beginnings
Symbols date back to cave paintings drawn well before foragers became farmers. The Chauvet Cave in southern France holds drawings of animals that are 30,000 years old. But writing did not start in caves. The more recent alphabetic markings that Western cultures identify as writing are different than drawings because they led to the phonetic system of representing sounds that are spoken language.
Instead of marks on a surface, writing may have begun as physical tokens representing numbers and goods. The history of producing and storing information in the form of molded clay objects began about 8000 bce in Sumer, possibly in towns along the Euphrates River.8 One theory, which is not accepted by all scholars, holds that, over many centuries, small triangles, spheres, cones, and other tokens were molded to represent sheep, measures of grain, jars of oil, and other possessions. These tokens kept track of goods for the purpose of pooling and redistributing a communityâs resources.9
As settled communities grew, fed by local agriculture and trade, their need for records expanded. About 5,000 years ago, numbers broke away from other information. Mathematics was born. The symbols for sheep or jars of oil came to differ from the symbols for their quantity. Tokens were placed in round sealed clay envelopes. The need to identify an envelopeâs contents led to scratching or pressing a representation of the tokens on the surface of the envelope. It could not have taken long to figure out that with the scratches on the outside, the tokens were no longer needed. The clay envelope itself was flattened into a tablet.
Cuneiform script on a clay cone, circa 18th century BCE.
About this time the first logograms emerged, those written symbols that each represented a spoken word. These scratches were true writing, the representation of what someone might say. Pictograms, the picture symbols representing objects and concepts, and ideograms, the symbols representing ideas, would in future become Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian cuneiform, and Chinese characters. Centuries later, independently, the Mayans developed a script. Even later, so did the Aztecs. The Incas used dyed yarns attached in specific patterns to convey messages.
The Role of Priests
Recognizing the value of marks on clay or papyrus, people would eventually control them and punish anyone who intruded into their mysteries. Writing became sacred. The priests of many religions, the keepers of the mysteries of the gods, found writing to be a natural fit for them...
