TECHNOLOGY
Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.- Susan Sontag
There is little doubt that technology is an important aspect of the communication environment, but there is considerable dispute as to the proper scope of the term "technology". In the words of scholar Raymond Williams ...[P]eople often speak of a new world, a new society, a new phase of history, being created - 'brought about' - by this or that new technology: the steam-engine, the automobile, the atomic bomb. Most of us know what is generally implied when such things are said. But this may be the central difficulty: that we have got so used to statements of this general kind, in our most ordinary discussions, that we can fail to realize their specific meanings.
For behind all such statements lie some of the most difficult and most unresolved historical and philosophical questions. Yet the questions are not posed by the statements; indeed they are ordinarily masked by them. Thus we often discuss, with animation, this or that 'effect' of television, or the kinds of social behavior, the cultural and psychological conditions, which television has 'led to', without feeling ourselves obliged to ask whether it is reasonable to describe any technology as a cause ....
- Williams Given this situation, we should not be surprised that there is much misunderstanding of and debate about the nature of human technology. Perhaps the most widely accepted viewpoint is known as technological determinism. This view asserts that human beings are naturally curious creatures who are driven to explore and invent. As the new technologies that result from these explorations and inventions become widely known and available for use, they bring about changes in the daily lives of the people who use them. This view is deterministic because it implies that technology is an inescapable part of human life -- humans can learn to live with their technologies, or at least they can try to, but they cannot stop themselves from inventing technologies. Theories of technological determinism range from pure pessimism -- the opinion that technology will eventually result in the destruction of the human race -- to pure optimism -- the opinion that humans will eventually create technologies that lead to a utopian existence for everyone. Many books have been written from these and other points of view, and, of course, there is not sufficient time to review all of them here. Instead, this tutorial highlights the work of four scholars who have contributed to the study of technology and human communication. Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Elizabeth Eisenstein have been chosen because their work is interrelated, and because it demonstrates the process by which communication scholars develop their opinions and explanations. INNIS: MEDIA, SOCIETY, TIME AND SPACEHarold Innis was a Canadian economist and historian who was particularly interested in the study of societal change and whose theories focus on general principles that might explain why some societies collapse while others remain stable for long periods of time.
Innis argues that
communication media play a significant role in the overall organization of a
society because the dominant media of expression influence the kinds of human
relationships that can develop among the members of the society. In this regard
he divides media into two categories, time-binding and space-binding.
Time-binding media tend to focus the attention of the society on its
past. Such societies are often controlled by strong philosophical or religious
institutions, are very concerned with preserving their traditional way of life,
are not open to change, and are usually not very interested in conquest and
expansion.
Speech is an example of a time-binding medium. Societies whose only means of
communication is the spoken word cannot communicate accurately over long
distances, nor do they have access to printed record-keeping. This limits their
ability to establish far-ranging governmental institutions. Members of such
societies tend not to travel very much, or very far, and most people's daily
lives are focused on family and religious traditions - the past is a very
important part of everyday life.
Space-binding media tend to focus the attention of a on its borders.
Such societies are often organized by means of a central, non-religious
government. Rather than traditions, such societies have laws which are written
down and subject to change. These societies are inclined to expand by means of
trade or conquest. At least some members of the society travel frequently. In
such a society day-to-day life is concerned with the present and the future -
with politics and economics and "improving oneself."
Print is an example
of a space-binding medium. When traditions can be written down, they become
"laws." Everyone who can read has access to the laws, and everybody notices when
they change. Print encourages the development of economic institutions such as
banks and trading companies, and also the development of bureaucratic
government. These tend to focus attention on economic growth and on the "state."
Innis proposes a process by which the development of new
media encourages change. Within a society the dominant medium of communication
will be controlled by the dominant political group who will use the media to
support the ideas and beliefs of the dominant group and make all others
illegitimate. In this situation, the appearance of a new media of communication
provides a vehicle by which those opposed to the dominant group could initiate
social change. An example of this is the use of the printing press by the
Protestant Christians in opposition to the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church
during the Protestant Reformation. 
Changes in
ancient Egyptian civilization
Innis's ideas became the starting point for a number of other communication
scholars. Marshall McLuhan extended Innis's concept of social change; Elizabeth
Eisenstein investigated the effect of the development of printing on the social
structure of Europe in the late-15th century; and Walter Ong explored the ways
in which oral and literate societies construct their social realities.
MCLUHAN: THE BALANCE OF THE SENSESIn a culture like ours,
long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it
is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical
fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and
social consequences of any medium-that is, of any extension of ourselves-result
from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by ... any new
technology. Marshall McLuhan's genius for phrase-making (among his creations: The Medium is the Message, The Global Village, Hot and Cool media, radio as The Tribal Drum...) made him something of a phenomenon in the late 1960s when he was treated in the news media as a prophet of the coming electronic age. Although his writing is sometimes difficult to decode, he was responsible for a dramatic shift in the way we view technology. In the words of Walter Ong McLuhan attracted the attention not only of scholars but also of people working in the mass media, of business leaders, and of the generally informed public, largely because of fascination with his many gnomic or oracular pronouncements, too glib for some readers, but often deeply perceptive. ...Few people have had so stimulating an effect as Marshall McLuhan on so many diverse minds, including those who disagreed with him or believed they did.
Although McLuhan built on the ideas of Innis, he took a very different approach to the study of media. Whereas Innis focused on the role of media in shaping the overall structure of society, McLuhan focused on the ways that different media might affect people's sensory perceptions. McLuhan's work is difficult to summarize, however, his main argument asserts that all technologies are extensions of the human body -- the automobile is an extension of the legs, the hammer is an extension of the arm, eyeglasses are extensions of the eyes, the telephone is an extension of the voice and the ear, and so on. This model of human technology produces original and intriguing observations, including, for example, that:
- Speech was the first technology because it extended, or "outered" the inner voice of an individual's thoughts,
- By means of electronic technology human beings have begun to extend themselves beyond their original bodies - telephones to speak, television to see, radio to hear, and so on - and in doing so they become physically larger,
- Computer technology is an extension of the human central nervous system, thus humans are moving in the direction of extending their brains outside of their bodies,
- Electronic technology "speeds up" human lives by bringing distant events close,
- Society's adoption of electronic media de-emphasizes dependence on print media, and this is reorganizing the social structure towards a more orally oriented social reality.
This latter assertion may be the most significant of McLuhan's insights. When he says, "The medium is the message," he agrees with Innis that a society's choice of communication media greatly influences its social organization. However, McLuhan extends Innis's concept to suggest that the media in use within a society affect its members at the level of the individual. Each of us must communicate via the available media, says McLuhan, and as these media make different demands on our senses, they directly affect our concepts, and through these our social reality.
This assertion is still being debated, but there is evidence that might be taken to support McLuhan's claim. In today's United States if people want to "get in touch" with one another, they seldom write letters - they pick up the telephone and make a call. The growing use of portable and cellular phones is well documented, and as in the medieval village, one need never be "out of touch."
Media are economic staples
For example, within the United States there is a growing debate as to whether
"access to information media" is the right of every citizen. Our society already
believes that access to water, sewer and power facilities is so important that
we have declared these to be government regulated public utilities. 
Some people argue
that as more and more services are carried out via cable systems and computer
networks, that these, too, should be regulated as public utilities. The debate
on this issue involves questions about public access to public information, the
right to privacy, the cost of setting up "information utilities" and so on. This
issue is important not only to those who might be denied access, but also to
media organizations who might be subject to government regulation in the future.
Who owns our eyes and ears?
Perhaps the best way to encounter McLuhan is to read his books and think
about his observations and comments. Question #1503 presents a series of
quotations from Understanding Media for your consideration.
ONG: HOW ORAL REALITY DIFFERS FROM LITERATE REALITYInnis argued that a
society's dominant communication media affect the organizational structure of
the society and influence the its culture. McLuhan expanded that view to include
the notion that all technological devices are communication media. On the other
hand, Walter J. Ong narrows Innis' view to focus on the changes brought about in
a society as it shifts from a dependency on speech to writing.
Ong asks a very interesting question - what would life be like in a society that has no ability to write. Ong calls such a society a "primary oral society," and his analyses of what he calls "the characteristics of orally based thought" provide much insight into this aspect of the communication environment. In his book Orality and Literacy Ong points out that it is very difficult for people such as ourselves - people who live in a chirographic society - to imagine what life would be like without writing. This section summarizes some of his observations. DEPENDENCE ON MEMORYWhat would it be like to live in a society where no one knows how to write? For one thing, such a society would have no way of keeping track of things other than by remembering them. In the words of Walter Ong
Try to imagine a culture in which no one has ever 'looked up' anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression 'to look up something' is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning.Participants in a culture that surrounds them with the artifacts of writing seldom think of the importance of such documents as dictionaries, indices, charts and tables. But these are very important to the life of the society. For example, if a society had no way of writing down the words in its vocabulary how would it keep track of them? Webster's Third New World Dictionary (1971) states in its Preface that it could have included 'many times' more than the 450,000 words it does include. Assuming that 'many times' must mean at least three time, and rounding out the figures, we can understand that the editors have on hand a record of some million and a half words used in print in English. Oral languages and oral dialects can get along with perhaps five thousand words or less. Suppose that a modern society decided to eliminate 90% of the words in its dictionary? How would that change the lives of the people? As difficult as it is to imagine this, the development of writing brought other, more subtle, changes. Print created a new sense of the private ownership of words. Persons in a primary oral culture can entertain some sense of proprietary rights to a poem, but such a sense is rare and ordinarily enfeebled by the common share of lore, formulas, and themes on which everyone draws. With writing, resentment at plagiarism begins to develop. Spoken words cannot be seen, and they cease to exist soon after they are spoken. Writing encouraged people to think of words as physical objects, and for the first time it became possible to imagine that people "owned" their words. THE NECESSITY OF CONSERVATIVE TRADITIONSWhen a people can only keep track of its history by, in effect, repeating the same things over and over again to insure that that remain remembered, new ideas are difficult to accept.
Lacking the ability to keep records, oral peoples have to constantly repeat the things that are most important to them. Since in a primary oral culture conceptualized knowledge that is not repeated aloud soon vanishes, oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages.
Notice how this ties in
with Innis' notion of time-binding media. With the advent of writing a culture's
history and its rules can be recorded, and more importantly, easily edited.
Corrections in oral performance tend to be counterproductive,
to render the speaker unconvincing. So you keep them to a minimum or avoid them
altogether. In writing, corrections can be tremendously productive, for how can
the reader know they have ever been made? With written records, however, different versions can be compared,
corrections made, new ideas criticised. In this way the development of writing
promotes change.
EMPATHIC AND PARTICIPATORYTo participate in the life of an oral society
a person must be where the words are being spoken. More than that, those
who are present at an oral presentation interact with the speaker who must be
sensitive to the needs of the audience.
...oral
memorization is subject to variation from direct social pressures. Narrators
narrate what audiences call for or will tolerate. When the market for a printed
book declines, the presses stop rolling but thousands of copies may remain.
- Ong No one is able to take a copy of the presentation home for later review. Consequently, those who were there have the sense of having participated in a unique event. Writing brings into existence the role of the "reader" -- a person who is able to imagine having attended the event from a distance. Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity,' in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing.
- OngWriting also brings into existence the role of the "author" -- someone who is not present at the event and who therefore can speak without regard for the needs of the audience. There is no way to directly refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before. this is one reason why 'the book says' is popularly tantamount to 'it is true'. It is also one reason why books have been burnt.
- Ong PRACTICAL AND FOCUSED ON THE PRESENTOng points out that primary oral societies make little use of abstraction.
In the total absence of any writing, there is nothing outside the thinker, no text, to enable him or her to produce the same line of thought again or even to verify whether he or she has done so or not.
- Ong This means that oral societies do not "think" in the same ways that literate societies do. ...an oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self-analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought. In other words, oral and literate societies operate by means of different logics. Writing gives us a different way of looking at the world -- indeed, a different reality. To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.
EISENSTEIN: THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINT MEDIA AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN EUROPEThe sweeping arguments of Innis, McLuhan and Ong are thought provoking, but they lack the thorough accumulation of facts that would prove their case. Historian Elizabeth Eisenstein's detailed study of the impact of print technology in the day-to-day lives of Europeans of the time makes it clear that the new technology did bring great social change. Eisenstein credits McLuhan with raising her interest in the subject.
...McLuhan raised a number of questions abut the actual effects of the advent of printing. They would have to be answered before other matters could be explored. What were some of the most important consequences of the shift from script to print? Anticipating a strenuous effort to master a large literature, I began to investigate what had been written on this obviously important subject. To my surprise, I did not find even a small literature available for consultation. No one had yet attempted to survey the consequences of the fifteenth-century communications shift. Eisenstein's research deals with the impact of the newly developing medium of print on the societies of Western Europe at the close of the Medieval period. She begins with an investigation of the establishment of printing presses in the Rhineland area of Germany in the 1460s, traces the rapid expansion of presses throughout Western Europe and the changes that this brought to the scribal culture of the time, and then identifies a number of social transformations that followed the advent of printing. To set the scene, recall that it was in 1431 that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, and in 1453 that the Turks captured Constantinople, which they then named Istanbul, thus ending the reign of the Eastern Roman Empire. Columbus had not yet sailed, and the Spanish Inquisition was not yet under way. This period of time, which we mark as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, was to give birth to tremendous social change. Eisenstein's work shows that the development of print was an important factor in shaping that change. This section summarizes some of her conclusions. ALTERED RELIGIOUS PRACTICEEisenstein notes that the wide distribution of Martin Luther's works by his followers came as a surprise to Luther himself. In fact the rapid spread of his words seems to have surprised everyone -- it is regarded as the first mass media campaign in history.
Although the anti-Turkish crusade was thus the "first religious movement" to make use of print, Protestantism surely was the first fully to exploit its potential as a mass medium. It was also the first movement of any kind, religious or secular, to use the new presses for overt propaganda and agitation against an established institution. By pamphleteering directed at arousing popular support and aimed at readers who were unversed in Latin, the reformers unwittingly pioneered as revolutionaries and rabble rousers.
-Eienstein Although the wars that followed were perhaps the most dramatic evidence of the Protestants' successful propaganda campaign, many other religious changes were initiated by the presence of print. Bibles, which previously had been available only to those trained in Latin, were translated into local languages and reproduced at will. In Europe the different Christian churches reacted differently to this -- the Protestants by accepting the notion the Bible should be read by individuals in their own languages, and the Roman Catholics by declaring that only the one, official, Latin version could be accepted as true. This situation led inevitably to other changes in the rituals and routines of Christian worship, eventually bringing about major changes in religious practiceMADE POSSIBLE AND PROMOTED UNIVERSAL LITERACYIn the process of translating Bibles, the printers also established standards for the languages in which they worked. Prior to the invention of print, there were many versions of spoken "German," for example. But as printers turned the spoken words into a written paradigm, translated Latin works into this paradigm, and distributed the new works, the paradigm became widely accepted as the one and only German dictionary. Different varieties of spoken German were accepted as dialects, but there was only one written version. Standard versions of written French, Spanish, Italian, and English soon appeared by similar means.
The
push to make the written word available to people in their own languages
impacted first on the most highly educated members of the society.
It was not only the craftsman outside universities who profited from the new opportunities to teach himself. Of equal importance was the chance extended to bright undergraduates to reach beyond their teachers' grasp. Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or academic skill. Instead, they could swiftly achieve master on their own....
- Eienstein 34 As reading became more important, more people learned to read. Eventually, this gave rise to the belief that the skill of reading is essential to the social health of the nation. The need to teach everyone how to read is one of the forces that produced generalized public education for all citizens. SUPPORTED DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE, INVENTION, INDUSTRY AND EXPLORATIONIn oral societies only what has been remembered can be known.
Who could ascertain precisely what was known - either to prior generations within a given region or to contemporary inhabitants of far-off lands?... Exact determination must have been impossible before printing. Progressive refinement of certain arts and skills could and did occur. But no sophisticated technique could be securely established, permanently recorded, and stored for subsequent retrieval. Before trying to account for an "idea" of progress, we might look more closely at the new dynamic process entailed in a continuous accumulation of fixed records. Permanence introduced a new form of progressive change. The preservation of the old, in brief, was a prerequisite for a tradition of the new.
- Eienstein 86
With no way of keeping
extensive records, and no way of transmitting large amounts of information over
distances, oral societies do not develop scientific and industrial
infrastructures. However, as records began to accumulate in Europe after the
invention of print, theorists gained the ability to "compare notes." This was
particularly effective with regard to scientific research - a method that
depends on constant review of recorded data.
Similarly, as craftsmen could now try out new ways of building things and
pass the ideas that worked on to others. Thus, scientific investigation and
technological development accelerated. The ability to record astrological and
geographical observations, in the form of charts and maps, promoted the growth
of science and of exploration of new lands. Thus, the development of literacy
led to the industrial revolution and the European discovery of distant lands.
ENCOURAGED THE GROWTH OF CENTRALIZED GOVERNMENTThe institution of taxes
had existed for centuries, usually in the form of a percentage of one's produce
set aside for the local ruler. But now, for the first time, there was paperwork.
Accountants and bankers and lawyers and bureaucrats - all of these, and the
institutions that they represent, came into existence because of the development
of print. 