Four Eras and a Printing Press Walk Into a Bar
In his article Media Evolution and Cultural Change, media studies scholar Joshua Meyrowitz’s describes the different mediums of communication throughout four eras of human existence, and how each one has molded our society into what it is today.
Each era has their own unique set of characteristics that helped their successor communicate more effectively and in a more diverse fashion. The Tribal Society era was based around oral communication, whereas the era that followed (the Scribal Phase according to Meyrowitz) started to develop the first decipherable written languages although writing still was not a well-known skill. Riding the coattails of the Scribal Phase came the Modern Era, which is where we started beginning to see the formation of our present-day society. Beginning with the Age of Enlightenment, this era continued through Industrialization, the 20th century, and is ultimately what set the tone for what Meyrowitz calls the Postmodern Era.
The first era that Meyrowitz discusses is what he calls the Tribal Society, which was formed strictly around our species’ earliest form of communication: oral communication. In the earliest and most primitive era that Meyrowitz outlines, he explains how these people had to rely upon nothing but spoken word to communicate with one another, until later on in the era when our earliest forms of writing were being created. Due to the lack of an widely-known written language, these groups would primarily learn through experience and storytelling passed down from generation to generation.
These early tribes were very close-knit communities with tribe members putting the values of the community over their own personal interests. So, basically the exact opposite of what we have in America today. As far removed as the world may seem from cultures like this, there are many different indigenous tribes scattered throughout the whole globe with values that parallel the ones found in the era of oral communication.

The next era defined by Meyrowitz is what he deemed to be the “Civilizing World”, also known as the Scribal Phase. This era is where we begin seeing a resemblance to the world we live in today, with the Scribal Phase ushering writing more to the forefront of communication than ever before. Although oral communication was still the dominant form of communicating with others, a very select few of skilled intellectuals were learning how to read and write, eventually crafting some of the first books that were ever recorded. Having a written language provided society with the ability to write down more complex ideas, keep records for current events that were occurring, and allowed for people to start creating a larger sense of individuality for themselves through introspective writings.
Throughout the Scribal Phase, writing would continue to gain leverage amongst civilians and opened the world up to new ways of learning. In their early years, books were extremely rare and expensive commodities, only for those who could afford them, as well as understand them. But as reading and writing started creeping into the masses, people began to recognize the importance of this tool. Due to this newfound (and unquenchable) thirst for words paired with the extremely slow rate at which books were produced, the world recognized they needed to expedite the process and make books available to all. Enter, the printing press.

The invention of the printing press can be pointed to as one of (if not the) most integral creations when discussing the rise of the production of mass media, as well as what has led us to where we are today. The printing press allowed for the mass production of books, which in turn not only made books far cheaper and more accessible due to the quantities they were able to create, but it also promoted a new form of education to the masses. Rather than only having the rich become educated, this allowed for people of all social castes to purchase books for themselves, thereby educating themselves and shrinking the disparity between the lowest and highest classes in a given society.
Along with allowing people to educate themselves the printing press also led to the creation of newspapers, which provided people with the gift to become more well-informed citizens. Rather than listening strictly to the higher-ups in society, people were finally able to read the latest news on their own time and could then think about certain issues for themselves. People’s ability to think for themselves is vital in any sort of reform within a government, and without it, who knows where we’d be as a society today?
