The Revolution of the Impossible…
Can you imagine growing up during a time period of no technology? At one point in life, technology was not even a word within the vocabulary, since it did not exist. A lot has changed from the time period of oral society to now, the postmodern era. After reading the article, Media, Evolution, and Cultural Change by Joshua Meyrowitz and watching the film Matter of Fact: printing Transforms Knowledge, I realized how our generation was created from many years before us. Throughout the article by Meyrowitz, he mentions the idea of ‘medium theory’ which helps the readers understand the different stages of the four eras. Meyrowitz states that he exaggerates on “medium” as singular to “encourage or constrain forms of interaction and social organization”. Therefore, different forms of mediums can initiate or end personal relationships for different situations or how the mediums have interplayed with our own thinking. These different mediums are continuously presented throughout the article, through the four different eras; oral, scribal, modern, and postmodern.

The first era that is mentioned is the “Traditional Oral Cultures”, this is where an individual’s interactions were solely focused on human interaction, nothing but communication. During this time, individuals relied on each other to form relationships. Everything that people were taught during this time was through songs, poetry, rhyme and many other forms of oral communication (Soha). Since there was such a lack of knowledge during this time period, there had been no social hierarchies, rather people were just in different tribes. It Is shocking to see how far we have come, today, people are often given different power based on their race, gender, etc. but this was the exact opposite during this time. The only distinction between the tribes is that elders know more about knowledge since they have gone through more experiences. From this, people put a lot of their focus on learning from their elders, since they were the closest thing people had to textbooks. From today's point of view, this lifestyle would be unimaginable, we depend on writing everything down to remember our daily task or memories. It was not until the Scribal era when people slowly began to write and read.

As for the next era, the Scribal era, it was the beginning of where writing and reading began to transition. During the Scribal era, social hierarchies began to transform, power was becoming more prominent for people during this time. Being able to read and write was very limited, people with more power were more obligated to be able to learn how to read and write since the different texts were very expensive. A lot of the texts revolved around the Catholic Church, the only place for everyone to come together to read and write was at the Catholic Church. Overall, the Scribal era was still very dependent on oral communication, but some writing and reading had been introduced to only those who were worthy.
After people were beginning to grasp writing and reading, the age of the Enlightenment ended the Scribal era, which leads to the “Modern Print Culture” era. This is because the printing press was introduced, which enabled the mass production of different mediums. The printing press led to different mediums to be introduced, some examples are; newspapers, radio, television, film, etc. Therefore, many people were becoming more involved with being educated about the world around them, they had so many options to interact with one another through all these new mediums. From the start of the printing press being created, it shaped our world today to flourish to so many new mediums. During the start of the printing press, newspapers were an important way to obtain news. To create the newspapers meant many people would have more jobs, look at the Boston Globe. At one point the Boston Globe was such a successful company, I had a friend working here this past summer. People were being laid off left and right since many people are now using the internet to gather information. It is incredible to see how far our world has come from the creation of the printing press, which has now lead to a world no one would have thought was imaginable many years ago. In all, the printing press was a revolutionary creation. It led to where we are today with all of our technological advancements, which even connects to how we as humans communicate in today's world.

As we continue through time, we now reach our time period of the Postmodern Era, here expand our new ways of communication. Around the world, people are using all forms of media such as videos, pictures, computers, television, radio, etc. the world has become more rapid with all of these advancements. We are no longer solely focused on human interaction, rather we focus a lot of our time on interaction through media. The growth of mass media has lead people to many new opportunities within our society. As Michael Soha would say, we never really graduate. Our world is always changing and we are always obtaining new information.
