From Oral to Scribal: The Advancements of Communication Technology
To understand society’s transition from oral to scribal culture we must get a firm understanding of each era’s main points and relationship to communication technology. The Four Era’s of Society are as follows as outlined by Joshua Meyrowitz in his chapter “Media Evolution and Cultural Change”:
The first of the eras is oral/tribal society and it was important for dealing with the start of man, with speech and sound being the main forms of communication. The tribes of this time had to rely on storing things in their memory, to be said later orally for others to also obtain this information for safekeeping in their minds often done through song or rhyme. Knowledge and attitudes were regional and there was a lot of isolation and violence between tribes. The systems they had in place focus on age as it relates to wisdom, so the elders were revered and in charge since they act as record keepers saving everything they have learned in their minds ready to pass onto others.
The next era is the scribal/civilizing phase with the emergence of writing; while not completely available to everyone it was a common practice through the Church for monks and scribes to do. Oral communication was still very much a large part of the lives of the villagers. The system of organizing people changed with this era because much larger city-states ruled by monarchies with feudalism were put in place. Most of what was being written during this time was information of the past that until then could not be physically recorded. There was still much control of what villager’s views were since they get their information from the same place, the Church, and haven’t been taught outside of that but free thought was in its early stages because of the emergence of writing.
The third is the modern era and during this time there was a shift in the way people thought, it was deemed the “enlightenment” because of the invention of the printing press led to mass media production. This advancement caused the rise of individualism and a transition away from previous thinking where you had to be told everything without asking questions. This was also the start of institutions, which became popular because there were now more complex ways to organize a community available, through the help of mass literacy and expanded knowledge.
In the current era, postmodern, the focus is that of electronic media and it’s capabilities many of which tie back to this idea of connectedness. This age, more so than others, you can gather any information and be in touch with anyone in the world no matter the location. In the film Matter of Fact Printing Transforms Knowledge its narrator James Burke says something that is very true for today’s relationship with information, that “fact doesn’t mean the same thing it did before, not definitive, checkable through your own experience but fluid, one stage removed, transient” (time stamp 51:03). With so many documents available and the ease at which to make them, it makes it hard to trust things as fact because credibility fades. Previous interactions of citizens with forms of printed readings on paper gave a disconnected way to read the material and take it in, but in this era due to the digital aspect this is all different. There is an emotional response because there is sound and images all happening at once, depending on the medium, the use of these electronic communication tools immerse the audience in the information being given.

Knowing the four era’s makes it easy to explore the transition from oral society to the scribal era, past the basic differences they have and focusing more on the developments of communication technology. In Joshua Meyrowitz chapter discussing this change he states, “in oral societies, words are not objects to be viewed or held, but time-bound events” (57) this shared view at the time meant that there was a huge necessity to remember these events to recount histories and everyday knowledge because there was no other way to have the information. Treating words as events puts a huge significance on their power and responsibility in this stage of communication; it explains why they respect wisdom and knowledge of elders because they have the most to share and teach the other members of the tribe. During this time the main reliance is oral communication especially through song and dance but there starts to be a shift in the culture once the era of the scribal phase emerges with the early stages of writing. Much of it starts out as symbols as a basic means of communication but slowly more formed languages emerge leading to documents being created, mainly by the Church. Writing was still a luxury and many didn’t have a way to learn the skill or read for that matter but much of daily life was completed with oral communication. As time went on towards the end of this communication period people of a high class were able to learn the basics of reading and writing if they pleased, but even this limited amount people created the beginnings of free thought because they didn’t have to rely on their memories. Not having to use your mind as an index of every sliver of needed information to survive helps make some room to start forming ones own opinions and arguments and this is all due to the transition to an era of writing.
The shift to the modern era relies heavily on the invention of the printing press because it allowed the start of mass production, which sparked mass communication. Before this invention the world relied on scribes to hand write books or pieces of information, and there had to be ways to keep track of it all, but it was a very complicated task since they didn’t have advanced filing systems. Many times scribes had to travel to copy documents or give them to another church for use, but with the printing press now you had a “portable” system to copy texts in a much quicker fashion without learning the art of the intricate handwritings by the monks and scribes. Mentioned in Technology & Social Change: Four Major Eras by Mike Soha, he says that mass communication technology will create a “shared experience” among its users and it is “leading to a rapid spread and standardization of knowledge across Europe” (10). Mass production was simpler due to this invention and meant that literacy would start to rise because books would be more accessible and a part of everyday life, it allowed for news to be spread past just one city-state but on a more global scale. Literacy would still take time to be a common normality but this helped push it to prominence because people could learn a trade through a book and gain individual opinions on subjects since knowledge could be acquired through so many new outlets not just the church or monarchs.