The History of the Message
When looking at the history of human communication systems, it is a bit trivial to break it up into four “eras.” However, communication scholars find that it is easiest to correlate the significant changes in human communication with the implementation of innovative communication mediums. Looking back into our deepest histories, we start in the age of the tribal and oral societies. From there we move to the civilizing world and scribal phase, with the invention of writing. After that is the growth of modernism that begins around the same time as the industrial revolution. Today we are in a post-modern society, that is still being shaped and defined by our everchanging global culture.
Our work this week focused on defining what our world was like in the two early stages of communication, the oral and the scribal phases. Looking first at the oral stage of human communication, the world was a much more segregated place than it is today. Small groups of people organized into tribes in order to create their version of a “community.” Tribes were ecosystems that worked together in essentially everything they did. They would hunt and gather food together, they would raise children together, and when they had drained an area of its crops they would all migrate together. Where the world got segregated was when one tribe would interact with another.
One reason for the harsh hostility amongst differing tribes was because communication between them was nearly impossible. In one given area we might describe as a country today, there could have been hundreds of different languages spoken. This separation of tribes led to a world that was riddled with warfare, where only the powerful survived. Survival was the only thing these people really did with their lives. In a world where communication is shared in such a small area, the room for innovation and growth was minimal.
What accelerated the world into the new era of communication was the invention of writing. People have always been able to record things, with pictures or sculptures, but these are very vague and their meaning is often up for interpretation. What writing did was it created a somewhat centralized language that multiple civilizations could use to communicate. Although only a miniscule percentage of the world could read and write, it still opened a pathway that the rich and powerful could use to build city-states. With the growth of writing came the rise of Feudalism, one of the first forms of government in human history.
Feudalism couldn’t have been created without the invention of writing, it required precise record keeping in order to make sure all levels of the pyramid functioned properly. Since only a small percentage of the world could read and write, they held tremendous power over the rest of the population. While they were only a few people, they had a larger power controlling them, the church. In this time period, the church essentially “owned” the knowledge of the people that followed them. Although writing was a power that was controlled by one system, it still managed to evolve the human mind drastically.
As Meyrowitz explains in his article “Media Evolution and Cultural Change,” writing encouraged things in the human mind that had never been seen before. Specifically the idea of the individual as apposed to the tribal view of social grouping. Before in the oral era of communication, there was really no way to look back and analyze what is being said or done in society. Now with the invention of writing we were able to learn from our mistakes and grow from them. Writing was influential to the growth of human communication, but it was still only a fraction of a percentage of the world that knew how to use the practice. In the 1400’s and invention would come along that would catapult reading and writing to the forefront of the human thought process.
In 1440, a German goldsmith by the name of Johannes Guttenberg created and invention that would connect the world like it had never been connected before. The invention of the moveable type printing press created a lightening fast way of publishing and spreading messages. Although now we live in a world where billions of messages are sent across the globe instantly everyday, it all started with the printing press. One of the first people to utilize this new form of communication was Martin Luther, who used the printing press to express his concerns with the catholic church. His words started the protestant reformation, and shook up the most powerful organization in the world.
With the growth of the printing press, communication really became a vital part of maintaining power. This was the first opportunity to implement large scale propaganda to citizens. Communication between city states was much more easily possible, leading to the consolidation of communities into larger empires. The printing press took all of the wonders of writing and expanded them tenfold. It allowed for the expansion of research and science, which is one of the greatest tools humans have had to innovate our lives. With the printing press, the human mind took a huge step forward to becoming the cognitive individual beings that we are today.