How the Four Communication Phases Shaped Our World Today
It is of upmost importance to grasp and understand our history of our worlds communication systems because without it, there would be no history at all. Everything we have done up until this day is directly due to our societies growing and transforming the way we communicate with each other. In Meyrowitz’s article entitled Media Evolution and Cultural Change, he deeply analyzes the four phases of communication in which we have developed from in order to get to this post-modern world we live in today. Each phase is an important stepping stone in our world’s history and leaves us to decipher each era’s characteristics that have helped us develop into the electronic culture we are currently living in.

To summarize the four cultures, we start with the traditional oral culture that ran approximately between the birth of civilization through early Greek times. During this phase of society, the only form of communication was through word of mouth and each community, typically a tribe, had their own dialect of language. This limited any sort of interaction or communication with other cultures who may be in the same spacial area or region of the world. This means that within the Oral Culture, they lacked time biased and space biased mediums considering that strictly oral communication limits the amount and range of people it can reach. These oral societies are also considered very individualistic because they are not exposed to outside ideas or concepts that we can get from a global village.
In the transitional scribal phase, there begins to be a slow change in the mediums used to communicate with one another. This phase started from early civilization into the Medieval/Renaissance times and led to the printing press that was developed towards the end of this era sparking the Age of Enlightenment and the modern printing culture. Although this era is called the scribal era, only select few “scribes” were able to write and they mostly worked for the church. When books were produced that weren’t church related texts, they were often very expensive and hard to come by, so the only writings that were available to read were religion based. This segregated those who could not read or write because this transitional period did not happen very quickly. As stated above, the majority of writings were church teachings or texts, so this period continued to be very individualist, up until the birth of the printing press.

In the Modern Print culture, that is when more forms of mediums came to light and opened the doors to a more wholistic and inclusive way of communication. This era began with the Enlightenment period in the 1600–1700’s. There was a more perspective view of other societies and the idea of a global village came to the fore front. The invention of the printing press was key to the development of the modern and post-modern world because they gave people the opportunity to establish greater ties within other communities and cultures as well as expand their circle of oral communication that may not have originally shared the same views with. The printing press allowed these cultures to establish space biased and time biased mediums because paper is something that can travel great distance while lasting longer than writing or speaking through the use of ink. This changed the way people communicated and centralized a type of “language” instead of various other dialects that was once used in the oral and scribal eras.

More on the printing press that changed the way our historic communication mediums changed comes from the film entitled “Matter of Fact Printing Transforms Knowledge”, where we get an in-depth look into the transitional period between scribal and printing cultures. This film gives us insight into medieval times and how drastically the use of writing and printing came about. The concept of new found individuality and the introduction of mass production was truly what made the printing press a milestone in the way we communicate today. The film highlights the importance of Martin Luther who was displeased with church’s ways of overindulgence that catered to the rich. He started a propaganda war that was one of the first “vial” message that wasn’t related to church teachings and made way for more creative and imaginative thinking.
This lastly leads us to our current climate in the post-modern global electronic culture that opened up new forms of communication with the invention of television, technology, and the internet. This era spreads shared experience quickly and efficiently while also being able to connect with all people all over the world. With the use of video and pictures to tell a story, it is now seen as a more inclusive medium because, unlike oral and scribal eras, you do not need to know how to read or write to understand the message. We can now see things “live streamed” and through personal view points which allows everyone to become their own author and dictate their own message to the world. Even now, I am posting on my own blog that is publicly published to the internet for anyone’s eyes to come across and read. This, in turn, does create the new concept of “fake news” because of the freedom the internet gives us to become our own author and editors.
Thus, the four communication/cultural phases are fundamentally important to the development of our world as we know it today. Without communication and the building of different mass mediums, our cultures and history would be forever changed. We must recognize that each of these eras have pros and cons, yet, without these vital stepping stones, I would not be publishing this blog post today.