The 4 Eras of Media Evolution and Social Change
I often find myself thinking about how I would ever live without technology. A world without phones, computers, and television sounds like a complete nightmare to me. How would people communicate or keep themselves entertained? How did we go from having nothing, to having everything at the click of a button? From this weeks reading, Media Evolution and Cultural Change, I learned where our society started and how it has evolved into the world we live in today. According to Meyrowitz there are four major eras of cultural and technological evolution. Although each of the four phases plays an important role in the cultivation of our society, I chose to mainly focus on the first two.
The first phase started all the way from the emergence of people and runs till the ancient Greek civilization period. This era is referred to as the oral culture. During this span of time, the only form of communication was done through speaking. Knowledge was passed down from generation to generation orally. To remember and maintain their knowledge and values, people used songs, poetry and rhythms. Although we can read and write in today’s society, we still use songs and poems as a method of memorization and learning. I remember learning the “water cycle boogie” song in my kindergarten class and to this day, at the age of twenty-one, I still remember the whole water cycle only because of that song. And that song will probably also be taught to my kids and future generations, so that they will learn the water cycle, just as the oral society passes down their knowledge.
During this era there was no sense of individuality because everyone shares the same cultural values and experiences. Unlike today’s society where we are encouraged to think “outside the box”, the oral society encouraged uniformity and togetherness. There was not much of a social status since everyone was so similar. The social groups were extremely simple. People were categorized into children, adults and elders or they were also separated by gender. Everyone in the society not only shared similarities, but also shared everything else. They lived in a communal society where no one owned land or crops, and everything was dispersed evenly throughout the community. According to Habermas, there was no sense of privacy in the oral era because everything was in the public sphere. They were close knit societies with no time or space to really be alone.

After the oral era comes the scribal phase. The approximate duration of this era was from early civilizations until the Medieval and Renaissance period. The dominant change from the oral to the scribal era was the emergence of reading and writing. Writing freed people from depending on their memories for knowledge and reading enabled a more extensive, specialized type of knowledge. Writing also enabled record keeping and more intricate thinking. For few people in the scribal era writing and reading was the common method of education.

The more dominant form of educating the public was through art. Artwork such as paintings, stained glass windows in churches and statues displayed the important information and stories of the day, rules and regulations, and values and religion for the mass majority of the population that lacked literacy.

To this day, we still use artwork as a major source of information for the public. Road signs and symbols are a prime example of this. We look at these signs while we are driving so to gain valuable information so that we can drive safely and avoid accidents. Individuality somewhat emerges in the scribal era, but it is limited to those with literacy. Major distinctions between the literate and illiterate also emerged because now there was an academic and social gap.
Overall, each phase is dependent on one another. Without the emergence of mouth to mouth communication in the oral era, reading and writing would not have developed in the scribal era. And without reading and writing, technology would not have been invented in the modern era and so on. Through constant chain reaction, our society will continue to evolve and keep advancing.