The Four Eras: The Evolution of Change

In the article, Media Evolution and Cultural Change, Meyrowitz discusses the “four eras” of society and how overtime these eras as well as the introduction of technology has helped mold the society that we live in today. The four eras are the oral, scribal, modern, and postmodern societies. Each era is significant and used their resources in the molding of how the community as a whole functioned. The presence of print and literacy has allowed us as a society to be exposed to other cultures around the world, from the comfort of staying put.
Prior to print and literacy, communities operated in an oral society, meaning that their knowledge and understanding about each other derived strictly from word of mouth and memory of what has been passed down to them within their community. There was no desire to branch out beyond what they knew, which is so distant from how we as a society think today.
Oral society began is the earliest communities, and is defined as a method of interaction through verbal communication, memory, and tribal rituals. Everyday living was done through experiential learning, which is the action of doing things. Oral societies obtained a communal way of living. Contrary to what we experience in modern day, there were no set rules or hierarchical rankings. Everyone in a particular tribe was considered a unit, and there was no concept of categorizing people omitting the obvious distinctions such as age, and gender. In tribal communities the elders were held at the highest ranking and they were viewed as the ones with the most wisdom. As previously stated, memory played one of the most important roles in oral communities. Since nothing was written down, the functionality of society was strictly off memory passed down from generation to generation. This came into play with court order, ceremonies, and the beliefs and expectations for every individual villager. Meyrowitz stated, “members of the society tend to have very similar cultural experiences and knowledge” (56). This was due to their communal way of living and ideology of universal morality. There was no need to branch off the beaten path because everything was just the way that it has always been done. There is no specific norms among all people. All tribes play as individual worlds and norms differ only tribe to tribe.
Meyrowitz states that the beginning of writing began to change the structure of oral societies. Though the beginning of print in the early centuries was still so minuscule, it enabled society to start separating the literate from the illiterate. He claims that writing is “unnatural”, therefore the people that obtained that ability were naturally ranked at a higher level than those who do not. Scribal societies still have similarities to oral, but this was the beginning of a more ordered and restricted society.
The scribal society was the beginning of the rise of the monarchs and the church. With this rise, this triggered a more complex society, enabling the concept of complex thoughts. Scribes were unpaid literate people who were able to put there thoughts down into words. However, they were not just writing whatever they wished. The beginning of writing was strictly master narratives, which were primary religious texts with some political and economic spreading.
In the early years of scribal communities, the concept of Fuedalism was developed. Fuedalism is a hierarchical ranking in which citizens are born into and cannot escape from.They are ranked kings, nobles, knights, to peasants. As written in the Soha reading, Buadrillard addresses the concept symbolic order which is a fixed system of signs that reflected basic certainty of life. In a scribal society, the beginning of writing works as a symbolic order. Though so far from today, this ranking was important because it was the beginning of a more modern hierarchical ladder that we use today. This sparked the age of Enlightenment (17th-18th) century which eventually sparked the printing press.
The beginning of the printing press was a huge movement towards mass communication among a large group of people. Society was finally able to interact and spread news in mass amounts, and not everything had to be spread orally or through memory. This also gave society as a whole a better sense of individuality and ownership of their own person. It was a huge progression in communication and the first giant leap toward our technologically advanced world that we live in today.
Through the Meyrowitz reading and the documentary, Matter of Fact Printing, it is evident that society as a whole has significantly progressed, and will continue to progress and we as a whole grow. The way we function as a society is completely depicted by what we are exposed to. The documentary focuses a lot on the early European Era, and how they were so sufficient and stable on the resources they had. However, once science granted us with these new technological advances, that is what we depend on solely. Personally, I believe the functionality of a society depends more so on what you are exposed to rather than what science has made us believe we are or are not capable of.
