About the Book

The conception - day gift includes a means of storing information (memory) and of transmitting information (speech). Memory & Speech could thus be considered as a first generation of media. However, natural selection can explain our evolution only to a hunter - gatherer society. How have we managed the transitions over historical time to an agricultural, an industrial, and now an information society? We have learned how to extend our nervous systems by storing information (Print & Film - second generation), by transmitting information (Telephone & Television - third generation), and by both storing and transmitting information outside our bodies (Multimedia & Internet - fourth generation). A History of Media tells this story of the co-evolution of the person and media as extensions.

This long perspective will help us better understand our turbulent transitional times as we assimilate the fourth generation of media. This third transition will be clarified by analogy with the first and second transitions as we assimilated the second and third generations of media. The work of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and their successors in the Toronto School of Media Studies will help illuminate those transitions.

About the Author

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W. Lambert Gardiner, Ph.D. (Psychology) - Cornell University, has published three textbooks in that discipline - Psychology: A Story of A Search (1970, 1974), An Invitation to Cognitive Psychology (1973), and The Psychology of Teaching (1980). His work on the Conserver Society and Information Society concepts at GAMMA, an interdisciplinary think tank, culminated in a fourth book - The Ubiquitous Chip: The Human Impact of Electronic Technology (1987). This fifth book - A History of Media - integrates psychology and media studies, which he has been teaching for 18 years in the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal.

Sample Excerpt and Table of Contents

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE - PRE-HISTORY

FIRST GENERATION - MEMORY AND SPEECH

SHIFT 1 - ASSIMILATING THE SECOND GENERATION

SECOND GENERATION - PRINT AND FILM

SHIFT 2 - ASSIMILATING THE THIRD GENERATION

THIRD GENERATION - TELEPHONE AND TELEVISION

SHIFT 3 - ASSIMILATING THE FOURTH GENERATION

FOURTH GENERATION - MULTIMEDIA AND INTERNET

SHIFT 4 - BACK TO FIRST GENERATION?

EPILOGUE - PERSON-AS-CAUSE

GLOSSARY

REFERENCES

INDEX

Chapter 1--Prologue

Theory of Evolution

Our story opens in a quiet country home in an English village. The first character in our cast is seen puttering about in his greenhouse and muttering about in his library. It was in this place and in this manner - apart from a famous voyage around the world aboard the H. M. S. Beagle - that Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) spent most of his life. Yet this uneventful life of this unassuming man in this unspectacular setting has had a greater impact on our world than the lives of the more flamboyant figures - the Caesars, the Napoleons, the Hitlers - who have stomped around our globe.

Darwin created a revolution. Not that shoddy shift in political personnel that typically passes for a revolution, but a real revolution - a change in our view of ourselves. After carefully collecting and collating evidence for 17 years, Darwin gently but firmly told us that we are not a special creation of God with an exclusive soul but an animal on the same scale as our dogs and our cows [DARWIN]. After the inevitable violent reaction - Scopes v. State of Tennessee, Professor Huxley v. Bishop Wilberforce - we swallowed this bitter pill. Indeed, we now find it not only palatable but sweet. Most of us feel better as raised apes than as fallen angels.

We are all familiar with the basic principles of the theory of evolution. Here, however, is a Rip Van Winkle special by way of reminder. There are differences among individuals within any species. Because of certain environmental conditions, the individuals at one end of a particular scale have some advantage over the others; because of this advantage, they are more likely to survive; because they are more likely to survive, they are more likely to reproduce; because traits are inherited, the next generation of this species will be, on the average, further along toward the desirable end of this scale. This generation, in turn, breeds another generation even further along, and so on and so on.

Let's take a concrete example. Giraffes differ in the length of their necks. The longer-necked giraffes are better able to feed off the leaves in high trees and are thus more likely to survive and reproduce. Since long-necked giraffes tend to have long-necked babies, the next generation will have, on the average, longer necks, and the next generation even longer necks, and so on. Note that no giraffe grows a longer neck during its lifetime by stretching it to reach leaves and then passes its longer neck on to its progeny. This is Jean Baptiste Lamarck's erroneous concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Whereas most of us are familiar with the initial reaction to the theory of evolution, we may not be as familiar with its subsequent history. It suffered a decline, because many malicious or simply silly people mis-used the theory as a rationalization for an extreme interpretation of capitalism as a survival-of-the-fittest principle applied to the social sphere and as an argument for eugenics - the "improvement" of the species by pruning out the unfit [DEGLER]. The debunking of those false arguments has resulted in a revival of the principle of natural selection as a basic principle for the psychological and social sciences.

A spate of recent books by evolutionary psychologists have questioned the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) underlying the social sciences, including media studies [for example, BARKOW ET AL, WILSON]. The SSSM assumes that the mind is a "tabula rasa", a blank slate on which culture writes. Evolutionary psychologists argue that the human mind, which has evolved over millions of years to enable us to survive in the harsh arena of our environment, is a medium which determines how the message of culture is received and interpreted. This "tabula" is far from "rasa". Much has been written on this slate over evolutionary times. They argue therefore that we need to ground our sociology in psychology and our psychology in turn in biology. This inevitably leads to natural selection and the "natural selection" of Charles Darwin, superficially an unlikely candidate, as the first member of our cast in a history of media.

We tend to think of the theory of evolution as a biological rather than a psychological theory - as concerned with the development of structure rather than of function. Perhaps the emphasis has been on structure because, with the death of an organism, structure survives but function fades. Much evidence for evolution is therefore based on structure (skeletons) or the imprint of structure (fossils). However, modern evolutionary theory is beginning to swing to an emphasis on function. The giraffe survives not only because it has a long neck but also because it can use it. The structure-function relationship is a chicken-and-egg problem. Is the egg the chicken's way of producing another chicken or is the chicken, as Samuel Butler suggested, an egg's way of producing another egg? Do birds have wings because they fly or do birds fly because they have wings?

Modern evolutionary psychology is exploring the evolution of the mind as well as of the body. Steven Pinker recently published a book with the title How The Mind Works [PINKER 1997]. Such a title may be premature and presumptuous but it is no longer preposterous. Evolutionary psychologists, like Pinker, are transforming many mysteries of mind into mere problems. As a child, I was addicted to jig-saw puzzles. I would start with the outer edge and work inward frame by frame. According to Pinker, the outer border of the jig-saw puzzle of mind is the principle of natural selection and the next border is the concept of the nervous system as a tool for processing information to enable us to survive. This book could be considered as my attempt to fill in the third border.

Edmund Hillary, the first European to climb Mount Everest, (or was it George Mallory, who earlier got lost near its summit?) explained his motivation by saying "because it was there". Evolutionary psychologists if pressed for a motive may answer "because we are here". Our species is here and we would like to know how we got here. Natural selection helps explain. Nervous system as information-processing tool helps explain. However, those two principles, expounded by Steven Pinker, explain only how we got to a hunter-gatherer society.

The recent shifts from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society to an industrial society to an information society have taken place in too short a time to be explained by the theory of evolution. Historical time is too short for the mechanisms of evolution to have much effect. Barbara Parker points out that it takes 500-1,000 generations for a survival-enhancing adaptation to become genetically encoded and we have had only about 100 generations since the birth of Jesus Christ [PARKER]. It is unlikely then that there is much genetic difference between our huntergatherer ancestors and you and I.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) had discovered the principle of natural selection at the same time as Darwin. Indeed, he published the same theory in the same issue of the same journal [DESMOND & MOORE, Pages 466-471]. Most people assumed, as did I, that he does not get as much credit as Darwin, because he did not spend 17 years accumulating empirical evidence for the theory. However, modern evolutionary theorists argue that he had done his homework. The main reason he does not get as much credit is because he subsequently abandoned the theory. He could see no way in which adaptation to a hunter-gatherer society could explain the sophisticated modern mind. How could a species, which evolved by adapting to a hunter-gatherer society, deal with the dramatic shifts to an agricultural society, then to an industrial society, and now to an information society?

This book suggests that at least part of the answer to this Wallace Paradox is that, during historical time, we have extended our nervous systems by developing tools for storing and transmitting information outside our bodies. The story of how we acquired those extrasomatic tools is the history of media. This history of media could thus be considered as an attempt to solve the Wallace Paradox, or, returning to the jigsaw metaphor above, to fill in the third border in the emerging picture of the human mind.

Co-evolution of Person and Media

At the moment the sperm of our fathers met the ova of our mothers to create the zygote, the single cell which became us, Zog and Anu (our hunter-gatherer ancestors) and you and I were all given the conception-day gift of all the wisdom our species has accumulated over millions of years of survival in a harsh arena plus three score and ten years to add our footnote to this wisdom. An important part of the conception-day gift is a means of storing information (memory) and a means of transmitting information (speech). Since a medium can be considered as any means of storing and transmitting information, Memory and Speech could thus be considered as a first generation of media.

This first generation of media is adequate for a huntergatherer society. How did we manage the transitions to an agricultural society, an industrial society, and now an information society? I will argue that, over historical time, we have supplemented this first generation of media with three further generations of media. We have developed means of storing and transmitting information outside our bodies. We learned to store information outside our bodies in print and on film (second generation), to transmit information outside our bodies with telephone and television (third generation), and to both store and transmit information outside our bodies in multimedia and internet (fourth generation).

Carl Sagan distinguishes between extragenetic tools (outside the genetic code but still inside the body) and extrasomatic tools (outside the body) [SAGAN]. Since those tools can be used for the storage of information or the transmission of information, we can represent those four generations of media in the 2x2 matrix depicted in Figure 1-3.

Those four generations of media are discussed, respectively, in Chapter 2 (Generation 1 - Memory and Speech), Chapter 4 (Generation 2 - Print and Film), Chapter 6 (Generation 3 - Telephone and Television), and Chapter 8 (Generation 4 - Multimedia and Internet).

This is a history of media - not a history of media studies. A fine history of media studies has already been written - A History of Communication Theory : A Biographical Approach [ROGERS]. Principle characters in that story would not merit a mention in the history of media, whereas such giants in the history of media as Bell, Marconi, etc. may appear only as footnotes in a history of media studies. Media Studies is an academic discipline, which tends to be highly critical of media - as attested by some titles of books by communication theorists - Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay [BRANTLINGER], The End of Conversation: The Impact of Mass Media on Modern Society [FERARROTI], Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism [GOLDSTEIN], Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology [POSTMAN 1993].

However, the Toronto School of Media Studies is used here to help provide a context for this history of media. This school seeks to understand what's happening rather than to pronounce on whether it should be happening. The history of media, presented in terms of four generations in Chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, will thus be augmented by descriptions of each shift as we assimilate each generation of media in the interspersed Chapters 3, 5, 7 from the point of view of the Toronto School.

We are currently experiencing a paradigmatic shift in the structure of media with the introduction of the fourth generation. Some perspective on this shift can be gained by examining the first and second shifts with the introduction of the second and third generations of media. Those three shifts are discussed, respectively in Chapter 3 (Shift 1 - Assimilation of Second Generation), Chapter 5 (Shift 2 - Assimilation of Third Generation), and Chapter 7 (Shift 3 - Assimilation of Fourth Generation). We are too close to this current shift to see it clearly. The ubiquitous is paradoxically elusive. The fish will be the last to discover water. Perhaps by stepping back and looking at the big picture, we can see this third shift more clearly by analogy with the first and second shifts. This long view will help us not only to better understand the present but to better project into the future. Chapter 9 (Shift 4 - Back to First Generation?) will argue that the future of media is best viewed in terms of a return to the first generation of media.

The Big Story

An empirical study of my personal use of media helped convince me of the importance of this topic. In order to establish a baseline for assessing the impact of the fourth generation of media on my communication patterns, I kept a record of the hours I spent using the first three generations of media. The records for the first six months of 1990 are presented in Figure 1-4. The results were so illuminating that I have continued the process since.

The most impressive finding was the sheer amount of time spent communicating - consistently over 70 hours a week, that is, over 10 hours a day. I'm spending more time communicating than on any other activity, including the mundane maintenance matters of eating and sleeping. Being a professor, the time I spend communicating is more than average. However, as we move deeper into a post-industrial, information-based society, more and more of us will be spending more and more of our time communicating. If this is how we spend our time, then this is what we should get good at. We should focus on acquiring the tools and skills of those four generations of media (most of us have pretty well mastered the mundane maintenance matters of eating and sleeping). A major theme of this book will be to pass on this very important part of the operating manual for our species.

A second finding was that there was never a half-hour period (my basic unit of analysis), which I was tempted to classify as thinking. Being a scholar, rather than thinking (whatever that means!) that I don't think at all, I would like to think that I am thinking all the time but as background activity to some aspect of communicating. Rene Descartes set the stage for most subsequent philosophy by considered body and mind as separate entities which interacted at the pineal gland. Evolutionary psychologists would argue that the important dichotomy is not between body and mind but between mechanism and organism. The error of Descartes is that he put "des cartes" (mechanism) before the "horse" (organism). In dealing with the person as an organism rather than a mechanism, there is no need for a separate entity called "mind", "spirit", "soul" or whatever is necessary to distinguish the person from a mere mechanism. Since the organism has evolved over the millions of years of our phylogenetic history and unfolds from the inside out during the decades of our ontogenetic history, it is sufficiently complex and sophisticated to deal with all the phenomena which "mind", "thought", and their various synonyms are designed to explain.

A third finding is that the amount of time spent communicating drops when I am traveling. The dip in the chart in Figure 1-4 corresponds to a trip to Europe. While traveling, the amount of time spent on mundane maintenance matters increases - one has to find new places to eat and to sleep from day to day and simple matters like making a phone call or mailing a letter are time-consuming in an unfamiliar setting. Another major theme of this book will be the argument that the consumer values of a corporate culture have to do only with reducing the time spent on mundane maintenance matters so that more time is available for communication to enable each of us to add our footnote to the wisdom we all were given as we opened our conception-day gift.

A fourth finding is that, whereas it is necessary to distinguish between the active and the passive aspects of communicating in the first and second generations of media (that is, between speaking and listening and between writing and reading, respectively), it is not necessary to do so in the third and fourth generations of media. This is because my use of the third generation - watching television - is only passive, whereas my use of the fourth generation - creating multimedia and exploring the internet - is only active. This insight has made me skeptical of critics who lump video-based and computer-based media together for the superficial reason that they both involve screens.

History is usually the story of conflict as told by the winners. During a war between two groups in Egypt, the Library of Alexandria was destroyed; because of the outcome of a war in Turkey, scholars were forced to flee to Europe and thus trigger the Renaissance. Those two events are presented in traditional history as incidental by-products of the wars. In the history presented here, those events are viewed as the important events.

Who remembers or cares that this gang of thugs captured that piece of land? The important effect on civilization was that a certain subset of the knowledge of the Greeks was preserved, which determined our view of them and the subsequent history based on their wisdom. The important issue between those two events is not which gangs gained which territories but who preserved this wisdom during the interval and how it was stored and transmitted to future generations. Cleopatra had lent many volumes of the books in the Alexandria Library to her lover, Mark Anthony, who had them copied and preserved in the Pergamon Library in Turkey. (That's partly why the scholars were there.) Such little-recorded facts are much more important than the well-documented wars that bracketed the destruction of the library in Alexandria and the flight of scholars from Istanbul.

Much current conflict is a continuation of ancient battles. The Battle of the Boyne on 12 July 1690 continues in Ireland today. Growing up in Scotland, I knew many people who continued to rerun in their minds the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 (the last major battle we won) or the Battle of Culloden in 1745 (the last battle we lost, if we don't include a certain recent soccer match at Wembley Stadium). Here in Quebec, we're still fighting a short skirmish on the Plains of Abraham on 13 September 1759.

The newspaper, being the first draft of history, is also the story of conflict told by the winners. Thus the front page news is about wars or politics (war by other means) or economics (what they are squabbling about).

During the 1970s, I stopped reading the morning newspaper. It occurred to me that I was reading it simply to get the latest installment on various current soap operas - for example, the Patty Hearst story in which the newspaper heiress was kidnapped and subsequently re-emerged as Tanya aiding her kidnappers in a bank robbery was unfolding in my San Francisco Chronicle. The Vietnam War (1965-1975) story, the current installment in the saga of the Third World War (the War in the Third World), was also being told. It was instant history in serial form with my instant coffee and cereals. I decided not to waste prime time - the first hour of the day when my mind was fresh - on such trivia. I shifted to reading Newsweek, which filled me in on the news weekly rather than daily, and then to reading the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year, which filled me in on the news yearly.

So why am I back to reading the newspaper every morning? There is something happening now in that important story of the history of media which I will tell in this book. We are in the throes of the assimilation of the fourth generation of media - multimedia and internet - and the accommodation of the media system to its impact. During the 70s, our story was in a latent stage. The telephone and the television set had penetrated to an asymptote of over 90% in industrialized countries. Excitement over the shift from rotary to push-button dialing or from black-and-white to color TV screens during this period demonstrated how little of significance was happening. Now, however, every day, my morning newspaper has information about the profound impact of multimedia and internet. I'm keeping abreast of those day-by-day innovations in the hope of understanding what is going on. Writing this book is an attempt to step back to get the big picture in which those changes are put into a larger perspective.

Peter Cooney, a neighbor of mine, who is responsible for putting the Montreal Gazette on the internet, views the daily newspaper as the tip of an iceberg. The newspaper is the point of contact between people and information. Each person, depending on time and interest, can use its electronic version to explore the rest of the iceberg. Some people aspire to raise the Titanic. My project here is to raise the iceberg. Underlying the day-by-day snippets of information about multimedia and the internet gleaned from the daily newspaper there is the history of media which will be presented in this book. Those isolated pieces of content make sense only within that context.

For example, one news item tells us that Conrad Black, who has previously built his newspaper empire by buying established newspapers, has created and launched a national newspaper, the National Post. Another news item tells us that the Thompson Corporation, his major competitor, has put all its newspapers on the market except for their national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. Black needed a tip for his iceberg; Thompson realized that an iceberg needs only one tip. The wealth is no longer in the tip but in the rest of the iceberg. At their web site, The Economist gives you free access to the latest copy on the news-stands, but charges you for access to the archives. Their new-found wealth is that huge database of information they have accumulated over their long history. This will no doubt become packaged so that anyone considering investments in a particular company or in a particular industry can quickly access the history of the company or the industry. Scholars, the only people previously interested in the archives, now find that they have to pay for access.

Another newspaper issue of interest to scholars is the fact that news needs to be entertaining as opposed to enlightening to attract audiences. Entertainment requires drama, drama requires conflict. Media may contribute to conflict by highlighting it. They don't just report the news - they create it. And the news is conflict.

When outside Quebec, all the news I get is of conflict. One gets the impression that the two solitudes - French and English - are at loggerheads. Yet when I return to Quebec, I find myself in crowds of thousands in the streets celebrating the Comedy Festival, the Jazz Festival, the International Film Festival, with hardly a policeman in sight and no conflict. Surely, if things were so tense between two warring factions, conflicts would erupt in the street. If conflicts ever do erupt, then they will at least partly be due to the self-fulfilling prophets in the media.

H. G. Wells describes human history as "a race between education and catastrophe" [WELLS]. Traditional history focuses on "catastrophe" with "education" as footnote; this history focuses on "education" with "catastrophe" as footnote. Well's metaphor of the race has been brilliantly rephrased in modern and empirical terms as an "ingenuity gap" between our problems and our capacity to solve them [HOMER-DIXON]. This book is my small contribution to closing that ingenuity gap.

Despite the argument that "the pen is mightier than the sword", history continues to tell the story of the sword. This is the story of the pen, penned in the hope that it will not be used to encourage conflict. It argues that the history of media is the Big Story of historical time. It tells how our species has dealt with the dramatic shifts from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural to an industrial to an information society by developing extrasomatic tools to store and transmit information outside our bodies.

Many people, to whom I described my plan to put history within a pre-historical context, recommended I read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies [DIAMOND]. When I finally read the book, I realized that they were telling me gently that it had already been done! Jared Diamond answered a question posed by his New Guinea friend, Yali: Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own? by going back to pre-history to explore a complex of factors including food production, domestication of large animals, germs acquired from those animals, large population, and central organization. It has indeed been done for traditional history based on conflict. Here it is done again for an alternative history based on communication.