Post tag: information age
How Old is Multimedia?

Sociologist William Fielding OgburnThe Marlowsphere (Blog #149)

It is a truism that laws more often than not lag behind cultural customs especially in times of change, to which we could add in times of rapid technological change. Sociologist William Fielding Ogburn (1896-1959) posited in 1922, for example, the difference between “material culture” and “adjustment culture.” The former refers to technology, the latter to the often lagging response to technological change on the part of members of a culture and its cultural institutions. In other words, technology is the primary engine of progress, i.e., change, and it takes time for people and institutions to catch up to the changes and characteristics new technology brings, especially when it comes to terms and definitions.

In academia adjustments to technological change with respect to programs, courses, and especially terms are more often than not “behind the curve,” never in front of it. Often, there is a tendency to grab on to a new technology well after it has been embraced by early adopters and to describe “new” courses with terms gleaned from the popular media without much aforethought.

I have observed this from direct experience.

In 1988 the Journalism Program at Baruch College (City University of New York) invited me to create and teach courses in video field production and radio news. I was the first professor in the program with a print and electronic media background based on my recently acquired Ph.D. and experience in video and radio production.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Inventor of the World Wide WebIn reality, I was hired because the Speech Department (now the Department of Communication Studies) had initiated a course in “Corporate Video” and the Director of the Journalism Program (then a part of the Department of English) didn’t want to be outdone! In other words, inter-departmental competition motivated my being hired. Mind you, this was 1988, a year before (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web which, in turn, began the slow but inexorable demise of print journalism. So, in some small measure, the then director of the journalism program (a full professor with a Ph.D. in English Literature, now retired) can be forgiven for not having a crystal ball to peek into the future.

It was not until 2007 (19 years after my hiring) that the department hired a second professor with expertise in electronic journalism. Her specialty was “multimedia journalism.” And it was only until 2016 and 2017 that a third and fourth professor with print and electronic journalism credentials were hired. The latest addition to the faculty has deep experience in podcasting. That’s four professors out of 11 full-time professors in 29 years, even though in this same period the world of journalism had moved inexorably to a greater reliance on visualization (video) and orality (podcasting) via the computer.

There was progress, however. The (now) Department of Journalism introduced a course in “Advanced Multimedia Journalism” following the establishment of a course in “Multimedia Journalism” which I also taught. There’s now two courses in podcasting.

A couple of years ago we were in the throes of a self-review in response to periodic accreditation requirements. One of the department’s “learning goals” (originally formulated in 2013) dealt with “multimedia.” My reaction to reading this learning goal was to immediately feel how out of date and mis-defined it seemed. It had been articulated in 2013 by a professor with no “electronic journalism” experience to speak of. This prompted me to look into the technical definition and history of the term “multimedia.” My search taught me again that all things have antecedents and confirmed that academia is usually behind the curve.

I discovered the “concept” and “term” multimedia is about 60 years old! Yes, it’s that old and it predates the advent of the personal computer. It’s also another example of what’s old is new again.

Bob Goldstein, SingerAccording to several sources, the term multimedia was coined by singer and artist Bob Goldstein (later ‘Bobb Goldsteinn’) to promote the July 1966 opening of his “LightWorks at L’Oursin” show at Southampton, Long Island. Goldstein was perhaps aware of an American artist named Dick Higgins, who had in 1964 discussed a new approach to art-making he called “intermedia.”

A month later, on August 10, 1966, Richard Albarino of Variety borrowed the terminology, reporting: “Brainchild of songscribe-comic Bob (‘Washington Square’) Goldstein, the ‘Lightworks’ is the latest multi-media music-cum-visuals to debut as discothèque fare.”

But wait! There’s more. Two more years later, in 1968, the term “multimedia” was re-appropriated to describe the work of a political consultant, David Sawyer, the husband of Iris Sawyer—one of Goldstein’s producers at L’Oursin.

The original meaning of “multimedia” kept evolving. In my 1995 book Winners! Producing Effective Electronic Media (Wadsworth Publishing Company) co-authored with "Winners! Producing Effective Electronic Media" by Eugene Marlow & Janice SileoResearch Associate Janice Sileo, in a chapter entitled “Multimedia” we wrote, “The Microsoft Corporation, in a February 1993 Backgrounder, defined computer-based ‘multimedia’ as ‘the integration of text, graphics, audio, video and other types of information. . . .’.” Further, “Clearly, multimedia has evolved from an integration of various digital, electronic, aural, and visual technologies into an interactive medium for use in the home and the office.” Sound familiar? 1993 is 29 years “after” the term was originally coined. Yet some journalism educators use the term and define “multimedia journalism” as if it were invented just a few years ago!

Clearly, the term “multimedia” has been bandied about and used by journalists and professors of journalism who have no concept of its origin or layered meanings. Further, the term “multimedia journalism” is likewise mis-construed. It should be “computer-based journalism” or “digital journalism. “ If used even more correctly, “multimedia” would also refer to film, broadcast and cable television. After all, these communication media combine sound with pictures and graphics and text of all kinds. This is an example of a more recent generation of professionals ignoring the fact that there are always antecedents.

But to ask these folks to appreciate the abovementioned distinctions might be too much. They perceive they’re in the technological vanguard and don’t want to be disturbed in their academic bubble. They haven’t done their homework. They’re in the caboose of a technological train—with a longer history than realized—whose engine is ahead of them.

©Eugene Marlow, Ph.D. 2020

Back to Top


Retreat from the Future

Retreat from the FutureThe Marlowsphere Blog (#133)

There we were in the second half of the 20th century, having experienced the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan that ended WWII, and watched in the late 1970s a pivot towards the west by Communist China following the 1976 demise of dictator Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), and in 1989 even as we watched the horror of Tiananmen Square, we also watched the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We saw the creation of the European Union, the death of South African Apartheid, the shrinkage of nuclear weapons on a worldwide scale, the expansion of democracies, the diminution of illiteracy to about 15% of the world’s population, and the increase of global trade, so-called globalism.

We also saw a further exploration of space and the rise of a few non-governmental organizations investing in the exploration of space. The Higgs Boson, the so-called “god particle” was confirmed and the “repaired” Hubble Telescope peered closer and closer into the origins of this universe. The future of generations to come appeared to be bright.

But here we are in 2016 and the reverse appears to be true. In 2001, on 9/11, Al Qaeda terrorists took over two commercial airplanes and destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City (this wasn’t their first attempt). There are now terrorist groups in BREXITAfrica, e.g., Boko Haram, and in Russia, and in the Philippines, and in France, and in Belgium, among others. It has taken over eight years for the United States and other contingent countries to recover from the “mortgage crisis of 2008.” Britain has just voted to leave the European Union, the so-called “Brexit,” and in the United States the upcoming national election pits a politician, Hillary Clinton, with decades of regional, national and international experience, against an entertainer, real estate magnate Donald Trump, who has decades of experience on reality television. His vision of the future is to retreat from it by building walls between the United States and Mexico, to undo our trade agreements with other countries, and to (possibly) use nuclear weapons against our enemies (whomever they might be).

Elsewhere in the world, terrorists’ attacks have governments and peoples nervous about open borders and immigration issues resulting in the loss of jobs in one place only to turn up for less pay in other places. Local and regional wars have made millions of people homeless. The disparity between the so-called 1% (the haves) and the rest of the world (the have nots) grows deeper with every year. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is getting screwed.

Further, the Internet is not creating a level playing field. It is allowing those with the technical know-how and marketing imagination to create platforms wherein users create content for free and the owners of the servers housing the platform very rich.

It is a gross irony that while some countries, like the United States, parts of the European Union, Japan, and China are exploring space both within and without our solar system, several tribal cultures, such ISIS and the Taliban, are more concerned with what women should wear in public, women’s subservient role in their society, and a strict adherence to the word of Allah. Also, in the Middle East extremist Jews and extremist Palestinians are at war over who should own what territory. In Saudi Arabia, despite their ostensible acceptance of western trade, there is an adherence to an anachronistic extreme form of Islam, so-called Wahhabism. The so-called Kingdom funds this form of Islam with millions of dollars and proselytize their point of view wherever possible.

Headline: Civil Rights Bill Becomes LawAnd in the United States, the chasm between predominantly white police forces and young mostly unarmed African-Americans appears to have exploded into the headlines and into television and radio news broadcasts in the last several years. The Civil Rights Acts were passed decades ago, but the blatant racism expressed by the shooting of unarmed black males by white police officers appears to have become a common occurrence, even in the historical context of an African-American president in the White House.

Q: Is America, is the world retreating from what seemed to be a        brighter future a generation ago?
A: Yes, it is. Or that’s the way it seems.

My view is that the world is experiencing a period of retreat from the future into a period of tribalism. And it is not recent. It has been building for some time, perhaps ever since the commercial introduction of the telegraph in 1844. This was the world’s first electronic communications medium that could transmit information from one point to another at the speed of light. In the mid-20thcentury photonic technologies were introduced (these are technologies based on photons as opposed to electrons). These combined technologies have bumped up the speed of communication and transport of goods and services and with them cultural values on a global basis. Cultures around the world where the literacy rate is lower and much lower than it is in more developed nations are repulsed by this invasion of outside cultural values. It is anathema to their entrenched cultural values. And, in turn, we are repulsed by their reactions, such as when we hear about honor killings in remote parts of India, and the mutilation of female genitalia in parts of Africa.

Even in places that are so-called developed nations there is a retreat into tribalism. The Brexit vote is one example, the rise of neo-fascism in Germany, and the increasing rejection of Islamic leaning peoples in France are other examples. It is a retreat borne out of deep fear—a fear that one’s family and community values are being tested, challenged, upended, and revealed as untrue or unfounded.

People don’t want change even when it is beneficial in the long-run to the greater whole. The speed of light technologies that now are increasingly circling the planet have thrown opposing cultural values into the same economic pot and have created such fear among the members of opposing tribes that it is engendering violence.

Global DiversityAnd this phase of planetary cultural evolution will not go away quickly. It will be with us for a while, perhaps a generation of two. Until peoples of different cultural stripes begin to accept that the future is about the integration of cultural values, even the loss and rejection of some values—such as religious and political beliefs—there will be a retreat from the future. Accepting that change is the constant, that change is the way of the universe, a universe we are just beginning to learn about, is a deeply painful process.

This view parallels the structure of scientific revolutions. First, there is rejection of facts that contravene the prevailing view, then there is anger and battles over what is true and what is not true, then ultimate acceptance of the new factual context. We are looking at a generation or two of battles over what is true and what is not true. If world history is any arbiter, progress will prevail, but only after many more have died for their antiquated beliefs and many more have died defending the values of the future.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 5, 2016

© Eugene Marlow 2016

Back to Top


“Innovating and Integrating Information Technology: Some Cautionary Notes”

Innovation & IntegrationInnovation and integration may be the organizational trend of the day, but just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither is innovation, and integrating innovation into organizations is even more of a challenge.

Innovation and integration are challenging activities. If they were easy to accomplish, there would be a lot more of it, it would be commonplace, and we would be living in a completely different world. But the reality is innovation—whether technological, social, economic, political, legal, scientific, or medical—does not happen on cue, so to speak, and more often than not, it happens by accident.

The eventual invention of the telephone, the discovery of plastics, and the creation of Viagara are but three examples of a long list of accidental innovations, which includes: microwave ovens, the Slinky, Play-Doh, Super Glue, Teflon, the Pacemaker, Velcro, X-Rays, chocolate chip cookies, potato chips, Post-It Notes, Corn Flakes, and Penicillin. The discovery of galaxies outside our own Milky Way by astronomer Edwin Hubble in the late 1920s—the scientific realization that changed our world view—is also an example of an accidental discovery—five hundred years after Galileo developed the telescope.

On the other side of the “innovation” coin is when an innovation is ignored.  A classic example is the invention of the digital camera at Kodak. It was summarily dismissed by company executives because they perceived camera “film” was their core product. Too late did they recognize their blunder. In January 2012 it declared chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Innovation is defined as: “the action or process of innovating.” Synonyms for innovation include: change, alteration, revolution, upheaval, transformation, metamorphosis, break-through.

Integration is defined as: an act or instance of combining into an integral whole; or an act or instance of integrating an organization, place of business, school, etc.

It can be said with a high degree of certainty that technological innovations we take for granted are manifold and have, in turn, influenced the shape and customs of cultures. According to Ryan Allis, a technology entrepreneur and investor who has been part of iContact, Connect and Hive. (source:  http://startupguide.com/about-the-authors/), these include:

Technological Innovations 
1. The controlled use of fire (400,000 BCE)
2. Phonetic language (100,000 BCE)
3. Trade and specialization (17,000 BCE)
4. Farming (15,000 BCE)
5. The Ship (4,000BCE)
6. The Wheel (3400 BCE)
7. Money (3000 BCE)
8. Iron (3000 BCE)
9. Written Language (2900 BCE)
10. The Legal System (1780 BCE)
11. The Alphabet (1050 BCE)
12. Steel (650 BCE)
13. Water Power (200 BCE)
14. Paper (105)
15. Movable Type (1040)
16. The Microscope (1592)
17. Electricity (1600)
18. The Telescope (1608)
19. The Engine (1712)
20. The Light Bulb (1800)
21. The Telegraph (1809)
22. The Electromagnet (1825)
23. Petroleum (1859)
24. The Telephone (1860)
25. The Vacuum Tube (1883)
26. Semiconductors (1896)
27. Penicillin (1896)
28. The Radio (1897)
29. The Electron (1897)
30. Quantum Physics (1900)
31. The Airplane (1903)
32. Television (1926)
33. The Transistor (1947)
34. DNA (1953)
35. The Integrated Circuit (1959)
36. The Internet (1969)
37. Microprocessors (1971)
38. The Mobile Phone (1973)
39. The Smartphone (2007)
40. The Quantum Computer (2011)

The movable type printing press was successful through Johannes Gutenberg’s work in the 15th century. Moreover, his “invention”—a vast improvement over the Chinese version of 500 Illiteracy in the Worldyears prior—led to a growing list of books, magazines, and newspapers, and the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, and the so-called Information Age. These developments, in turn, increased the level of literacy in the world. Yet integration is not complete. Now in the 21st century there are still approximately 800 million people in the world who are illiterate—about 16% of the world’s population; mostly women in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In other words, the spread, adoption, and integration of innovation takes time. Integration of innovations also takes time, not only in societies as a whole, but also in organizations, academic and otherwise.

Why? A recent article in the online “CIO Journal” section of the Wall Street Journal (dated June 17, 2015) has the headline “At Innovation Labs, Playing with Technology Is the Easy Part.” In this article the writer points out:

“For many companies with innovation labs, the road from eureka to real product isn’t . . . smooth. Often a lab builds exciting stuff but then is frustrated in bringing it to the broader organization for commercial use. . . .Classic management science dictates that stable, repeatable processes keep companies in business. Innovation, by definition, disturbs equilibrium, threatening what has gone before. . . . “You are causing disruptions to a system that has an immune response to repair those disruptions.”

In other words, how do you get the “. . .[organizational] body not to reject the [new] organ.”

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Thomas S. KhunA seminal work on how the scientific world initially rejects discoveries that challenge the prevailing wisdom is found in the 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.

This brings me to the world of academia. Putting innovation aside for the moment, integration of innovation is both inevitable and resisted. On the inevitable side of the organizational equation, all academic institutions have already integrated a host of technological innovations, for example: touchtone telephones, teleconferencing, computing, the Internet, e-mail and mobile phones. Without these electronic technologies no academic institution of higher learning, at least, would exist today. As a result, “the invisible affect” is anyone at the bottom of the organization can communicate with anyone at the top of the organization. The role of organizational middle managers as messengers has virtually vanished—a trend that began in the 1980s that has resulted in the flattening of many organizations.

On the other hand, academic institutions are typically organized into groupings, that is, by academic discipline, otherwise known as departments. Yes, these departments are further grouped into larger groupings, such as arts and sciences, or business, or public affairs, but inherently academic organizations are separated into “silos,” to use the prevailing terminology. And what is the level of collaboration and cooperation among these departments? In my experience, very little. Breaking down the imaginary boundaries among departments is a very difficult endeavor.

So, on the one hand, electronic technologies have created a breakdown of hierarchy of sorts and allowed academics to communicate with others on a global scale 24/7. On the other hand, the typical organization of academic disciplines by subject inherently creates internal resistance to change.

If technological innovation is to occur on a broader basis, more colleges and universities need to create what has been initiated at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York.

Lehman College has been selected by the American Council on Education/Change Innovation Lab LogoAmerican Council on Education (ACE) to participate in the Change and Innovation Lab (CIL), a program to help colleges and universities implement significant and sustainable initiatives to increase the number of first-generation and nontraditional students who gain a college degree. Lehman is one of nine institutions that will work during the 18-month CIL project to implement concrete steps on their campuses and identify how some of these practices can be applied broadly at colleges and universities across the country. The project is supported by a $400,000 grant from Lumina Foundation.

Second, and this is really the difficult part, colleges and universities on the undergraduate level need to re-think how students take courses and earn a degree. Online learning aside, is the organization of academic subjects by department the best way to go, or is it just the way it has been always done, and why change?

In a way, the organizational status quo is the line of least resistance. In another way, take any subject, from anthropology to zoology, from accounting to English, and you should find that no subject is pure in content. For example, accounting is a lot about “debit left, credit right.” But it is not just about numbers. It is about analytical thinking, and communicating conclusions in an efficient and effective way to someone else or a group of someone elses in written and oral forms. In other words, in this one subject, it is not just about crunching numbers, it is also about conceptual thinking, and communicating. You can throw in “ethics” as well, given the history of the accounting business in the last 20-30 years.

The integration of innovation takes lots of timeExpectations of short-term results from organized innovation efforts, and integration of these innovations into the organizational structure need to be tempered by the long history of homo sapiens’ technological evolution. The reality is innovation, more often than not, happens by accident and there are always antecedents. And integration of these innovations always takes time, a lot of time.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 7, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

Back to Top


The Media Hierarchy

The Progression of MediaThe Marlowsphere Blog (#108)

Why is it that the Internet and the World Wide Web were created after the advent of television and radio? Why is it that television was invented after radio and not before? Why is it that the telegraph was invented before the advent of radio, but after the advent of printing? Why did homo sapiens discover writing after two million years of evolving spoken language?

Obviously, from our perspective living on the planet in the early part of the 21st century looking back at the world’s communications media history we take it for granted that certain communications media came first, second, third, and so on. In a way, these abovementioned questions seem absurd. But there must be some evolutionary logic underlying the progress from medium to another, and there must be some inherent relationship among the media.

Media Hierarchy Chart First, let us define the various communications media that are central to this analysis. The chart below puts each mega-media category in appropriate order, starting with body language:

First, it should be apparent that as you move up the chart the prior communications media do not wither away. On the contrary, if history is any guide, we are still engaging in oral communication, we are still writing and reading, and we are now communicating over large distances electronically. In this century photonics only adds to the ease of communication and access to information–all on a global and, perhaps ultimately, interplanetary scale.

New communications technologies don’t replace older ones. They might modify their function and role in a society, but they do not go away.

The advantage of new technologies is that they provide the capability and characteristics to do something that wasn’t available before. For example, over the two million years of the evolution of spoken language—according to Robbins Burling author of The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved  (Oxford University Press, 2005)—language evolved as a survival mechanism (his concept; my words, not his). It was also a sexual attraction device. Females of the species were attracted to the male of the species who had a greater mastery of using words and sentences; and therefore, concepts and ideas. In other words, males who could use language effectively and efficiently were more attractive than males who could not. Burling offers many other ways of describing the evolution of language in homo sapiens, but this is one of the central gists of his concept.

Another example is one that is mentioned often among teachers of media history. Prior to the advent of the printing press in the mid-15th century, Bibles, among other documents, had to be copied by hand—a very laborious process that could take years. However, with the printing press not only could a Bible be copied in a much shorter period, the press itself conveyed the concept of standardization. Pick up a printed Bible, any Bible of the time and they would all read the same, printing mistakes notwithstanding. In our present time the advent of the Internet and printers, email notwithstanding, has given rise to handwritten letters and notes—a more personal way of communicating. While the Internet/email provide instant interactive communications 24/7, 365 days a year on a global basis—no other communications medium had this characteristic before—it has also given rise to ways of more personal interaction. Handwriting used to be the only way people communicated. The typewriter notwithstanding in the interregnum, email transcends time and space, i.e., geographic distances don’t matter. Therefore, handwriting has become (again) an art form. And for those of us who have terrible handwriting skills, the computer is a godsend.

Further, you can put an older technology into a newer one, but not vice versa. In other words, you can go up the ladder of communications technology ladder, but not down.

You can put body language into spoken language, but not vice versa. In fact, body language has become part of spoken language. Spoken language (an analog medium) can be translated into writing (a digital medium), but not vice versa. You can put writing in print or typography, as some like to refer to it, but you cannot do the reverse. You can put printing into all manner of electronic media, but you cannot put electronic media into printing. You can put traditional photography and filmic technologies into electronic media, but not the reverse.  Likewise, you can put electronic media into a photonic technology, but you cannot go backwards in the process. Technically, photonic technologies rely on electronic media to operate; they are not independent of one another, although the other communications media are.

Another observation it the time is has taken each mega-communications medium to develop, to wit:

  • It took spoken language (orality) two million years to evolve
  • Early writing did not evolve until about 6,000-5,000 years ago in the so-called Fertile Crescent
  • Early typography (Gutenberg’s printing press) did not come onto the scene until about 560 years ago.
  • Early electronic media, starting with the telegraph, did not happen until about 170 years ago
  • And photonic technologies did not emerge until the early 1950s, about 64 years ago.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it is clear from the historical record that as we have moved from one dominant mega-communications medium to another, going up the ladder, the period of development of each has gotten shorter and much shorter.

Linguistic EvolutionTo return to the opening series of questions, it should be obvious that the more complex media could not occur before the less complex media had evolved. While this is not to say that spoken language is not complex and that the process of speaking is not complicated, it is perhaps understandable that it took a couple of million years for spoken language to evolve. This has become the foundation for all the other communications media. To put this another way, nature has said to us “If you want it to be good, effective and efficient, it’s going to take some time.” The evolution of spoken language is also significantly based on the evolutionary expansion of the brain and the re-arrangement of the voicebox in relation to the mouth and tongue about two million years ago. This kind of physiological evolution takes time. The dinosaurs did not evolve into birds overnight. It took 65 million years!

Further, the development of electronic and photonic media could not have occurred without writing and typography. These two latter media combined to allow later generations to read the works, thinking, and ideas of previous generations. This, in turn, allowed later generations to absorb the works, thinking, and ideas of previous generations and build on them. This relates to the meaning of illiteracy and literacy. Illiterates, with very few exceptions, do not conquer the world. Illiterates live in a static, non-progressive world. Literate peoples, on the other hand, have much greater opportunity to evolve.

The Information Age (and subsequently the social media age) happened after the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution happened after the Renaissance. Early writing appeared after the establishment of agriculture and the advent of counting (we know it as accounting). Agricultural societies only appeared after the development of language.

It is one mega-medium step after another.

If you have any questions or comments about this or any other of my blogs, please write to me at
meiienterprises@aol.com.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 29, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

Back to Top


The Four Communications Stages of Man

The Shape of Society © Eugene Marlow 2005The Marlowsphere Blog (#107)

Mankind’s communications technology history can be divided into four mega stages: oral communications; written, then printed communications; electronic communications; and most recently communications based on photonic technologies.

Oral Communications

The initial stage of man’s evolution as a communicating species is the age of oral communications. This age has lasted, of course, until the present day. All of our electronic and photonic devices notwithstanding, we still use orality to communicate. But it should not be taken for granted that orality has been extant since man’s antecedents walked out of Africa and began to populate the world. As Robbins Burling, author of The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved (Oxford University Press, 2005), points out, man’s development of language as a means of communication beyond body language and cries and calls probably took a period of a couple of million years to evolve, beginning with physiological changes to the position of the voicebox in relation to the tongue and mouth. In effect, language is a success story that did not happen overnight.

This age can be symbolized by a circle. Why? Because in the age of oral communication it all took place in a face-to-face context. In a tribal context, imagine the old man of the tribe sitting around the campfire in a circle telling the stories, the news of tribe. Everyone in earshot was at that moment part of the tribe. The record or history of the tribe was verbal. It radiated from the speaker. Everyone who was around to hear the speaker received the message directly from the storyteller. Hence the circular symbol. 
 
The Age of Writing and Print
 
Inca Quipu currently in Larco Museum CollectionTribal history and record keeping moved from the ear to the eyes with the development of visual symbols, for example, primeval Chinese ku-wan–gesture pictures. These pictures preceded pictographs, the picture symbols that first appeared in Western Asia. Native American tribes notched or painted sticks to convey messages. In South America, Incas knotted colored quipu cords to keep complex records.  Notice that all these last approaches have an element of portability.

About 10,000 years ago, in 8,000 BC in Sumer in the so-called Fertile Crescent, particularly Mesopotamia, small clay triangles, spheres, cones and other tokens were molded to represent sheep, measures of grain, jars of oil and other trading goods. Around 3,100 BC the Sumerians invented numerals, thus separating the symbols for sheep from the number of sheep. This was perhaps the first digital (as opposed to analogic, as in orality) technology.

Fast forward a few millennia to somewhere between 1,100 and 800 B.C. when the Greeks added vowel sounds and both expanded and contracted the antecedent Phoenician alphabet to create the unique alphabet we use today. This alphabet became the standard for writing in the Western world. I use the word standard advisedly: standardization along with portability are the two central prerequisites for the ubiquitous adoption of a new technology.
 
Before there was printing, there was copying by hand. Before copying by hand, there was paper. The invention of paper in China is credited to a eunuch, Ts’ai Lun, the emperor’s minister of public works, in 105 A.D. .

In the eleventh century, one Pi Sheng, a [Chinese] blacksmith and alchemist, invented movable type, molding characters out of baked clay–pottery type that he placed in an iron frame. He made several copies of each word character and 20 or more of the most common words so he could print a whole page at once. Unfortunately, success eluded Pi Sheng. No ink behaved well with pottery type and the sheer volume of Chinese word characters (today there are about 40,000) worked against his medium of poetry type, so it was easier just to engrave wooden blocks.

It was printer Johnannes Gutenberg, in the mid-1400s, in Mainz, Germany, who produced a printing system using movable type. Most obvious among its elements wereGutenberg Press controlled, exact dimensions of alphabet type cast from metal punches made of hardened steel. These were not unlike the dies, stamps, and punches that were well known to European leather workers, metal-smiths, and pewter makers.

In 1451 Gutenberg used a press to print an old German poem. In 1453 he prints a 42-line per page Bible. By 1490 the printing of books on paper (rather than parchment) becomes more common in Europe. By 1500 approximately 35,000 books have been printed, some 10 million copies.

Note again that fundamental to the success of the printing press is the characteristic of standardization. The portability factor comes into play with respect to the product–the thousands of books that contained history, records, and ideas that could be easily transported from one place to another.

Writing and printing: lines on paper, read from left to right in Western cultures, right to left in Middle Eastern cultures, and down and up in Far Eastern cultures, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. Linear and orderly. From a communications model point of view, writing and printing evolved what has become known as a militaristic or bureaucratic model symbolized by a triangle, or, if you prefer, a pyramid.

Writing and printing evolved hierarchical societies: the top of the hierarchy (primarily those who could read and write) told the folks in the middle of the hierarchy what to do. They, in turn, told the rest of the society (primarily those who could not read and write) what to do.

This form of societal organization–militaristic, bureaucratic, industrial and manufacturing oriented–existed intact from the time of the great Pharaohs to the middle of the 20th century. The symbol of this kind of society–the pyramid–can be viewed as imposed on the circular symbol that represents the antecedent oral society.

The Electronic Age

The more recent communications technology stage is the electronic age, symbolized by an amoeba-like pyramid. Imagine this symbol superimposed on the top of the pyramid, on top of the circle. All three co-exist today.

Samuel B. MorseThe electronic age was born in 1838–a mere 176 years ago. Early in that year Samuel Finley Breese Morseartist, daguerrotypist, a so-called “American Leonardo”–gave a series of public demonstrations of the first practical electromagnetic telegraph. In 1844, after receiving a thirty-thousand dollar grant to construct a telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C. the year before, Morse finally opened the nation’s first commercial telegraph line on May 24 with the now famous query “What hath God wrought?”  On that day the electronic communications age was born. On that day, the message was separated from the messenger at the speed of light.

Then came Thomas Edison, himself a master telegrapher, also inventor of the electronic light bulb and many other electrical devices that have contributed to our speed of light culture. About the same time, the telephone was invented.

The basis for modern network broadcasting was created in the United States by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). In 1922, AT&T opened radio station WEAF in New York. Soon thereafter broadcast radio became a dominant mass medium in the United States with many people and families listening to the radio in groups to electronic reporters.

In 1939 at the World’s Fair in New York, broadcast television was introduced to the American public. At the time it was called “Radio with Pictures.” Soon broadcast television became the dominant mass medium, especially for news. In time, network television became the medium of choice for primetime.

But in the 1950s came cable television. And today several local and regional cable outlets have developed news channels, such as NY1 in New York City.  Broadcast news channels have become just another number on the cable box.

In between these developments in radio and broadcast and cable television, "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarksatellites were developed. Actually it was in the mid-1940s that Arthur C. Clark, the author of 2001 A Space Odyssey first proposed the idea. Satellites not only expanded the broadcast television world, and helped launch the pay cable network business, it also gave birth to business teleconferencing, which lead, in turn, to the advent of satellite media tours.

Computers, of course, and computer networks are the communications media of the 1990s-present. Even though the first mainframes were developed in the mid-1940s, today computers in the form of personal computers give new meaning to the phrase “information access.”

All of these electronic technologies are merging into what we call today the Internet and the World Wide Web.

In sum, between 1838 and now a cornucopia of electronic media have been created to reach a variety of audiences on a local, regional, national, and now global scale.

The Photonic Age

It should be obvious that the electronic age is not the end all, be all of man’s communication technology evolution. I propose we have already entered the next stage in the history of communications technology: the age of photonics, or the age of light.

What is photonics? Photonics is “The technology of generating and harnessing light and other forms of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon. Photon WavesThe range of applications of photonic extends from energy generation to detection to communications and information processing.”

You are already familiar with some photonic devices: fiber optics for telecommunications, supermarket checkout scanners, CD-ROMs, lasers in medicine, lasers in military weaponry. Of course, in science fiction there are many more photonic applications: phasers and non-invasive surgery tools.
 
Apart from the fact that more and more technologies are increasingly using photonic applications, there are other clues that we are at the early stages of a new communications technology era.

It can be said that the work of artists are precursors to emerging trends. For me, the clue to the emergence of the age of light comes from Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” When you watch this film one of the things that should become apparent is that it is all about light: shades of light, use and misuse of light, shedding light on the truth, lighting up the sky, reaching for the light, and the light within.  |

It has become an accepted truth that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Yet some films presage just the opposite. And keep in mind that one of the first movies ever made at the turn of the 20th century presaged a trip to the moon, almost 70 years before it actually happened!

All in all, it needs to be pointed out that while it took a couple of million years for man to communicate via spoken language, it has only taken about 12,000 years for the species to move from an agricultural-dominant culture, to writing, then printing, to electronic media, and now photonic communications media.

More on this subject in the next blog.

Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 15, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

Back to Top