Communication
theorists often divide media
history into three broad periods. These correspond roughly to the
Cyclical, Linear, and Web cultures. . . . and to the Pre-modern, Modern, and
Postmodern eras.
Finally, we have
emerged into what Marshall McLuhan labeled the age of the Electric Media--referring
ultimately to the telegraph, telephone, audio recordings, radio, movies,
television, cable TV, satellites, video recordings, cell phones, faxes, and
related computer-based technologies. We are immersed today in a
colorful, whirling display of images, sounds and dazzling
impressions.
Emotion and spontaneity have pushed aside contemplation and rational
discourse. This postmodern breakdown of linear structure defines the web
culture. According to McLuhan, the speed of the electric media returns
us to the "all-at-onceness" environment of the oral period. We
are swallowed up in the nonprint, non-linear, non-analytic communication of
the oral tradition. Print, with its individualizing tendencies, served
to fragment a tribal structure; but television tends to re-tribalize human
connections, with everybody living in the same "global village."
First
came the Oral (and Pictorial) Tradition. This was an extended
culture stretching from the beginnings of speech up to the creation of the
alphabet. It encompassed not only the spoken word and
gestures,
words
and gestures, but also primitive use of pictorial records and cave paintings.
Religion was the dominant social institution. This was the tribal,
cyclical culture.
Secondly,
we have the Written Word--specifically the Age of the Printing Press.
Evolving from early cuneiform and hieroglyphics, the alphabet gradually gave
humans the ability to master the written word. With the invention of the
printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, the power of the written word was
magnified
tremendously. Print fostered a linear, sequential, analytic style of
thinking and discourse. The tribal elder was replaced by the scribe.
The church was replaced by secular bureaucracy.
