if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture.
PRINT MEDIUM: Our smartphone culture is not the first technological extension of human abilities.
Examining a prior technological extension, we can discern the lines of force and influence of society’s new dominant medium — digital via smartphone.
PRINT MEDIUM: Our smartphone culture is not the first technological extension of human abilities. Examining a prior technological extension, we can discern the lines of force and influence of society’s new dominant medium — digital via smartphone.
…[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. Gutenberg Galaxy 1962, p. 41.
A technology with a world-shaking impact was standardized print. Marshall McLuhan identified standardized print as the medium which drove numerous fundamental changes to civilization. He credited it with the rise of individualism (Protestant Reformation, universal human rights), nationalism (Hobbes’s Leviathan — the nation-state) and the great prosperity of the Industrial Revolution (arising out of the Enlightenment). His conclusion that reading based on a phonetic alphabet allowed humanity to develop distance (POINT OF VIEW) in a way traditional oral media (song, dance, theater, worship) did not was the message of this medium NOT ITS CONTENT.
Until humanity invented writing, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizon-less, the dark of the mind. It was a world of emotion-driven by primordial intuition, by terror. Writing is a method of “painting speech, and speaking to the eyes….” Printing, a ditto device, confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly line — mass production.
The Print Culture’s icon is the book — a container of exactly repeatable word symbols arranged in an exactly repeatable order. This exact repeatability on a continuous uniform line with its indifference to the oral values/content of traditional tribal societies changed the way humanity thought according to William Ivins in Prints and Visual Communication. Words and their necessary linear syntactical order forbid us to describe objects by traditional oral means and compel us to use very poor and inadequate lists of theoretical ingredients (phonetic alphabet) in the manner of ordinary cookbook recipes — this distance creates mental space to think.
The power to act without reacting (like a surgeon operating) is the core societal development from the Print Culture. By reading, humanity developed the ability to fragment any process and put the fragmented parts in a series which gave rise to the Enlightenment (where empirical reasoning replaced the authority of God or King to determine truth) and the Industrial Revolution (allowed humanity to extend physical abilities and senses in new ways — machine, train, and telescope). Within the framework of this medium that fosters the application of empirical reasoning, humanity has learned to control the physical world and birthed the Mechanical Age.
The content of the Print Culture’s Mechanical Age, whether manufacturing cornflakes or cars, is irrelevant. The same logic applies to modern life. The content of today’s electronic media is irrelevant.
The result: Both the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution owe their existence to the mass-produced books of the Print Culture that allowed for the distribution of “useful knowledge” to the masses and the ability to organize and work with it in new ways resulting in the modern world’s current prosperity.
The average life expectancy of a human has increased from 31 to 71 years in the past century. Every country in the world has experienced infant and child mortality drops since 1950. “We are fortunate to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history” Pres. Barak Obama said in an April 2016 speech, adding that “It’s been decades since the last war between major powers. More people live in democracies. We’re wealthier and healthier and better educated, with a global economy that has lifted up more than a billion people from extreme poverty [in the past generation].”
While the Print Medium gave us a new civilization. Our electronic media, however, now controls our perception of this reality. Just as with myths originating from an oral culture, all meanings in our electronic age are SIMULTANEOUS.
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