The Beginning of Media Speech, Symbols, Tokens & Writing

Why study history? To make the familiar strange To understand the social and technological scaffolding supporting present-day society To identify recurring dynamics To see what makes us human-- communication--and how changes in communication change what it means to be human

History as linear progress Typical history = discrete events as linear progress: oral  writing  print  electronic But gesture, oral communication, iconic representation, and hand-written script (“old” forms of communication) remain the foundation of much of our social world

History as archeology Archeological approach: analyze the selective accumulation and sedimentation of technologies “Technologies” = embodiments of habit which we then inhabit with our bodies (J. MacGregor Wise) –revolving door –inscription of moon phases or seasons –telephone

Questions to ask of history What media technologies were available in a particular historical context? How did new media transform the “older” media environment? Who used the available technologies? What were they used for? Who controlled them? What forms of knowledge production and distribution did they facilitate? What forms of social organization did they make possible?

Before writing (~45,000-3,000 B.C.) Oral communication (performance) Ritual inscription Tokens Two key shifts toward abstraction: 1. oral representation  inscription 2. iconic representation  phonetics

Writing: social implications inscription  communication at a distance record-keeping  sense of history abstraction  reflection, analysis literacy  democratization of knowledge but also: new literate elite; bureaucratic control media technology as arena of struggle

Oral communication sound is evanescent (can’t be stopped) spoken words = powerful, dynamic events naming facilitates control but evanescence limits thought and memory  need for interlocutors, mnemonics, and formulas (e.g., epic, song, ballad)

Oral culture limited spatial extension cyclical sense of time rigid social hierarchy community, not individuality stasis, not change

Oral vs. written culture “Sight isolates, sound incorporates.” (Walter Ong) –“sight situates the observer outside what he views” –“sound pours into the hearer” Oral culture: unifying, centralizing, interiorizing, aggregative, conservative Written culture: analytic, dissecting, abstract, dynamic

The advent of symbolic communication (=humanness?)

Symbols (45,000 BC-present)

Early human symbol use celebration, ritual, and magic record-keeping, prediction, and instruction? in any case, expression

Tokens ( BC)

Token-based societies hunting/gathering  agriculture  pooling & redistribution of community resources need for complex organization and control beginnings of tribute and “government” tokens also status symbols (sound familiar?)

Other “ancient” accounting systems Chinese ku-wan (gesture pictures) notched or painted sticks (Native Am) Inca quipu

The transition to writing 1: abstraction symbol of token (mark resembling imprint)  trace of token (imprint on clay)  physical token (sheep token)  physical object (sheep)

The transition to writing, contd. symbol of sound (phoneme)  symbol of idea (ideograph)  symbol of token or object (pictograph)

Pictographic writing around 3300 BC: tablets begin to replace tokens in Sumer eventually gives rise to cuneiform writing, Egyptian hieroglyphics

Ideographic writing ( BC) Babylonians build on Sumerian and Akkadian pictographic writing, combine ideographs with syllabary develop abstract scientific and philosophical treatises, laws Chinese still uses ideographic writing

Phonetic writing (1800 BC - present) Phoenecians revise Sumerian writing, develop symbols for sounds Phoenecians introduce writing to Greeks (~1000 BC) Greeks modify phoenecian alphabet, develop dynamic written culture and new levels of philosophical abstraction, artistic literature (~ BC)

The transformation of writing media stone and chisel clay and sylus papyrus and brush parchment and quill paper and pen

Writing and social change “thought gains lightness” (Innis) oral performance of common values  written codes and sacred texts  new status elite: scribes new spatial extension of control and coordination: agricultural tribute-based civilizations new sense of time: history “begins”

Writing and social change writing  new forms of control and stratification but also, democratization of knowledge production, circulation, and storage  wider debate, new ideas, political and cultural change (Greek libraries) later technologies (printing press, telecommunications, electronics) will also have this dual effect

Image credits 1 Tokens and clay envelope Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “Accounting With Tokens in the Ancient Near East” ( 2 Garment care symbols Rowent, USA ( Ironing example drawn from Andrew Robinson, “The Origins of Writing,” in Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society, 3rd ed. Edited by David Crowley and Paul Heyer (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999). 3. Marketplace icons Metacrawler ( 4. Species timeline Washington State University World Civilizations course ( 5. Lascaux cave painting Conseil Régional d'Aquitaine, France (