Marshall McLuhan begins his seminal work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man with the following: “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message”(7). To the uninitiated this remark may seem paradoxical. After all, we are accustomed to thinking of communications media as nothing more than neutral conduits for delivering a message or “content.” However, McLuhan’s observations manage to turn this common sense notion on its head. He postulates that we tend to focus too much on the obvious dimension of communication—which is the content—as the primary object of study. As a result, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that accompany the introduction of new media forms. According to McLuhan:
The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This . . . is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. (8)
In other words, it was the locomotive’s capacity for traveling rapidly between distant locales that caused changes in the forms of social organization—not the freight it carried. The medium’s ability to transport food quickly and cheaply led to alterations in people’s eating habits, since they were no longer dependent on what could be produced locally. And when diverse regions of the country were put into regular contact with each other, national time zones ended up becoming synchronized. This is what McLuhan means when he says that the train as a medium created great social change. Its existence altered the way that people related to each other and structured their lives, irrespective of its “content.” For these reasons, McLuhan ultimately contends that communications media themselves—not the content they carry—should be the focus of study.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman builds on McLuhan’s insights, explaining that our very “definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed” (17). For instance, Postman describes the way that oral cultures relied on proverbs and sayings in order to provide models for truth and justice. When two members of a tribe had a dispute, the chief would choose from a large store of aphorisms in order to find one that would allow all parties to agree “that justice has been done, that the truth has been served” (18). The chief might call on a parable that somehow related to the circumstances surrounding the dispute, and the moral or message of the story would thereby provide a model for justice in that instance.
However, in the world that we live in today, the oral medium has lost most of the prestige that it once commanded. As Postman asks, “Can you imagine . . . a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle?” (23). To the modern mind, this would seem ridiculous, since we have come to believe that the truth about economics is best expressed in a numerical form. Yet Postman is not suggesting that statistical figures somehow provide a more accurate reflection of the “real.” Rather, he uses this example to illustrate how distinct media forms structure our notions of truth and reality.
Because communications media fundamentally impact the way that we understand the world around us, it follows that they must also play a role in the way that intelligence gets defined. Whereas an oral culture may define intelligence by the ability to memorize a large amount of information (and therefore have a great number of aphorisms to draw from), in a print based culture “the memorization of a poem . . . is merely charming. It is almost always functionally irrelevant and certainly not considered a sign of high intelligence” (Postman 25). After all, in a literate culture things can be written down, so memorization becomes a far less essential skill. This means that what we think of as “intelligence” is predetermined by the way that our communications media require us to use our intellect—and the way they enable a particular range of cognitive capabilities. From this perspective, intelligence can be understood not as a transcendent and stable object, but as something that is largely defined by the media through which a culture conducts its conversations.
Considering the degree to which a culture’s dominant media tends to shape our understanding of the world around us, I will use the rest of this chapter to examine how the evolution of communications media has influenced human consciousness—and forms of social organization—throughout history. This provides the necessary background for theorizing how the advent of the internet is currently altering contemporary notions of knowledge production and academic expertise in Chapter 3.
Primary Orality
Any history of communications media must begin with an investigation of oral culture, yet it remains difficult for members of literate societies to comprehend the conditions of primary orality. Because our thought patterns have been conditioned by hundreds of years of print literacy, we find ourselves largely unable “to represent to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing, even when they have nothing to do with writing at all” (Ong 11). In other words, when we try to comprehend the nature of primary orality, we end up subjecting it to the metaphors that are most often associated with literacy, thereby creating various oversights and inaccuracies.
In order to understand the nature of this dilemma, we can begin by examining the status of Homeric epics in literate culture. For most of our history, we have conceived of Homer’s works as “the most exemplary, the truest and the most inspired secular poems in the western heritage” (Ong 18). Yet Milman Parry discovered in 1928 that “virtually every distinctive feature of Homeric poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition” (Ong 21). These oral methods of composition involved “an abundant repertoire of epithets diversified enough to provide an epithet for any metrical exigency that might arise as he stitched his story together” (Ong 21). What this means—in a basic sense—is that Homer’s epics are assemblages of prefabricated parts. He essentially composed by repeating a series of formulaic set of phrases that could be combined in various ways. Therefore, having made this discovery, Parry concluded that, “Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker” (Ong 22).
Obviously, this realization has significant consequences for the popular notion of Homer’s poetry as “great literature.” Within literate culture, we have been conditioned to avoid clichés, so it is assumed that the works of “great authors” will be devoid of such stock phrases. But we now recognize that the Iliad and the Odyssey are largely collections of “devastatingly predictable formulas” (Ong 23). And this makes it difficult to place these works in the same category as those that were natively composed in a print medium. After all, their method of construction is antithetical to the values of a literate society.
Yet this discovery should not be seen as an indictment of Homer’s character. Rather, it provides a unique means of understanding the conflicting epistemologies of oral and literate cultures. As Eric Havelock explains, any culture “oral or literate, exists as it succeeds in combining individuals in to a nexus, which is coherent” (Havelock 68). And in order for this coherent nexus (or social structure) to survive, the culture must have a means of maintaining traditions and preserving information through time. According to Havelock:
This requires a body of language ‘encoded’ (as we say in literate terms) to carry the necessary instructions. The instructions [also] have to carry stability. They have to be repeated from generation to generation, and repetition must be guaranteed to be faithful or else the culture loses its coherence and so its historical character as a culture. (69)
For literates, the maintenance of culture poses little problem since the necessary language is archived in print—and available for easy recall. Indeed, law, scripture, philosophy, history, and literature are readily transmitted through extensive documentation. However, in primary oral societies, nothing can be written down. Therefore, the language that inscribes the content of an oral culture must be easily memorized in order to preserve tradition. And since successful retention in memory is dependent on repetition, “[w]hat is required is a method of repeatable language (meaning acoustically identical sound patterns) which nevertheless is able to alter its content to express diverse meanings” (Havelock 71). As might be expected, the outcome of this communicative exigency was the birth of metrical poetry: a series of metrically interchangeable parts that could be combined in different ways in order to carry the content of the culture. Thus, we have to understand the repetition of clichés in Homer’s poetry not as a flaw—but as an outgrowth of the demands imposed by a particular (oral) media form. If the culture was to be maintained, it had to be memorized, and that required that the information be mnemonically memorable.
Although alphabetic literacy has since been reduced poetry to the status of a mere entertainment pastime, in oral cultures it was a sort of verbal encyclopedia or storage mechanism that carried important cultural information. For this reason, it was the domain specialists who were charged with safeguarding the traditions it held. According to Havelock, “These become the ‘bards of the people’ and also the seers, prophets, priests” (73). They were often called upon to articulate relevant proverbs in the event of legal disputes or when governmental matters needed to be decided. In this manner, being a “master of sayings [was often a] direct avenue to political power” (75). With information being so evanescent, those who could memorize a great deal of it were highly valued.
Because the preservation of knowledge was such a high priority, oral communities were also conservative in nature and resisted intellectual experimentation. With knowledge being so hard to come by, they “regard[ed] highly those old men and women who specialize[d] in conserving it, who [knew] and [could] tell stories of the days of old” (Ong 41). Instead of seeking to innovate, the poet’s primary objective was to preserve tradition. This is because whatever wisdom existed in the oral world had to be protected and kept intact—as is. For this information to be critically analyzed was to risk making it strange—and therefore less memorable. And any new knowledge that was not easily memorized would ultimately be lost.
The oral medium also compelled people to engage in communal and participatory language practices. This is because, in the absence of print, information had to be closely shared among the members of the tribe. There was literally no other way to communicate—other than in person—since knowledge could not be objectified or separated from the physical body through writing. Thus, when a poet addressed a crowd, the group was united by the experience. Consider, for instance, a festival where choruses and dances were performed. Owing to the rhythmic quality of the language, these occasions involved the whole group in recitation and memorization. The people effectively joined together in chanting the poet’s message, which was a vehicle for instruction (and group solidarity). As Eric Havelock describes it: “The dramatic festivals preserved the means by which primary orality controlled the ethos of its society through a repeated elocution of stored information,” (94). In other words, the disparate members of a culture became united by joining poets in reciting their shared cultural knowledge. In the absence of writing, this was the primary means of maintaining the necessary group cohesion.
Obviously, this is much different from a literate culture—where readers can enter in to their own mental space by interacting with texts in private. In the oral culture, there is no private space—or ability to think independently of the group—so everyone effectively shares the same collective consciousness (Ong 73). And what people are able to talk and think about is largely determined by their placement within the social hierarchy. According to James Paul Gee and Elisabeth Hayes, “the powerful set themselves up as the official spokespersons for the culture. Kings, elders, and shamans came to produce the official and powerful speech in [oral] cultures. Everyday people became, when speech was truly consequential, consumers (listeners) and not producers (speakers)” (2). Thus, by privileging the passive acceptance of privileged speech, and discouraging any form of critical analysis, the oral medium managed to engender an extraordinary degree of conformity.
The Transition to Alphabetic Literacy
In the Western world, primary orality survived until the seventh century B.C. when the earliest Greek writings began to appear on parchment and papyrus. Although this was the beginning of a communications revolution, at the time people failed to recognize the magnitude of the change they were undergoing. They believed that the introduction of alphabetic script would simply provide a means for continuing the oral tradition and furthering poetry’s didacticism (Havelock 87-89). However, they couldn’t have been more mistaken. We can now see that the institution of writing actually managed to attack the oral tradition.
Because Plato’s writings were composed at a moment in history when Greek society was in transition between orality and literacy, they present a unique illustration of these two epistemologies coming into conflict. For example, in Phaedrus, Plato presents a story (told by Socrates) involving a discussion between the god Theuth (an inventor) and King Thamus. At one point during the discussion, Theuth claims that his invention of writing will “improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians.” However, King Thamus counters with the following:
You, who are the father of your offspring, attribute to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality; they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are in fact quite ignorant. (1392)
As the above suggests, Plato (via Socrates) was suspicious of the effects that writing would have on society. He feared that people’s memories would begin to atrophy as they received information from “lifeless” texts without the benefit of dialogue or instruction. He also believed that, as literates, they would only possess the outward appearance of erudition—while lacking the experience necessary for the true development of wisdom. This lingering allegiance to the oral tradition, in a time of transition, is what led Harold Innis to call Socrates “the last great product and exponent of the oral tradition” (79).
Nonetheless, what makes these remarks so interesting (and ironic) is that they actually could not have been made without the benefit of writing. According to Walter Ong, the mental processes necessary for critique simply did not exist in the oral tradition:
the new technology [of writing] is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato’s philosophically analytic thought . . . including his critique of writing, was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes. (Ong 79)
The reason for this is that before the advent of writing words could not be archived for visual recall. As a result, people’s mental energies were largely consumed with committing things to memory. And this need for memorization, in turn, had an effect on the way that information was codified. Because narratives are mnemonically superior to abstract forms of thought, information in oral societies had to conform to a narrative logic if it was to be preserved (Havelock 101-102). That is why, in ancient Greek mythology, concepts are personified as agents: it is more feasible to remember a story of Eros (the god of love) as an embodied individual than to think about love as a concept in the abstract.
However, with the advent of writing, much of the intellectual machinery that had been constrained by memorization was freed for more conceptual modes of thought, leading to the development of syntactical structures that never could have existed in the oral world. For example, the verb “to be” (which came into use with literacy) provided the means for linking a subject and its property in a “timeless” connection (Havelock 108-109). Whereas the oral medium required statements to be couched in terms of immediate narrative fact (i.e. Zeus attacked the rebellion), the verb “to be” allowed people to make abstract declarations that were not instantly connected to the life-world (Zeus is a vengeful god). The first statement about Zeus represents a concrete action (Zeus attacked); however, the second is more theoretical in nature. It moves beyond the world of observable fact, and makes an abstract claim about Zeus’ character (Zeus is). According to Eric Havelock, this sort of intellectual operation would have been impossible in an oral medium—since abstract information is not easily memorized. Stories, on the other hand, are. Thus, it becomes apparent that Plato’s critique of literacy never could have been made without the objectivity afforded by writing. After all, it is necessary to conceive of a subject in the abstract if one wishes to engage in evaluative analysis.
Taking this into consideration, it should not surprise us that Plato ultimately came to embrace the analytical worldview that writing made available. Although he may have spoken against writing, we can now see that it was actually writing that gave him the power to do so. Plato’s growing realization of this fact helps to explain why Republic actually contains an entire chapter devoted to criticizing oral poets. At the beginning of this chapter, Plato (again, via Socrates) distinguishes between “real” objects and the types of “representations” created by painters. He establishes that there are real objects, such as “a bed,” that exist in the world, and then there are paintings of beds which are mere imitations. According to Plato, one need not have any “true knowledge” of beds in order to create a representation of one: “a representer doesn’t have either knowledge or true beliefs about whatever it is he’s representing” (354). From Plato’s perspective, a representational artist merely imitates what he sees and hears.
As the dialogue continues, we realize that Plato using this analogy to critique oral poets. According to Plato, poets were no more than representational artists themselves:
they stood for the old oral, mnemonic world of imitation, aggregative, redundant, copious, traditionalist, warmly human, participatory—a world antipathetic to the analytical, sparse, exact, abstract, visualist, immobile world of ‘ideas’ Plato was touting. (Ong 164)
For this reason, Plato maintained that poets would provide poor leaders for society. From his perspective, philosopher kings were better equipped to lead, since their “eyes [were] occupied with the sight of things which are organized, permanent, and unchanging . . . where all is orderly and rational” (223). In essence, Plato believed that the ability to engage in rational, abstract thinking allowed philosophers to penetrate the superficial appearances of the world and contact a transcendent reality (i.e. the eponymous Forms). And this ability to perceive the underlying truths of the universe put them in the best position to guide the populace toward an ideal state of being, since they were less likely to be deceived by appearances. Hence, whether he knew it or not, Plato was embracing the abstract rationality afforded by writing when he rejected the unthinking didacticism of poetry. Whereas oral language necessitated that individuals spend their energies on memorization (and passive acceptance) of narrative data, visual writing objectified knowledge (by separating it from the body) and made it available for critical reflection. In essence, writing allowed people to ponder and evaluate ideas in physical space, thereby leading to increasingly abstract forms of thinking (i.e. philosophy).
In the end, it was this enlarged capacity for abstraction that eventually paved the way for the development scientific and philosophical rationalism. Walter Ong elucidates this concept by tracing the history of Learned Latin. He begins by describing how, “Between about AD 550 and 700 the Latin spoken as a vernacular in various parts of Europe had evolved into various early forms of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, French, and the other Romance languages” (110). Due to this fragmentation of dialects, people lost the ability to understand the old written Latin. Yet, because it would have been impossible to translate all of the works taught in schools into each oral vernacular, schooling continued in Latin. As a result, Learned Latin eventually became a language that existed only in writing. And because people no longer spoke this language in the life-world, “Learned Latin [effected] even greater objectivity by establishing knowledge in a medium insulated from the emotion-charged depths of one’s mother tongue” (Ong 112). What this means is that, because Learned Latin did not exist as a (spoken) vernacular, it became a language far removed from people’s daily experiences. Consequently, individuals were precluded from forming any sort of emotional (i.e. irrational) ties to it. According to Ong, this ultimately made possible “the exquisitely abstract world of medieval scholasticism and of the new mathematical modern science” (112). Without the extraordinary objectivity of a language that was totally controlled by writing, modern science and philosophy would never have gotten underway.
A Dissenting Point of View
In The Psychology of Literacy, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole challenge and extend Ong and Havelock’s hypotheses by arguing that literacy does not automatically contribute to a singular form of cognitive development across content domains and learning contexts. Instead, Scribner and Cole contend that any cognitive differences associated with oral or written language may very well be the result of the conditions under which a people learned to be literate. They (Scribner and Cole) were able to arrive at these conclusions after years of studying the Vai people, a native tribe in the West African country of Liberia. As Scribner and Cole explain, they chose to study the Vai because they possess four distinct forms of literacy in their society. These literacies are classified as follows:
- 1) Individuals who are not (print) literate in any language.
- 2) Those who have mastered the Vai script (a form of writing that is only taught in the home—never in school).
- 3) Those who have been formally trained to memorize the Qu’ran in Arabic.
- 4) And, finally, that portion of individuals living in Vai society who have attended school—and are literate in writing with the English language. (1480-1507)
By examining these distinct literacy populations in relation to each other, Scribner and Cole ultimately found that it was the way each of these groups engaged in literacy practices that influenced the cognitive development of their users. For instance, those who read and wrote Vai script demonstrated better communication skills than Arabic speakers and non-literates. However, this is not because the Vai script itself contains some inherent property that induces superior communication skills in its users. Rather, this outcome was attributed to the fact that Vai script is primarily used for letter-writing, and “the overwhelming majority of Vai script letters are transactional in nature—that is, they communicate information intended to lead to some action on the part of the recipient” (5576). As a result, those who have practiced letter writing in the Vai script are more likely to communicate instruction effectively, since their literacy has provided them with plenty of practice in doing so. As Scribner and Cole explain, if an individual is writing a letter to request the delivery of money that is owed to him, “he has to communicate these arrangements clearly and in detail if he hopes for a successful outcome to his plea” (5589).
In contrast, they also found that those who dedicated themselves to learning the the Qu’ran in Arabic often performed better at tasks involving memorization. This is because students are taught to master the Qu’ran first by memorizing the foreign (Arabic) words contained in the text. Only after they have committed these words to memory are they given the chance to learn what those words actually mean (1651). Hence, Scribner and Cole found that this type of literacy (memorization of the Qu’ran) produced people who performed well when it came to remembering a series of numbers—but not as well when it came to retelling a story (6109). Thus, the authors determined that:
Instead of focusing exclusively on the technology of a writing system and its reputed consequences (“alphabetic literacy fosters abstraction,” for example), we approach literacy as a set of socially organized practices which make use of a symbol system and a technology for producing and disseminating it. Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use. The nature of these practices, including, of course, their technological aspects, will determine the kinds of skills (“consequences”) associated with literacy. (6450-6455)
This differs from the conclusion reached by Walter Ong and Eric Havelock. Because Scribner and Cole see literacies as culturally situated phenomena, they do not conceive of these practices as inert technologies that possess inherent benefits or properties. Rather, they understand literacy as a culturally specific phenomenon whose benefits cannot be separated from the social contexts in which it is practiced.
Nonetheless, while Scribner and Cole do remind us that literacy is not an isolated cognitive activity, their findings do not invalidate the work done by theorists such and Walter Ong and Eric Havelock. For one thing, they (Scribner and Cole) acknowledge that, “whether literacy is considered a primary or a secondary causal factor . . . few doubt that the printing press and the book, no less than the steam engine and telescope, provided the technological basis for the rise of industrial society” (204-205). In other words, while communication technologies may not have effects that exist independent of their contexts of usage, we cannot overlook the fact that these technologies provide the vehicle for epistemological formations that could not have taken hold in their absence. Indeed, as Scribner and Cole mention, the industrial revolution would have been impossible without the invention of the printing press.
Furthermore, it must be noted that the Vai people are not a completely oral culture (of the type that Ong and Havelock discuss). Rather, within Vai society, there are three different forms of writing available for storing the context of the culture: Vai script, Arabic, and English. Although some members of this society may lack the ability to read and write, the inevitable fact remains that any culture will be fundamentally impacted by the mere presence of writing. As previously discussed, in a completely oral culture there is no means for recording information visually, so a great deal of the people’s cognitive energy is tied up with the need for memorization. However, societies that have come to embrace writing are freed from this necessity. Although a portion of the culture may lack the ability to decipher the written word, there will still be elite classes of people who are able to access this information. The fact that the content of the culture is able to be archived in writing (and interpreted by those who achieve literacy) frees men and women from the fundamental need to memorize, thereby paving the way for new social formations and cognitive abilities.
In the end, these two positions can be reconciled as follows: while it is true that literacy can produce different cognitive outcomes depending on how it is used and practiced within a given society, there are still cognitive abilities and forms of social organization that can never be achieved without the benefit of the written word. Whether or not a culture manages to achieve a particular set of cognitive abilities will depend on how writing is used; however, the fact remains that those capabilities (i.e. the ability to engage in abstraction) would be impossible in the absence of this technology.
The Printing Press and the Modern Era
Although we can now see that writing is a necessary precursor for the development of abstract thought, throughout history a number of scholars have assumed that the scientific revolution was the result of early empiricists turning their attentions away from books and toward the natural world itself. They believed that the growth of science was due to a direct investigation of the natural world—unobstructed by the vagaries of the written word. However, this proves to be a mistaken notion. In fact, the idea “that one should use one’s own eyes and trust nature, not books—derived from an experience which printing had outmoded. Classical authors had warned against trusting hand-copied books . . . for the excellent reason that they degenerated over time” (Eisenstein 218). However, printing reversed this process. Rather than degenerating, books became subject to ongoing standardization and improvement. The reasons for this have to do—in large part—with the sheer volume of information the press made available.
In the pre-Gutenberg era, manuscripts had to be reproduced by hand. Because this was such a time consuming affair, only a limited number of copies of a given work could be generated at a time. As a result, books were so scarce that knowledge remained almost as impermanent as it had been during the oral period:
No manuscript, however useful as a reference, could be preserved for long . . . Insofar as records were seen and used, they were vulnerable to wear and tear. Stored documents were vulnerable to moisture and vermin, theft and fire. However they might be collected or guarded within some great message center, their ultimate dispersal and loss were inevitable. (Eisenstein 87)
Even if it would have been possible for scribes to generate a significantly larger number of copies by hand, this still would not have solved the problem of making knowledge more permanent. This is because manual copies will inevitably experience what is referred to as “textual drift” (Eisenstein 88). Since hand-copying invites human error into the equation, manuscripts will inevitably begin to manifest a number of discrepancies and incongruities. This means that, after a text is recopied over and over again for an extended period of time, its meaning will end up being altered beyond recognition. That is why, in the pre-Gutenberg era, knowledge remained almost as evanescent as it had been during the oral period. People could only rely on “drifting texts and vanishing manuscripts” to convey information from one generation to the next (Eisenstein 87).
Yet this problem of impermanence was eventually solved by the advent of the printing press in around 1450 A.D. (Gee and Hayes 55). Because the press was able to produce such a large volume of identical replicas, less emphasis needed to be placed on protecting individual copies. With such a wealth of printed matter in circulation, if one copy was lost, it was easy enough to replace it with another exact copy. According to Elizabeth Eisenstein, this altered the way that people related themselves to knowledge: “when written messages are duplicated in such abundance that they can be consigned to trash bins or converted into pulp, they are not apt to prompt thoughts about prolonged preservation” (88). This marks a considerable change from the scribal period—where common sense dictated that knowledge was best preserved by being kept in a vault under lock and key. With the advent of print technology, men were coming to realize that permanence was better achieved by making information available in large quantities for all to see. In the end, if an individual copy was lost in an accident, it was no longer a great tragedy, since one could still count on the existence of others.
Making knowledge public also helped to remedy the problems associated with “textual drift.” Before the invention of the printing press, books were so scarce that wandering scholars had to travel great distances in order to read a set of texts on any given subject. This meant that they often couldn’t compare texts side by side. As a result, it was rather difficult to determine whether a particular text contained errors. However, in the age of print, “A serious student could now endeavor to cover a larger body of material by private reading than a student or even a mature scholar needed to master or could hope to master before printing made books cheap and plentiful” (Eisenstein 47). The printing press even made it possible to examine a number of texts simultaneously, creating “a new era of intense cross-referencing between one book and another” (Eisenstein 47). This process of cross-referencing ultimately allowed for errors to be eradicated from earlier scholarship and reversed the inevitable degeneration brought about by hand copying. Indeed, Eisenstein describes how, during the sixteenth century, editors and publishers “created vast networks of correspondents and solicited criticism of each edition, sometimes publicly promising to mention the names of readers who sent in new information or who spotted errors which would be weeded out” (82). The resulting amplification of research meant that texts were constantly being updated with newer editions to replace the old:
By the middle of the sixteenth century, botanists were vying with each other to obtain novelties from India, from the New World, from frozen countries, marshes, and deserts—from anywhere and everywhere. The plants and animals of distant exotic countries were either radically new or sufficiently different from those already known to cause perplexities and to invite further investigation. (Eisenstein 84)
In this manner, the world witnessed an explosion of knowledge unlike anything that had preceded it. As men discovered new details about the world around them, their discoveries were able to be recorded in print, paving the way for even greater study in future generations. The result is that knowledge continued to grow as time went on.
This marks a significant change from the scribal era. Before the advent of printing, a great deal of energy was spent in copying scribal texts and investigating the wisdom that had been accumulated in the past. This is because people generally believed that probing ancient texts would bring them closer to an original wellspring of knowledge. They were still under the impression that:
Some pagan seers [had been] granted foreknowledge of the Incarnation. Possibly they had also been granted a special secret key to all knowledge by the same divine dispensation . . . Efforts to think and do as the ancients did [reflected] the hope of experiencing a sudden illumination or of coming closer to the original source of a pure, clear, and certain knowledge that a long Gothic night had obscured. (Eisenstein 97)
This lent the medieval period a significantly backward-looking character. As E. Harris Harbison has written, “Throughout the patristic and medieval periods, the quest for truth is thought of as recovery of what is embedded in tradition . . . rather than the discovery of what is new” (qtd. in Eisenstein 96). However, after the printing revolution, men’s perspectives changed. They were now able to conceive of the possibility of unlimited growth and advancement. For instance, as new and improved editions of atlases and maps of astronomy were accumulated, they began to recognize that “modern navigators and star gazers knew more things about the heavens and earth than did ancient sages” (Eisenstein 99). This led to an eventual attack on the authority of the past. Because of the fixity that print introduced, it was no longer as urgent for men to guard inherited knowledge so closely. It actually became preferable to look to the future instead. As Elizabeth Eisenstein observes, “the search for primary sources, which had once meant drinking from pure wellsprings, came to be associated with dry-as-dust pedantry” (Eisenstein 99).
Hence, it becomes apparent that Enlightenment notions of progress and innovation were made possible, in part, by the epistemology of print media. With the proliferation of identical texts that the printing press made available, people were able to collaborate and build on each other’s ideas in order to create new knowledge. As a result, learning became less about guarding the old wisdom contained in scarce manuscripts—and more about perpetually building on a shared body of information.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the printing press had a significant impact on the way people understood the nature of knowledge itself. For instance, before the introduction of printing, manuscripts were not visually organized for easy reading (in many cases there were no spaces between words on the page) and continued to employ mnemonic verbal structures. This is because they were seen as little more than a means of “recycling information back into the oral world” (Ong 117). Indeed, during the scribal period, people continued to read books aloud—even to themselves in private. However, printing eventually managed to eradicate this auditory sense of the world. As Walter Ong explains, though writing may have moved words from the world of sound to a world of visual space, it was printing that “locked words into position in this space” (119). And this eventually led to texts being conceived of as empirical ‘objects’ that ‘contained’ knowledge.
The reason for this has to do, in large part, with the way that printed texts were manufactured. In the scribal world, letters did not physically exist before a text was written; the author freely chose letters to transcribe his or her thoughts as they arrived. Yet, with the printing press, the letters had to be pre-arranged in a machine before any printing could occur. They essentially “pre-exist as units before the words which they will constitute” (Ong 116). For this reason, print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did. This impression is compounded by the mechanical nature of printing:
Printing from ‘hot metal’ type . . . calls for locking up the type in an absolutely rigid position in the chase, locking the chase firmly onto a press, affixing and clamping down the makeready, and squeezing the forme of type with great pressure onto the paper surface . . . Printed texts looks machine made as they are . . . the lines perfectly regular, all justified on the right side, everything coming out even visually, and without the aid of the guidelines or ruled borders that often occur in manuscripts. This is an insistent world of cold non-human facts. (120)
Hence, the printing press made it seem as though it were generating texts from an infallible realm that existed beyond human error. Whereas hand-copying most often led to textual drift, the mechanical printing press could produce an infinite number of identical, mechanically precise copies. This led to an unprecedented faith in the printing press’s ability to generate texts that reflected a transparent reality. In fact, early dictionaries were assembled based solely on the usages that occurred when writers were producing text for print. Because print-based definitions were able to be precisely duplicated by a seemingly infallible machine, they came to be understood as a transcendent reflection of a word’s “true meaning.” Consequently, any usage that deviated from what could be found in the dictionary came to be seen as “corrupt” (Ong 128). As such, printing managed to transform words into a sort of commodity and encouraged the notion that knowledge could be objectively quantified and measured separate from human contexts of usage.
Thus, we can see that print is largely to blame for the logocentric notions of language (i.e. the belief that words are a fundamental expression of external reality) that followed—and are still with us today. For one thing, in the oral world, “the divorce between poem and context would be difficult to imagine,” since a large part of the performance was dependent on how the poet related to the audience in a given moment (Ong 157). It would have been impossible to conceive of a poetic “text” as having an objective meaning that transcended the context in which the poem was performed. Additionally, in scribal cultures manuscripts were impermanent, subject to textual drift, and communally constructed. As Walter Ong explains, “manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies) were in dialogue with the world outside their borders” (130). It was not until the advent of print that texts came to be thought of as hermetically sealed artifacts. And this is what paved the way for linguistic positivism: because printed texts are thought of as closed entities—and because there is assumed to be a “gross one-to-one correspondence between concept, word and object”—it is believed possible to deduce a text’s objective meaning (Ong 157).
In the end, it was this sense of linguistic positivism that made the modern era possible. For one thing, Enlightenment notions of progress were predicated on mankind’s (supposed) ability to obtain ultimate knowledge of the universe. Obviously, this ability to achieve ultimate knowledge necessitated an objective language that could communicate exactly the external reality to which it corresponded. After all, if we are to achieve ultimate knowledge, then we need a means of representing it to our minds, and this requires a language that can provide a transparent widow to the real.
In Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, James Berlin examines how this ideology (what he terms “current-traditional rhetoric”) continues to influence the way that writing is taught in twentieth-century universities. Berlin explains that, “Current-traditional rhetoric does not deal with probabilities—as do, for example, the major rhetorics of Athens and Rome as well as those of the eighteenth century—but with certainties ascertained through the scientific method” (30). Because it is believed that language corresponds directly with an external reality:
the real is always the factual and rational. The answer to all questions—scientific, social, political, cultural—can be found unproblematically in the facts of the material world. The method of investigation is inductive, amassing data for the analysis of university-trained experts. Power in society is put in the hands of professionals in a newly formulated misrepresentation of democracy. (Berlin 32)
As Berlin explains, by positing an unproblematic relationship between a linguistic sign and its referent, current-traditional rhetoric provides the perfect vehicle for the hyper-rational authority of the modern age. Because there is assumed to be a direct one-to-one correspondence between language and the material world, expertise becomes a matter of being in possession of the greatest amount of knowledge capital. In this context, traditional experts are assumed to be in the best position to make informed decisions. After all, they have a greater store of unbiased knowledge to draw upon. However, Berlin goes on to further argue that “the problems and solutions these experts discovered most commonly served the interests of their own class” (32). In other words, while we may assume that traditional experts are guided by knowledge that is a neutral reflection of truth, they often make decisions that are motivated by self-interest. Yet, because they appeal to the transcendent logic of science and rationality, these ideological maneuvers manage to escape detection.
In this sense, traditional publishing can also be understood as a hierarchical practice, which grants authority to certain classes of people. Because the means of production (i.e. printing presses) are concentrated in the hands of the few, a text must be approved by a long line of reviewers before making it into print. As James Paul Gee and Elisabeth Hayes explain, “Printing houses and publishers, almost from the beginning of print, controlled what could be officially published (often along with state authorities). Once again, [as in the oral period,] everyday people were meant to consume (read) and not produce (write, and certainly not publish)” (3). To state the obvious, this allows for a significant amount of ideological control. After all, only a select number of texts will be allowed to reach a mass audience—and they will have to conform to a particular set of discourse conventions before this can occur. Although we have long believed that experts are in possession of the “truest” understanding of a particular subject, it becomes apparent that this notion of expertise has been justified by the epistemology of the printing press.
Conclusions
This brief historical overview is not meant to suggest that oral culture is somehow superior to print culture—or the scribal culture is to be valued over orality. Rather, the purpose is to illustrate how evolving media epistemologies have altered our cultural values and understanding of knowledge through time.
As we have seen, information was evanescent during the oral period, so people had to spend a great deal of energy on memorization in order to ensure that knowledge was transferred from generation to generation. Because they could not write anything down, their primary intellectual concern was preserving the content of their culture. This created a society where knowledge had to be codified in easily memorized narratives—such as formulaic epic poetry. Otherwise, the information would be lost. In oral cultures, the powerful also set themselves up as the official spokespersons for the culture, so it was common for everyday people to be silenced when speech was truly consequential. In essence, they functioned as consumers (listeners) rather than producers (speakers) of language.
The discovery of alphabetic writing, by contrast, allowed ideas to be recorded in physical space, freeing people from spending their mental energies on memorizing cultural narratives. As a result, they were able to engage in increasingly abstract modes of thought, which led to the development of previously unknown subjects such as philosophy and mathematical science. However, knowledge still remained impermanent during the scribal era due to the forces of textual drift, a scarcity of written matter, and erosion/loss of texts over time.
The printing press eventually managed to solve this problem of impermanence by putting a wealth of printed matter into circulation. However, it also managed to transform knowledge into a sort of commodity. Because printed books are bounded objects whose contents can be reproduced exactly, people came to believe that they stored stable and objective meanings. This had the effect of making knowledge seem like a static, easily transmitted entity. Consequently, experts were understood to be people who possessed a great deal of knowledge capital. The printing press also concentrated the means of production into the hands of the few, which means that only a select group of individuals were able to find an audience. Therefore, much like in the oral period, the average person was relegated to the role of a consumer of language.
With the coming of the internet, it appears that everyday citizens are once again gaining the ability to be both consumers and producers of media. Because our cultural institutions have long been organized according to the logic of print media, they are currently facing great consternation and change. Indeed, many questions have arisen: How are we to define “knowledge” within this current media environment? How does the change from print to electronic media challenge forms of social organization that have existed for centuries? How does broadband connectivity bring with it a new cultural logic? And how must our educational institutions adapt in order to remain relevant in the contemporary world? These are the issues to be explored in the following chapters.
