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Here is the story. Life may not have a happy ending, but it does have a happy beginning. You received the conception-day gift of all the wisdom that our species has accumulated over thousands of years of survival in a harsh arena. You were born wise. Part of that gift is a means of storing information (memory) and a means of transmitting information (speech). Since a medium is any means of storing and transmitting information, Memory and Speech could be considered as a first generation of media. That is all we had, and needed, for 99.9% of our time on our planet - as hunter-gatherers. However, over the last few thousand years, we have moved from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural to an industrial and now to an information society. Extending our nervous system by storing (Print and Film - second generation), transmitting (Telephone and Television - third generation), and now both storing and transmitting information outside our bodies (Multimedia and Internet - fourth generation) has enabled us to deal with those increasingly more complex societies. Both those new societies and new media are inventions of this creative species which explores and manipulates its environment. Necessity is not the mother of invention. It is the father. The human mind is the mother. Thus the co-evolution of the person and media as extensions is the Big Story [GARDINER 2002]. Conflict is just a footnote about failures of communication. The history of media is the sequel to the theory of evolution, which explains only how we became hunter-gatherers. The first generation - Memory and Speech - is essentially democratic. All members of our species receive those means of storing and transmitting information as part of the conception-day gift. There are no primitive languages. The second generation - Print and Film - has an autocratic version (newspaper) and a democratic version (Post Office). Underlying the former is a system in which a few sources transmit information to thousands of passive destinations; underlying the latter is a system in which everyone can be both source and destination. In the third generation - Telephone and Television - the former has that democratic network of interlinked nodes of the Post Office and the latter has the few source to many destination structure of the newspaper. Will the fourth generation - Multimedia and Internet - be democratic or autocratic? It is intrinsically democratic since it piggybacks on the telephone system but many people, who will remain nameless, aspire to erecting Gates on the internet and Billing us for passing through them. |
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