Lecture 1 What is Media?

[Read Chapter 1 of Media Essentials]

Lecture 1 – What is Media?

What is media? The means by which we communicate … the words, pictures and 2

sounds we send from one source to another or from one person to millions. Humans

probably first began communicating by using drum beats, music, physical objects

like smoke signals and eventually language and pictures.

Nobody knows exactly when we first invented language, but the best current

estimate is somewhere between 200,000 years ago, when the first people who looked

like us evolved, and 60,000 years ago when the last large group of humans left

Africa.

Whenever language started, the words we used in those distant times are lost

forever, but forty thousand years ago our distant ancestors began painting in caves

recognizable figures and some of those paintings remain.1 7

The media our distant ancestors used to tell their stories were the sound waves that 8

carried their voices and creative mixtures of minerals, burnt bone meal and charcoal

mixed with water, blood, animal fats, and tree saps to paint their pictures.

“These paintings mark a shift in how early humans thought about and engaged 9

with their environment—from focusing on survival and daily mundane necessities to

cultivating what could be the earliest threads of human culture.”

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 Most of these early cave paintings were probably made by women, incidentally. 10

“A study sponsored by the National Geographic Society in 2013 suggests that three-

quarters of the hand stencils found on the walls of dozens of European caves were

made by women, and that the paintings alongside them likely were as well.”2

By 13,500 years ago cave art had evolved. “This period is dominated by black 11

pigmented geometric shapes and stick figures engaged in activity, such as dancing,

boating, and hunting.”3

This is complex storytelling, and the humans who told these stories lived as

hunters and gatherers. Agricultural civilizations wouldn’t emerge for another 10,000

years. Hunters and gatherers had a long run of it.

By comparison, civilization is a new experiment, only a few thousand years old. 12

And to put things in perspective, the industrial civilization we are just passing

through is less than 200 years old. And we seem to be moving on to something new.

What role did storytelling play in these paleolithic tribes? We can get some idea

by observing the few hunting and gathering tribes that have survived. Andrea

Migliano, an anthropologist at University College in London, studied the Agta, a

group of hunter-gatherers from the Philippines. 

She asked them “to nominate the strongest people they knew; the best hunters,

fishers, and foragers; the ones whose opinions are most respected; and the ones with

the most medical knowledge.” As an afterthought, she asked them about storytellers.

To her surprise, “the Agta seemed to value storytelling above all else. Good

storytellers were twice as likely to be named as ideal living companions. … [Story

telling] was highly valued, twice as much as being a good hunter.”4 13

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 When they asked the Agta what their stories were about, they found “that most of

the content was about cooperation, egalitarianism, and gender equality. … These

themes aren’t unique to the Agta. They’re also present in around 70 percent of the

stories that Migliano compiled from work with other hunter-gatherer groups.

‘Hunter-gatherers move around a lot and no one has particular power,’ she 14

explains. ‘You need ways of ensuring cooperation in an egalitarian society.’”5

Paleolithic tribes had no gods. Gods were invented by larger, stable agricultural

societies as a way of enforcing community standards through fear of retribution and

hope of rewards after you died. 15

We’re talking here about the impact of the media, the subject of this course. Of

course, it’s not the media that has the impact, it’s the messages the media transmits or

doesn’t transmit. Not everyone agrees with that. One of the most famous media

analysts is Marshall McLuhan who wrote a hugely influential book called The Media

is the Message. We’ll get to what he actually meant by that in another class.

For the Modern Era (from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution through the 16

Twentieth Century the favored messages were about working efficiently, celebrating

the individual, believing in rational order, rejecting tradition and embracing progress.

In the Post Modern Era (from the nineteen eighties to today), we seem to be 17

celebrating populism, questioning authority and embracing technology. Of course,

these are gross simplifications, and we’ll be looking closely at media to see what

messages we were getting in the past and what we’re getting today.

One fascinating fact, some of the classic stories we tell each other today

apparently go back thousands of years.

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 Researchers have investigated the origins of classic folk tales, for example, by

examining “nuggets of cultural currency” or memes, which you all know about

because memes proliferate on the Internet today

The idea of memes comes from a 1976 book by the English evolutionary biologist

Richard Dawkins called The Selfish Gene. He “coined the word meme to describe a

“unit of cultural transmission” analogous to a biological gene.

Memes, he wrote, could be ideas, tunes, or styles of clothing—essentially any

product of human intellect. Moreover, they were not just metaphorically alive but

technically living things.”6

By searching for patterns of memes in thousands of stories, clear patterns

emerged, and it has allowed researchers to trace stories back in time. ““Beauty and

the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” for example, were more than 2,500 years old.”

The endurance of these stories shouldn’t surprise us. What do they have in 18

common? They teach us ways to survive in the world around us. They are

preoccupied with peril. “They are populated by predators real and imaginary. They

are replete with physical and interpersonal threats—in particular deceit.

They confront characters with at least one crisis and force them to either resolve it

or meet a terrible fate. Even the folktales of the Agta, which emphasize harmony,

only do so through a sharp contrast with discord.”7

The world around us doesn’t makes sense without stories. It is inchoate, formless,

random, really just an infinite number of unconnected impressions. That’s the way a

baby sees it. Everything is equally fascinating, because nothing makes any sense.

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 We learn to differentiate the room from the trees outside by focusing on one set of 19

impressions instead of another. The word “room” is really a story we tell ourselves to

link together this set of impressions.

Nobody is sure exactly when written language was invented, but it developed in at

least five different places around the world, beginning in Mesopotamia between

3,400 and 3,100 BC, around the same time in Egypt, a little later in China and

Mesoamerica.  

Writing provided story tellers with new media to communicate their stories. 20

In Sumer, in Nouthern Mesopotamia, the new media was wet clay tablets scored with

a reed implement in a process called cuneiform.

A little over four thousand years ago, the first writer in history that we know of, a

Mesopotamian priestess, wrote hymns to the goddess Inanna on clay tablets and

signed them with her name and seal. The Epic of Gilgamesh, considered the first epic 21

tale in the world, was written a little later also on clay tablets. It deals with the great

king of Uruk Gilgamesh and his search for the meaning of life.

From clay tablets writing media went on to reed pens and papyrus (paper made 22

from seeds) used by Egyptians, parchment paper (treated animal skins) used for

scrolls by Greeks and Romans, and calligraphy by the Chinese.

The Roman Empire collapsed, and the writing of the ancient world disappeared 23

for a while … thank god the Arabs kept a lot of it. Catholic priests kept writing in

Latin, the official language of the church. Words were written down word for word,

bound in books and kept in libraries. Punctuation, spelling and grammatical rules

became somewhat more standardized, but almost no ordinary people read books.

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 Finally, in the 15th Century, a thousand years after the fall of Rome, mass media 24

was invented. It was the late Middle Ages. Western Europe was made up of nobles,

serfs and priests. The Roman Catholic Church was the only unifying institution and

it held tremendous power.

The Black Plague had wiped out between a third and sixty per cent of Europe’s 25

population in three years. There were barely enough people to maintain the farms,

markets and crafts necessary for a community’s survival.

The demand for labor was intense and wages went up. A middle class consisting

of craftsmen, independent farmers and merchants emerged with enough leisure time

to pursue education.

In 1424, Cambridge University, one of the most prestigious universities in Europe

maintained a library with only 122 books—each of them with a value equal to that of

a farm or vineyard. The Renaissance was flourishing in northern Italy and people

were learning how to read and write in their native language.

They wanted books, but the only available method of reproducing books (other

than copying them word for word) was woodblock printing, which had arrived in

Europe from China at the beginning of the century. But wood blocks couldn’t print

the complicated letters of the Western Alphabet.

Every printer was looking for an answer. Johannes Gutenberg was probably the 26

first to make type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony. To create these lead

types, Gutenberg used a special matrix enabling the quick and precise molding of

new type blocks from a uniform template.

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 Gutenberg also used oil-based ink, which didn’t run like the water-based inks

most printers used at the time. The technic quickly spread across Europe. Within fifty

or sixty years the entire classical canon preserved by Arabs and discovered during the 27

Renaissance was reprinted in vernacular languages (the common languages of each

country) and was widely distributed throughout Europe.

The ability to read the Bible and the classics in their own language, undermined

the authority of Rome and lead ultimately to European nationalism and in 1517 to the

Protestant revolution.

Human’s first mass media, printing, brought down the awesome power of the

Catholic Church that had effectively ruled Europe for a thousand years. Some

scholars argue that the recent shift from a dominance of print media distributed in a

physical world to a dominance of visual media delivered in a virtual world will have

an equally profound impact on our future. What, if any, major institutions will

disappear? That’s a question we’ll explore during this course.

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1
40,000-year-old cave art may be world's oldest animal drawing
The Southeast Asian island of Borneo joins a growing number of sites boasting early cave art innovation. By Maya Wei-
Haas Atlantic Magazine, November 7th, 2018
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Storytelling Across the Ages
From our earliest times of uncertainty, it seems, we have searched for a happy ending. By Adam Gopnik
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The Story of Storytelling What the hidden relationships of ancient folktales reveal about their evolution—and our own
By Ferris Jabr
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