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A Short History of Communication
- 02/23/11
- 18
Over the past few days I have been preparing to preach on Genesis 3, one of those amazing biblical texts that just opens wide as you begin to study it. One clear application from the first seven verses is that we need to know, believe and stand upon the Word of God. Adam and Eve did not do this—they doubted God’s Word. That doubt, that lack of trust, led to sin, led to the Fall, led to this world.
One thing I have been thinking about is the fact that Adam and Eve did not have God’s Word written for them. They had God’s Word spoken to them. And that brought me back to a study I did a few months ago on the ways in which humans have communicated over time. From the first days until today we have passed through various phases of communication, beginning with an oral culture, passing through a written and then printed culture, and now arriving at a digital culture.
I want to outline this flow over time and seek your input on a couple of things. So get reading and then help me out along the way.
Oral Culture
As far as we know, God created Adam and Eve not just with the ability to speak but with ability to speak meaningfully in some kind of a language. Created as adults, Adam and Eve were created with the ability to communicate with one another and with God. The speech they knew when they were created they taught to their children and their children after them. This was the first form of human communication. This was an oral culture in which words were not written but, rather, memorized and recited. What they did not remember or choose to record in their memories was lost forever.
It is difficult for those of us who live in the twenty-first century to imagine ourselves in an oral culture or to understand just how different our lives would be. Consider a world in which there existed no copy of the Words of God outside the memories of a small number of people. Many people would know snippets of these words, but only a small elite would know exhaustive words, exhaustive scriptures. When God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, when he told them of the judgment that would fall upon them for their disobedience, these words were recorded only in the memories of those first humans. It was up to them to pass those words, faithfully and carefully, to their children. They could not reference chapter or verse; they could not even reference words carved in stone or written on paper. They could say only, "Here is what God has told us." In those days there were words God spoke and words God didn't speak, but there was no Scripture as we understand it today. Adam would teach Seth, "God said..." and that would be enough. Seth would tell his children who would tell their children. And so the words would pass from generation to generation.
Within such a culture, a culture with no access to writing, virtuous living was based less around an abstract set of values than it was based on interpersonal interaction. Philosophical thinking was largely dependent upon the written word and would be a later development. At this time, right living and wrong living was often defined by heroes and villains, and epic tales encouraged people to live like their heroes had lived. According to the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, "Moral norms, trade skills, history, and every aspect of communal life were passed on in oral history."
Within these cultures, a class of oral expert arose, a class of oral poets who would commit to memory vast histories and genealogies. Words were passed from one expert to the next with careful and deliberate memorization. We are amazed today as we learn of these feats of memory, but we are amazed only because such skills have been lost as memory has been outsourced first to paper and then to bit and bytes. Yet oral transmission in such cultures was very accurate in its own way. Oral poets would use formulaic expressions--figures of speech or groups of expressions, along with themes--groups of topics usually associated with one another, to build compositions. A poet telling a story might never tell it exactly the same way twice through hundreds of recitations, inserting different formulas in different orders, but the topics would remain much the same and the general content would change very little.
Writing
Though Adam and Eve could speak and remember, they could not write. Writing was a later development, one that came approximately 4,000 years before Christ. First came pictures, often depicting simple human activities such as hunting. Soon after that came pictures used to record historical events. Drawn on the walls of caves, for example, pictures began to take the place of oral transmission. Then came pictograms, pictorial representations for letters or sounds. Though there was at first typically some noticeable correlation between a pictogram and the object it presented so that the character for fish might be in the shape of a fish, scribes, drawing on damp clay using a pointed tool, soon found that it was easier to make a few simple marks rather than a drawing. As scribes communicated with one another, these markings became standardized across a culture. First an advance in economics, writing allowed records to be kept of land, harvests and loans. Pressed into soft clay and hardened in a kiln, marks would represent a commodity or a transaction. Syllabic writing soon developed, allowing each symbol to represent not a concept but a sound. The alphabet was not far behind, with evidence indicating some cultures may have turned to it as early as 2000 B.C.. Now each letter equaled a sound and words were composed of a string of letters put together, harmonizing reading and pronunciation.
As language developed, so too did the media upon which writing was placed. Stone was plentiful and long-lasting. But for the difficulty in inscribing upon it, it made an ideal medium as evidenced by God's choice of stone as the media for his Ten Commandments. Many stone monuments carved thousands of years ago remain to this day. Clay was an easier medium to work with and offered a good compromise between ease-of-use, cost and durability. By the third millennium B.C. the Egyptians had discovered that they could make a paper-like medium from papyrus. Though not at all durable, it was convenient--easy and cheap to produce, simple to write upon and able to be joined together to form scrolls or codices. Parchment, made from the skins of animals, was the medium of choice for important and high-quality writing but it, too, was prone to decay. Paper was introduced from Asia to Egypt about 1000 years before Christ. Its heyday was to come in the age of print.
Oral culture did not immediately pass with the development of the written word. Even as B.C. turned to A.D., memory was still regarded as a pure and reliable means of transmission. Socrates, living some 450 years before Christ, regarded writing with suspicion, understanding rightly that writing would inevitably damage memory, as people stopped using their brains to remember but instead relied on the written word. He saw also that it would create a kind of false wisdom in which recollection, aided by written records, would overshadow true wisdom. We would be impressed not by understanding of facts, but instead by their mere accumulation (to quote Neal Postman). Many of Jesus' words were recorded in memory and maintained there for years or decades before being written down by the chroniclers of his life, the writers of the gospels.
Even with the invention of writing, cultures remained largely oral. Literacy rates were very low and until the explosion of literacy following the invention of the printing press, far more people heard the Bible than read it. On the Sabbath day, one rabbi would read the Scriptures and everyone else would listen (and not with their own copy open in their laps). As they heard the words of God, they would immediately contextualize them, thinking about what came before and what came after. Thus as he announced the beginning of his ministry Jesus could quote from Isaiah and say, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21) and the people would think not just of those words, but all they entailed. The early Christians could quote from the Bible saying only, "David said..." and the minds of the listeners would immediately understand the context. We may experience much the same thing today when we hear the words, "I have a dream." We think not just of Martin Luther King, Jr., but of the national and racial context in which he gave that speech. Our minds immediately provide the context. We do not need chapter and verse but a simple pointer to the context (source).
Ideologies
Here is where I want your help. I want you to help me understand how a person’s worldview or how his ideologies would be shaped by being a product of an oral or written culture. Let me get the conversation started.
The mindset of those in an oral culture and written culture must have been very different from the mindset in our digital culture. There were different ideas bound up in orality and writing, different ideologies carried by it into the minds and worldviews of those immersed in it.
In an oral culture both recitation and interpretation were the realm of the expert. A scribe would write and a teacher or oral poet would read. The reading of Scripture was a community event, not one done in isolation. Interpretation was largely the same--a teacher would read the Scriptures and then explain it to those in attendance. So there would be little conception of a private or individual faith, little idea of a faith carried on by times of personal devotion. Faith was inherently a community activity. There is one great difference. In a print or digital culture we are far more isolated, far more prone to personal study and interpretation.
Second, when communicating orally, there is an immediate connection between the speaker and the listener. It is a very personal form of communication, it is an event that is experienced. The ancient Hebrews knew this and the word dabar carries a deeper meaning than the English word. We may think of a word as a collection of letters or symbols, something that is abstract and objective. But in the ancient Jewish mindset, a word conveyed some kind of a power, it was effective and effectual, making things happen. God spoke the world into existence through a word and promised that his word would never return to him empty (Isaiah 55:11). So there was a measure of subjectivity to words that became foreign in a later printed context.
Third, accuracy in an oral context is very different from within a print or digital context. In an oral culture a person spoke accurately if he properly conveyed the sense of a person's words. Footnotes did not exist, quotation marks did not exist. Word-for-word accuracy was less important than thought-for-thought accuracy. So we see the writers of the gospels occasionally quoting Jesus' words a little bit differently. In our minds we may see contradiction but in the oral mindset there was no contradiction at all as long as both authors accurately conveyed these sense of what Jesus had communicated.
With the ascendency of the written word it was inevitable that an oral culture would eventually give way. And indeed, it soon did just that. And as Socrates had predicted, memory soon faded as words became inscribed. I want to talk a bit about that tomorrow. But first help me see some of the other ways in which people of oral and printed culture were different from us.
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Comments (18)
A main difference between the two would be the development of complex arguments and reasoning in print cultures. With the invention of the codex and the further development of print, complex arguments could be made over the course of a work, presenting a unified whole. The codex, with its pages and later page numbers made it more possible for readers to interact with the author’s arguments - flipping back and forth to check their accuracy, consistency, and validity. Readers could also read some of the argument and put the book down and think on that argument more fully, and pick it back up again later. Authors in turn developed more unified, consistent, and complex arguments because of the codex and later the printing press. Because codices allowed a reader to progress page by page, he could interact with material earlier or later in the book. This allows more reasoned, thoughtful interaction and also made writers more cognizant of a solid, unified argument from the first page to the last. Orality by default cannot sustain such prolonged, complex arguments that print can. It could be argued that the digital age is actually taking a step back in this regard, as digital media cannot sustain complex arguments either. But that’s a discussion for a later time I suppose.
Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy is masterful in talking about the distinctions between oral- and print- based cultures.
By way of helping you think through, I’d like you to flesh out why you think in point #1 that print or digital makes one isolated. I’ll give you prone to personal study. Mostly because this is the way it is taught that one makes their way into jobs and how we accumulate knowledge at somewhat of a self-pace. In other words, we need not wait for the teacher to teach. However, I would say that written and digital communication has made a conversation much wider in it’s scope (albeit perhaps somewhat more impersonal). Case in point: I’m responding to your thoughts from far, far away. Isolated? I don’t think so. Impersonal, maybe. Maybe I misunderstand what you meant by isolated?
On point #2, maybe the deeper meaning of words is more subliminal in our culture. Nobody but english majors really think of a word as a mere collection of letters. There’s always a meaning attached. Again, it could be more subliminal, but it’s there. There may be differences in what a translated word might mean, but it still means something. There is still some, if not great effects produced by the use of words.
Your third point I think is the better one. Since everyone, that is literate, can now check (read scrutinize) the story for themselves, they look for black and white 1+1=2 and completely throw out the idea of interpretation of ancient documents. Hermenutics are not clearly understood and so make perceieved contridictions more of a problem.
Some counter-thoughts. Hope they help.
quote—“When God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, when he told them of the judgment that would fall upon them for their disobedience, these words were recorded only in the memories of those first humans. It was up to them to pass those words, faithfully and carefully, to their children.” —endquote
God didn’t “tell” Eve. He spoke the command to Adam. And perhaps here we have the failings of an oral culture, especially in a sin corrupted world, and evidently even before sin entered the picture.
Notice Adam’s receiving the word:
(Gen 2:16-17) “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: {17} But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
And then Eve’s declaration:
(Gen 3:2-3) “And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: {3} But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.”
Where did Eve get the part about touching it? Many think that Eve added that part autonomously, but I would contend that is the way Adam condescendingly gave the word of God to her. “Don’t even touch it!”
Also notice this:
(Gen 2:18) “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”
We went from “very good” in Gen 1:31 to “It is NOT good” here. What is happening? Adam is only having eyes for Adam. Self-focus was beginning to take over Adam’s perspective, so God said he needs HELP! A helper to mirror himself (meet = counterpart) to see that he is not self-sufficient.
So then, written communication is recorded communication, to assist in accurately conveying what is said and then can be consulted in the future to assure the parties what was said.
In an oral culture those who have access to learning the Scriptures know them very well. We see this today in cultures where the printed Bible is/was limited, like the former Soviet Union. Even today in Russia, missionaries encourage believers to memorize their whole Bible. Of course the problem is that corruption of the word is very easily done.
In a written culture, the biggest benefits are that, like Joel said above, more developed theological arguments and explanations. Also, the word is preserved with less corruption, which is why God had the Bible written.
HC,
There are different viewpoints on what was going on with Eve’s statement to Satan. Some consider it appropriate.
See Bob Gonzales’ writeup:http://blog.rbseminary.org/2011/02/did-eves-first-response-to-the-serpen…
Tim: Allow me to wax a bit on Gen 3 and Luke 4 with regard to the two face-to-face encounters of man and Satan (garden and wilderness). Of the many correlations and contrasts within the stories, memory and the spoken word are two very rich ones. My own interest is raised exponentially when I also think about Moses’ instructions to the fledgling Israelites on the cusp of “speaking” to the culture of the Canaanites, and our own need to speak to culture today. It should come as no surprise to us that in Gen 2 day six is deemed “not good” at the point in the story where no one else is present for Adam to communicate God’s word.
The literary techniques of Hebrew story telling, at least as communicated in Scripture, reveal remarkable poetic structure adding layers of understanding incorporating rational and imaginative thinking. Very sophisticated and intentional and entirely under-appreciated today. It manifests thinking with the whole brain (duality) instead of dichotomizing the rationalistic and poetic as we do today.
I imagine the Hebrews in days of hard work motivated by the excitement of campfire evenings spent acting out the stories, the laughter when elders tell it “wrong” to bait choruses of children’s “correction;” stories where boldness in fear, praise in hardship, and living coram Deo is inculcated in the warmth and providence of community.
Film, books, art, theatre… all poor substitutes for the potential of this kind of culture-making.
I think too much has been made of the difference between Hebrew and Greek language, specifically with regard to the concrete/abstract and dynamic/static ratios. The connection between language and thought is not a one-way determinism, but a mutual interaction of artist and utensil, I am limited by the constraints of my language, but I can also find ways to bend those limitations, or even break them and create new uses, should I find the desire and inclination (for example, consider how much effort the Stoics put forth into discovering all the various ambiguities of language).
Even the point about oral communication being a personal event can be used to describe the way in which some people experience reading, or writing, a piece of literature. Surely there are differences between reading and hearing, speaking and writing, but perhaps the differences are not so stark as scholarship has made them out to be.
Still, I think there are a few things that seem good to highlight in response to your three points:
1. The relationship between the self and other is different in oral and written communication. In both there is an element of fixed presence as well as an element of the imagined—both listening and reading requires one to anticipate what is going to be said or written (imagined) in light of what has been said or written (fixed). Still, written communication seems to possess a greater aspect of imagination, since the interaction is at most soliloquy of the reader—the reader has to do more thinking, since he cannot ask the writer what is meant. There is more self-effort, and less other-action.
2. I don’t really buy that words in oral cultures carry deeper meanings than words in literate or print cultures, or that oral words carry power inherently, as opposed to being invested with power on the basis of the presence and authority of the speaker. Oral words today can (though they do not always) carry more power than written words, not because the cultural ideologies are different, but because the type of communication is more sensually rich—volume, tone, pitch, proximity, etc. are all part of the context that provide (or can eliminate, if poorly handled) the gravity of the words. Abstraction may occur more easily in writing or in print, but it is not inherent. The OED entry for “word” happens to cover eight full pages, showing that it carries a vast range of meanings that give it depth. Even the slang use of “word” indicates that it bears a certain gravity to it.
3. An excellent point, and one that bears more emphasis and consideration, especially in the new media age—since new media allows words to be ripped from their context with much greater frequency and ease than either oral or print media.
It could be that one of the key differences between written and oral communication would be that the recipients of information are much more invested in an oral culture. For instance today I can read Facebook, Twitter, or the dozens of books and magazines just laying around the house and typically the words I see are just words written that may or may not have an impact on me. These writers, and by virtue of that, their words are talking “at” me.
In an oral culture you wouldn’t have the sense of being talked “at” but being talked “to”. I think you can see that fairly clearly in Luke 4. Jesus made it clear that His message was inherently personal to the people He had grown up with. That would have been common place in that culture because they were so invested in hearing Biblical stories. They knew that had to assimilate what was important to repeat it so their children and so on could still know the truth that they knew. These people were not just reading words on a page they were looking someone in the eye while he said, “Thus saith the Lord.”
When you lose that oral communication what you often end up with is just a barrage of facts to be assessed, then accepted or discarded. Words are just letters on a page and they can lose their impact So basically, what would have been living, breathing, truth to the average Hebrew has devolved into having about the same impact as reading a Math text book.
However, what must be noted is that with the written word of God and the Spirit of God living inside of us, we not only have a Bible but we have a God who speaks when we read it. We have the best of both worlds. When you add to that the regular preaching of the Word then you get both the sense of the written word that God is speaking to “me” and the sense of community that God is working in “us”. However, the truth of God’s word, no matter how it is communicated always reminds “me” as an individual, and “us” as a church, that it’s really all about “Him” and “His” being for “me” and for “us”.
Good thoughts…
Socrates warned that writing would be the death of memory, but I don’t think it was entirely. It was more a blow to forgetting—as the collected stories, laws, and traditions of a society were transcribed and gathered into libraries, they were preserved for posterity, even if at the expense of the readiness of access that internalized memories provided. After the proliferation of writing, nothing of import could completely slip from the realm of existence except through disasters (fire, flood, etc.)
The role of memory was still important in the age of writing because of the difficulty of moving large quantities of written material. That is, a debater or speaker couldn’t drag an entire library to the lectern with him. He depended upon his memory from careful reading and rereading of relevant writings.
In the digital era, even that stronghold of memory is being supplanted by the instantaneous recall of information from any number of the plethora of web-ready devices available today. Why bother to have committed a passage of a book to memory when you can pull it up on your iPhone in the middle of a conversation? Why study geography when you can affix a GPS device to your windshield to guide your every turn?
This is not an inherently problematic development of culture—it allows a broader knowledge base to come into play in every discussion than was ever possible previously. However, there are three main frustrations/dangers associated with our computer-assisted communication today. 1) Sorting: The volume of information available far outweighs our ability to properly and carefully utilize it. 2) Laziness: Essentially what I described in the paragraph above. When we don’t have to rely on memory and other personal skills, we lose those skills. 3) Fragility: Whereas in the previous two epochs there was some level of permanence to information (the odds of every tribal elder with a good memory dying at the same time or of every library in the world burning down on the same day were quite slim), the necessary interconnectedness of the digital world makes it susceptible to systemic failure. That, in light of the previous two problems stated would render a digital culture largely helpless to recover (or even recognize) what it had lost.
Some generic thoughtsPrint speeds up learning. The teacher can teach more quickly to the point rather than the words, so specialization of labor becomes more rapid.The book then shapes the way the ideas are organized together. We remember the book - the chapter divisions, the layout, as much as we remember the content. The very act of organization impressed upon the material is passed to us in memory now, which is a break from the story stream.
Oral v. Written … Luke was not content for Theophilus to be soley in possession of an oral history or telling of the Gospel . . it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, … the Holy Spirit inspired Luke, as well as others to write. YHWY also instructed Moses to “write” the Law, not to mention the writing in Deut. 29.29. It seems that in the progression of God’s inspired Word, He moved from oral to written, shadows to reality, pictures to The Living Word. the written Word of God makes it truly accessible to all me, even more so than oral word/tradition. 64x in the NT, “It is written …” John said, these things have been “written so that you may believe . . .”
the written seems to be superior, given all else equal or considered.
The Third Lausanne Congress recently held in Cape Town, South Africa had a whole multiplex and talk highlighting the effort for Oral Translation — pieces of the scripture that could gain access for places that still are without the written Word. Fascinating stuff.
Tim,
Much of what you say is spot on. Allow me to add to the argument a bit. First, we would expect for an oral culture to remain so committed in absence of other necessity. This is chiefly supported by the biblical record that e lifespans of individuals were so much longer. Direct communication with progenitors of information was not only possible, it was at least probable with “oral disciples”. One does not need the same intilectual or social discipline of a shorter life of communication (or the record of the far less transitory written word) when people themselves are less transitory. This can open up a vast number of conclusions and should directly tie one to some of the deeper evaluations to true communication versus the more shallow. It ought also to point to what reading the written communication of those who are now long past and all we have left is their written communication— we are often reading men who would have still been living, and in fact could say the written word is them, in a sense, continuing to live— today. Fascinating to reckon ones written word with them directly, as if one were sitting inI a room “listening” to them speak, though they are gone…for now. This provides a bettr parrallel with what communication was in a world where people lived to be 10 times their current age. I is also interesting to note God’s own facilitation with His written word in a world that was gradually declining in age to the more modern terminus. God’s own pattern of communication acknowledges our own frailty and this “loss” of time, if you will.There are many other considerations that are even more exciting to me but I did want to respond to some of the presuppositions of your article. You may want to seriously consider if the absence of written language is a sustainable presupposition not only in the antedeluvian world but even to the the very immediate generations after Adam (remember the presense of the primeval couple well nigh to the Flood). I am not pointing this out due to it undermining your points at all but rather perhaps to shine some light where a fellow historian and theologian may not have considered before. While the advent of the intrroduction of written language would definatey have had several choke points (and even perhaps lost knowledge and ability—the Flood, again, would have accomplished this, Babel being the next obvious) these do not necessitate and even militate against assuming that the development of written expression developed in the fashion you are assuming! Just food for thought! Feel free to email me if you want some further thoughts. I am confident however, you may find many more riches in these thoughts and even the door open to a better understanding and application or your own stated query. God bless.
Wait a minute - Adam didn’t write - ever? How do we know that?
It seems to me that Adam was likely one of the most intelligent people to ever live - and he had quite the lifespan. And yet he never thought to put a tally mark on a tree, or draw a picture in the sand or anything? I think that, considering our limited knowledge of the world before the flood, we can’t be so sure… or maybe I’m missing the obvious.
Actually, the life spans of those early days bring up another interesting point. Oral culture then is not what it is now. Imagine the number of people Adam could have shared something with - over and over. It makes a drastic difference when your ancestors are still alive, still sharing the same stories, which can be corroborated by those who heard them before AND those who were maybe even there 200 years ago as witnesses. It’s a whole different ball game from a semi-literate person with a life span of 70 years in today’s culture. VERY different.
Hi,
I’m not sure they would be much different from us at all. We are still very much an oral culture ourselves. Withthe aid of radio, television, and a host of other audio media, the rate of dissemination for sermons, and other para-church communications (including movies) is now greater than ever. Your question seems to be pitting one culture against another simply through the advent of printing itself. I don’t remember the alleged demise of the oral tradition.
Roger Ball
Tim,There are a couple of things that you might want to consider in terms of your analysis of communication and ideology and that is their relation to power and participation. The communications theorist Harold Innis points out that each media is “biased” to either time or space and this determines the nature of the civilization that uses it. For instance, “media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone”. As a result, civilizations which favour “durable” materials tend to be decentralized and less likely to be swayed by innovation. Those that utilize less durable but lighter media, such as papyrus and paper, are more prone to having larger, centralized administrations, but are also subject to huge and unexpected changes. Innis made the argument that for a civilization to endure through time and space it needed to strike a balance between the differing media. The major threat to this balance comes when a monopoly is made that prefers one media over the others. For instance, he sees the demise of the Egyptian empire around 2000 B.C. as due to the fact that writing was a highly complex affair controlled and exclusively maintained by a priestly class. Greece, on the other hand, was able to break out of rigid philosophical and political systems and produce greater lasting impact by combining oral and written communication in the form of a dialectic, specifically the dialogue, as exemplified by Plato. As Innis writes: “The dialogue was developed as a more effective instrument for preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page”. This balance of speech and prose engendered an incredible amount of flexibility and gave the reader a sense of being a participant in the search for truth, instead of being the recipient of truth as handed down through the generations. As such, ideologically, this lead to the Greek (and later western) idea that truth is something pursued if not necessarily ever to be fully known or grasped. I would contend that our current over-reliance on participation has extended us to the postmodern belief that truth may be non-existent, or even irrelevant.This “collaborative” aspect of communication can be mapped out using Marshall McLuhan’s concepts of “hot” and “cool” media. Each media, according to McLuhan, invites differing degrees of participation from the media consumer. Movies, for instance, were considered “hot” as they enhanced one single sense, in the case of movies, this was vision. As a result of this, the viewer does not need to make much effort to fill in the details and is thus less likely to encourage the viewer’s own thoughts. TV, on the other hand, was “cool” as it required more effort on the part of the viewer to fill in the details (remember, this was in the era before HD flatscreens!). Think how differently we behave when exposed to these two media. In the movie theatre it is dark, and everyone watches silently with (generally) rapped attention, as opposed to TV, where we view it with the lights on and no one minds conversation or the sharing of opinion on what is being watched. McLuhan notes: “Any hot medium allows of less participation that a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and book for less than a dialogue.”Hot media provide involvement, but have little stimulus and this would include, along with film, radio, the lecture, photography and the sermon. Such works are also sequential, linear and logical. Cool media, by which he means “detached”, on the other hand, have less involvement, but much more stimulus and as such, require more active participation in the form of perceiving abstract patterns and a simultaneous comprehension of all aspects of what is going on. Examples of this media include TV, the seminar, cartoons and even the Sunday School class.In one famous example, McLuhan showed how Senator Joe McCarthy lost his political suasion in America through a transition from hot to cool media. When McCarthy was heard via radio in his early days (a hot media) he had incredible power to convince his audience of his ideas, who had very focused attention on his broadcasts. When TV (cool) came along, audiences spent less time listening to what he said and more time talking with one another about what a funny and suspicious looking character he was.As a further example of this kind of thinking, readers may want to consider their different perceptions of Moses when: a) reading the book of Exodus, b) hearing about him in a Sunday School class, c) watching a cartoon about him on TV and d) seeing the film The Ten Commandments in a theatre.Another thought exercise would be to try to determine where more recent media fit on the hot-cool scale and how that affects our understanding of the Christian message. McLuhan, incidentally, did not see these categories as binary, but along a spectrum. So for instance, while McLuhan considered TV cool in his day when TVs were small, black and white and had tiny speakers, it has definitely become more hot thanks to increased resolution, bigger screens which take up a larger portion of our visual space and have surround sound which increases the immersion. I have noticed a considerable change of effect recently in my own viewing of online sermons. For a long time I would watch them on my computer which is small and has a screen cluttered with other application which distracted me and allowed me to be less focused and more opinionated (usually just to myself). Now, thanks to Apple TV, I can watch some of them on my home theatre, with the voice of John McArthur booming over my surround sound and nothing else to distract me from his 50” high-def glory!Blogs, like this one where participation is encourage, are cool, while web pages where no interaction occurs, are hotter. People who spend most of their time on blogs are going to have a different understanding of what they are interested in than people who simply read from web pages.As can be seen, we should not approach the matter of communication as merely oral vs. written. The matter has much more complexity to it than that. Even if we just restrict ourselves to the oral stage, we need to ask what forms oral information is conveyed: is it told through a storyteller, an academic dialogue, family conversation around the dinner table, or furtive gossip? What we recall, value or engage with are dependent upon these modes.I hope this helps a bit. To go more in-depth, I recommend Innis’s “Empire and Communications” and “The Bias of Communication”, though I should warn in advance that Innis takes a decidedly Hegelian approach to history (for instance, he sees Hebrew reverence for the word as a direct result of their exposure to Egyptian hieroglyphics). Also, the first chapter of McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” for a full fleshing out of hot and cool media. McLuhan even spent time discussing communication theory and the Trinity in his last work, “The Medium and the Light”, though some of his theories get a bit wacky. In any case, both men were crucial figures in the history of communication theory and both were Torontonians!Blessings,Michael Plato, Toronto
Learning a foreign language as an adult is very difficult. In a world without broad access to written media, I suspect that it would be even more difficult to become proficient in some languages, if the language were not learned in childhood. No wonder the babel tower builders dispersed after they couldn’t talk to each other - communication became next to impossible. The confusion of languages at Babel was a merciful act of God in some respects - it prevented sinful ideologies from spreading so easily between people groups.
I wonder if broad access to the written word makes learning foreign languages easier and therefore has radically changed the flow of information and ideologies between nations, for good and also for evil.
I have to agree with you, Jim. There is no reason to think that Adam could not have written down his thoughts to communicate with others. If we start from a biblical understanding, Adam and Eve were created perfectly and their immediate descendants were creating musical instruments, working with metals, and building cities (Genesis 4). So, they can do metalworking and make a handy flute, but they can’t write??? There is also a theory of the authorship of Genesis that describes how Moses may have compiled/rewritten Genesis based on the written records handed down to him (not the JEDP). For more on this consider http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/feedback/2006/1027.asp and various articles listed at http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/topic/linguistics(In full disclosure, I work at Answers in Genesis.)With that disclosure, I must reject the idea that written language only developed at 4000 BC, since that is the approximate date of Creation when we add up the dates from the genealogies in Genesis and other lists. So civilizations could not have “developed” by this time. It’s funny how many thoughts rub up against the age-of-the-earth issue.