text, image, sound

Johannesburg Gutenberg printing press

Challenges to Church’s authority

New sense of individuality and privacy

Literacy among lower classes

Formation of political parties

Democractic government

Movable type printing produced era of mass communication

In Sevigny’s article, “A reflection on the evolution of the field of professional communication” they suggest that information is becoming more fluid and less fixed. How, in their view must the field of Professional Communication respond to these changes

In their view, the field must adopt an interdisciplinary approach to professional communication, integrating marketing and advertising, regulating professional communication in the same way law is regulated, as well as increased surveillance, data, and metrics. People want to be fed stuff that caters to their beliefs and are going to search for themselves in the field of professional communication.

McLuhan describes media as “extensions” of human beings. What does he mean? How will “electronic media” change humanity, in his view?

Media is an extension of human beings in the sense that producers of media imbue their productions with their unconscious desires and is an amplification of our senses and deepest desires. Electronic media will change humanity by helping us develop consciousness of the unconscious and awareness, and humanity will either control or become enslaved by technology.

"We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the

sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in

themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their

value.”

Nakamura

Nakamura argues that critical media scholars tend to focus less on content, and more on how media creates a sense of identity and belonging.

Nakamura also talks about the grand narrative that circulates about technologies in the present

that they facilitate a global, democratic village (where everyone can participate)....

But which also leave out many of the actual realities of technological access (or lack thereof) and the means of production of said technologies.

Ong

“Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine

what a primary oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no

knowledge whatsoever of writing or even of the possibility of

writing. Try to imagine a culture where no one has even

"looked up" anything.

*What vibe is this giving?

In a primary oral culture, the expression "to look up something" is

an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning.

Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when

the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds.”

The organized knowledge that literates today study so

that they "know" it, that is, can recall it, has, with very

few if any exceptions, been assembled and made

available to them in writing.

This is the case not only with Euclidean geometry but

also with American Revolutionary history or even

baseball batting averages or traffic regulations.

An oral culture has no texts. How does it get together

organized material for recall? This is the same as asking,

"What does it or can it know in an organized fashion?“

Suppose a person in an oral culture would undertake to think

through a particular complex problem and would formally

manage to articulate a solution which itself is relatively

complex, consisting, let us say, of a few hundred words.

How does he or she retain for later recall the verbalization so

painstakingly elaborated? In the total absence of any

writing, there is nothing outside the thinker, no text, to

enable him or her to produce the same line of thought

again or even to verify whether he or she has done so or

not.

Ong

Only after print and the extensive experience with maps

that print implemented would human beings, when they

thought about the cosmos or universe or "world”, think

primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a

modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of

surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be "explored

p. 459: Scholars refer to three communication revolutions in history. The

emergence of writing was the first…

What does a sentence like this do?

“….the invention of printing was the second. The convergence of

telecommunication, computers, and digitization is widely held as the

third.

The revolution effects a change in the societal power structure. Thus

writing undermined the power monopoly of the elders, who preserved in

oral form the accumulated knowledge of preliterate people.

Likewise, printing ended the information monopoly of the church, the

clergy and the mandarins, depending on the social context. The invention

of digitization may change the societal power structure in ways yet to be

seen”.

pgs. 459-460: “The evolution of writing began in the Middle

East….the evolution of writing took place in four stages: first,

picture writing, which expressed ideas directly; second, word-

based writing systems; third, sound-based syllabic writing

systems; and fourth, the invention of the alphabet.

The origins of Chinese characters can be traced to primitive

cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts developed during the

Shang dynasty (1700?-1100? BCE), although some argue that

the Chinese system of writing developed separately”.

Objectivity

In his 2019 book The Skin We’re In, Black journalist Desmond Cole paints a

disturbing picture. Cole describes a situation at a May 2017 Toronto Police

Services Board meeting where a debate around police officers in schools was on

the agenda.

Speaking up at the meeting brought on warnings of an arrest, despite the fact

police appeared to be using tactics to limit the number of opposition voices in the

room, something Cole and others were pointing out.

Cole’s ground-breaking 2015 Toronto Life article on carding—the police practice

of stopping, questioning and documenting individuals (often Black and

Indigenous people) though no crime has been committed—shone a light on the

conversation surrounding the policing of Black lives. It also raised the argument

of objectivity, one often used to silence Black journalists when they attempt to

use their platform to address the anti-Black racism they deal with on a regular

basis. Cole writes: “The false premise of objectivity in journalism reinforces

white supremacy. My activism is my writing, and in the fight for Black life, I am

by necessity an actor and a critic at the same time.”

Claims tech revolutions make

record, and make a factual narrative of events as they happened.

In the compelling arguments of the preeminent

journalism history thinker John Nerone (2013), he explains that historians

and journalists concern themselves with one thing: the pursuit of truth.

It is likewise established that written accounts serve as chroniclers of

the past, and human history often relies heavily on written

documents.

Here, in this page, three elements are solidly linked:

Reality/history, truth, and writing.

The newspaper and journalism as a whole (apparently) bring this trifecta

to life.

McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan had a sunnier, even utopian attitude toward the role of media in society. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964/2003), he was eager to consider electronic media forms such as television, radio, and film as specific forms of technological practice. While we no longer envision television as “hot” or radio as “cool,” as McLuhan advocated, digital media scholars have taken up his work after a period of neglect during the eighties.

What they find useful is McLuhan’s envisioning of electronic media forms such as television and radio not just as ways to get information and entertainment but also as having distinctive affective qualities and as extensions of the human body and brain.

What is the promise of the Internet?

Democratic utopia, much like the Victorians believed the telegraph would eliminate misunderstanding between nations and usher in a new era of world peace

Print capitalism

Drawing on historical materials from diverse anticolonial movements (beginning with the American Revolution), Anderson found that

newspapers did far more than report happenings in a

particular regional locale. They also brought the nation

into being by creating a readership that came to view

or imagined itself as sharing a common identity. Media,

in this account, do more than convey information or

even ideology. They create communities. Anderson

claimed that national identity was less a function of

birthplace or legal standing within a citizenry than it was an “imagined” or virtual state—called into being by

the process of mediation itself. A form of media such as

print, in this account, functions as a space or medium of

cultural interpellation.

Technological determinism

Historical amnesia

The medium is the message

The way in which you communicate content is supposed to convey a message

Amplify or accelerate existing processes

Power imbalance and social relations

Inability of oral and intuitive oriental communication to reach European standards

The idea that oral traditions are backward or savage, produces orientalist thinking

Why create divides between oral and writing cultures

What were the claims of writing as a communication revolution

Preservation of history, facts and truth

What is colonialism

Such assumptions ignore the fact that authors of written documents bring their own experiences

It is just their experiences and is not objective truth

What is wetsuweten

Indigenous land that they wanted to build a pipeline to go through it

What are are limits of writing compared to oratory

The tone

Whatever group as posssessed writing has invariably outwitted those that did not. Writing is not simply a storage device for speech. History of writing is a part of civilization and goes together with such lasting facts such as male dominance

Whoever has the power write the story

What is significant about the signature

Requires other forms of communication

Why use emojis

Different ideas of what they communicate

Where did writing originate

China and Middle East

Where did the west claim the printing press was invented and by whom

Claimed it was invented in Germany by Gutenberg channeled the message that they are civilized and everyone else isn’t

What does it mean to say tech revolutions are ideologically driven

Why is gunaratne counter history important

Challenges dominant at historical narratives, shows that

What are the claims of the newspaper