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History of Communication Media (Kittler)

Introduction

  • Purpose: Discuss the history of communication technologies (as far as possible) to outline a scientific history of the media; theory that media sciences is a new field enabled by the triumphs of modern information technologies.

  • Practical problems in this project:

    • Documentation bias: communications technologies are less documented or accessible than their contents (cited as the practice of intelligence services and wars; the term “Cinderella of military-historical research”).

    • Methodological problem: the term “communication” may not fit times/places where other terminology (mythology, religion) dominated.

  • Philosophical backdrop and shifts:

    • Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding linked communication to speech and bonds of language between individuals, but this risks ignoring how ideas originate without language.

    • Liberation from this confusion came with a technical concept of information (Shannon, Mathematical Theory of Communication). This avoids references to ideas/meanings and thus to people; information systems focus on storage, processing, transmission of messages.

  • Distinction between information systems and communication systems:

    • Information systems focus on messages; communication systems control the traffic of persons and goods and thus encompass broader media (McLuhan’s view of roads, language, etc.).

    • Despite distinctions, it makes sense to analyze communication systems with information-system analysis because communication depends on control signals, especially as systems grow in complexity.

  • Shannon’s influence and historical critique:

    • The classic five-stage model of information transmission aligns with information theory, but Kittler argues this model lacks historical depth or historicity.

    • The history of communication technologies should be explored historically to understand how their evolution actually proceeded.

  • Theoretical frame and epochal view:

    • Taking Luhmann’s idea that communication technologies demarcate epochs, the shift from orality to writing marks a decoupling of interaction and communication; the shift from writing to technical media decouples communication and information.

    • This evolutionary arc suggests two main blocks in the history of communication media:

    • Block I: History of writing (including scripts and printing).

    • Block II: History of technical media (from telegraphy through analog media to computing).

  • Preview of major blocks:

    • A. Writing

    • 1. Script

    • 2. Printing

    • B. Technical Media

    • 1. Telegraphy and Analog Technology

    • 2. Digital Technology

  • Key methodological stance: prefer tracing historical pathways of how the five Shannon stages could have evolved, rather than taking the five-box model as a given historical fact.

  • Significance and themes to track:

    • Decoupling of transmission and storage; decoupling of communication and information; the role of writing surfaces and tools in power and administration; the rise of state systems (courier networks, post, libraries) and their political implications; the transformation of reception and interpretation with mass printing; the shift from human to machine-mediated processing; the emergence of digital computation and its potential end-state in theory and practice.

A. Writing

1. Script

  • Foundational idea: the literate cultures’ medium (writing) often processes another medium (speech); this is a long-standing philosophical observation (referencing the Stoics and Aristotle’s view that writing is speech in material form).

  • Key variables governing writing development:

    • First series (conceptual/functional):

    • Content of a medium is another medium (writing as storage/transmission of speech).

    • Writing can couple storage with transmission; inscription and post begin to matter.

    • Time needed for transmission and reception; permanence or erasure of written items; transportability of information.

    • These variables determine the space–time reach and durability of information.

    • Second series (material/technical):

    • Writing implements and writing surfaces determine the power gained by writing.

    • Historical drivers of writing surfaces:

      • Priestly needs: storage of divine/ancestor addresses over long times.

      • Merchants: storage of goods and long-distance transportation of goods.

      • Warriors: transmission of commands over long distances in short time.

    • Oldest scripts (circa 3000 BCE) arose in Sumeria and Egypt for economic and religious functions; early inscriptions used clay seals, stamps, and stone inscriptions for tombs.

  • Decoupling of communication and interaction through inscriptions:

    • Inscriptions opened literature as a principle by removing the source from direct interaction, enabling literature to exist as a separate medium (Assmann’s view).

  • Surface materials and their role in state formation:

    • Early river-based empires (China with bamboo/mulberry; Mesopotamia with unfired/clay for storage; Nile Delta with papyrus) used writing surfaces to manage complex irrigation/agriculture, taxation, and command networks.

    • Rivers and writing surfaces jointly enabled centralized control of resources and information flows.

  • Spatialisation of speech in writing:

    • Writing yielded lists without immediate context, creating a new data architecture independent of oral networks; this helped form empires and bureaucratic systems.

  • Mobility and expansion of writing networks:

    • Expansion beyond a unified territorial area required mobilizing messengers and warriors—enabled by horses and road systems.

    • Herodotus: “nothing swifter on earth” than the alliance of media (royal road + staging messenger service) that carried urgent messages rapidly.

  • The Persian vs Greek systems:

    • Angareion (Persian) as the root of the word for messenger and angels; the Persian system used mounted messengers on a wide network.

    • Greek polis relied on a primarily oral culture; the Greek alphabet (Indo-European with Semitic influence) converted redundant consonants into vowels, enabling a more accessible literate culture.

    • Vowel notation allowed teaching, memorization, and later notation of music; letters carried numerical values (Pythagorean numerology), enabling mathematical notation tied to music.

  • Implications of vowel notation and public literacy:

    • The unambiguous phoneme allocation reduced literacy effort and extended literacy to public domains (palace/temple secrets to public domain).

    • Literature could incorporate oral mnemonics and later prose; Athens’ public library and Euripides as a patron of reading.

  • The Roman imperial command network and postal system:

    • The Nile scene: the empire’s command and communication networks used papyrus; Rome’s cursus publicus: overnight stations at ~40 km and staging posts about ~12 km apart; beacon telegraphy along frontiers.

    • This system transmitted imperial power via written commands; Caesar’s dictum captured in Latin as “Caesarum est per arbem terrae litteras missitare.”

  • Papyrus vs codex and indexing:

    • Papyrus was light but fragile; indexing by location was not feasible; codex (parchment) allowed indexing by location, sheets, and pages, enabling durable storage and addressable content.

    • Christians and later libraries adopted codices; indexing allowed more efficient navigation and recall.

  • Transition to codex and changes in knowledge storage:

    • As papyrus declined with the Islamic incorporation of Egypt, parchment/codex gained prominence; by Hadrian’s era, a Roman officium memoriae existed for memory of emperors in codex form.

    • 13th century paper arrives in Europe via China via Baghdad; European cities develop rag-paper production suitable for books, universities, and commerce.

  • The rise of universities and mathematical notation:

    • Paper and numeracy enable separation from oral languages; double-entry bookkeeping emerges, and a modern mathematical notation system develops (plus and minus signs, evolving to internationalized notation).

  • Printing as a new hinge for writing:

    • Gutenberg’s movable type printing (arguably not a revolution on par with codex, but a major step to meet demand created by paper).

    • Printing as the first “assembly line” in technology: editions use uniform texts and consistent woodcuts/engravings; enables alphabetical indexing (titles, page numbers; Leibniz’s library catalogs) and reduces copying errors in illustrations; this underpins engineering reliability.

    • Printing intensifies the public dimension of writing, linking to the rise of post infrastructure and state curation.

  • Printing and the state postal system:

    • Early state post networks develop for military/diplomatic traffic; cryptography emerges in the post system (Vieta’s algebraic encoding prefigures modern cryptography).

    • As commercial correspondents enter the public postal network around 1600, newspapers arise; post-coach networks by ~1650 become scheduled services.

    • However, the shift to public discourse for the middle class does not fully abolish aristocratic publicness; public life remains intertwined with mercantile state structures and post networks.

  • The social and cognitive effects of print mediatisation:

    • Mass literacy and compulsory schooling foster a broader readership; the “intimacy of family reading” preludes future media forms; this reading culture supports public language and national literacies.

    • Printing creates an ongoing tension: literature and science must rethink transmission/receiving techniques as printed books become non-erasable storage devices.

  • The industrial revolution of writing:

    • Around 1800, mass book production leads to abundance of printed material; the era sees the transition from discrete manuscript formats to continuous paper processes (paper machines, pulp paper from forests by 1850).

    • The typewriter (circa 1880) begins to blur lines between writing and printing, enabling new literary forms; Mallarmé advocates reducing literature to its lexical core (the 26 letters) to avoid competition with other media.

  • Haunt of writing: the intellectual environment of print:

    • The new regime emphasizes interpretation over quotation; lectures without textbooks, seminars as interpretive exercises; philosophy’s memory of prior forms becomes an important discipline (hermeneutics).

2. Printing (continuation into major shifts)

  • Summary of printing’s wider consequences:

    • Printing reorganizes the relationship between written texts and their social dissemination; it supplies a stable, replicable basis for knowledge and public discourse.

    • It helps create modern science’s reliance on standardized texts and reproducible data; the public reading culture fosters democratization of knowledge while maintaining state and private controls.

    • It also raises new systemic issues: non-erasable books require new modes of textual criticism and interpretive practices.

B. Technical Media

1. Telegraphy and Analog Technology

  • Necessity and natural history of technical media:

    • There have always been technical media because signal transmission (audio/visual) itself qualifies as technology; however, preindustrial channels (smoke, fire, bush telegraphs) were merely subsystems of everyday language.

    • Early examples of long-distance signaling included beacon signals (e.g., Troy to Mycenae) which carried a single bit of information about a fall of fortress, but such signals depended on prearranged plans.

    • Some claimed telegraphy could encode complex alphabets (e.g., Polybius square 5x5) but practical use is unclear; these early attempts suggest very limited information rates compared to later systems.

  • From optics to electricity and the emergence of modern telegraphy:

    • The telegraph’s early significance lay in speeding command flow in mass armies and standardizing weaponry and communication.

    • France’s national lines (Napoleon era) established the optical telegraph as a democratic mechanism for public political processes (electric telegraph later replaces optics for speed and reliability).

    • The transformation from optical telegraph to electric telegraph removed relay reliability concerns; Morse code (dots and dashes) allowed a compact encoding of language into a limited sign set, implementing Leibniz-like binary encoding principles in a practical form.

  • Organization and global impact:

    • The electric telegraph decoupled information flow from physical movement—information could travel independently of people and goods.

    • Remote control via landlines enabled a systematically coordinated railway network and accelerated goods/person transport (relevant to military and civilian use).

    • Telegraphs forced the post to become a pure information technology (house numbers/letterboxes, prepaid stamps, international postal unions) and contributed to the world’s first globally linked communications infrastructure (e.g., undersea cables).

  • Repercussions for state power and society:

    • Telegraphs create a new informational time; information becomes a massless, fast-flowing commodity that enables centralized control and rapid decision-making.

    • Radio and later communications technologies would further transform public life and politics (e.g., mass persuasion, political organization).

  • The telegraph as a gateway to broader analog technologies:

    • Analog media (photography, phonography/phonograph, film) emerge as complementary technologies that store and reproduce sensory data (visual and auditory) beyond the reach of standardized language.

    • The link among analog media (sound, image) and transmission media creates hybrid systems (sound film, radio with gramophone, early television).

  • Key points about the analog media era:

    • Analog media “underbid” the perceptual thresholds defined by Fechner; they can resolve frequency components (phonemes and musical intervals) that language-based mnemonics could not easily encode.

    • Fourier analysis becomes relevant for understanding the frequency content of signals, which underpins modern physics and signal processing.

    • Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and Hertz’s experiments anchor the physics of wireless transmission, enabling non-material channels since the early 20th century.

  • Social effects and constraints:

    • Despite women’s participation in telegraph, telephone, and typewriter work, the broader literacy and media system’s development faced gendered, socio-technical constraints that specified limitations on learning and communication.

    • The emergence of non-linguistic, sensory-based media created a gap between media effects and literacy development, complicating the social diffusion of literacy.

  • Radio, telephone, and the era of “secondary orality”:

    • Radio emerges as a mass medium that bypasses traditional writing, standardizing unwritten languages through short-wave broadcasting and transforming colonial networks into independent nations.

    • The telephone links urban networks and, later, global networks via satellites; these technologies enable non-hierarchical networking and a sense of a connected global village.

  • The current limits and regulatory concerns:

    • Publicly accessible radio bands remain finite and are subject to governmental and military control; surveillance and taps on public wavebands are pervasive.

  • Electrification and the entertainment industry:

    • The combination of analog storage media with transmission media leads to hybrid entertainment formats (sound film, radio, early television). These connections between memory and transmission create new aesthetic forms (radio drama, electronic music, videoclips).

  • The problem of standardization:

    • Despite the integration of several technologies, there is no universal standard governing their control or reciprocal translation; this gap is where the editorial and studio craft (film editors, sound engineers) historically played a crucial role.

  • The fate of human-mediated standardization:

    • The automation of standards and the obsolescence of manual montage would come with digital technologies, bringing a new regime of standardization and processing.

2. Digital Technology

  • Conceptual shift: digital technology functions like an alphabet, but on a numerical basis.

    • It replaces continuous signals (typical of analog media) with discrete samples and binary evaluation. This enables universal standardization across media.

    • The sampling theorem (Nyquist-Shannon): Any frequency-limited signal can be reconstructed from its samples if the sampling rate is at least twice the bandwidth: fs \,\ge 2B\, where fs is the sampling frequency and B is the bandwidth.

    • Quantisation noise arises in digital sampling but can be minimized in proportion to system design; digital systems allow controllable, bounded error characteristics.

  • Historical lineage to digital computation:

    • 1936: Turing’s universal discrete machine demonstrates the principle of computation via a simple paper-tape machine capable of simulating any other correctly programmed machine (the core idea of universality). This provides the theoretical basis for general-purpose computation.

    • The development of alphanumeric universality arises from combining symbolic/logical processing with numeric computation, achieved through Boole’s logic and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

  • Parallel strands toward modern computers:

    • Alphabetic (textual) lineage: From lists and catalogs to card indexes (Hollerith) to early computers; notable milestones include the 1890 U.S. Census Hollerith machine.

    • Numeric lineage: From Schickart’s calculator and Jacquard’s programmable looms to Babbage’s engines (Differential Engine; Analytical Engine) that used difference equations and conditional jumps.

    • The unification of these strands required Boole’s algebra and Gödel’s incompleteness to achieve programmable, symbolic computation.

  • World War II and postwar architecture:

    • 1940s: Rapid wartime computer development—Shannon’s information theory informs automated logic with relays; Konrad Zuse builds early machines for Luftwaffe work (though cryptography departments resisted automation).

    • 1943–1945: Allied cryptanalysis efforts (e.g., VHF traffic) accelerate computer development; John von Neumann designs the stored-program computer architecture in 1945 for nuclear weapon planning, articulating a three-part structure:

    • Central Processing Unit (CPU) for command-controlled processing under mathematical/logical rules.

    • Read/Write memory for data and Read-Only Memory (ROM) for program commands.

    • A bus system for sequential data/command transmission using binary addressing.

  • Core hardware abstractions and binary universality:

    • All data, commands, and addresses in a computer are represented in binary; this enables cross-media data processing and the application of signal processing techniques across different data types.

    • This breakdown allows operations to be applied to operations and automates decision processes across media data.

  • Growth in speed and capacity:

    • 1948: Transistors replace vacuum tubes; 1968: Integrated circuits replace individual transistors, reducing space and time requirements by roughly an order of magnitude with each step.

    • This enables real-time analysis and real-time synthesis for one-dimensional data streams (e.g., speech or music).

  • Limitations and future directions:

    • For multi-dimensional real-time signal processing (e.g., video, computer graphics), the classic von Neumann architecture becomes a bottleneck.

    • The trend toward parallel computers and specialized architectures (biological/optical circuits) aims to overcome these limits and approach new computational capabilities (e.g., brain-function simulations).

  • The endgame question and ethical/strategic implications:

    • The historical arc suggests a potential endpoint governed by logical and physical limits of computation and signal processing.

    • The philosophical question: does history end with an artificial intelligence intercepting other intelligences in space? The discussion ties back to Freud, McLuhan, and the idea that the logic of information might be driven by strategic escalation and interference (hostile intelligence).

  • Practical and societal implications of digital media’s ascendancy:

    • Digital standardization enables broad interoperability across media; yet it also concentrates control in the hands of those who design, deploy, and regulate the infrastructure.

    • The risk of surveillance and control is intensified as digital media enable pervasive monitoring (taps on public wavebands, data flows, etc.).

    • The shift to digital media changes the epistemology of knowledge (e.g., how data are stored, retrieved, and interpreted) and challenges traditional interpretive approaches (hermeneutics) in science and humanities.

Synthesis and Connections

  • Evolutionary motif:

    • Writing marks a shift from an interactional to a decoupled information regime; technical media then decouple communication and information further, enabling new social forms of governance, knowledge production, and cultural production.

  • Historicity and methodology:

    • The history of media is not merely a sequence of technological innovations but an interwoven development of social institutions (cities, states, libraries, post systems), cognitive practices (literacy, numeracy, indexing), and cultural forms (literature, journalism, cinema).

  • Real-world relevance:

    • The discussion illuminates how modern information infrastructures (internet, telecommunication networks, broadcast media, and computing) emerged from earlier media ecosystems (writing, printing, telegraphs) and how their organizational and regulatory architectures shape contemporary politics and economics.

  • Ethical, philosophical, and practical implications:

    • The ethical dimension includes surveillance, control of information flows, and the distribution of literacy and access to media.

    • Philosophically, the shift from human-centric to machine-centric information processing raises questions about agency, authorship, and the nature of knowledge.

    • Practically, the ongoing automation and standardization of media processing pose questions about dependency on technology, resilience, and the balance between open access and controlled infrastructure.

  • Key recurring themes:

    • The tension between durability and erasure (codex vs parchment; digital storage vs ephemeral streams).

    • The balance between publicness and secrecy (printing/public discourse vs military secrecy and cryptography).

    • The continual decoupling of channels, content, and recipients, enabling expansive social reach but also new forms of control.

  • Core equations and constants mentioned:

    • Shannon’s five-stage model (conceptual chain):
      \text{Source} \rightarrow \text{Transmitter} \rightarrow \text{Channel} \rightarrow \text{Receiver} \rightarrow \text{Destination (Information Drain)}

    • Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem (digital sampling):
      fs \ge 2B where fs is the sampling frequency and B is the signal bandwidth.

    • Alphabet size (letters):
      |\Sigma| = 26

    • Binary representation and universality (Turing machine and von Neumann architecture):

    • A universal discrete machine can simulate any other correctly programmed machine using a finite state set; data, commands, and addresses are represented in binary; core architecture elements are described by three components (CPU, memory, bus).

  • Notable historical milestones and figures to remember:

    • Key historical nodes: Sumeria/Egypt (3000 BCE scripts); China (bamboo/mulberry writing surfaces); Mesopotamia (clay/write storage and transport); Nile papyrus; Greek alphabet (vowels, phonemic notation); Roman cursus publicus; Caesar’s commands; papyrus → codex transition; 13th century paper from China via Baghdad; 15th century double-entry bookkeeping; Gutenberg’s movable type printing; 1800s mass print era; 1850 mass paper/pulp; 1880 typewriter; Mallarmé on lexical reduction; 1906 wireless radio; 1945 von Neumann architecture; 1948 transistor; 1968 integrated circuits; 24 frames per second (Nipkow screen reference); 1936 Turing machine; 1943–1945 wartime computer development; 1906–early 20th century electromagnetic theory and Hertz’s experiments; the broader shift toward a digitally mediated regime.

Notes:

  • All explicit numerical references from the transcript have been included above where relevant (years, distances, frame rates, alphabet size, etc.). Other qualitative points have been translated into concise, study-ready bullets for quick review.

  • If you want, I can tailor this into a shorter study sheet or expand any section with example questions and answers for exam practice.