History Of Communication Media Essay, Research Paper
The History of Communication Media
Introduction
What follows is on attempt to discuss the history of communication technologies – as far as this is humanly possible – in general terms. The objective is ultimately the outline of a scientific history of the media – an outline for the simple reason that media sciences is a new field of research which would not exist had it not been for the triumphal advance of modern information technologies. This is why such a history comes up against methodological and practical problems.
One practical problem is that communications technologies themselves are documented to a far lesser extent or are far less accessible than their contents vide the manner in which the intelligence services have remained, despite their frequently decisive role in wars (to quote the last head of the Wehrmacht intelligence service, “the Cinderella of military-historical research” 1
Then there is the methodological problem posed by the conundrum of whether the now so self-evident term “communication” can properly be used in connection with times and locations which manifestly were characterised by other terminology (drawn from mythology or religion). At any rate its enthronement in philosophy was based in John Locke’s “Essay on Human Understanding” on the scarcely generalisable assumption that communication means the rendering into speech of perceived ideas and consequently the linking of isolated individuals through “bonds of language”.2 The only trouble is that philosophy omits to enquire how, without language, people are supposed to have arrived at their ideas and conceptions in the first place. Liberation from this unfathomable confusion came only with a technical concept of information which, since Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication”, avoids any reference to ideas or meanings and thus to people.
Information systems in the narrowest sense of the word are, it is true, optimised in terms of the storage, processing and transmission of messages. Communication systems on the other hand because in addition to messages they also control the traffic of persons and goods 3 comprise all kinds of media (in McLuhan’s analysis) from road systems to language.4 There is nonetheless good reason to analyse communication systems in the same way as information systems. Ultimately, communication too depends on control signals, the more so the more complex its working; even the triad of “things communicated” – information, persons, goods – can be reformulated in terms of information theory:
Firstly, messages are essentially commands to which persons are expected to react [this definition in the original German is based on the etymology of the German word "Nachrichten" - Tr.].
Secondly, as systems theory teaches, persons are not objects but addresses which “make possible the assessment of further communications”.5
Thirdly, as ethnology since Mauss and Levi-Strauss has taught, goods represent data in an order of exchange between said persons.
However if data make possible the operation of storage, addresses that of transmission and commands that of data processing, then every communication system, as the alliance of these three operations, is an information system. It depends solely on whether the three operations are implemented in physical reality to what extent such a system becomes an independent communication technology. In other words the history of these technologies comes to an end when machines not only handle the transmission of addresses and data storage, but are also able, via mathematical algorithms, to control the processing of commands. It is thus no coincidence that not until the start of the computer age, that is, when all operations of communication systems had been mechanised, was Shannon able to describe a formal model of information. This model comprises, as we know, five connected stages 6:
Firstly there is an information source which selects one message per unit of time from the either enumerable-discrete or innumerable-continuous quantity of possible messages.
Secondly this source supplies one or more transmitters which process the message via suitable coding into a technical signal (something which is quite impossible in the discrete case without intermediate data storage).
Thirdly these transmitters feed a channel which safeguards the transmission of the signal in space and/or time from physical noise and/or hostile interference.
Fourthly these channels lead to one or more receivers which reconstitute the message from the signal by subjecting it to a decoding algorithm inverse to that of the transmitter, so that finally,
Fifthly, the retranslated message arrives at the address of an information drain.7
This elegant model, however, cannot simply be applied to the factual history of communication technology, not least because it lays no claim whatever to historicity. Instead of simply accepting Shannon’s five black boxes, as has become customary in linguistics and the humanities too, it seems more important and more rewarding to trace back through history how their evolution must have proceeded in the first place. Taking Luhmann’s premise that communication technologies provide a “first-rate demarcation of epochs magnetising all else” 8, it is reasonable to conclude that the historical transition from orality to the written word equated to a decoupling of interaction and communication, and the transition from writing to the technical media indeed to a decoupling of communication and information. What we have here, therefore, is a process of evolution which has come to a conclusion only in the theory and practice of an information which corresponds to the exact opposite of the energetic concept of entropy.9
This evolutionary process gives us the possibility of dividing the history of communication media into two main blocks. The first block deals with the history of writing and itself divides into a section on scripts and one on printing. The second block on technical media will take us from the basic invention of telegraphy via the analog media to, finally, the digital medium of the computer.
A. Writing
1. Script
The history of the literate cultures, whose “medium” customarily also divides history from prehistory 10, is determined by two series of variables. The first series stands in relation to what philosophy since the Stoics has recognised, or failed to recognise, as a reference: To the extent that the content of a medium is always another medium 11 and that of writing (even for Aristotle 12) is speech, scripts can be classified according to whether they process everyday languages into pictographs or syllabic or phonemic signs.13 However to the extent that the medium of writing, probably for the first time, also couples storage and transmission, inscription and post, then physical variables relating to writing implements and writing surface decide as to the space and time frame of the communication. These variables dictate the time needed for transmitting and receiving, the permanence or erasability of what is written and, not least, whether the information is transportable or not.
The first series of variables controls developments between speech and writing: degrees of memory performance, degrees of grammatical analysability, the possibilities of coupling speech with other media. As an independent field of anthropological media research it can, for our purposes, be left to one side.
The second series of variables has received considerably less attention, possibly because it is so material in nature. And yet it is such simple things as writing implements and writing surfaces that determine the gain in power in which the introduction of scripts always results. If priests were interested in the storage of addresses, that is, of gods or the dead, for a maximum length of time; if merchants were interested in the storage of goods over a maximum length of time and in the transportation of goods over maximum distances and finally warriors in the transmission of commands over maximum distances in the shortest possible time, then the oldest scripts which were produced some 3000 years BC in Sumeria and Egypt had economic and religious functions. In warrior circles however, that which military historians call the oral “stone age of the command flow” ended only with Napoleon.14 Apart from commands passed from mouth to ear there were only the semiotic use of fire for signaling purposes and fast but equally oral messengers, whose record was probably held by Genghis Khan.15
The first manifestations of script are of course inscriptions without a writing surface in the accepted sense. Two-dimensional rolls of seals or stamps in the medium of clay enabled goods to be given addresses indicating their owner or their contents. Stone inscriptions named the deceased occupants of tombs.16 As signals in the absence of the source of information, in other words through the decoupling of communication and interaction, inscriptions opened up, according to Jan Assmann, the possibility in principle of literature.17
By contrast an administration of those great river irrigation systems in which cities and high cultures blossomed presupposed the transition from inscribed tablets to skillfully crafted and optimised transportable writing surfaces: bamboo and mulberry in China, unfired clay or clay fired for storage purposes in Mesopotamia, papyrus as the monopoly of the Nile delta. Thus the same rivers on which the traffic of slave labour and goods flowed simultaneously carried (on the basis of a calendar or goniometric mathematics) the commands of water allocation and the harvesting of products.18 The same cities that translated the anthropological schema of head, hand and torso into the architectonic schema of palaces, streets and storehouses 19 needed scripts for the processing transmission and storage of their data. This establishment of a unified area is reflected in the texts themselves as a spatialisation of speech: since its very beginnings writing has yielded lists without context which bear no traces of oral or written communication networks, but for this precise reason no longer have any equivalent in everyday situations.20
By contrast, outreachings beyond the unified area – the founding of empires in other words – only became possible when states in both the ancient world and the modern took over control of the warrior messengers and additionally, in the ancient world since 1200 BC, after the crossing of two breeds of horse, made messengers and warriors mobile.21 In classical times, “There was,” in the immortal words of Herodotus, “nothing swifter on earth” than the alliance of media which, under the Achaemenides, combined Persia’s Royal Way with a mounted staging messenger service to carry “urgent messages at a fast trot, in the face of all natural adversities, from rider to rider, from stage to stage.22 Angareion, the Persian name of this military mail, is the root of the Greek word for messenger and consequently of all Christian angels.
The Greek polis had but one script to set against a communications empire such as the Persian, but in contrast to oriental bureaucracies it was entirely susceptible *of orality. Firstly the Greek alphabet (from Indo-European necessities and because it developed in the course of commercial and translation intercourse with semitic consonant scripts) turned redundant consonants into vowels, thus performing the first total analysis of a spoken language – and in principle of all such.23 The fact that vowel signs for the first time encoded prosodic-musical elements of speech permitted of a musical notation, and in the Pythagorean school for the simple reason that Greek letters also possessed numerical values 24, a mathematisation of music, to the extent that this remained a matter of abstract intervals.
Secondly, the triumphal progress of the vocalic alphabet seems less to be the result of an overestimated degree of innovation rather than of the unambiguity of its phoneme allocation. This minimised the effort required for literacy and thus transferred palace and temple secrets to the public domain.25 It became possible for literature firstly to incorporate oral mnemonics (such as airs or rhapsodies) and later also prose.26 Athenian tyrants founded the first public library; the bookworm Euripides became the “first great reader” among writers.27
These ancient scrolls got their Biblical name from a papyrus-exporting city in Phoenicia whose place was taken as of 5O0 BC by the Nile delta. The Imperium Romanum too, after the conquest of Egypt, based its command network – which is what the empire was – on a combination of mounted staging messengers, madeup military roads and easily transportable papyrus. The empire, in other words, combined despotic transmission mechanisms with a democratic alphabet. The cursus publicus which Augustus set up, with overnight stations at distances of 40 kilometres and staging posts at around 12 kilometres, exclusively for officials and legions 28 became, despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, the crystallisation point for European towns. In combination with beacon telegraphy at sensitive frontiers, a state postal service, which was faster than the fastest ships and was not excelled until Napoleon, transmitted imperial power as such: “Caesarum est per arbem terrae litteras missitare” 29, as a late Roman writer has it – “It is the office of emperors to send written commands across the world.” In comparison with this perfect transmission medium for said world and Caesar’s news-sheet distribution in the city of Rome, data storage – even if there was an imperial officium sacrae memoriae since Hadrian – remained technically retarded.
Papyrus may be light, but it is fragile and impermanent. It could only be stored in rolls and read with two hands. In the opinion of Alan Turing, the first computer theorist, “it must have taken some time to look up references in such volumes”.30 It was not until the arrival of the codex in parchment, used first by the library of Persimmon for circumventing the Egyptian papyrus monopoly, and by Christians since 140 AD, that indexing by location, sheets and finally sides, became possible. Books, which were durable, erasable (as in the palimpsest) and addressable with special pages (indices) were worth their extra weight and extra cost. They decoupled increasingly cursory reading from the laboriousness and slowness of orality. When Bishop Ambrose of Milan (according to the testimony of his best-known disciple) read a codex “his eyes swept over the pages extracting the essence of the meaning while he himself remained silent”.31 In the codex, the transportable, addressable and interpretable scripts of former nomads, the Jews and Arabs, vanquished the immobility of statues and temples of the gods.
The decline of the cursus publicus and the Islamic incorporation of Egypt, which also led to the destruction of the great ancient library, cut off Western Europe from papyrus imports. What was left was the agricultural product, parchment, on which monks were constrained to copy the censored Christian version of what was contained on papyrus, while in the Byzantine Empire the flaw of written commands from all past emperors coagulated into the legislation of the Codex. Through such bridgings or compressions of time a translatio studii was enabled to take place; but the translatio imperii presupposed new orders of distance and thus more accessible writing surfaces.
In the 13th century, paper, imported from China via Baghdad, arrived in Europe, where it was further developed by cities of the linen trade and the new windmills and watermills into rag-paper. This writing surface was central to the rise of the universities which, with their incorporated book-copying departments and postal networks broke the storage monopoly of the monasteries. And at the same time it was central, in combination with the Indian numerical system imported via Arabia, to the rise of trading cities.32 The important thing in this context was not simply the well known invention of double-entry bookkeeping but, above all, a mathematical notation which for the first time brought independence from the numerous workaday languages.
Greeks, when adding two numbers together, had said kai, and Romans et; since the 15th century however we have had plus and minus, as mute as they are international, as signs for mathematical operators.
2. Printing
Gutenberg’s invention of printing using movable letters developed from book-spine stamps which, in contrast to their predecessors in China and Korea, functioned both alphabetically and (after the disappearance of ligatures) discretely, may not have been a revolution of the magnitude of the codex – but it met the demand awakened by paper. As “the first assembly line in the history of technology” 33, printing potentiated the data processing capacity of books. Because all copies of an edition, in contrast to manual copies, had the same texts, woodcuts and engravings in the same places, they could be accessed via unified and for the first time alphabetical indexes. This addressing using page numbers, titles and, since Leibniz, alphabetical library catalogues 34, put the communication system which is science on its reference basis, while book illustrations free of copying errors formed the basis of engineering.35 Not without reason could Vasari boast that Italy had discovered perspective, as enabling the production of technically accurate drawings, in the same year as Gutenberg invented typography.