Communication Technology and History ----- The Rise and Fall of Civilizations as Understood from the Perspective of the Media

Innes's work Canadian communication scholar Harold Innes was McLuhan's teacher, and through reading his book Empire and Communication, one cannot help but be impressed by the depth and thoroughness of his study of the cultural economy of the ancient West. Understanding civilizations through the attributes of media is indeed a new and novel perspective, and it also helps us to have a glimpse of the cultural spirit and the characteristics of knowledge dissemination in each era from another side. Ancient Egyptian Sacred Writings 1. Innes analyzes the rise and fall of empires through the perspective of communication media In ancient Egypt, the first sacred writings were recorded on stones. According to the theory of Harold Innis, the stone-based medium is a time-biased medium, and the time-biased medium is represented by the religious regime and the religious empire. According to Innes. In Egypt, the gods were *** institutions, instruments of stretched creativity, and messengers of law and justice. Yet as Egyptian civilization shifted from absolutely total and relatively democratic organization, the medium of knowledge transmission also happened to undergo an important shift during this period, from the ancient stone vehicle to the relatively lightweight papyrus. During the First Dynasty of ancient Egypt, the Egyptians discovered papyrus in the Nile Delta. This made of plant fiber paper is very light, can be transported over long distances, easy to write, which is the text is also from the complexity of the holy script changed to the monks, with the number of handwritten text grows significantly, the original belongs to the upper class of the spiritual culture gradually secularization when the situation monopolized by the high separatist class was broken for the first time, the ordinary class can also be improved by raising the level of literacy to improve the cultural literacy, and it is this that brought about an onslaught of commoners and foreigners against the privileged classes of ancient Egypt, which ultimately led to its subjugation by foreign peoples in a competition between the time-biased medium and the medium of space. Egyptian Papyrus It was the failure to resolve the relationship between religion and the alphabet that led to the successive decline of the Assyrian and Persian empires in the two river valleys. These states were initially founded on the medium of time represented by clay tablets, but it was the introduction of the spatial medium of papyrus and soft pens, due to the lack of clay in the north, which fostered the rise of the flexible and versatile alphabet board. But the alphabet favored the development of small cities and states to the detriment of the empire, due to the fact that its adaptability to different languages weakened the same idea of the imperial rulers who tried to erase the differences between the city-states, increased the difficulty of governing a large empire, and inflicted a fatal injury on large-scale political organization. The monopoly on complex writing was once the basis on which large-scale organizations existed, but with the emergence of the alphabet and simple writing, this monopoly was ultimately destroyed by the occupation of a simple writing system, and in later years, the diversity of languages and ideas made the empire that the differences between the Chen Bang states continued to increase, the organization of the relationship between the more and more loose, and ultimately became a fatal factor in the collapse of the empire. Ancient Greece had an oral tradition In the eyes of Ines, Greece was the most ideal civilization, the medium of time and space reached the paradigm in ancient Greece, however, the ancient Greek city-state civilization eventually could not escape the fate of the balance was broken and the civilization was disintegrated. From the time of Homer's epics, Greece has always had a time-biased oral literature tradition, and later introduced the space-biased Phoenician alphabet, which seems to have completed the balance between the religious empire and the space-biased political empire. However, when we look into the details, this balance lacked mutual constraints, and Greek civilization did not have a strong religious outlook, and Greek mythology was all about the divinity of gods, and the gods were humane. Nor did Greece have a strong tradition of centralized power, as typified. It was the classical civilization of ancient Greece that took the form of a confederation of city-states. Homer Oral communication was one of the various standards and sacred beliefs that the Greeks*** had, and the achievements of Greek civilization reflect the power of oral communication, through which bards, philosophers, and dramatists spread monopolized knowledge to the citizenry and contributed to the flourishing of culture. Individualism thus awakened. All classes and regions used oral communication to express themselves. The Phoenicians who came to do business, which was brought with them a highly flexible alphabet. And the widespread use of Greek communication began in Greece, further skewing Greek culture towards space. Ancient Greek Comedy During the boom period of the development of Greek civilization, the popularity of papyrus allowed for more writing to be recorded, which, along with the flexible epigraphic alphabet, led to the increasing development of the written language and combined it with the system of oral Greek communication to create an equilibrium between time-biased and space-biased modes of communication. This equilibrium contributed to the prosperity of Greek civilization and reached its peak in the works of Plato, Socrates. In Greece, the written language began as a simple record of the spoken word, used to write inscriptions and record poetry. The loss of the dialectical essence of the spoken word was the result of a gradual ossification of oral communication, and, as Plato said, the written word became a shadow of the spoken word. Innes argues that the emergence of books and the written word allowed for the development of geography and dialectal culture throughout Greece, however, as the written word became more and more developed, the gap between the cities*** and the country deepened to take into account the shrinking of traditional methods, and the accompanying ways of thinking and methods of ossification and spatial bias of the written word overpowering the time bias of the spoken word, thus accelerating the pace of disintegration of the Greek civilization. This accelerated the disintegration of Greek civilization. In Ennis's view, the bias of the oral tradition cannot be ignored in any way, and he believes that in the modern world it is necessary to regain some of the spirit of oral communication, and that it is extremely important to be based on the oral debating society, because in debates human emotions and themes. It is the focal point of the debate. Ancient Roman Stelae And in the era of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, built on the technology of writing and papyrus, the Roman Empire had a powerful writing, and the spread of traditional writing contributed to the fall of *** and institutions and the rise of the imperial capitals The spatial bias of the writing and papyrus traveled, and Rome ultimately became a vast empire spanning three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa. But the increasing use of papyrus was also revealing its weaknesses. Is also exposed its weakness: fragile, easy to fall off; another time-biased medium is the rise of parchment, although he is lighter than papyrus, but more complex production process, expensive, resulting in its media bias in the media belongs to a more durable time media. This medium of parchment is also the reason why Christianity had a greater advantage over other religions. In 313 A.D., Constantine the Great issued the Edict of Milan, determining the special status of Christianity, which also completed the transformation of the Eastern Roman Empire from a political empire to a religious empire. Despite the division of the Roman Empire into East and West Rome, and the increasing encroachment on its territory, the territory of the Eastern Empire persisted until 1453, when it was completely annexed. The Eastern Roman Empire grew by a system caused by two mediums, this papyrus and parchment system facilitated political and cultural unity, the papyrus facilitated the development of an imperial bureaucratic organization, and this system brought about an empire with vast territories still sustained by parchment, which helped to consolidate the ecclesiastical hierarchical system, and played an important role in the development of a strong Christian organization. Parchment In Ines' view, it was the rise and use of parchment that ultimately led to the imbalance between the European mediums of time, media and space, and Europe's eventual entry into the dark Middle Ages. The information on parchment in fact exacerbated the monopoly of knowledge, making medieval Europe an age of obscurantism, but it was also because of the temporal bias of parchment that a great deal of the writings of the Greek civilization and the Roman empire were preserved by the medieval monasteries and *** empires, and were not dispersed because of the ease with which parchment could be detached. This monopoly was not broken until the popularization of paper and printing, and this popularization developed in the commercial sphere. The production of paper came to Europe as a sign of the commercial revolution, which began around 1275 A.D. The use of paper contributed to the growth and expression of credit, the use of insurance policies and bills of exchange, and paper made the expensive material used for the dissemination of ideas to be replaced by a medium-economy one, which facilitated the circulation of the fruits of human thought, and the ordinary class of citizens also possessed the right to read, and the vernacular literature, in the form of dialects, gradually sprang up. Vernacular literature in the form of local dialects gradually emerged. The rise of vernacular literature accelerated the development of nationalism, which, in turn, accelerated the development of vernacular literature, and the appearance of paper, which created competition with parchment, and fibrous paper, which was a media conducive to space, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Italy monopolized the paper industry in Europe, and so coincidentally, it was in that era that Italy emerged with a large number of professional writers, and became the center of the Renaissance Renaissance Renaissance The Renaissance first emerged in Florence, Venice and other places, the dominance of parchment was not guaranteed to be established, and its bureaucratic system of religious organizations in the organization also collapsed, the Reformation emerged in all parts of Europe, the Bible was printed in large quantities in the vernacular, and ordinary believers were required to own a copy of the Bible to understand the Scriptures in their own way. Then came the bourgeois revolution, first in the Netherland, and the modern state map of Europe took shape. By the 17th century the civilization brought about by printing had successfully challenged the medieval church's temporal inclination to civilization. The authority of the church was based on printed matter such as the technology of parchment manuscripts, which exacerbated the spatial bias of the medium, fostering nationalism, the rise of national languages, and the development of bureaucratic politics, and the growth of the paper and printing industries, which gave rise to modern media such as newspapers. Printing represented a mechanical cultural production based on consistent repetition, a mechanization that provided a model for the later standardization of mass production of goods and support, it introduced a new civilized knowledge, monopolies were broken up, information*** sharing became the norm, the written word didn't always have to be written by experts and scholars, and ordinary journalists were able to publish articles in newspapers. It was the power of the newspaper that was seen. Political groups began to use it to manipulate public opinion, and then the development of broadcasting led to new political groups. Again radio was used to break up political monopolies, the radio loudspeaker played a big part in the matter of the election of the Nazis, and vast areas of the German language, responded to the call on the radio inviting them to join a greater German Reich, and it is likely that this was the push and pull that radio and newspapers played in the First and Second World Wars. World War I In 1930s America, print constituted a complete monopoly on knowledge. It is from the printed word that Ennis derives the modern paranoia that the United States is all about the immediate; print culture is protected by the U.S. Constitution, which supported the rapid growth of the newspaper industry, and in the U.S. the vigorous growth of the newspaper and magazine industry led to the creation of a massive monopoly on communication, and Ennis argues that the creation of this monopoly on communication has resulted in the disruption of the enduring, continuous system of cultural activity. The modern newspaper has turned news into a commodity that can be sold like any other commodity in competition and monopoly, so that the emphasis on change has become the only cultural trait that sells, and news that emphasizes excitement, sensation, and effect sells, and the culture of time has been spatialized, and advertisers have taken full advantage of the technological advances in communication to monopolize information and push it out as far as they can to the masses, with far-reaching consequences and effects on the economic system. Consequences and Implications Innes next discusses how the great power of the American press created an economic monopoly over Canada, and the economic monopoly in turn created a cultural monopoly over Canada. The great power of the American newspaper industry first disrupted Canada's trade in cardboard boxes and paper, and a large portion of the manufactured pulp and paper products were advertisements and reading matter, which they returned to sell back to Canada, which resulted in the bombardment of Canada by American culture. The relative positions of American and Canadian territories In fact we only have to extend Ennis's ideas further to see that radio and television are actually an even greater step forward in the modern spatial bias, radios and televisions are easily and readily movable, electromagnetic waves are far more fleeting than newspapers, radio removes the boundaries of the state, it conquers space with the airwaves, and the payoffs of advertising underpinned the American broadcasting which is more dangerous than the space-biased media of the past. Although Innes does not analyze advertising in his own way, he still understands the implications of the latest communication technologies as an expansion of both American vested interests and culture, and the proximity of Canada's largest population centers to American broadcasting transmissions setups as a further expansion of the almighty power of American commercialism, where American occupation of the entire English-speaking cultural zone will be inevitable. Even in Canada's own broadcasting system the Commission of Inquiry found. The proportion of American-produced programs on English-language television stations throughout Canada reached 53 percent, compared with only 44 percent in Canada. New communication technologies will inevitably lead to greater concentration of power, hence what he calls the inherent bias of communication due to this bias. The fringes of the test flight center area will inevitably be dominated by the center. and serve their interests. Economic and cultural expansion was ultimately reflected in political and diplomatic strategies, in the post-war recovery period, fearing a depression, Canadian nationality adopted an American-style policy of emphasizing military spending to ensure full employment, however, America's Cold War policies at the time, both internally and externally, as well as the expansion of Canada's economy and culture, put tremendous pressure on Canadian politics and intelligentsia to allow the forced adherence to the United States' diplomatic course and suppress domestic subversion. According to Ennis, Canadian political activity has been suppressed by American foreign policy and is in danger of being twisted and deformed. We are in an American, bad influence. It can be said that American culture has become something that has been hardwired into us by the Americans. 2.Characteristics and flaws of the theory Although Ines' doctrine has the risk of technological determinism. But the idea that communication media are biased is really groundbreaking. She also provides us with a new way of thinking about the world. That is, to understand civilization through the medium, and to understand the forms of civilization through its vehicles, a line of thought that is undoubtedly very enlightening. Time-biased media Ines divided the media into two kinds of time and space bias, time as the usual medium of communication, mostly refers to the ancient civilization is very durable, difficult to transport the media, phase clay, parchment and stone, space media is not durable, but conducive to transport, such as papyrus and paper, oral communication can only be spread over short distances, so more conducive to the traditional social child, this sheet makes long-distance transportation of the possible, favoring the geographical expansion of large empires. According to Innes, each advancement in the development of the media brought an important role in the development of the empire, and in early societies that relied on oral language communication, oral discourse made the dominant mode of public discourse. Political authority also used oral discourse as the main mode of communication, and later written texts gradually became the main mode of elite communication, and early Egypt, Greece, and Rome were all based on a writing culture. Ancient China and Ancient Greece both had beacon-like messaging systems With the invention of new writing materials writing became durable and long-lasting and the power of the written word grew tremendously, with paper and pen rulers were able to govern vast territories, and in this way new mediums of communication were made possible for the creation of empires. Innes argues that the expansion of political empires depended not only on politics and the military, but equally on orders from the capitol and national centers as well as on the administration of localities. Time-biased media, in terms of culture, represent institutions related to history, tradition, and religion; space-biased media imply the rise and expansion of empires in relation to secular power. Temporal culture is the cultural space of beliefs, afterlife interests and moral order, and culture is secular scientific and material, Obviously, both media concepts are at work in any culture, and a culture can only achieve a balance between temporal and spatial media for a short historical period, such as classical Greece, Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan times, and modern Western culture in England due to its inability to handle the problem of temporal continuity well, and is in danger of falling apart. Schematic diagram of Innes' thought Innes developed this idea of media-technology-like determinism in relation to his disciplinary background and experience. His master's and doctoral programs, as well as his dissertation, were all related to political economy, and his doctoral dissertation was on the History of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which discussed the impact of transportation and media technology on imperial rule. During his lifetime, he observed that there was less and less objective reporting of the news in newspapers and more and more advertisements and features; at the same time, the penetration of American capital into Canadian culture was affecting a Canada whose cultural roots were already very shallow. It was with this concern in mind that Ennis organized his six lectures at Oxford into a book, his book Empire and Communication. It is an illuminating work and hypothesis rather than an assertive one; the intellectual density of his writing is such that he can often summarize in a single sentence a work of literary historiography or the cultural spirit of an era, but because of his experience, the work inevitably has a tendency to be 'technologically deterministic about media'. Historical movement is a complex process of movement, not determined by a single factor, and it is biased to attribute the rise and fall of empires simply to the rise and fall of media technology, but it is indeed a good idea to look at the inheritance of culture from the perspective of communication media. But because of the aggressiveness of American culture in the twentieth century, in which he lived, the threat of space media was generalized to previous eras, which is suspected of being rote and magnifying the threat. Qin's Unification of Writing III. Adaptation of Theory to Chinese History and Culture Taking the history of communication in China as an example, bronzes and bamboo slips are time-biased mediums that are not conducive to mobility, whereas orally transmitted poems and ballads, and even scholars who traveled and lobbied around, belong to space-biased mediums. For example, due to the difficulty of writing and the difficulty of producing writing materials, the language of the pre-Qin period was simple and concise, and the fewer words were actually conducive to writing; the different ways of writing the characters of the Warring States period corresponded to the cultural and historical identities constructed by their respective states; historical books such as the Chu Ju and the Jiyi are historical accounts of the Chu and Jin states centered on themselves. The history books such as "Chu Ju" and "Ji Nian" are the historical records of Chu and Jin centered on themselves. The pre-Qin literary style and the vehicle of writing complemented each other, but the writing of each country had roughly the same origin, and even though there were slight differences in local dialects, it was still possible to communicate with each other through the written word. When King Zhuang of Chu asked for the throne of the Central Plains, Wang Sunman said that the Zhou virtues had not yet declined, the intention behind this was that the cultural influence of the Western Zhou was far from being lost or dispersed. It was such a large cultural identity that laid the foundation for the subsequent reunification. Chinese characters, as a phonetic script evolved from hieroglyphics, have a very weak relationship between glyphs and pronunciation, and because of the disassociation of glyphs and pronunciation, glyphs only correspond to their meanings, so that people from different dialect areas can communicate with each other in time through Chinese characters, which is very different from alphabetic scripts, which correspond to pronunciation from subtitles, and then correspond to semantics from pronunciation. This is how the plurality and diversity of European culture was born. Time-biased media, because they were not mobile and precious, such as parchment and bronze, did serve to monopolize culture. So there is no shortage of insights in Ines' work. Finally, he also argues that it is problematic for both individuals and societies to evolve to the point of over-refinement; after all, do not overdo anything, so maintaining a balance between spatial and temporal media is both prescient and relevant. Temple of Delphi The ancient Greek's "Do not overdo anything" speaks to a sense of wholeness and not exceeding boundaries. In order because spoken language is timely and has a sense of site, spoken speech exists only in the moment in which it is heard, spoken expression cannot be fixed or figurative, it lacks materiality. In order to maintain a sense of immediacy of an idea or event, it must be shared, retold, and passed on. The floating nature of the spoken word does not allow it to be stripped and dissected. In tribal times hearing was valued, and McLuhan believed that the lives of primitive people were richer than those of their descendants because the senses of the primitive people emphasized more on the overall perception of the environment; primitive people had deeper emotions for the community, and were better able to perceive the presence of things around them, and the auditory environment fostered more enthusiasm and spontaneity in such an environment. The human senses are unified; human hearing, touch, and vision have not been completely divided and polarized. Whereas in the West, with its subtle differences, accents are synthesized into a solid national language, this new sense of unity is accompanied by a sense of isolation and separation. Advances in media technology may have brought a lot of convenience as far as the material dimension is concerned, but from another perspective, new technologies always offer Faustian bargains ----- a private deal with the devil. Technological skills give and can take away, sometimes the creativity of the new technology, outweighs its destructive qualities, and conversely, its destructive qualities sometimes outweigh the creative qualities, and things are never just one-sided. Whether right or wrong. Innes' views are hard to falsify quantitatively, because neither inductively nor deductively can he find a single point in those statements of his that can be substantiated quantitatively. That's why Ennis's slogans, metaphors, and maxims are so hard to prove. But such scholarship is also hard to prove wrong. Enis's historical analysis reinforced concerns about the possible cultural impact of new media technologies and inspired his protégé, Mike Lewhan. The medium is the message In McLuhan, the content of the media is the tasty steak, but the form of the media is the thief who uses the steak to lure away the watchdogs of the people's brains, and then enters the brain himself by taking advantage of the weakness, which is the subliminal effect of the form of the media on the thinking of the people. 1.Empire and Communication 2.The Bias of Communication 3.The Gutenberg Group 4.A First Look at Communication 5.Twenty-Five Lectures on Communication