Seven Historical Regimes of Media and Communication

Typology

Mark Whitaker:

"The Seven Regimes of Communication, A List and General Timeline over the Last 5,000 Years

Each media regime change punctures the hegemony of the previous regime. Thus, media changes come out of and depend on the history of the previous media regime, yet that fails to mean the next regime will automatically be successful. However, it can create challenges to leadership in rearrangements of the past six well-practiced procedures of cultural reproduction like education, communication/transmission, information gathering, making decisions, selective promotion, and selective censorship. Older institutional leaderships have less power to do all six over time in a successful media regime change.

Media regime change starts to create ‘institutional mismatches’: social, political, and cultural lags of older institutions compared to an updated daily life of communication in a challenging and fresh media regime. Institutions are of necessity good at using and building themselves via older technological media regimes. Thus media regimes condition how leaderships and whole cultures reproduce their own power. However, as novel media regimes are invented within past cultures, it is hypothesized that such institutional mismatch can slowly erode past leadership’s power regimes. These tend both to dissolve slowly after a time when certain saturation is reached in the wider culture of how information is flowing, and more quickly when some conflicting event(s) facilitate a showdown between different media-using groups in the culture. Of course if it rarely reaches (or is allowed to reach) these contexts, a media regime change can fail to happen. It is historically contingent. For instance, China still uses complex scripts despite many simple scripts invented in its peripheries around it for millennia. Korea rocketed ahead in the late 1800s skipping several media regimes or getting them simultaneously, in the series below. As said, it is historically contingent.

The seven media regime inventions so far in world history are described in terms of what came before them that got interrupted, challenged, or punctured by the latter media regime’s challenge.

1. Regime 1: oral language;

‘no language’ punctured by oral language itself; Ong’s ‘first orality’; oral communication is the first regime, taking us from animals to something closer to homo symbolicus, linked into particular small cultures of oral communities, oral stories, and oral poetry, and oral creation myths different than the next group in cultural transmission. It includes symbolic communication with the body directly of all kinds still and thus includes body language-based communications like dance, song, and music that likely existed before oral language itself.

2. Regime 2: complex scripts;

oral languages punctured by complex scripts; tokens with symbols or as symbols by shape themselves start to be used as ‘written’ memory aids before full complex scripts were elaborated, and many examples of cave art in Europe show a common set of symbolic shapes for millennia so it is likely oral language developed some form of symbolic picture notation as well; however, even as complex scripts were invented, still oral communication exists as well; complex scripts become elaborated in the bureaucracies of the first territorial states around 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia, and many other birthplaces of urban civilization all developed their own complex scripts built into a particular physical medium and suitable for long term storage in their local ecological situation (such as even in the early quipu (rope writing) found in early Caral, or the mud brick and cuneiform mix of Mesopotamia, etc.); complex scripts are pictorial-to-‘local oral’ sounds of those pictures as the origins of these scripts are as memory aids; thus, complex scripts require a human translator, speaking that oral language, to actually understand the sometimes thousands of symbolic pictures (standing for remembering the sounds), instead of the signs representing sounds themselves; there are several kinds: logographic, ideographic, and/or rebus-syllabic writing; since it requires a living oral speaker of an oral language to translate the written scripts of the language (because only they know what the symbolic pictures ‘sound’ like), this is why many complex scripts were lost until ‘rediscovered’ from the 1800s onward by patient research, testing, and study. When complex scripts lose oral speakers, no one living knows how to translate the meaning of the symbols anymore into the sounds of a particular language anymore that itself is soon lost by linguistic drift of the oral language. However, most complex script civilizations were only using the technology in a very small percentage of the population (with scribal elites being the “original 1%”) lording over a widely oral-only population. Thus complex scripts were mainly used to expand an administrative and exclusionary control system of a tiny number of literate elites in a bureaucracy of states over a mass of oral speakers. Complex scripts allowed scale of such cultures and states to expand as well. This set the stage for the next media regime change within the periphery of the culture of a complex script, or even in the shared periphery between multiple cultures of different complex scripts.

3. Regime 3: simple scripts;

complex script civilizations and/or oral language groups punctured by simple scripts; true phonetic scripts develop, thus they had far fewer signs; with far fewer signs, simple scripts are easily learned, shared, distributed, and copied by amateurs; cultures of shared manuscripts are easier to accomplish; cross-cultural discussion and communication is easier to create for the first time; three main kinds: abjads (writing consonant sounds only), abugidas (writing combined consonant-vowel units or syllables, with each syllable with a symbol), and alphabets (writing all consonant sounds and vowel sounds separately); Hangul is hybrid: it is an alphabet yet it is written only as a syllable-based abugida and it has figural principles of being a notation of abstract line images trying to show the approximate proper mouth-to-tongue shapes of the sounds to make as you read.

a. Social dynamics are the invention of various mass publics of religious/scientific communities sharing widely many different texts in a plural manuscript culture without clear textual authorities or ‘canonization’. As a technology, simple scripts spread rapidly through the world like an early peer-to-peer Internet.

b. Simple scripts allow wider scales of communication. This set the stage for the next media regime change within the periphery of the culture of a simple script, or even in the shared periphery between multiple cultures of different simple scripts or in the periphery between simple scripts and complex scripts.

4. Regime 4: mass printing

simple script civilizations, complex script civilizations, and/or oral cultures punctured by mass printing; mass printing typically begins as one carved wooden ‘page’ or block-based printing, moving to wooden/clay/metal type-based printing; it requires a paper medium, an ink medium, as well as durable harder materials to make the blocks that can stand many thousands of pressings easily without falling apart. [MW1]

a. Social dynamics required for successful ongoing mass printing are several: mass printing technological skills, cheap paper, ink, mass markets, and politically favorable circumstances all are required; thus durable mass printing requires more than ‘technology’, since it requires either state sponsorship and subsidization with its designs of mass population of some centralized kind of instruction, which is expensive; or, it requires an underground press and mass commercial markets that are now possible as well to keep it going; some contexts show both happening at once, for instance, the invention of modern European science is based on the sharing of the same mass produced copies of texts within that generally underground press and mass commercial market instead of always popularized by state sponsorship, religious sponsorship, or aristocratic dedications for subsidizing and aiding writing and publication; invention of various mass publics of religions [MW2] communities sharing widely the same texts at this point, instead of the earlier more plural text culture without clear authorities.

b. Mass printing scripts allows wider scales of communication. This set the stage for the next media regime change within the periphery of a culture of mass printing. The main states or zones involved in revolutionary mass printing ideas invent and popularize faster telecommunications.

5. Regime 5: two-way, non-mass-media, non-electrical telecommunications;

simple script civilizations, complex script civilizations, oral cultures, or mass printing civilizations punctured by non-electrical telecommunications; distant sharing; instantaneous ‘by-sight’ communication of symbols in various mediums from smoke signal towers of the Joseon dynasty Korea all across the nation, to a series of Chappe semaphore towers first used in the French Revolutionary period and soon adapted to the British Empire next; this led to British ship-based communications based on semaphore flags now communicating to those British ‘Chappe’ towers on land, for routing information back to London quickly in the combination of both semaphore on sea and towers on land; typically since the towers are an expensive technology, it was used only by states or empires for important rapid communications to and from the center of power, particularly to and from the coasts to the capital city of various states. Smoke towers had a simple symbolism only. The Joeson dynasty could send only a series of simple message depending on the minimum of one to a maximum number of five smoke fires as ‘towers’ that could be seen rising separately from a distance. In France of the late 1700s through the early 1800s, Chappe’s telegraphe towers used different flashed signs based on the orientations of two long wooden arms on the top of the tower that could be rotated by pully and chains into symbolic positions relatively quickly that could flash the symbolic orientation for every letter of the Roman alphabet, for complicated messages, down the line to the next tower perhaps a kilometer away. When the message was complete, this was repeated and flashed in this process to the next tower a few kilometers away, etc., until the destination of the message was reached. Chappe telegraphe towers look like a larger mechanical version of British semaphore flags and arm orientations.

6. Regime 6: many separate, one-way, mass-media electrical telecommunications, wired and into wireless broadcasting;

civilizations of non-electrical telecommunication, simple scripts, complex scripts, and/or mass printing punctured by mostly one-way mass media electrical telecommunications; it started with wires of the telegraph that were expensive and so used mostly as military technology before it became commercially popularized as a line of wired electrical communication regularly in parallel to the growing railroad track networks between stations; it is said ‘mostly one-way’ because there were early, small, two-way wireless and synchronous electrical telecommunications possible from the 1890s, yet in practice it became easier (and state regulated) toward (1) licensing only one-way mass media wireless electrical telecommunication due to expensive production studios built from a few wealthy or powerful voices broadcast or shown to many millions of silent receivers on radio, in movies, in recorded music, etc.; (2) this resulted in many different, parallel, and separated physical mediums and electrical technologies of storage or transmission (i.e., one technology for sound recordings/playback, one technology for image showing/recording/playback, etc.); this slowly started to merge first in sound and vision of movies by the late 1920s even as more singular technologies of mass radio and mass music recordings continued); broadcasting and recording mass media production was very expensive at the beginning, giving rise to vast radio studios, movie studios, recording studios, TV studios, etc., each with their own parallel technologies of recording and transmission; despite ‘radio wireless’ starting as small two-way non-mass media home kits and turning into ‘pirate radio’, soon it was applied mostly in cultural hegemony of expensive, licensed, regulated, dedicated wires or dedicated frequency bands only for authorized mass broadcasts on particular frequencies; this built a world of big one-way (and mostly) state-censored mass entertainment media culture/politics seen in mass telegraph/telephone exchanges, mass media, mass politics, mass movies, mass radio, broadcast TV); totally novel recording, (re)transmission, and (re)broadcast of word sounds and images became possible to show ‘reruns’ (“second orality,” Ong’s term); understandably, all this one-way mass media created a mass society.

7. Regime 7: digitally converging two-way mass-multimedia telecommunications;

‘Computerized Wireless Telecommunications of Digital Electronic Mobile Mass Multi-Media’; ‘Diamond Democracy’, abbreviated for memory as ‘CWT DEM4’; two-way mass-multimedia telecommunication starts to puncture other existing media regimes; ‘two-way mass multimedia’ in everyone’s hand became possible as millions become makers and mass broadcasters of media more cheaply in miniaturization of computer equipment, then greater mobility and cheapness of it, and then a network in the former is possible; this electronic two-way network of mass media is different than the one-way mass media of a few voices and millions of passive listeners/watchers; instead, ever shifting networks of such communication is harder to exercise any past centralized state or corporate censorship upon."

Source: Mark Whitaker writes: "appendix 4 from my recently finished co-written book on the Korean Economic Miracle and the Korean Wave."

Example

The Printing Press media regime and the European Reformation

Mark Whitaker:

"What happened in Europe with saturation toward mass printing after 1450 can be interpreted as the primary media regime change that was a major cause of many later secondary power changes across European organizations of politics, religion/education/science, economics, or finance that many historians frame as autonomous changes.

However, respectively, (1) in politics and religion, an earlier media change can be seen as a major influence in the decline of the Catholic Church and the rise of the many regional Protestant Reformations from the 1500s that continues through the present. Such rebellions could now at last coordinate the longer and unorganized regional and oral opposition to the Catholic Church, like seen for centuries in Lollardy for example or the earlier ‘proto-Protestant’ rebellion of Jan Hus (1370-1415)—who lacked mass printing.

Next, (2) an earlier media change that influenced a change in education and science can be seen as the major influence in the decline of Catholic-based science censorship toward the modern European Scientific Revolution from the 1450s that continues in the present. Europeans could now at last coordinate information spreading in older scientific ‘pagan’ Roman or Greek authors, or ‘heathen’ Islamic texts, or even ‘new works’ of science beyond rare secret hand-passed copies. Europe blossomed into hundreds of years of mass underground covert publishing with a mass commercial audience as state and church censorship existed yet was increasingly powerless.

(3) An earlier media change can be seen as the major economic influence of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1600s that continues through the present. It accelerated the mass published sharing of innovative technical commercial information in mining, agriculture, and industry and altered technical and market information away from previous different orally-transmitted secret knowledges of various guilds or smaller regional markets into mass public advertising and calls for mass investments from thousands of readers.

(4) An earlier media change can be seen as the major influence in the later spread of the ideal politics of democratic republics that started in the early 1500s that continues through the present. They were first spread in mass publications that repopularized of older Greek and Roman texts themselves with their own state/ethical concerns or even sharing of mass printed copies of older state-centric legal codes from the Roman Empire that inspired mere regional princely states to build more centralized national sovereignties over multiple regional aristocratic or church authorities and courts.

(5) A media regime of mass printing had the power to invent much about the daily feeling of what are the ‘imagined communities’ of nations that we live within today, as a world of international Latin texts and transnational religious organizations regionalized as mass publishing of whatever was the major spoken language was [MW3] the only effective way to make profits in books. In turn vernacular language-based nations came to dominate the ideational views of more international religious based states over multiple language groups. (Anderson, 2006)

(6) Even the spread of mass education and mass revolution from underclasses that started in the 1800s that continues through the present depended on the cheapening of paper from 1802 and the general reduction or elimination of taxes on paper and newspapers. Plus many revolutionaries of the time preferred just like capitalists (that had their own telegraph exchanges put in the earliest electronically networked stock exchanges in Europe) or governments (that could build Chappe telegraphe towers into their royal palaces like Czar’s palace of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia) to be in or near the cities of the earliest electronic telegraph communication cores and newspaper wire services, to keep an ear for what was happening in Europe and throughout the world in their similar or different secular plots and plans.

Once more, Europe was earlier than any other world region in being a saturated culture of mass printing and then equally in one way electronic telecommunications and then two-way electronic telecommunications. This has made all the difference in the world from the 1450s to the present in the world history of different regional hegemony over other regions. These media regime changes happened in electronic telecommunication from the mid 1800s through the 1990s, equally revolutionary to people living in a world of mass print-only institutions in Europe or their European empires for hundreds of years."