University
of Toronto was for this brief period the intellectual centre of the
world --
Oswyn
Murray, fellow of Balliol College at Oxford University
We
are living at a time of revolutionary change in
communications and information technology.The convergence of radio, television, cellular
telephone and the computer along with the internet, e-mail
and fax have made information exchange and retrieval
instantaneous.These developments have altered the forms of
organization that both reflect our society and help to shape
it.Advances in technology have transformed our economy
and our society, and have touched off far reaching changes
in the way we learn, work, play, and relate to one another.Many believe the changes that will be
wrought by this technology are so unprecedented there is no
way of knowing what the repercussions will be.Or is there?
Marshall
McLuhan: The Three Fundamental Innovations in Technology
When
the ancient Greeks borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenecians and
gave it vowels, they achieved a significant advance in the
technology for preserving and transmitting the accumulated body of
knowledge in their civilization.The late theorist of culture and technology, Marshall
McLuhan, argued that there have been three basic technological
innovations: (1) the invention of the phonetic alphabet by the
ancient Greeks which shifted humans out of oral patterns of speech
and thought and made way for the dominance of literate forms of
communication and instruction; (2) the introduction of movable
type by Gutenberg in the 16th century which accelerated this
process; and (3) the invention of electric media, beginning with
the telegraph in 1844, and followed in succession by radio, films,
telephone, and computer.These, argued McLuhan, will ultimately transform all aspects
of our social and psychic existence.In his lectures at the University of Toronto, he told his
students that the use of the electronic media "constitutes a
break boundary" between the linear thought processes
characteristic of Gutenberg man and the simultaneous perception of
electronic media man, just as phonetic literacy was a break
boundary between oral man and literate man.[1]After
the Greeks adopted the technology of the alphabet, there was a
long period of tension between oral and literate modes of
communication. For centuries, the ancient oral tradition
persisted alongside the practice of writing. McLuhan pointed
out that
there
was a very rich cultural result from the interplay of the oral and
written forms.The
revival of oral culture in our own electronic age now exists in a
similar fecund relation with the still powerful written and visual
culture.We are in our
century "winding the tape backwards."The Greeks went from oral to written even as we are moving
from written to oral.They
ended in a desert of classified data even as we could "end"
in a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation.[2]
According
to McLuhan, the story of the ancient Greeks is our own story,
unfolding in reverse. It is a tale with particular
relevance for educators at the end of the 20th century, which also
happens to be a time of revolutionary innovation in communications
technology.
[1]Marshall
McLuhan, "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan -- A Candid
Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician
of Media," Playboy (March 1969) in Essential
McLuhan, eds., Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (Basic Books: New
York, 1995), p. 245.
This
series on the Toronto School of Communications is abstracted from Twyla
Gibson, Plato's Code: Philosophical Foundations of Knowledge in Education,
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2000.
