Períodos de uma revolução para outra são cada vez mais curtos

Se a sociedade está pronta, as transformações acontecem. Se não for um autor, será outro.

Se uma revolução é a introdução de instrumentos ou ideias de forma generalizada, significa

que não podemos fugir dela. Atualmente, é muito difícil viver sem email.

Nada vem do nada. As inovações são o resultado de inúmero pequenos processos.

Social media: Monopoly of data-based knowledge

Three communication Monopolies

-Knowledge monopoly

-Coordination capacity monopoly (China- Impede a coordenação de grupos)

-Symbolic policing Monopoly (É simbolicamente (rei-coroa) que o poder se expressa)

Numa altura de grande transparência, em que quem detém o poder simbólico está mais
exposto, é mais difícil manter a legitimidade.

O desenvolvimento da matemática e do pensamento abstrato acompanham o

desenvolvimento da escritas por questões práticas. As ideias “impressas” vão-se
complexificando porque/e por isso as formas de as expressar também.

Escrita cuneiforme- Os “desenhos” representam os sons

Quanto maior a capacidade de estender as tecnologias de comunicação, menos centralizado

será o poder e a autoridade central perderá a sua força.

Pergaminho- Usado na idade média, com pele de animais

Alfabeto- Pode ser adotado por diferentes culturas. Por isso, espalhou-se pelo mundo,
tornando a comunicação mais fácil. Surgem as primeiras escolas, o que significa uma cultura
que escreve e lê, generalizando ainda mais o conhecimento.

Sistemas educativos, administração pública mais sofisticada. Abriram a porta para o Império
Romano.

Há uma secularização do texto e da escrita. Aumenta o pensamento analítico. Podendo

cristalizar ideias, os conceitos ficam registados. Temos acesso a eles que, constantemente
presentes, permitem-nos progredir e desenvolver novas ideias. Podemos voltar a elas. A nossa
capacidade para analisar transforma-se Apenas de forma oral, as ideias não se podem
desenvolver da mesma maneira. O texto é “context-free”

O texto é impessoal e “desobediente”. Tem vida própria. Não lhe podemos bater ou confrontar.

Passamos de usar os ouvidos para os olhos.

Criam-se trabalhos. Talvez menos exigentes fisicamente. Com o conhecimento adquirido,

certas pessoas distanciam-se intelectualmente e podem enriquecer.

Emerge uma classe de pessoas educadas (graças à escrita). O mercantilismo desenvolve-se. O

potencial económico de investimento cresce.
Os países mais poderosos encontram-se no hemisfério norte porque tiveram primeiro acesso
às revoluções. Jogam com o tempo a seu favor

Weber- Burocracia e racionalização abrem a porta para o Capitalismo

Atualmente, com os algoritmos, as notícias são direcionadas a consumidores específicos. Cada

pessoa tem acesso a uma realidade específica.

Jornalistas eram no inicio dos jornais posicionados perto de polícias e tribunais.

Telefone/Telégrafo: Tempo e espaço já não contam. Mais fácil cobrir informação e notícias
internacionais.

Telégrafo: Pode-se enviar dinheiro. O que permite o alargamento (início?) da bolsa.

As informações de fora chegavam primeiro às capitais e daí partiam para os outros locais.
Chegavam com um atraso muito grande

Poder da data: Controlar comportamentos futuros ou prever comportamentos já existentes

IRVING FANG- HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER 1, THE FIRST REVOLUTION: WRITING

In alluvial valleys and deltas, the nomads settled down to the more certain life of farmers.

Communities grew, conquests united them, governments followed, and commerce spread.
Priests required tribute to the gods and tax collectors came calling for much of what was left.
All this getting and giving required writing and record keeping.

To be practical the medium had to be transportable, storable, reasonably permanent, readily

made, and cheap. The writing had to be fixed, so a contract, government document, or
religious proclamation could not be altered.

Small clay triangles, spheres, cones, and other tokens were moulded to represent sheep, jars of
oil, and other trading goods. These tokens served a community as a means of keeping track of
goods for the purpose of pooling and redistributing the resources.

About 3100 B.C., the Sumerians invented numerals, separating the symbol for sheep from the
number of sheep. About the time that the Sumerians invented numerals, they advanced an
additional step with phonetic writing, where the symbol meant the sound of a consonant and a
vowel, thus combining the written and spoken language. The Sumerians had invented syllabic
writing, somewhat like the modern Japanese kana, not yet an alphabet.

The next step would be an integrated system of symbols for both written and spoken language.
In a word, an alphabet, in which one written symbol stands for one spoken sound, so a
combination of visible symbols represents what is spoken aloud. The next step would be the
phonetic alphabet.

To solve the sticky problem that a reed scratching into wet clay will pull the clay up as it is
withdrawn, they designed a writing tool with a wedge tip, resulting in the writing we know as
cuneiform.
When we recognize that even in our own time those who can understand certain kinds of
symbols such as computer programming languages have an advantage in a computer-
dependent society, we can appreciate without difficulty what happened in Egypt with a shift of
writing from priestly control to its widespread use.

The introduction of writing undermined the magic of the spoken word and the authority and
tradition of the elders, leading toward science and secularism.

With papyrus and the phonetic alphabet as the carrier of thought, knowledge and ideas
travelled the Hellenic world and returned enriched.

Papyrus came from one source, Egypt. Something more durable and more universally available
was also manufactured. That was parchment, made from the skin of a sheep, a calf, or a goat.
Perhaps its greatest advantage was that it could be fabricated anywhere there were sheep.
Papyrus grew only in the Nile Valley. Parchment also resisted time better than papyrus. Old
parchment documents still exist, but almost no papyrus from ancient times

The written tradition was strengthened in the third century as scholars tried to find a synthesis
between Hebraic religious beliefs, which were at the base of Christianity, and Greek
philosophy, which was at the base of intellectual life in the Roman empire.

In Europe, now began centuries of monastic responsibility for knowledge and information. As
monasteries were built in Europe during the Dark Ages of western civilization, monks, chiefly
Benedictines-, took up the profession of scribe. Among their tasks, they were charged with the
duty of transcribing the crumbling old papyrus manuscripts in the libraries onto fresh
parchment that was prepared in or near the monastery. To be a scribe was no longer a mean
calling. It was to do the work of God.

HAROLD ADAMS INNIS: THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATIONS & MONOPOLIES OF POWER

Time vs space based cultures

The relative stability of cultures depends on the balance and proportion of their media.

Three questions: How do specific communication technologies operate? What assumptions do

they take from and contribute to society? What forms of power do they encourage?

A key to social change is found in the development of communication media. Each medium
embodies a bias in terms of the organization and control of information. Any empire or society
is generally concerned with duration over time and extension in space.

Time-biased media, such as stone and clay, are durable and heavy. Since they are difficult to
move, they do not encourage territorial expansion; however, since they have a long life, they
do encourage the extension of empire over time. It`s associated with the customary, the
sacred, and the moral. Time-biased media facilitate the development of social hierarchies, as
archetypally exemplified by ancient Egypt. Speech is a time-biased medium (relative stability of
community for face-to-face contact)

Space-biased media are light and portable; they can be transported over large distances. They
are associated with secular and territorial societies; they facilitate the expansion of empire
over space. Paper is such a medium; it is readily transported but has a relatively short lifespan.
The first model is religious and concerned with the conquest of time. The second model is
militaristic and concerned with the conquest of space. Comparatively, the media that have
supported the military conquering of space have been lighter, so that the constraints of long
distances could be lessened. Those media that supported theocratic empires had relative
durability as a major characteristic so that they could support the concepts of eternal life and
endless dynasties.

Stable societies achieve a balance between time- and space-biased communications media.

Change came from the margins of society since people on the margins invariably developed
their own media. The new media allow those on the periphery to develop and consolidate
power, and ultimately to challenge the authority of the centre. Latin written on parchment, the
medium of the Christian Church, was attacked through the secular medium of vernaculars
written on paper.

Those who monopolize knowledge are also able to define what is legitimate knowledge.

Monopolies of knowledge derive their power from several sources:

Mastery of Complexity creates a hierarchy of professionals and amateurs.

Control of Raw Materials for Media: Microsoft buys the Bettman Archives!

Performativity: Just as Egyptian priests were able to accurately predict the regular flooding of
the Nile because knowledge of writing allowed them to make calculations, so does access to
public opinion allow pollsters to predict elections within certain percentage parameters.

Speed: Advantages accrue to those who have the knowledge first. Business done in back rooms
or in the corridors of power are often never reported in the media.

Ability to Afford High Costs: The cult of "production value" in design, recording, television, and
Hollywood movies makes it difficult for lower budget artifacts to compete for attention.

Monopolies of knowledge tend to polarize societies into a mass of the ignorant and a
knowledge elite. Monopolies of knowledge encourage centralization of power. Those who
control knowledge have the power to define reality.

Dialectical relationship between society and technology: they influence one another mutually.
According to this view, certain social forms and situations encourage the development of new
media; these media, operating within existing situations, react back on society to produce a
new cycle of change.

The "relative emphasis on time or space will imply a bias of significance to the culture in which
it is embedded". Empires are, in other words, characterized by the media they use most
effectively, partially because that’s how others come to know of their achievements.

It is not the heaviness of stone that necessarily makes it a time-biased medium, but rather its
ability to survive the elements and natural disasters so that it may still communicate its
message centuries or millennia later. The pyramids, temples, bridges, and cathedrals of the
world are still able to communicate something of their essential meaning to us today, if only we
know how to decode their empire-building messages. Those messages which have lasted have
tended to bias our view of the history of empires: Writing on clay and on stone has been
preserved more effectively than that on papyrus. Since durable commodities emphasize time
and continuity, studies of civilization such as Toynbee’s tend to have a bias toward religion and
to show a neglect of problems of space, notably administration and law

We know about the history of empires largely from the time-biased documents.

McLuhan’s "the medium is the message."

Innis juxtaposes the need for continuity with the need for claiming territory, a balance of
concerns central to the enterprise of empire building, and significantly determined by media of
communication: "The monopoly of knowledge centering around stone and hieroglyphics was
exposed to competition from papyrus as a new and more efficient medium". It is really the
"monopolies of knowledge" which are at stake in the longevity of empires.

PRINTING

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press is the origin of mass communication.
However, the invention of the printing press depended on a confluence of both cultural and
technological forces that had been unfolding for several centuries. Print culture and technology
also needed to go through centuries of change after Gutenberg's time before the
"massification" of audiences could fully crystallize.

Because their alphabet employs thousands of visually specific ideograms, the use of movable
type was much more labour-intensive for the Chinese. Consequently, it did not change
production efficiency as dramatically as it did for Europeans.

In the early 1450's rapid cultural change in Europe fuelled a growing need for the rapid and
cheap production of written documents.

The production and distribution of an expanding variety of texts quickly became too
widespread to contain. Printed copies of Martin Luther's theses, for example, were widely and
rapidly disseminated. They prompted far reaching discussions that became the foundation for
mounting opposition to the Church's role as the sole custodian of spiritual truth. Bibles printed
in vernacular languages fueled the Protestant Reformation based on the assertion that there
was no need for the Church to interpret scripture.

In 1476, William Caxton set up England's first printing press. He realized that English suffered
from so much regional variation that many people couldn't communicate with others from
their own country. Caxton's contributions as an editor and printer won him a good portion of
the credit for standardizing the English language.

The scientific principle of repeatability--the impartial verification of experimental results-- grew

out of the rapid and broad dissemination of scientific insights and discoveries that print
allowed. The production of scientific knowledge accelerated markedly. The easy exchange of
ideas gave rise to a scientific community that functioned without geographical constraints.

The rigidly fixed class structure which determined one's status from birth based on family
property ownership began to yield to the rise of an intellectual middle class. The possibility of
changing one's status infused the less privileged with ambition and a hunger for education.

Paper became available in Europe from around the twelfth century but was mainly used for
work that didn’t need to last a long time. Parchment continued to be the preferred medium for
recording matters that were important or needed to be preserved, such as the Bible and Books
of Hours.