Page 105 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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90 Then
culture strongly suggests a loss of certain rational aspects in cultural
life. On the other hand, the mediascape replaces the cultural vitality
of pre-literate societies, grounded as they are in physical proximity
and face-to-face ties, with pseudo-social media events and celebrity-
driven news reporting. Part 2 examines how this creates an eternal
now of fresh affective images (that are, however, always the same in
their essence) that dominate and undermine rational discourse. This
produces what Langer (1998) calls the Other News and Nichols
(1994) calls an ideological reduction of the discourses of sobriety.

Literate/visual cultures

The emergence of writing constituted a fundamental rupture with
acoustic culture. In introducing an external means of preserving and
transmitting information, writing alters every aspect of culture.
Indeed, McLuhan argues that writing introduces a new form of
subjectivity, a novel form of self-identity radically different to the
form it took in oral societies. The scope and scale of this transfor-
mation cannot be overestimated: for McLuhan civilization is writing.
Phonetic writing is the first real medium because it translates or
carries an extrinsic content, namely, oral communication. According
to McLuhan every subsequent medium will have as its content a
pre-existing medium, a process that begins with the alphabet.
Moreover, it is not a case of simple transposition; the nature of the
spoken is itself modified in literate societies. McLuhan regards many
of the characteristics of the culture and technology of the West as
direct consequences of the phonetic alphabet’s impact upon culture
– a consequence of the arbitrary and linear nature of script. The
arbitrary nature of the elements that make up phonetic script
contrasts with ideographic scripts. It marks a break with any form of
symbolic or pictorial reference. Script’s linearity serves to reduce a
continuous chaotic flow of sense impressions into an orderly
sequence of discrete units. In this respect, writing involves a ‘lossy’
(to adopt the terminology of today’s media technology) compression
of information; whereas the oral word was replete with nuances and
entered into a complex interplay with other sensory streams, the
written word is resolutely visual. It contracts the multi-sensory
interplay of non-technological, symbolic culture into a single sensory
data stream, substituting ‘an eye for an ear’. This ultimately resulted
in a fundamental disruption of the sensory world of man. It tore
him out of the archaic multi-sensorial acoustic space and located
him in the harsh and exacting world of the visual.

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