The Dawn of Media

I closed last Monday's media literacy blog – "The Wizard's Toolbox" – with the argument that journalism, and all media, is practiced exactly the way people want. That is because people, not the media, created the Wizard's tools, the values and definitions that media professionals use to provide the public with news and entertainment. The mass media, created with the arrival of the Gutenberg press, simply took those values and definitions and turned them into a business.

If you want to verify this independently, close your computer right now and do not consume any media for one week. No news, no entertainment, no newspapers, no television, no movies, no magazines, no books, no radio, no recordings, no Internet, no advertising, including billboards.

When you have separated yourself from media, you will be living exactly as people did before media, before Gutenberg, going back to the beginning of humanity. Just as those pre-media people did, you will still react to the immediate world around you, using the same code with which you respond to media, a "reaction package" created from the basic Wizard's tools: conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity, plus the "definition of news:" anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.

Where did this reaction package originate? How did it arrive on the planet? Let's go back to "The Dawn of Man," the title that Stanley Kubrick provided for the famous opening scene of his 1969 movie, "2001 – A Space Odyssey." That scene could just as easily be titled, "The Dawn of Media," as it unfolds before us on YouTube.

(Note: the link doesn't show the entire sequence; for the completion of the sequence, click here. The musical score accompanying this section was discarded, happily, before the movie's release.)

That planet was inhabited by primitive humans, still ape-like, in Kubrick’s vision, who lived in groups of 20 or so in forbidding terrain. Watch them, for evidence of the code emerging as they reacted to their world. Conflict surrounded them: the heat of day, the dark of night, the growl of big cats in the darkness, the search for food, the conflict for water, animals competing for the food. Disaster struck suddenly, sensationally: a cat springing from a ledge, bringing a human down, and death was the consequence. The people were never free of the threat to the status quo. They huddled in terror under rock overhangs in the darkness, listening to the cries of the cats.

They knew about prominence. Each group followed a leader who emerged naturally as the one in the group who had the respect of the others in part because of strength and size – usually but not always the largest – and because of his quality of dominance, but mostly because he seemed to know things. He seemed to want to know things, in ways the other people didn’t. He knew where food and water and dangers were and he knew the land and the sky. People in the group felt an urge to keep him in sight. He acquired prominence.

People in the groups all looked alike and behaved alike and yet they knew they belonged to their group. They recognized each other and would only mate with each other and natural bonding between parents and offspring enforced the sense of belonging. They were bound demographically, and felt a comfort in their physical and emotional proximity. In any group there were young children, young adults and adults, the total number varying from 20 to 30 depending on illness, accidents and predators. No one starved. They shared a strong human interest. Food was shared even with the weakest who could not gather it themselves. Their food was berries and grasses and bark and insects found in the ground. The best was saved for the leader because the people knew how important he was to them.

When two groups came close together there was conflict. Mostly it was food or water that brought them into the same place. Groups facing each other across a favorite watering place sought to establish priority by screaming, gesturing, foot-stamping and charging. There were rocks all around their feet but it never occurred to them to pick up a rock and throw it. Usually it was the leader’s display dominance that settled the issue and determined which group would drink first.

Then something happened. A leader scratching for food beneath a mound of animal bones picked up a bone shaft, a femur, to move it, but it tapped the ground and small fragments flew up. The leader, curiously, tapped again. Bones flew. Again, harder, and harder, and bones broke, a skull shattered, and in the leader’s brain, a connection was made. Something had changed. Now we saw a tapir fall, killed by the bone weapon, who no longer would be a competitor for the food, and that was progress.

Then, in a transfixing moment, the tapir became food. At the end of his bone club, the leader saw a red color. He became aware of a scent that moved him in a new and powerful way and brought him back to the tapir. He saw the same red color on the tapir’s battered skull, and it gave the same scent. He touched the red with his fingers. He lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Deep inside him an instinct awoke and instantly was very strong. He licked at the red and inside his throat gathered a growl that grew into a roar of discovery. He knelt and lifted the tapir’s head. This took great courage. With equal care and helplessness, he sank his teeth deliberately into the flesh. Then he gently pulled, and the flesh came away. Then he chewed, and then swallowed, and a novel new circuit in humankind was closed.

It was not many generations before all the groups knew what the leader had discovered that day and after a thousand years the overall population of the people on the coastal plain had quadrupled because of the new and abundant food supply that could be killed with a bone club. And at the watering places the rock had become a weapon in the group confrontations. It was a new and violent life among the people but by then no one remembered the old ways. Irrevocable changes had occurred.

At that point, Kubrick had his ape-man throw the bone club into the air and fast-forwarded a few hundred thousand years, where the reaction package remains intact, but life is not so intense, as you will discover in your week of media deprivation. In fact life in the civilized 21st century can be totally boring, day in and day out, which is why you will yearn for more action. Your reaction package cries for it. That is why, after Gutenberg, and the introduction of the media and shared media codes, for humans, there was no turning back. They discovered they didn't need to witness a sensational conflict; it could be imported to them, from far away.