Todd Gitlin on The Future of the Media

Why, when the topic is the future of the media, are we starting with the Ancient Greeks?

The Greeks matter because some of them, at least, recognized that they were passing through a change in how people frame the world. In their case, it was the change from the oral to the written, and this is of course the subject of one of the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus. In it, Socrates declares himself fully aware that human capacities can change, and that as memory is displaced or funnelled into print, a variety of changes may set in which affect not only how we know things, but also who we are as human beings. Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows that the Greeks were aware that there was some connection, perhaps even an all-embracing connection, among forms of communication, memory and thought. It’s quite fascinating to me that people should have this awareness of a sea change in their way of knowing, this self-consciousness about it.

We today may also very well be in a moment when we are dimly aware that our way of touching the world, or having the world touch us, is amid a transformation. I won’t say it’s in the process of dissolving or re-forming, we’re not even sure what the right verb is at this point, but something big is going on in the way people encounter the world, and the way the world encounters them.

My point is that the more you know what earlier pivotal moments felt like, maybe the better you can get your mind around what is and isn’t going on now.

Which is why your next book is The Printing Press as an Agent of Change?

Yes, for related reasons. Elizabeth Eisenstein made a very audacious claim about the relation between printing and the Reformation, as well as the Renaissance. And certainly Luther and many contemporaries were deeply aware that they were able to stir up a cognitive and ideological revolution at least in part because of how easy it was to move their stuff around. Again, I don’t find it conclusive – that there would have been no Reformation without the printing press – but certainly there’s an intimate connection. So reading this work is stimulating. It’s not capable of delivering an answer to the question of what’s going to happen in the next 100 years. But I find it stimulating to think in terms of big blocks of historical transformations, and these two books are both stimuli of some sort.

Your next choice is The Creation of the Media by Paul Starr, which you’ve chosen for rather different reasons…

This book looks at the historical precedents through a different angle, not through sensibility, what brains are doing, but through institutions. And its main point is that the state has been intimately involved in the evolution of the media from the beginning. It looks in particular at the very homely institution of the post office, which is provided for at the beginning of the American Republic. Media rely on public institutions like the post office. The post office was established precisely in order to expedite traffic in ideas and writing of all sorts. It’s a worthy reminder, and an incontrovertible reminder, that fantasies of free markets that operate on their own to produce media are just as foolish in reference to the ancestral past as they are with the respect to the presumed spontaneous combustion that produced the internet. Anybody who knows anything about the internet knows that policy, government policy specifically, was a necessary condition.

So your next selection is an article, Raymond Williams’s “Drama in a Dramatized Society”.

This is an inaugural lecture Raymond Williams gave in 1974, when he assumed a professorship in drama at Cambridge University. He’s one of the most fertile minds when it comes to media in the last century. Basically he’s saying that it’s extremely odd, and yet central, to the form of civilization that has evolved, that there’s so much drama. And what he means by drama is not simply normal plays, but everything from advertising to television serials, to the contents of newspapers and magazines. He died in 1988 before a lot of the new technology we have now appeared; he had not encountered the iPhone. But he anticipates a life in which people are immersed in narrative nonstop. I would add sound, or song, as another important component. This article is, at least to my way of thinking, the earliest statement of the point that quantity becomes quality. The quantity of a certain kind of media experience creates a different way of life, which is in fact ours. Williams directed us into the whole problem of media saturation as a phenomenon worthy of treatment in its own right.

And is that what your own book, Media Unlimited, is about? Given it’s a tough topic, I have allowed you to include your own book as one of the five…

Yes, Williams’s perception launched me on to my own book.