Media Evolution

• Innis (1972) explores roles of media as used by different civilizations. Main point: Media use and forms (bias and emphasis) contribute to civilization and political structures of societies.
• Harnad (1991) asserts that the fourth cognitive revolution is electronic communication.
• Havelock (1986) traces how writing transformed Greek culture from orality to literacy.
• Levinson (1990) sees CMC as an ongoing evolution of media: speech, writing, printing, telecommunications.
• McLuhan and Powers (1989) describes the idea of the global village transforming life and media.
• McLuhan (1964) explores the extensions of people through media. Main point: Media's characteristics create and operate in a social and historical context; electric technologies create an emphasis on effect and total involvement.
• McLuhan (1965) Technology revises the linearism of print. Main point: "The Gutenberg Galaxy is intended to trace the ways in which the forms of experience and of mental outlook and expression have been modified, first by the phonetic alphabet and then by printing."
• McLuhan and Fiore (1967) asserts that media extends consciousness. Main point: [p. 26] "All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments."
• Vallee (1982) presents perspectives on the network revolution.