Masters of the Word
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Masters of the Word

How Media Shaped History

William L Bernstein

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eBook - ePub

Masters of the Word

How Media Shaped History

William L Bernstein

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About This Book

From the author of A Splendid Exchange comes a remarkable history of media - from the alphabet to the internet - that examines how it has shaped human society over millennia.


In Masters of the Word, Bernstein chronicles the development of the technology of human communication, or media, starting with the birth of writing thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia. In Sumer, and then Egypt, this revolutionary tool allowed rulers to extend their control far and wide, giving rise to the world's first empires. When Phoenician traders took their alphabet to Greece, literacy's first boom led to the birth of drama and democracy. In Rome, it helped spell the downfall of Empire.

As Bernstein illustrates, new communication technologies - from the clay tablet to the radio - have all had a profound effect on human society. But it's not just the technologies themselves that have changed the world, it's access to them. Medieval scriptoria and vernacular bibles gave rise to religious dissent, but it was only when the combination of cheaper paper and Gutenberg's printing press drove down the cost of books by some 97% that the dynamite of Reformation was lit.

The Industrial Revolution brought the telegraph and the steam driven printing press, allowing information to move faster than ever before and to reach an even larger audience. But along with radio and television, these new technologies were more easily exploited by the powerful, as seen in Germany, the Soviet Union, and even Rwanda, where radio incited genocide. With the rise of carbon duplicates (Russian samizdat), photocopying (the Pentagon Papers), and the internet and mobile phones (the Arab Spring), access has again spread and the world is both more connected, and more free, than ever before.

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Information

Year
2013
ISBN
9781782390022

CONTENTS

Introduction
1 Origins
2 The ABCs of Democracy
3 Twelve Tablets, Seven Hills, and a Few Early Christians
4 Before Gutenberg
5 Punch and Counterpunch
6 The Captive Press
7 With a Machete in One Hand and a Radio in the Other
8 The Comrades Who Couldn’t Broadcast Straight
9 The Argus
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index

INTRODUCTION

The morning, like all mornings, began poorly for Winston Smith. Awakened by the screeching alarm of the omnipresent telescreen, Winston, the hero of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, hurled his cold, naked, arthritic body out of bed for the mandatory calisthenics. “Thirty to forty group! Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!” screamed the personal trainer from hell.
Winston—or, more accurately, 6079 Smith W—struggled gamely against his infirmities, but his efforts did not satisfy his tormentor, whose exhortations to bend lower yielded only waves of searing spinal pain.1
From the moment of the book’s appearance in 1948, both casual readers and critics argued about its meaning. Was it a specific indictment of socialism, as conservative readers supposed? Or was it a more generalized warning about the totalitarian tendencies inherent not only in communism and fascism, but also in liberal democracies? (Orwell eventually made clear that he meant the latter.)2
The debate over Nineteen Eighty-Four’s political meaning obscured a much larger point: by the middle of the twentieth century, advances in telecommunications had decisively tipped the balance of power between the ruler and the ruled toward the former, and the book’s miserable characters could not hope to escape the malevolent new electronic media technologies. Almost a decade before the book’s publication, Orwell wrote:
The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern state. The radio, press censorship, standardized education, and the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is a science of the last twenty years, and we do not yet know how successful it will be.3
Orwell certainly had in mind Hitler’s fascist state and the security apparatus of Stalin, the likely model for Big Brother. Yet no state organ, before or since, has ever exceeded the relentless efficiency of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit of the German Democratic Republic—the feared Stasi. At its height, its ranks comprised nearly 100,000 East Germans, one of every 160 in the population.
Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker commanded a larger security apparatus in their small corner of the Teutonic world than Adolf Hitler had in all of greater Germany. The Stasi employed more resources, and about as many personnel, as East Germany did for health care. East Germans even coined a word that described a life permeated by listening devices and informers: flächendeckend—nothing left uncovered. Three thousand operatives tapped telecommunications, a remarkable number considering the scarcity of private phone service; the wait for a new line could be twenty years, and quicker installation generally meant that the applicant had been targeted for surveillance. The Stasi could place a hidden camera in a room in any large hotel on two hours’ notice.
East German surveillance was not all high-tech. In a police state, the avoidance of microphones, wiretaps, and cameras becomes second nature, and the Stasi increasingly relied on older methods, particularly informers. Overall, about 2 percent of East Germans regularly snitched on their friends, neighbors, and colleagues. In many professions and locales, the Stasi penetrated even more deeply. For example, it responded to high defection rates among physicians with intense recruitment of informers; one doctor in twenty spied on his or her colleagues.
After the regime fell, citizens rummaging through Stasi facilities came across rooms filled with numbered, sealed glass jars containing bits of cloth. In time, their purpose was discovered: each specimen was impregnated with sweat, obtained from men’s armpits and between the thighs of women, so dogs could track them, if necessary, at some future date.4
Counting the newborn People’s Republic of China, at the time of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s publication, nearly a third of the planet’s population lived in Orwellian states.5 But something happened on the road from Nineteen Eighty-Four to 1984, or at least 1989, the year East Germans threw out Big Brother. After the Berlin Wall fell, the portion of the world’s population suffering under the heel of technologically empowered totalitarian regimes plummeted. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the number of such smothering, omniscient regimes could be counted on the fingers of one hand: Myanmar (Burma), North Korea, and perhaps Cuba and Vietnam. Data from Freedom House, an organization that systematically tracks human rights, confirm that political freedom is breaking out all around the world: between 1975 and 2010, it estimates that the portion of “free” and “partially free” nations has increased from 54 percent to 78 percent.6
Longer-run data confirm this trend. Many researchers have compiled measures of global democracy over the past two centuries, but their data tell a curious story: increasing democratic development over the course of the nineteenth century suffered a “setback,” characterized by a stagnation in the percent of nations considered democratic, which lasted from about 1920 to 1980, followed by a rapid upswing in the past few decades.7
Even more dramatically, between 1920 and 1980—the decades of the primacy of radio and television—the world saw a sharp upward spike in the number of nations considered despotic. (Figures I-1 and I-2 are not symmetrical, because they do not include a third category of nations: those with indeterminate governmental systems.) Note how the early- and mid-twentieth century increase in the percent of despotic states coincides with Orwell’s literary career; the downswing after about 1980 would certainly have surprised the author.
Obviously, correlation is not causation, but this turn of events would certainly have astounded Orwell, since the technology available to today’s totalitarian state would have overwhelmed even his fertile imagination: cameras capable of reading license plates from space, Internet-based “data mining” technology with an analytic capacity of millions of messages per minute, and microphones able to record the sonarman’s “gnat’s fart at fifty thousand yards.” Given, then, the ever-advancing nature of surveillance technology, how did the state lose the battle for control of the individual?
Simply put, in a free market economy, communications and surveillance technologies rapidly become cheaper and more accessible to and—more important—controlled by the general population. Any device that increases the speed and volume of communication enhances the ability of its user to influence events; and, after all, such influence is the very essence of political power. With the passage of time, the same communications technologies that empowered the state in due course empowered the individual even more; the same technologies that allowed governments to spy on citizens allowed citizens to evade surveillance, and indeed to monitor governments themselves.8
Percent of Nations Considered Democracies
Figure I-1. Percent of Nations Considered Democracies
Percent of Nations Considered Despotic
Figure I-2. Percent of Nations Considered Despotic
After the development of the telegraph by Morse, Cooke, and Wheatstone in the 1830s and 1840s, the first commercial services were so expensive as to prohibit their deployment in everyday life, and their use was largely restricted to the transmission of essential financial, government, and military data. Later, radio and television stations were, similarly, so costly that they and their enormous propaganda potential were either directly run, or at least closely regulated, by the state. Even the lowly printing press, then entering its fifth century, still lay beyond the control of most private citizens.
When Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the mid-twentieth century, he could not have imagined that mere individuals would ever command such complex and expensive technologies. Orwell died in 1950, so he never lived to see the spread of modern communications devices into everyday personal use—the photocopying and fax machines, the cassette tape, the personal computer, the Internet, and the camera-equipped cell phones that helped save the world from the end he so feared.
The spread of these new technologies occurred with stunning speed. By 1960, only armies, governments, and very large corporations operated computers; by 1970, even small organizations had acquired them. By 1980, hobbyists happily assembled kits; by 1990, inexpensive personal computers had entered the home; by 2000, most citizens of the developed world had access to the Internet; and by 2004, residential broadband penetration in the United States, by no means in the vanguard of high-speed access, exceeded 50 percent. In the second half of the twentieth century, the easy availability of such communication technologies helped dismantle the totalitarian regimes that had originally used them to oppress citizens.
This cycle, in which cutting-edge communications technologies are first acquired by the state and employed to oppress the population, and then are embraced and controlled by the general population, thus enabling the people to take back power, is nothing new.
Further back in history, the growing availability of more basic technologies drastically altered the political, religious, and even cultural balance of power. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, the so-called “corn laws” oppressed the urban poor by placing onerous tariffs on imported grain. (For centuries the word “corn” simply referred to grain in general, particularly wheat.) Simple economics mandates that tariffs on imported goods benefit the domestic producers by shielding their goods from competition. In this way, the corn laws increased the price of imported grain to consumers and so, too, raised the price of domestic grain, with which it competed. Consequently, the corn laws greatly profited the landowning aristocracy and simultaneously savaged the pocketbooks of the urban and rural poor, and occasionally precipitated outright mass starvation.
By the early nineteenth century, a titanic battle raged between the ruling aristocracy, who favored the laws, and two groups that supported repeal: urban slum dwellers and the factory owners who employed them. The ground for repeal had been laid by the Reform Act of 1832, which expanded the voting franchise; by the spread of the railroad; and by the establishment of the penny post, which greatly lowered the cost of sending letters. In the end, poor wheat harvests and the Irish potato famine in 1845–1846 provided the final impetus for repeal.
What did the railroad and the passage of the penny post have to do with repealing the corn law? Everything. Cheap rail travel enabled the leaders of the Anti–Corn Law League to crisscross the country to give speeches and organize their supporters, and cheap postage allowed the League to send out millions of pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines. When the penny post cleared the House of Lords, Richard Cobden, the charismatic leader of the League, shouted, “There go the Corn Laws!”9
If we go back another four hundred years, to around AD 1500, we find that industrially produced paper and the printing press amplified the burgeoning literacy revolution, and with it, the power of ordinary people to spread their opinions and influence. By the time Martin Luther arrived at the University of Wittenberg, its library shelves already groaned with the fruit of the Gutenberg revolution. It was not Luther the theologian who effected the Reformation, but rather Luther the publisher.
Throughout history, novel communications technologies have fascinated the public. Well before Luther’s time, lay readers had became so entranced with vernacular Bibles, lurid accounts of papal corruption, and the new heresies that the Roman Catholic Church found it difficult to sell its own texts. Moreover, the new presses became, as coffeehouses would become two centuries later, meeting places where the most philosophically and technologically advanced practitioners of the age exchanged ideas and fomented change.
The relationship between the accessibility of communications technology and individual liberty, in fact, extends all the way back to the dawn of human history. Five thousand years ago in Sumer and Egypt, literate elites exploited the new—and highly complex, and thus inaccessible—cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts to exert power over increasingly large populations and geographic areas. It is no coincidence that the rise of the world’s first large-scale empires in Mesopotamia and Egypt followed fast on the heels of dramatic improvements in cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing, respectively. Although very different in outward form, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic had quite similar inner structures: in each written language, individual symbols stood for syllables and entire words. In both Mesopotamia and Egypt, writing consisted of several hundred to a thousand such symbols, and the mastery of literacy could take decades; the scholar and scribe did not so much read a text as decipher it.
Not only was reading conceptually difficult in remote antiquity; so, too, was the mechanical act of writing. Merely obtaining writing materials could constitute an insurmountable hurdle; a single sheet of papyrus, the medium of everyday correspondence in Egypt, cost the equivalent of at least several hours of a skilled craftsman’s time. Outside the Nile Valley, even less appealing materials were available: stone and animal skins. Until papermaking technology spread from China to the Muslim world and Europe in the late first millennium after Christ, the production of a single folio might consume an entire herd of sheep. Only in Mesopotamia, with its abundant moist clay—cheap, durable, and relatively easy to write on—was this problem less acute.
Small wonder, then, that before about 1000 BC, rulers deployed these complex and powerful writing systems to gradually increase their power over individuals and to assemble ever-larger nation-states. The scribe became the ancient equivalent of a high-tech entrepreneur, whose command of the era’s cutting-edge technology—literacy—gave him an unbeatable edge on the road to wealth and power. Said one Egyptian father to his son:
Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labor of any kind. . . . I have seen the metal-worker at his task at the mouth of the furnace with fingers like a crocodile’s. He stank worse than fish spawn. . . . The weaver in a workshop is worse off than a woman; he squats with his knees to his belly and he does not taste fresh air.10
In any age, illiteracy disempowers, and the formidable physical and cognitive barriers to reading and writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt served to exclude almost everyone except the aristocrats and their scribes from meaningful political influence. In societies where only a tiny minority can read and write, the illiterate are in awe of literacy and of the literate, and the ruling classes exploit this awe to the hilt. That was especially true in the ancient world, where religion provided ruling elites with their most potent source of political power. In Egypt the god Thoth, “The Lord of the Divine World...

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