New Media and Transformations in Knowledge (I)

Abstract

As media change so also do our concepts of what constitutes knowledge. This, in a sentence, is a fundamental insight that has emer1 ged from research over the past sixty years. In the field of classics, Eric Havelock (Havelock 1963), showed that introducing a written alphabet, shifting from an oral towards a written tradition, was much more than bringing in a new medium for recording knowledge. When claims are oral they vary from person to person. Once claims are written down, a single version of a claim can be shared by a community, which is then potentially open to public 2 scrutiny, and verification. The introduction of a written alphabet thus transformed the Greek concept of truth (episteme) and their concepts of knowledge itself. In the field of English Literature, 3 Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan 1962; McLuhan 1964) influenced also by historians of technology such as Harold Innis (Innis 1986; 4 Innis 1964, Stamps 1995) went much further to show that this applied to all major shifts in media. He drew attention, for example, to the ways in which the shift from handwritten manuscripts to printed books at the time of Gutenberg had both positive and negative consequences on our world-view (Gordon 1997). In addition, he explored how the introduction of radio and television further changed our definitions of knowledge. These insights he distilled in his now famous phrase: the medium is the message.