1. Keynote Speech – Saturday King Center Concert Hall 4:5:15
Medium Theory – Theory of Medium Ecology
Harold Adams Innis – political economist
Argues that elites can control some forms of media better than others
A special encoding or decoding skill that supports the special interest of elite classes
Because of more time and recourses to exploit it.
Papyrus – pa-pie-rus – a plant native to the Nile valley – paper was made using thin
strips of the pith of this plant laid together, soaked, pressed, and dried
Hieroglyphics – time biased communication, rarely revised, and limited mobility
Ong, Carpenter, Schwartz, and Boorstin claim that electronic media has altered
thinking patterns and social organizations.
Boorstin – new media has made experiences ‘repeatable’
Three major forms of communication:
1. traditional oral societies
- living memory
- memorization and recitation
- this is why they used stories to make memorization easier
- individuality is difficult to keep up with and especially difficult to pass on
to any significant number of people
- creativity and newness are discouraged as potential destructive forces
- a society of community
2. The traditional scribal phase
- separation of knowledge
- allows people to know and experience different things, to have different
world views
- to feel connected to each other
- religious unity
- a separation between rich and poor
- ideas move from the world of the aural and temporal (secular) to the
world of the visual and spatial
- a listener can interrupt where a reader has to let the author have his or
her say before drafting a reply
- a break from aural involvement allows people to become more
introspective and independent in thought
- a shift from the round world of sound to the linear form of typography
- multiple copies – “safety in numbers”
3. Global electronic culture
- a shift back to the aural but it is not subject to the physical limitations of
time and space

2. - they can be experienced simultaneously by large numbers of people
regardless of their location
- the sharing of experience across nations dilutes the power of the nation
state
- emphasizes feeling, appearance, and mood
Medium Theory
Patterns of access to social information are linked to patterns of access to social
situations. Ex. Patients stay out of hospital staff meetings, customers out of
restaurant kitchens
The more situations and participants are segregated, the greater differentiation in
status and behavior
Exposing different people to different experiences
Isolating the contexts for one social role from those of another
Situations and information systems
Isolated place for adult conversation but the media makes it accessible to children
Ex. Talk shows
The role triad
Group Identity/Socialization/Hierarchy
The spread of print supports compartmentalization and specialization.
Widens the gap between those who can read and those who cannot.
Young are excluded from all printed communication (innocence)
Childhood and adulthood are both invented in the Western culture
Age rules
Dress rules
Classroom rules – segmenting information while keeping other information in
continued secrecy
Oral society – unity is a homogeneous solidarity that relies on people acting,
thinking, and feeling in relatively similar ways
Print society – unity depends on heterogeneity. The world is a machine with
distinct parts and people that fit together to make it work
- division of labor, separation of social spheres, segmentation of identities
by class, occupation, sex, etc.
Electronic media tends to reverse the trend of isolated spheres by making
boundaries more permeable.
It has helped to brake the trend of where we are and what we know and experience.
Television takes sheltered children across the globe
Women are no longer isolated in a domestic sphere

3. T.V. blurs the line between public and private and has lifted the veils of secrecy
between adults and children, men and women, politicians and average man
Some chosen technologies may have social consequences
Uni-directional mass communication when the political and economic system is
stimulating consumption of goods and ideology.
Medium theory – not as deterministic but as a model that deals in general
tendencies
History shows us the books had two major influences:
1. The fostering of religion
2. The further empowering of central monarchial and religious authorities(who
controlled most of what was printed)
However, now it has cultured the opposite
1. The weakening of religion
2. Growth of science
3. Decline of monarchs with the development of constitutional systems.
Electronic print made it impossible for some countries to restrict their citizens
access to many aspects of Western culture
Encouraged by ongoing global response
the ability to create publics, define issues, provide common terms of reference, and thus
to allocate attention and power
He also believed that technology, in any aspect, was a way in which humans amplified
their own abilities; the car is an extension of the feet, clothing is an extension of the skin,
mobile communications are an extension of the voice, and so on. This ties into the
importance of the medium in itself as we interact with our own realities.
How people use media to create a sense of community
the content is not always primary but the act and comfort of the repetition of the action
makes us feel involved.
Ex. Morning ritual of newspaper and coffee or a favorite television show
Or logging into Facebook. This is more of a ritual than being interested or not
Heuristics:
Critical terms critical ideas critical tools
Lexicon – discipline specific
Form – platform, delivery (not was is being delivered)
Ex. The packaging of a birthday gift
Do we pay attention to the meat only? What about how it was delivered?

4. What senses are activated?
Power and the nature of sound: The message is gone after it is spoken. Speed of
connection.
Encoding and decoding model
Speaker – receiver – audience
How many people can attend to the message at the same time?
Before computers: telephone, print, radio or television, film
When the Internet comes into play it started to devastate these industries
Convergence – all these things converged into a singular platform