I know this article is long but I thought it was interesting. I am concerned about how we relate to others in our era. I find it frustrating at times. I think we all need to try to understand each other better. There are some great articles online on..... What younger people need to know about older people..... and.... What older people need to know about younger people. I would have posted them but they are way to long. Below is part of an article I read that is not exactly about that but gives good insight, I think, into some of the why's and wherefore's.
"During each of these three major communication eras, socio-economic and cultural life were deeply affected by the dominant medium of communication. As each new mode of communication had an impact on society, it dominated those which had preceded it, not obsolescing them, but dramatically changing their character and the use to which they were put. Speech or the oral tradition naturally survived both literacy and electricity but its function changed. It retained its dominance for conversation and everyday communication; however, it was no longer used as the repository of a culture’s traditions as it had been in Homer’s time, nor the means of spreading news from one village or country to another. The wandering minstrel who had conveyed information across both space and time was replaced by the written record which spanned space through the courier and time through the library or archive. With writing, the spoken word took on new functions, sometimes becoming an art form in the guise of poetry and theatre.
Writing also underwent enormous changes with the advent of electricity. The modern newspaper, as McLuhan points out, is a product of the printing press and the telegraph. Electricity and the instantaneous flow of information changed the psychic environment of authors, causing them, in McLuhan’s words, to “live mythically and in depth” (McLuhan 1964, vii). As a consequence, writers became concerned with psychology, anthropology, and sociology. The psychological novel and stream-of-consciousness technique were born.
Electricity produced another unexpected flip that affected the spoken word, namely a revival of the oral tradition in the art, music, and literary world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as exemplified by jazz and the use of African masks in Cubism. The structure of education also changed with the advent of each new mode of communication. With writing, education was transformed from the apprenticeship mode of learning on the job to formal schooling. The alphabet, abstract science, formal logic, and codified law gave rise to the academies of higher learning that appeared in ancient Babylon, Egypt, and Greece. The printing press gave rise to the modern school system of mass education and the assembly-line style of mass production.
The mass media of radio, television and telecommunications shrunk the world to the dimensions of a global village.
Neither Harold Innis or Marshall McLuhan lived long enough to see the two post-1980 revolutions of personal computing brought about by microcomputers or the World Wide Web made possible by the Internet. If they had had the opportunity to observe these two phenomena I believe they would have divided history in to four distinct eras rather than the three they chose. I believe, like me, they would have added a fourth era by making a distinction between the era of electric media of mass communication from the era of electronic media of mainframes, microcomputers and the Internet. While the dissemination of electronic information parallels in some ways that of electric information there is a very important difference. The users of electric media are merely passive consumers of information whereas the users of electronic media can interact actively with the information they access".
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