Remembering Pre-Media

What was it like before the media arose? To get a feel for that I just think back to the times when I was too young to read the printed version effectively. The time when I could came when I was already an adult, had left home, had joined the Army, felt myself out “in the world,” and bought myself a subscription to Time magazine.

Before that time the world seemed oddly greater—because the part I knew about was relatively small. It reached me through living people: parents, nursemaids, teachers, other children. Yes, radio was already present then. It had an odd, a funny sound. Adults sometimes gathered around it and listened to that sound with anxious faces. It was war time. Martial music would come in the wake of such troubling news.

Before papers, before radio? Outdoor markets and civic squares substituted for the media. People had to go outside and meet with others—or someone came by, hurriedly passed “it” on, and then one had to rush out to the square to see, to hear. As for what might be going down in far away Tibet—and whether or not some army was invading it—that sort of thing was way beyond perception.

I learned of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination from a young nurse in a hospital waiting room. I was the only person there, half nodding off as I waited for Brigitte who was giving birth. The nurse was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes. Hers were right in front of mine. “They shot him,” she said in agitation. “They shot him.” And she was gone. I had to discover what she meant on my own. That was a tiny return to the pre-media days. But, of course, she’d heard it on the radio—and rushed out to take the news to whomever she could reach.

Even since my childhood, which already had that squeaky radio and those slow periodic papers actually worth reading—papers that printed special editions when something really big was happening—the world has been completely transformed. Distance has invaded our Now. Our bodies, optimized to deal with rather small environments—while our spirits can range to infinity—are now subjected to stimuli from all across the globe, in images, sounds, and in written form. We react to all of the alarms as if they were here, on top of us—but they are far away. They cloud our mood, they distract, they shanghai our reflexes and emotions. The media bring news of explosions and of mayhem—but do not match these with still landscapes that, in Tibet as indeed everywhere, are also part of the environment. Monstrous distortions. I applaud those who are beginning to filter out all the news unfit to know because we cannot do the least bit of a thing about them.

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The image is an Amplion AR 19 Dragon Radio Horn Speaker shown here.

Through a Glass Brightly

In a real sense the medium is the message, not in any erudite, sociological, McLuhanesque sense but merely in the kind of content that it brings—and how it brings it. In 1911, we had neither radio nor television. News from far away reached us more rapidly then than in 1811; the telegraph had speeded up communications immensely. But it reached us each personally as print on paper and thus had a predominantly conceptual, abstract, symbolic form. In a meaningful sense then the Chinese saying still held: The sky is high and the emperor is far away. Radio began to spread in the 1920s and had reached world-wide extent by World War II. Radio rides on sound and for that reason, possibly, still retains a certain mysterious quality (for me anyway). Sound whispers to us from the dark, and we’re quite skilled at parsing multiple sounds simultaneously, spontaneously. The image of women, their cheeks pressed into their palms, anxiously staring at a monstrous trumpet that topped my grandmother’s radio during the war in Europe has become for me an icon, preserved like an old sepia print, of the Greater World under deep clouds of advancing doom. Television dawned in the 1950s and rapidly became the eye by means of which we watch Big Brother, a very flexible fellow who is now Ed Sullivan in grey and all the kings, the kings’ men, the kings’ clowns, in bright flickering colors to this day.

The deceptive aspect of TV is that it seems to be the best source of news because it is the most visual of media. It’s vivid, now, and the camera moves, like our own eye, its focus seemingly drawn by what’s important. But what the bright eye shows is less, much less than is actually there. We see what we, in fact, can’t see. From Detroit I cannot really see what happens in Afghanistan, in Washington, or in Los Angeles. If I think I do, I am deceived. If I were there, I wouldn’t see that. But I’d see a whole lot else—and that would make me think quite differently about the images I’m fed. We’re accustomed to hearing what we cannot see, therefore radio is, oddly, more natural somehow. But to see what we cannot—not without days or weeks of arduous travel—give us a peculiar experience for which, in effect, millions of years of evolution have failed to prepare us. The images are sharp, vivid, dynamic, accompanied by matching sound. But they’re not happening to us. Not really. They are far away. And we can’t move that eye. We seem to—but others really move the view. A small, tiny square looks here, looks there. But when I move my gaze—why then all I see is the window of my living room and a gauze curtain still carrying its Christmas lights.

As through a glass, brightly—but certainly not face to face. The vast sociological mirage evolves from this radically diminished perspective. It deceives by its vivid sensory message, makes effort to acquire knowledge using symbols too costly and inefficient; we know less, feel as if we’re overwhelmed by information; but that information is shrunken and deformed into something primitive but made on purpose by many teams to shape somehow—even if competing with each other—a deceptive something we call the public will.