Chapter 4: Books –
Chapter 4: Books –
The First Mass Medium
Media and Society
A Brief History of Books
• Pagination: the system by which pages are numbered. Pagination started soon after the spread of books began. With page numbers, information within a book could be organized and categorized for easy reference.
•The idea of categorized knowledge helped pave the way for the development of organized scientific disciplines, such as biology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy.
• Continuous-roll paper was invented in the 1800s and metal presses replaced wooden ones.
• The publishing industry took off in America after many people learned how to read. Also, the freedom of the press helped spur the popularity of magazines, newspapers, and books.
• The early 1900s gave birth to publishing companies: Prentice-Hall and Random House, to name a couple. Finally, in the 1940s, cheap pocket paperbacks were available to the masses.
Permanent Communication
Uniform Communication
• The Age of Enlightenment followed the printing press. Knowledge became permanent and accessible. Libraries were built. People could educate themselves.
• New scientific discoveries were published and spread to more and more people.
• Books are still the major medium by which knowledge is cataloged and stored.
• One of the downsides of the permanence of books is that the world is changing. This becomes a problem with nonfiction books, like textbooks. When new knowledge is discovered, then textbooks must be updated. This problem doesn’t arise with novels, short stories, and poetry.
• The whole value of books as a system of storing and distributing knowledge is based on their ability to present that knowledge in a standardized and uniform way.
• Therefore, every reproduction of a book needs to be exactly the same. Otherwise, the shared information wouldn’t be accurate.
Portable Communication
• The printing press made the process of copying information more reliable.
• It also allowed people to store information permanently.
• Before the printing press, thoughts and ideas were told orally or written on manuscripts. These modes of communication could be easily lost or altered.
• The first books go back about 5,000 years. Books were etched on clay tablets. These books featured legal, religious, and mythic writing and were permanent but not portable.
• The Egyptians invented papyrus, which changed the techniques of writing from etching on clay to writing with ink on paper. Papyrus could be strung together into scrolls, which allowed for portable documents to be passed around Egypt.
Books as a Medium: How We Read
• Another reason that books are important as a mass medium is that they are portable.
• This made widespread distribution of knowledge possible. Books do not require electricity or batteries.
• Some may say that books are becoming obsolete because of the rise of reading on Kindles, Nooks, Tablets, iPads, and so on.
Books as a Medium: How We Read
• We read individual paragraphs and chapters and books in linear order.
• This is the only way that reading
usually makes sense.
• The linear quality of written language provides a much more controlled communication experience than the language we use inside our own minds.
• Written language causes the mind to
think in a linear, sequential, controlled
way.
• It forces you to focus your attention in
order for its communication to be
successful.
• One of the most important qualities of written language is that it presents information in a linear fashion, when words and sentences follow each other in line, or in sequence.
• Our eyes move along a line of print, reading each word and building words into sentences.
• We then build the meaning of sentences into thoughts, which flow together in sequences and usually make some kind of sense.