Refer to the original for footnotes and references, at http://www.ctheory.com/ga1.14.html#bio

This text uses a lot of abstract and somewhat abtuse language, much of which I have excerpted for our class.  It does address the fundamental theoretical issue of the relationship between the medium and the message.

Writing 1. Script  The first manifestations of script are of course inscriptions without a writing surface in the accepted sense.
Two-dimensional rolls of seals or stamps in the medium of clay enabled goods to be given addresses indicating their owner
or their contents. Stone inscriptions named the deceased occupants of tombs.16 As signals in the absence of the source of
information, in other words through the decoupling of communication and interaction, inscriptions opened up, according to
Jan Assmann, the possibility in principle of literature.17

By contrast an administration of those great river irrigation systems in which cities and high cultures blossomed
presupposed the transition from inscribed tablets to skillfully crafted and optimised transportable writing surfaces: bamboo
and mulberry in China, unfired clay or clay fired for storage purposes in Mesopotamia, papyrus as the monopoly of the Nile
delta. Thus the same rivers on which the traffic of slave labour and goods flowed simultaneously carried (on the basis of a
calendar or goniometric mathematics) the commands of water allocation and the harvesting of products.18 The same cities
that translated the anthropological schema of head, hand and torso into the architectonic schema of palaces, streets and
storehouses 19 needed scripts for the processing transmission and storage of their data. This establishment of a unified area
is reflected in the texts themselves as a spatialisation of speech: since its very beginnings writing has yielded lists without
context which bear no traces of oral or written communication networks, but for this precise reason no longer have any
equivalent in everyday situations.20

By contrast, outreachings beyond the unified area - the founding of empires in other words - only became possible when
states in both the ancient world and the modern took over control of the warrior messengers and additionally, in the ancient
world since 1200 BC, after the crossing of two breeds of horse, made messengers and warriors mobile.21 In classical times,
"There was," in the immortal words of Herodotus, "nothing swifter on earth" than the alliance of media which, under the
Achaemenides, combined Persia's Royal Way with a mounted staging messenger service to carry "urgent messages at a fast
trot, in the face of all natural adversities, from rider to rider, from stage to stage.22 Angareion, the Persian name of this
military mail, is the root of the Greek word for messenger and consequently of all Christian angels.

The Greek polis had but one script to set against a communications empire such as the Persian, but in contrast to oriental
bureaucracies it was entirely susceptible *of orality. Firstly the Greek alphabet (from Indo-European necessities and
because it developed in the course of commercial and translation intercourse with semitic consonant scripts) turned
redundant consonants into vowels, thus performing the first total analysis of a spoken language - and in principle of all
such.23 The fact that vowel signs for the first time encoded prosodic-musical elements of speech permitted of a musical
notation, and in the Pythagorean school for the simple reason that Greek letters also possessed numerical values 24, a
mathematisation of music, to the extent that this remained a matter of abstract intervals.

Secondly, the triumphal progress of the vocalic alphabet seems less to be the result of an overestimated degree of
innovation rather than of the unambiguity of its phoneme allocation. This minimised the effort required for literacy and thus
transferred palace and temple secrets to the public domain.25 It became possible for literature firstly to incorporate oral
mnemonics (such as airs or rhapsodies) and later also prose.26 Athenian tyrants founded the first public library; the
bookworm Euripides became the "first great reader" among writers.27

These ancient scrolls got their Biblical name from a papyrus-exporting city in Phoenicia whose place was taken as of 5O0
BC by the Nile delta. The Imperium Romanum too, after the conquest of Egypt, based its command network - which is what
the empire was - on a combination of mounted staging messengers, madeup military roads and easily transportable papyrus.
The empire, in other words, combined despotic transmission mechanisms with a democratic alphabet. The cursus publicus
which Augustus set up, with overnight stations at distances of 40 kilometres and staging posts at around 12 kilometres,
exclusively for officials and legions 28 became, despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, the crystallisation point for
European towns. In combination with beacon telegraphy at sensitive frontiers, a state postal service, which was faster than
the fastest ships and was not excelled until Napoleon, transmitted imperial power as such: "Caesarum est per arbem terrae
litteras missitare" 29, as a late Roman writer has it - "It is the office of emperors to send written commands across the
world." In comparison with this perfect transmission medium for said world and Caesar's news-sheet distribution in the city
of Rome, data storage - even if there was an imperial officium sacrae memoriae since Hadrian - remained technically
retarded.

Papyrus may be light, but it is fragile and impermanent. It could only be stored in rolls and read with two hands. In the
opinion of Alan Turing, the first computer theorist, "it must have taken some time to look up references in such volumes".30 It
was not until the arrival of the codex in parchment, used first by the library of Persimmon for circumventing the Egyptian
papyrus monopoly, and by Christians since 140 AD, that indexing by location, sheets and finally sides, became possible.
Books, which were durable, erasable (as in the palimpsest) and addressable with special pages (indices) were worth their
extra weight and extra cost. They decoupled increasingly cursory reading from the laboriousness and slowness of orality.
When Bishop Ambrose of Milan (according to the testimony of his best-known disciple) read a codex "his eyes swept over
the pages extracting the essence of the meaning while he himself remained silent".31 In the codex, the transportable,
addressable and interpretable scripts of former nomads, the Jews and Arabs, vanquished the immobility of statues and
temples of the gods.

The decline of the cursus publicus and the Islamic incorporation of Egypt, which also led to the destruction of the great
ancient library, cut off Western Europe from papyrus imports. What was left was the agricultural product, parchment, on
which monks were constrained to copy the censored Christian version of what was contained on papyrus, while in the
Byzantine Empire the flaw of written commands from all past emperors coagulated into the legislation of the Codex. Through
such bridgings or compressions of time a translatio studii was enabled to take place; but the translatio imperii presupposed
new orders of distance and thus more accessible writing surfaces.

In the 13th century, paper, imported from China via Baghdad, arrived in Europe, where it was further developed by cities
of the linen trade and the new windmills and watermills into rag-paper. This writing surface was central to the rise of the
universities which, with their incorporated book-copying departments and postal networks broke the storage monopoly of
the monasteries. And at the same time it was central, in combination with the Indian numerical system imported via Arabia,
to the rise of trading cities.32 The important thing in this context was not simply the well known invention of double-entry
bookkeeping but, above all, a mathematical notation which for the first time brought independence from the numerous
workaday languages.

Greeks, when adding two numbers together, had said kai, and Romans et; since the 15th century however we have had plus
and minus, as mute as they are international, as signs for mathematical operators.

Printing  Gutenberg's invention of printing using movable letters developed from book-spine stamps which, in contrast to their
predecessors in China and Korea, functioned both alphabetically and (after the disappearance of ligatures) discretely, may
not have been a revolution of the magnitude of the codex - but it met the demand awakened by paper. As "the first assembly
line in the history of technology" 33, printing potentiated the data processing capacity of books. Because all copies of an
edition, in contrast to manual copies, had the same texts, woodcuts and engravings in the same places, they could be
accessed via unified and for the first time alphabetical indexes. This addressing using page numbers, titles and, since
Leibniz, alphabetical library catalogues 34, put the communication system which is science on its reference basis, while
book illustrations free of copying errors formed the basis of engineering.35 Not without reason could Vasari boast that Italy
had discovered perspective, as enabling the production of technically accurate drawings, in the same year as Gutenberg
invented typography.

New media do not make old media obsolete; they assign them other places in the system. Thus because printing now
reproduced the rhetorical-musical performances at tournaments as literature and fictions of the authors, the physical
techniques of these tournaments appear (according to Gumbrecht's thesis) to have been transmuted into silent, measurable
disciplines.36 Equally, it was only as a development within typography that the intrinsic value of handwriting emerged, the
individuality of the hand taking the place of seals on letters and documents and which became the domain of a state system of
post and police. The first state postal systems of early modernity were, after the fashion of the Roman imperial system, still
reserved for military and diplomatic networks and protected from interception by a cryptography whose rise began with
Vieta's algebraic encoding of alphabetical and numerical signs.37 On the other hand, the territorial states, controlled
extensively by post and firearms, opened up their networks to a private traffic which they also monopolised through their
sovereign right of posts. When commercial correspondents were included in the public postal network after 1600,
newspapers and journals came into being; when the transport of persons was also included after 1650, the post-coach
networks were established as a scheduled service.38 However the oft-quoted structural transformation from the aristocratic
to the middle-class publicness, whose travels and letters, printed pamphlets and newspaper critiques are supposed to have
undermined the old power system of Europe, never took place.39 Even without its consistent control through secret cabinets
and print censorship the middle-class publicness remained an artefact of mercantile states, whose new post office provided
half the budget and half the war chest.40 Only in the intimacy of family circles did the "addiction to reading" of the so-called
public 41 promote a record rise in national-language belles-lettres which compensated for the "loss of sensuality" 42 with
virtual effects on readers' senses, thus presaging future media technologies.43

This mediatisation of the printed word presumably had its basis in a routine light reading which was no longer a privilege
of the elite, as in Saint Ambrose's time, but which paved the way for democracy through compulsory schooling and general
literacy. But precisely this effortless reading triggered a new systemic problem. Because, unlike parchment codices, printed
books are storage devices having no possibility of erasure, there was, around 1800, (to quote Fichte) "no branch of
knowledge on which a surfeit of books is not available".44 As a result literature and science had to revamp their
transmission and receiving techniques: away from the literalness of quotes from the scholarly elite, and rhetorical
mnemonics, towards an interpretative approach which reduced the quantity of printed data to its essence, in other words to a
smaller quantity of data. The consequence for the communication system that is science, since Humboldt's reform, was
lectures without textbooks, seminars as exercises in interpretation and the rise at universities of a philosophy whose absolute
"spirit" preserved only the "remembrance" of all previous forms of knowledge and of its own textbook, thus becoming the
hermeneutic "silhouette" of the totality of books.45

In the real world this mediatisation of writing amounted to its industrial revolution. In place of Gutenberg's enumerable
combinations came, in practical terms too, a calculus of infinites: endless paper machines replaced, as of 1800, the discrete
formats and moulded sheets; pulp papers from America's seemingly inexhaustible forests, this material basis of all mass
print material since 1850, took the place of rag. And finally the typewriter and have, since 1880, levelled out the difference
between writing and printing 46, thus opening up the floodgates of modern literature.47 It was Mallarme who first offered the
solution of reducing literature to its lexical meaning, the twenty-six letters, and thus not competing with other media at all.

Technical Media
Unlike writing, technical media do not utilise the code of a workaday language. They make use of physical processes which
are faster than human perception and are only at all susceptible of formulation in the code of modern mathematics.

1. Telegraphy and Analog Technology.   Self-evidently there must always have been technical media, because any sending of signals using acoustic or visual means
is in itself technical. However in preindustrial times channels such as smoke signals or fire telegraphy which exploited the
speed of light, or bush telegraphs and calling chains making use of the speed of sound were only subsystems of an everyday
language. The beacon signal from Troy to Mycenae with which Aeschylus introduces the literary genre of tragedy announced
in one single bit the fall of the besieged fortress although that depended on prior arrangement.48 On the other hand it remains
questionable whether a form of telegraphy which according to Polybios was capable of encoding the Greek alphabet into
five times five light signals and thus transmitting random sets ever saw service.49

Information rates which exceeded all performance limits of writing were first achieved as a result of the necessity for
command flow in conscripted mass armies and wars waged with standardised weaponry. It was one and the same to
Lakanai, the politician who presented the revolutionary France of 1793 with an elementary school system and a literary
copyright law who one year later persuaded the national assembly to build optical telegraphy lines. As the official reason
for this revolution the argument was pressed into service that, in large nation-states, only Chappe's optical telegraph could
make possible that democratic election process which Rousseau had, as we know, picked up from the city-state of Geneva.
With Napoleon however, a less public but exclusive use of the optical telegraph network gave rise to a strategy which
finalIy released wars from the stone age of command flow. Independently-operating divisions were able to fight on several
fronts at the same time because newly-created general staffs imposed their cartographic knowledge by telegraph on the
actual ground.50

Telegraphy thus separated literary publicness and military secrecy at the same historic moment, since publicness was
transferred from elites to entire populations. A new elite of engineering schools and general staffs finally discovered in the
1809 war their new, to all intents and purposes, secret medium of electricity. With the move of telegraphy from optics to
direct current, not only did the human and therefore unreliable, relay stations disappear, but also Claude Chappe's grand total
of 98 signs. The Morse code with its dots and dashes and pauses put an economy of signs into practice which Leibniz had
previously come up with in expressly typographical theory in the form of his binary code.51 The electric telegraph,
optimised on the basis of letter frequency and charged by the number of words, was the first step on the road to information
technology.

In terms of organisation and technology too, telegraphy had world-wide repercussions. For absolutely the first time,
information was decoupled, in the form of a massless flow of electromagnetic waves, from communication. Remote
telegraphic control via landline made possible a systematic railway network.52 Railways made possible an accelerated
traffic in goods and persons 53 which, from the time of the American Civil War onward, was also subject, for military
purposes, to telegraphic command.54 However, in the form of goods and people traffic, the post lost two of its traditional
functions. It was forced to become a pure information technology based on the principles of house numbers and letterboxes,
prepayment with stamps and the world postal union.55

This detachment from the ground whose distances (as in synchronous mathematical topography) are, in contrast to all
pre-modern postal systems, no longer calculated because only absolute speed counts, brought internationality: from the stock
exchange reports of world trade and the telegraph agencies of the world press, to colonial empires which, like the British
Empire, were founded on a "fleet in being" and consequently on a global undersea cable monopoly.56

Technical repercussions of telegraphy as information time made discrete, were consequential inventions which
paradoxically also processed precisely the continuous signal sources. Of these I shall pass over the analog medium of
photography which requires a treatment of its own and mention only the telephone, gramophone record and film.

Bell's telephone, the most lucrative single patent of all time, came about in 1876 not by any means in its familiar function,
but in the course of an attempt to transmit several messages over a single telegraph cable at the same time. In exactly the
same way only a year later Edison's phonograph emerged as a spin-off from an attempt to increase the throughput rate of
telegraph cables. And finally Muybridge's scientific serial photographs which, in 1895, after the invention of Maltese cross
and celluloid paved the way for cinema, were triggered by electric telegraph relays.

Film and gramophone, these mass-reproducible competitors to Edison's phonographs, made it possible to store optical and
acoustical data as such. Because analog media underbid, first mechanically and subsequently electrically, the perceptual
thresholds determined by Fechner, they can recognise in speech phonemes and musical intervals - which is where the Greek
analysis as their being the final alphabetical elements stopped - complex frequency mixtures which are open to a further, and
since Fourier, mathematical, analysis. The modern fundamental concept of frequency 57, which since Euler governs
probability calculation, music and optics alike, has replaced the arts with technical media. This physics in the simulation
process of the real is no longer partnered in the reception process by a language-based mnemonics or pedagogy, but by a
sensory physiology which has guaranteed the media their world-wide and, thanks to Shannon's measure of information,
calculable success.58 At the same, time a knowledge gap between unconscious media effects on the one hand, and the
innovatory thrusts on the other, (which since Edison's first laboratory are also plannable) has emerged which, despite the
participation of women in telegraph, telephone and typewriter operations 59 is inimical to the general development of
literacy and absolutely rules out communication on communication.

A prominent role in this turning-point, whose significance is probably equalled only by the invention of writing 60, was
taken by Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations and their experimental substantiation by Heinrich Hertz. Since Christmas
1906, when Fessenden's radio transmitter broadcast low-frequency random events as they occur as amplitude or frequency
modulation of a high frequency, there exist non-material channels. Since 1906, when de Forest developed, from Edison's
light bulb, the controllable valve, information is open to any kind of amplification and manipulation. The valve radio,
developed as wireless telephony for breaking the imperial cable monopoly, first of all made the new weapons systems of the
first World War, the aeroplane and the tank, both mobile and dirigible by remote control 61, and after the end of the war, was
applied to the civilian populations.62

In the guise of a "secondary orality" 63, bypassing the written word, radio had the effect of standardising unwritten
languages, primarily through world-wide short-wave broadcasting 64,thus transforming colonised tribal associations into
independent nations.65 In the same way the telephone, in its progress from the direct dialling system via frequency multiplex
to satellite links, has made possible the non-hierarchical networking firstly of cities and ultimately of the "global village".66
Yet the publicly accessible wavebands remain, despite their critical overcrowding 67, only fractions of a frequency
spectrum which, from long-wave broadcasting to the decimetre radar, exercises governmental or military control functions
and taps all public wavebands for the secret services.68

The electrification of sensory input data through transducers and sensors enabled the entertainments industry to couple
analog storage media firstly with one another and secondly with transmission media. The sound film combined optical and
acoustic memories; radio, before the introduction of the tape-recorder, largely transmitted gramophone records; the first
television systems, prior to the development of electronic cameras, scanned feature films. Thus the content of entertainment
media always remains another medium which, in this way, they serve to promote.

But all these couplings of technologies which are already individually standardised, even though they gave birth to aesthetic
forms from the radio play and electronic music to the videoclip, have one decisive deficiency: there is no general standard
which regulates their control and reciprocal translation. This is precisely the point at which the heroes and heroines of
Benjamin's theory of media came to the rescue in the form of editors in film studios and sound engineers for tape with their
celebrated but strictly manual montage techniques.69 The rendering obsolete of this human intervention and the automation of
a general standard was reserved for digital technology.

Digital Technology

Digital technology functions like an alphabet but on a numerical basis. It replaces the continuous functions into which the
analog media transform input data, which are generally also continuous, with discrete scannings at points in time as
equidistant as possible, in the same way that the 24 film exposures per second, or at a much higher frequency since the
Nipkow screen television did before. This measurement, followed by evaluation in the binary number system, is the
precondition for a general media standard.

Remainder of this discussion deleted...