How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 1

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe so many lies that 77 mil­lion Amer­i­cans vot­ed into the White House a crim­i­nal real­i­ty TV star from NBC, one groomed by a real­i­ty TV pro­duc­er from CBS, who then appoint­ed his Cab­i­net from Fox and X and World Wrestling Enter­tain­ment?

It’s a long sto­ry, but the mov­ing image had some­thing to do with it – which is to say, the way we have let tele­vi­sion, video, and screen cul­ture run almost entire­ly unreg­u­lat­ed, pure­ly for prof­it, and with­out regard to its impact on the minds of our cit­i­zens.  And it’s no acci­dent that the media and tech­nol­o­gy tycoons sur­round­ing the Pres­i­dent at his White House inau­gu­ra­tion – from Alpha­bet, Ama­zon, Apple, Face­book, Tik­Tok, X, you name it – con­trol the screens, net­works, and tech­nolo­gies that prop­a­gate the lies we’re forced to inhale every day. He invit­ed them.

What’s worse is that they accept­ed.

* * *

It’s a long sto­ry indeed – one that stretch­es back to the dawn of man, back tens of thou­sands of years to the time when our pre­de­ces­sors exist­ed on Earth with­out a sin­gle writ­ten word between them.  “Lit­er­a­cy,” the philoso­pher, Jesuit priest, and pro­fes­sor of lit­er­a­ture Wal­ter Ong has writ­ten, “is impe­ri­ous.”  It “tends to arro­gate to itself supreme pow­er by tak­ing itself as nor­ma­tive for human expres­sion and thought.”  This arro­gance, for Ong, is so over­reach­ing because the writ­ten word – writ­ing, text, and print gen­er­al­ly – is actu­al­ly such a brand-new phe­nom­e­non in the long his­to­ry of man.  Our species of Homo sapi­ens, Ong reminds us, has been around only for some 30,000 years; the old­est script, not even 6,000; the alpha­bet, less than four. Mesopotami­an cuneiform dates from 3,500 BC; the orig­i­nal Semit­ic alpha­bet from only around 1,500 BC; Latin script, or the Roman alpha­bet that you’re read­ing now, from the sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC.  “Only after being on earth some 500,000 years (to take a fair­ly good work­ing fig­ure) did man move from his orig­i­nal oral cul­ture, in which writ­ten records were unknown and unthought of to lit­er­a­cy.”

For most of human exis­tence, we’ve com­mu­ni­cat­ed with­out print— and even with­out text.  We’ve been speak­ing to one anoth­er.  Not writ­ing any­thing, not draw­ing a whole lot, but speak­ing, one to one, one to sev­er­al, sev­er­al to one, one to many, many to one.  Those who con­sid­er writ­ing, text, and print as “the par­a­digm of all dis­course” thus need to “face the fact,” Ong says, that only the tini­est frac­tion of human lan­guages has ever been writ­ten down – or ever will be.  We com­mu­ni­cate in oth­er ways besides writ­ing.  Always have.  Always will.  Ong press­es us to devel­op a deep­er under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of the “nor­mal oral or oral- aur­al con­scious­ness” and the orig­i­nal “noet­ic econ­o­my” of humankind, which con­di­tioned our brains for our first 500,000 years – and which is at it once again.  Sound and human move­ment around sound and pic­tures sus­tained us “long before writ­ing came along.”  “To say that lan­guage is writ­ing is, at best, unin­formed,” Ong says (a bit impe­ri­ous­ly him­self).  “It pro­vides egre­gious evi­dence of the unre­flec­tive chi­ro­graph­ic and/or typo­graph­ic squint that haunts us all.”

The unre­flec­tive chi­ro­graph­ic squint.  We squint, and we see only writ­ing.  Up to now, we’ve found truth and author­i­ty only in text ver­sions of the word.  But writ­ing, when it, too, first appeared, was a brand-new tech­nol­o­gy, much as we regard cam­eras and micro­phones as brand- new tech­nolo­gies today.  It was a new tech­nol­o­gy because it called for the use of new “tools and oth­er equip­ment,” “styli or brush­es or pens,” “care­ful­ly pre­pared sur­faces such as paper, ani­mal skins, strips of wood,” “as well as inks or paints, and much more.”  It seemed so com­pli­cat­ed and time- con­sum­ing, we even used to out­source it.  “In the West through the Mid­dle Ages and ear­li­er” almost all those devot­ed to writ­ing reg­u­lar­ly used the ser­vices of a scribe because the phys­i­cal labor writ­ing involved – scrap­ing and pol­ish­ing the ani­mal skin or parch­ment, whiten­ing it with chalk, resharp­en­ing goose-quill pens with what we still call a pen-knife, mix­ing ink, and all the rest – inter­fered with thought and com­po­si­tion.

The 1400s changed all that.  Guten­berg start­ed print­ing on his press in Ger­many, in 1455.  The great his­to­ri­ans of print – Robert Darn­ton, Eliz­a­beth Eisen­stein, Lucien Feb­vre, Antho­ny Grafton – tell us about how print­ing passed through patch­es of explo­sive growth, and how that growth was unno­ticed at the time.  Thir­ty years after Guten­berg cranked up his shop in Mainz, Ger­many had print­ers in only forty towns.  By 1500, a thou­sand print­ing press­es were in oper­a­tion in West­ern Europe, and they had pro­duced rough­ly 8 mil­lion books.  But by the end of the 1500s, between 150 and 200 mil­lion books were cir­cu­lat­ing there.

Like ours, those ear­ly years, now 500 years ago, were full of chaos – the new tech­nol­o­gy seemed over­whelm­ing.  Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Librar­i­an Emer­i­tus Robert Darn­ton has writ­ten, “When the print­ed word first appeared in France in 1470, it was so brand new, the state did not know what to make of it.”  The monar­chy (keep this in mind) “react­ed at first by attempt­ing to extin­guish it.  On Jan­u­ary 13, 1535, Fran­cis I decreed that any­one who print­ed any­thing would be hanged.”  For the mov­ing image today, with all of us on our iPhones, the mod­ern cog­nate of hang­ing every­one record­ing or shar­ing video might seem extreme.  But in the long view, we too, com­par­a­tive­ly speak­ing, don’t yet know what to “make” of this new medi­um of ours.

That’s part­ly because it, too, is so young.  The Lumiere broth­ers showed the first movie to pub­lic cus­tomers in France in 1895 – only 130 years ago.  But today video is becom­ing the dom­i­nant medi­um in human com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  It accounts for most of our con­sumer inter­net traf­fic world­wide.  The giga­byte equiv­a­lent of all the movies ever made now cross­es the glob­al inter­net every two min­utes.  Near­ly a mil­lion min­utes of video con­tent cross glob­al IP net­works every six­ty sec­onds.  It would take some­one – any­one – 5 mil­lion years to watch the amount of video that scoots across the inter­net each month. YouTube – YouTube alone – sees more than 1 bil­lion view­ers watch­ing more than 5 bil­lion videos on its plat­form every day.  Video is here, and every­where.  It’s part of every sport­ing event, it’s at every traf­fic stop, it’s at every con­cert and in every court­room.  Twen­ty net­work cam­eras active­ly film the Super Bowl.  The same num­ber work Cen­tre Court at Wim­ble­don.  It’s in every bank, in every car, plane, and train.  It’s in every pock­et.  It’s every­where.  For what­ev­er you need.  Dog train­ing.  Chang­ing a tire. Solv­ing a dif­fer­en­tial equa­tion.  Chang­ing your mood.

It’s tak­en con­trol.  It’s just us who’ve been slow to real­ize it.  Some 130 years into the life of the mov­ing image, we are in what Eliz­a­beth Eisen­stein, writ­ing about print, called the elu­sive trans­for­ma­tion: it’s hard to see, but it’s there.  If you pic­ture an air­plane flight across an ocean at night, you can sense it.  As the sky dark­ens and din­ner is served, the most notice­able thing about the plane is that almost every­one is sit­ting illu­mi­nat­ed by the video screens in front of them.  The screen and the speak­er are now at the heart of how world cit­i­zens com­mu­ni­cate.  In many ways we are the pas­sen­gers on this plane, rely­ing no longer on the print­ed page, but on the screen and its mov­ing images for much of the infor­ma­tion we are receiv­ing (and, increas­ing­ly, trans­mit­ting) about our world.  The cor­rup­tion and malfea­sance and occa­sion­al achieve­ments of our mod­ern politi­cians; sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ments; tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments; news­casts; ath­let­ic feats – the whole pub­lic record of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, in short – is all being record­ed and then dis­trib­uted through the lens, the screen, the micro­phone, and the speak­er.  Now text may be los­ing its hold (short as that hold has been) on our noet­ic imag­i­na­tion – espe­cial­ly its hold as the most author­i­ta­tive medi­um, the most trust­wor­thy medi­um, the medi­um of the con­tract, the last word, as it were.

Don­ald Trump and the greedy, cow­ard­ly tech­nol­o­gists that sur­round him know it.  They have the data; but they also intu­it it.  And they are clamp­ing down on our access to knowl­edge even as the oppo­site seems true – which is that Apple, Net­flix, Tik­tok, and YouTube are mak­ing video ever freer, and more ubiq­ui­tous.

This marks the end of Part 1 of Peter Kauf­man’s essay. Part 2 will appear on our site tomor­row.…

–Peter B. Kauf­man works at MIT Open Learn­ing. He is the author of The New Enlight­en­ment and the Fight to Free Knowl­edge and founder of Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion, a video pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny that works with cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions around the world. His new book, The Mov­ing Image: A User’s Man­u­al, is just out from the MIT Press.