Marshall T. Poe, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet

New media scholars have long looked to historians for help in making sense of our own current media age, and for good reason. Historians conceptualize and substantiate the connections and the changes that make it possible to understand a medium as ‘new.’ History frees new media scholars to consider sources not reliant on the present for their relevance, while encouraging analysis informed by the dramatic plot lines and conceptual scaffolding that support previous worldviews.

That said, Marshall Poe’s recent media history should strike both new media scholars and historians as something of an anomaly. Poe’s self-described ‘outsized project’ is bound to surprise as well as frustrate (p. xi). It is no less than an attempt at a general history of media; it is also a daring attempt at ‘a general theory of media causes and effects’ (personal correspondence with the author). Spanning over 150 millennia in 275 pages of text and nearly 50 pages of endnotes, this book takes chapter-length leaps from speech, to writing, to printing, to audiovisual media, to the internet. And Poe delivers all this in punchy, plainspoken, breezy prose.

His general media theory proposes two sub-theories inspired by Harold Innis: one, a ‘pull theory’ of media origins, or how technologies take hold only after enough interested actors organize around pulling the medium into existence, and, two, his ‘push theory’ of media effects, whose internal logics seemingly predict how media impact society. The specifics get complicated. His push theory methodically correlates eight media attributes (accessibility, privacy, fidelity, volume, velocity, range, persistence, and searchability) across eight corresponding dichotomized social practices (equalized/hierarchicalized, closed/open, sensualized/conceptualized, hedonized/economized, democraticized/centralized, diversified/simplified, historicized/ritualized, amateurized/professionalized), which in turn translate across eight further corresponding dichotomized cultural values (egalitarianism/elitism, privatism/publicism, realism/idealism, hedonism/asceticism, deliberativism/authoritarianism, pluralism/monism, temporalism/eternalism, individualism/collectivism). All this, detailed over a history of five media ages, in which each medium – speech (180,000–3500 BC), manuscripts (3500 BC–1450 AD), print (1450–1850), audiovisual media (1850–1990), and the internet – is discussed as the driving new medium of its age. Thus, it can be claimed that, within certain cautions, the rise of speech engendered, or ‘pushed’ into existence, an egalitarian, publicist, idealist, asceticist, deliberativist, monist, eternalist, and individualist culture, while the rise of the internet has engendered an egalitarian, private, sensual, hedonistic, deliberativist, pluralist, temporalist, and individualist culture (pp. 58, 249). Whatever else can be and already has been said, much of it nasty, about this kind of sweeping cultural categorizing, Poe has laid out his grand theory so systematically that his theory can be easily tested and rebuilt. A classroom exercise, for example, that compares the social networking cultures of Zynga, LinkedIn, Facebook, and 4chan, plus, for spice, perhaps LiveJournal in Russian or Renren in Chinese, would go some way toward testing how well the push theory predicts culture in the age of the internet.

While the empirical testability of his theory should be obvious, so should the knee-jerk critique: Poe’s push theory of media effects almost invites accusations of broad-brush technological determinism, putting him again in good company with Innis and McLuhan. I will not pursue this criticism here, however, because, in part, the critique almost writes itself (and thus strikes me as a deflated complaint to begin with) and because, in part, while not convinced by his answers, I must admit to sympathizing with the book’s foundational question: what do different media do? So fundamental to the field of communication and media studies, yet so rarely openly discussed, this question deserves attention just for being raised.

Poe writes decidedly as an outsider to the field, and in this light, it is not surprising Poe does not defend his argument against this criticism. Professionally a journalist and a Russian historian, he distances himself from the field from page one: ‘the most influential thinkers in the field of communications studies are, like the philosophers of Marx’s day, a bit too fond of high-flown ideas and not fond enough of the solid facts. They propose theories that are at once hard to understand, difficult to test, and sometimes just plain wrong’ (p. 1). Elsewhere, he further owns up to his isolation: ‘It has become customary in acknowledgements to provide a long list of people who contributed to the project at hand. Alas, I have no such list because I researched and wrote this book largely in solitude’ (p. xi). His text delivers on this promise; with the exceptions of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Jack Goody, three foundational outsiders, the book ignores decades of media scholarship. A few scholars, including Janet Abbate, Paul Edwards, Claude Fischer, Mark Poster, Neil Postman, Howard Rheingold, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and a couple others are each cited once in an impressive, if hurried endnotes section boasting over 1000 names. (This is either irresponsibility or hundreds of fresh names for media theorists and historians to consider.) His Russian area specialty shows through only occasionally, scattered alongside references to popular culture, Proust, Ptolemy, and especially Plato. This volume simply does not entertain scholarly conversations that take place at elevations less than exospheric.

While Poe’s chapter on ‘audiovisual media’ will likely disappoint media historians for indiscriminately lumping together radio, film, telephone, and TV – all topics with a worthy literature – it is Poe’s chapter on the internet that deserves some explicit discussion here. According to the pull theory, the internet (e.g. Wikipedia) fulfills a long-standing need to organize knowledge prefigured by Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Paul Otlet’s index card wizardry, microfilm and Vannevar Bush’s memex, the North American (or in Poe’s gloss, American) SAGE, and the ARPANET (pp. 204–214). According to the push theory, the internet satisfies our natural curiosity, while simultaneously feeding a hedonistic culture populated by what he calls, with reference to Plato’s cave, ‘homo somnians,’ knowledgeable yet sedated creatures. Poe claims the internet is an historically private medium, even though every act online leaves a persistent data trace (pp. 226–228 on privacy, pp. 241–244 on persistence). At another point, he claims that the digital divide is closing rapidly, noting that ‘only North Korea has been really successful’ in censoring access to the internet, thus flattening a global mountain range of barriers into one outlier (p. 224). ‘[The Internet],’ he concludes with a flourish ‘will save everything, and make everything saved findable, and thereby make us at once vulnerable and knowledgeable’ (p. 250).

Few of these points stand up under scrutiny. While Poe’s theory is usefully and empirically falsifiable, the analysis at times verges on being inaccurate, if not altogether false. The work of Michael Zimmer or Daniel Solove, whom Poe cites but does not use, could counter or at least complicate the proposition that online media offer more privacy than others; Rebecca MacKinnon could enrich our views on global censorship of the internet; Dmitry Epstein could paint a more colorful portrait of that thorny topic, the digital divide; that the internet will save and make findable everything is more the stuff of age-old dreams about communication than it is based on an empirical sense of the incremental gains and losses that keep digital archivists and search engineers going to work every day.

Specialist complaints aside, undergraduates may be this book’s saving grace in higher education. I have been teaching this book critically this semester, and, despite my doubts and criticisms, I do not regret the choice for the following reasons: according to the anonymous evaluation and test results of over 30 bright undergraduates, my students have learned more from and enjoyed reading this book more than the average assigned college text. Only a few students have reported sharing my irritation with the dichotomized nature of each chapter’s analysis. Others reported retaining thoughts that would have otherwise been lost without the repetitive chapter structure. The structure also encourages some to push back: e.g. ‘why,’ one student asked, ‘does Poe’s analysis only begin to distinguish between sending and receiving in the age of audiovisual media?’

The plain writing helps too. This anonymous student comment speaks volumes: ‘I actually read this text.’ Reading it takes me back: there is an undeniable pleasure in engaging in foundational questions at flyover speeds. Long in the intellectual import business, communication and media scholars often profit by looking beyond our own boundaries, and undergraduate students new to the field may be among the least appreciated jury on what works and what does not.

So, while Poe’s book will probably not appeal to new media scholars and historians, it may speak importantly to undergraduate students. It mixes empirically testable theories and foundational questions, and it reads accessibly. While I doubt many scholars will adopt or adapt Poe’s theory, it remains to be seen whether the empiricist motivations behind his theory building will be put to work, or even appreciated. Whatever the most egregious missteps in Poe’s theory, the larger mistake would be to outright dismiss the book simply for not engaging the field. Thankfully, there are other new media books that try to take up Mills’ call to ‘take as your time-span the course of human history’ (1959: 225): Gleick’s The Information (2011) may be among the brightest of the recent, readable candidates. Of course, it goes without saying that none of these should be read, taught, written, or perhaps even reviewed in isolation.

But of the many reasons Poe’s history has and likely will continue to rub media scholars the wrong way, this one may deserve some reflection: if his theory is right, the big-picture work in media studies has been accomplished – in 275 readable pages. If, on the other hand, his theory still needs work, and it does, then it remains to be shown what will take its place. Whatever else its problems, in short, A History of Communications still deserves critical attention from those on the hunt for a testable general media theory, those who want a flyover media history to teach critically to undergraduates, and those willing to appreciate general theories for both the noble projects they begin as and for the occasionally productive messes they leave behind.