Print Culture

Question 1

• Clay and stone tablets
• hand-copied manuscripts on parchment or vellum

Characteristics:
• heavy/durable
• suited to development of architecture and sculpture; favours collection of permanent records in widely scattered communities (because difficult to transport)
• carry messages that last for many generations but tend to reach limited audiences
• favours decentralization and hierarchal institutions and in particular religious control
• favours stability, community, tradition and religion

Answer 1

Time-biased media

Question 2

The way the world is conceived and organized: time biased media

Answer 2

Societies that depend solely on time-biased media are

oral and tribal

although leadership tends to be hierarchical

time-bound societies may also operate by consensus

in their purest form, time-bound cultures do not rely on written records, they must preserve their traditions in story, song and myth handed down unchanged from one generation to the next.

Question 3

• Papyrus
• Paper
• Contemporary media such as radio, television, mass circulation newspapers and the internet/World Wide Web

Characteristics:

• light, less durable, even ephemeral
• suited to the administration of wide areas
• favours centralization and less hierarchal systems of government control
• facilitates rapid change, materialism, secularism and empire

Answer 3

Space-biased media

Question 4

Societies that depend on ____ media

tend to favour abstract thought and control over space

they have little regard for tradition when compared with oral societies

ways of thinking are apt to be more rational, linear and impersonal.

Answer 4

The way the world is conceived and organized: Space-biased media

Question 5

For successful civilization these need to be in _____ bt space and time biased media

Answer 5

balance

Question 6

the singularity

Answer 6

hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of greater than human intelligence, radically changing civilization and human nature (von Neumann)

Question 7

Suggests links between the new invention and the cultural changes of the period.

Answer 7

Print culture

Question 8

with print comes ____

Answer 8

standardization

Question 9

Other Changes in Understandings of Space/Time

Answer 9

clocks - punctuality becomes a virtue

glasses - new perception

Question 10

Obstacles of book publishing in Canada

Answer 10

Canada a large territory with a small scattered population, making distribution difficult and expensive

Faced unfavourable competition from US publishers who were not not bound by imperial copyright laws. US publishers swamped the Canadian market with cheap editions

Canadian authors wanted to publish abroad to avoid the stigma associated with being published by a colonial press

After 1890, British and American publishers established branch offices in Canada and returned most profits to the parent company

Canadian firms acted as agents for foreign publishers and promoted their books to the neglect of developing indigenous Canadian publishing

Question 11

the idea that when tv shows get stale, they do ridiculous, stunt shows to get ratings up

Answer 11

“jump the shark”

Question 12

harness that tied the fingers to the writs in order to force the writer’s hand into the correct position

Answer 12

talentograph

Question 13

KEY IDEAS

Answer 13

1. Form of old media becomes content in new media
2. old form ←→ New form
3. Media profoundly affect understandings of space/time