1.2 - Four Great Information Ages in Human History

Oh, hi, you're back. I guess that's the Mr. Roger's approach. Welcome. Welcome to the second segment of the, of our course. And a lot happened, in between segments. I mentioned last time that this was a DIY course, a "Do It Yourself" course. We had never done anything like a MOOC before, we never done an online drive test before. And after we finished filming, not just one take but a couple of takes let's say, we reviewed it and realized that we needed to work on the lighting; we need to work on the sound. So we went to a resource that you should all know about: lynda.com. And we learned a little bit more. So we've adjusted the lighting to try to make shadows be a little less Dr. Caligari in their extremity. We adjusted the sound to be a little louder. Let us know: use the forums, give us some feedback. Help us make the best course we can make.

We also did something else interesting. After filming the first segment, I realized, now's the time to go way back and give some history. I've talked a lot already, about the purpose of history, about a purposive activist history. Now I want to do a little history. So we're going to go back today to the last information age. This is the first book I wrote, and not my first book, but a book I wrote a long time ago, called Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. And this is a book about exactly the last information age. It's an unusual book for an English teacher, because it's not so much about the literature as it is about reading, and the sociology of reading. It's a book about what happened during the Information Age characterized by steam-powered presses, machine-made paper, and machine-made ink, that made books available widely to the middle class, and even the working class for the first time in history. That was very, very startling to everybody: that you owned not just a prayer book, not just a hymnal, but the book I was reading when you tuned in.

This is what an early American novel looked like. They were cheap you could afford them, or in groups of you could afford them. Lending libraries were invented, famously by Ben Franklin. And the novel was the most important kind of book that was stocked in the lending libraries. And they were passed around friends, read at spelling bees. But the main thing is, you didn't need a preacher, you didn't need a town councilman to tell you how to read a novel. You are reading about people like yourself. That's what created that information age.

Historian Robert Darnton says that in all human history, this is important, in all human history, there really only four great information ages that changed so much the way we communicate with one another, that there was no going back. The ages he talks about, and we can quibble with it with the the details, but it's very useful even to get this broad perspective. The four ages he talks about are first, the invention of writing; that happens at about 4000 BCE, in ancient Mesopotamia. And this begins with cuneiform and other forms of marks and tablets. For the first time in human history, it wasn't just "he said, she said". There was actually a way to record, record your thoughts, to have a record of your transactions. And interestingly, the first writing was about commerce; it was also about poetry. I love that, that some of the earliest writing samples we have, were hymns of prayers to gods and goddess, and to guiding, guardian spirits, inverse, songs, creative expression, and also bookkeeping. Both of those together at the beginning of the invention of writing.

The first writing era, the first information age, and the first era in writing progressed quite slowly, until we get to about 400 BC, many thousands of years later, when we have the golden age of Greece. This is when Socrates was teaching, Plato was his very, very good student. And it's interesting that, even at that time as the Greek alphabet was being concretized and being uniform and standardized, Socrates hated writing. Socrates thought writing, ruined the dialogical process between you and me. He thought writing hurt the memory. He thought writing caused distraction, because you weren't focused on the exact argument and the dialogical way that argument was unfolding. But, you could just go off and read on your own. That's not a good way to pay attention. Fortunately, Socrates had a great student named Plato who wrote all of this down in the Socratic dialogues, or we wouldn't know that Socrates did not like writing and was really an opponent of the first information age.

The second information age is moveable type. And we used to in the West, in the West, insist that moveable type was invented by Gutenberg in Europe in the late 15th Century. Interestingly, one of the things that we've learned from Wikipedia and worldwide contribution Wikipedia is that history has been very skewed. And now in fact, we're having a much larger contribution from a global force, from a global intellectual community that's contributing and flushing out that history. So now it's pretty commonplace that we say that movable type was, too, invented in fact in around 9th or 10th Century China. In order to translate some Turkish texts into Sanskrit and then into Chinese. And slowly, the invention of movable type made its way through the Silk Road, changing as it went, until it finally came to Europe during the reformation. And it became movable type, that we know about through Gutenberg.

Needless to say, there were lots of people who hated movable type. It took the control of printing from out of the hands of the scholars, and the priests, and the law, and made a printer suddenly very, very important. In fact, one of the things I think is very interesting about the English language is the first printers, mass printers, in the Renaissance were Dutch. And a lot of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling, are because English is a combination of German and French, which are very different phonetic systems, but then they were printed by Dutchmen, who had still a third phonetic system, and they were transcribing things to their Dutch ears. And because it was in print, it became standardized. And that meant a very idiosyncratic moment in the history of Middle-English turning to Modern English, blurring of French and English got standardized by Dutch printer. And there we have it: many, many of the idiosyncrasies of the English language go back to that invention of moveable type, and who the printers were that were controlling what was being printed and how to standardize printing.

The third great information age is the one that used to be my specialty and that is the age of mass printing in the 19th Century. Interestingly, one would like to think, once the working classes and the middle classes could afford any kinds of books and lots and lots of books, that they might want serious hopes of scholarship; actually not. What they read were novels; they could not get enough novels. But what's interesting about these 18th Century novels, happening just about the same time as the U.S Constitution, is that often they gave a very different view of the social structure than you found in elite books of the time. So, for example, aristocrats are often the villains in novels of seduction. In the very first American novel, a novel called The Power of Sympathy, there's a preamble to the fair ladies of United Columbia. It was including in its preamble to the novel, a whole class of women who had been excluded from the preamble to the Constitution. Why that's interesting, is in the same month, in the same town of Boston, Massachusetts, by the very same printer, Isaiah Thomas, the preamble to the U.S constitution and the preamble to the first American novel were printed.

We used to think the first American novel was written by a woman. The voice in The Power of Sympathy is by a woman, but it actually turns out it's by a 23-year-old young man, William Hill Brown, who was pretty mad at some of the founding fathers and blamed one of them for the seduction; he would've said incest, because it involved a young sister-in-law the man's wife's younger sister. And he wrote about it in a Roman à clef that pretty much exposed the seducer, Perez Morton, and the founding father/signer of the constitution who defended him: James Bowdoin, a governor, who would become a governor of Massachusetts. Thinly disguised, but everybody, everybody in Boston would have known who the villains were in that piece. And here they were. In official American history, these were heroes; in the novel, these were villians.

The rumor was that William Hill Brown, the 23-year-old who wrote the first American novel, was run out of Boston on a rail and he pretty much disappears from history. And, interestingly many years ago, I was on the University of North Carolina campus-- I teach at the other University of North Carolina down the road from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill: Duke University-- but I happened to be on the UNC campus, and I saw a plaque that said, that this was the first public university in the United States, the first State university, and the person who energized funding and support for this university was a young immigrant from Massachusetts named William Hill Brown. And I thought, there's no way that can really be the same William Hill Brown. Nobody had written about that in history before; it's a quite covert history. This, again, was a very scrappy, little book; not elite fine literature, but working class and middle class literature. It turns out it's the same person. The first American novelist ended up coming to North Carolina and helping to found the first public university. That's a pretty cool way, that the history of communication-- the history of the book-- are tied and entwined histories, that the history of literacy and the history of public, of education are one in the same history.

These early American readers loved their books. That's something else that's different about my history of the early American novel, Revolution and the Word. I was less interested in writers than I was interested in readers. And in these books you find really tender-- they're scrappy novels-- one of my favorites is called Female Land Pirate. This is not great literature; it's adventurous, picaresque Seduction literature. It's wild, it's sensational, but it features middle class and even working class heroes and heroines, even homeless people. One of the most popular novels of the time was called, The Beggar Maid, and the hero was, the heroine is a beggar maid. They're often factory workers in the new factory system in America, but people loved them. An inscription in this book is, my book and heart shall never part; that was actually a fairly common inscription in these books. And, one person would bequeath them to another.

But guess what? Not everybody loved the third information age. In fact, the founding fathers, almost uniformly, were nervous; frightened; scared of the impact of literacy on a new democracy. What happens if you're not finding out what to think about books, what to think about the status quo, but are really novels about beggar maids, or seductresses, or where founding fathers are seducers, instead of hearing that no, no, no, the founding fathers are perfect. What, what happens in a democracy when people can go off silently and read?

On a curious side note, when I was doing research for Revolution and the Word, I was reading a lot of diaries, so I could read how real readers from the 18th and early 19th Century felt about reading. And one of the readers started talking about learning from a friend how you could take your pocket in the 19th century you had-- I am going to stand now-- you had a little reticule that you'd wear around your waist, and it'd form a little bag that you would put things in, a kind of purse that men and women carried around their waist. In this diary, we're told that there's a way you can make a piece of fabric that is hidden under the fabric of your dress or your pants; you sew it into the seams and make a little declivity, it was called. And my diarist actually described this. I then went to Old Sturbridge Village, which is a historical site, and talked to the conservator-- the clothing conservator-- who said, oh yes, we've found these. It's pockets, they were the first homespun pockets that we know about in history. And we did something interesting: we got out an old 18th Century dress that had one of these homespun pockets hidden within the seam, and we took one of these books-- this is called the, duodecimo-- the duodecimo is the format of cheap publishing of the 18th century-- and we slid it. And sure enough, sure enough the duodecimo went right into the pocket so that Dolly the dairy maid could walk down the street with her hands free and looking innocent, but she had that novel hidden in her pocket.

So why we ask, why do you have to hide the novel? Because it was thought that the novel, listen carefully, it's going to sound like Socrates and it's going to sound like pundits today, caused distraction; ruined your memory; depleted your taste for elite literature and culture by giving you popular books with seedy subjects; made you susceptible to sexual predators. Isn't that interesting? It was thought that if you read novels about seduction, you'd get so aroused that then predators could take advantage of you. It filled you with all kinds of anarchic ideas that were not conducive to a calm, stable, submissive public. In fact, the advice literature of the time was all addressed to parents, warning parents about what their kids were doing online. I'm kidding, of course, online in that case was on, on the lines of their favorite duodecimo, popular, sentimental novels; not like our worries today about what kids are doing online.

In another segment, I'm going to talk about the great revolution of April 22nd, 1993, when some scientists and government officials-- including Al Gore-- decided that the internet should be a public utility for all, and the fourth information age began. But today I want to conclude simply by saying that many of the concerns raised by pundits in our own information age, recapitulate the concerns of past information ages. Why? The reason is because when communication suddenly takes a dramatic turn, and the ways we communicate to one another and with one another, is no longer in control of people in power, there's a sense of fear. This is something that repeats itself over and over again; not only in the four great information ages in human history, but in the history of technology. We tend to want to believe, that technology either, is the source of everything evil in our culture-- blame it on technology-- or, that technology is somehow a panacea that will solve everything. Neither of those things are true. Technology is always social. Technology is about changed social relations.

The connection between technology, the book, literacy, communication, and the history and future of education is that each moment in the history-- and in a different information age, it's in the history of the book and the history of technology-- cultures and societies have had to ask, "What is the role and function of education in our era?" And basically, this is the big issue of our course, in "The History and Future of Higher education". And we might define it in two ways: one is the purpose of education to prepare younger people, the next generation for their future, or two is the purpose of education to instill the status quo, to prepare the younger generation for our past, not their future? That to me is the crucial choice.

When we talk in the next segment about April 22, 1993, we'll have to ask about the system of education we've inherited from the last information age. We'll be talking about some of the features and qualities of that last information age. And we'll be thinking together about whether that system does 1) Prepares this generation for their future, or 2) is designed to instill the status quo, to keep reinforcing virtues, patterns, behaviors, methods of attention, that were designed for the last information age. It's my conviction, it's my belief, and it's my reason for doing this course, that we have a choice: do we want to prepare young people for their future or our past? That is our choice. I think you know which one I opt for. I believe we should be, the difference is our operating system, that we should be learning the future together. Which is your choice? What about you? What are the choices you're making about education? Those are some of the key questions we'll be asking throughout this course and in our assignment for this week, that's one of the questions we'll be posing to you as well. What kind of education do you believe in? What kind of education do you want? What can you do in your life, whether you're a student; a teacher; a parent; or a life long learner and un-learner, what can you do? To ensure that you have the learning you need for your future, and that your choice is a choice in favor of the future, not the past.

Thank you, see you, see you next time. Bye bye.