The printing press revolutionized the world, but Gutenberg’s invention isn’t revolutionary only because it succeeded in spreading knowledge around the world; it is important because of the way it changed social behavior. Over the course of time, Gutenberg’s printing press became a mass market invention, capable of producing enormous quantities of small volumes that could be ready anywhere. Books belong to the industrial revolution in the same way that computers belong to the technological age. They reflect the fragmentation of society that took place during this era. The industrial revolution fragmented society by displacing them from agricultural and agrarian ways of life that had been the norm for families for centuries. Books reflect this fragmentation in the way that they can be read anywhere. Prior to industrialized production of books, readers were incapable of enjoying their books in isolation. Books served to further the division of the population brought about by the industrial revolution. But if books were a way of sharing and gaining information, this ability to enjoy them in isolation contributed to the collapse of the old tribal ways that kept society a collective entity throughout history.
Since pre-history, humans seemed to have possessed an innate and instinctual drive to bond and share. Cave drawings present a view of early man gathering together to share information; the contemporary image is one that has these ancestors sitting around a fire and swapping stores. Whether that image has any relevance to actual fact is not nearly as important as the fact that is typically accepted uncritically. Our willingness to accept the image of cavemen gathered around a fire telling stories may say more about ourselves than it does about our knowledge of prehistoric man. The opening sequence of the 1980s TV anthology series Amazing Stories made the connection concrete by showing the progression of storytelling from cavemen around a fire to audiences sitting in front of a television.
Television’s power lies in its ability to recreate the tribal atmosphere of the pre-technological age. The industrial revolution and the urbanization of society resulted in a diaspora of sorts of ethnic subcultures. The cultural ties that kept people of certain backgrounds together became diluted as a result of immigration to American and movement within their own countries. The breakdown of the old tribal ties had resulted, by the twentieth century, in the greatest sociological change in the structure of humanity ever. The longstanding methods of communicating shared opinions and viewpoints, stories and folk tales, and news and information had undergone a tremendous sea change. The technological advances that made television possible arrived at probably the most perfect time imaginable.
Cinema looks very much to be an attempt at regaining the tribal connection that had been lost. The image of a large group of people gathered in darkness watching flickering images on the screen certainly has much to commend it as a modern evolution of cavemen around a fire, but it lacks one particular component that television was able to provide. Watching a film is unquestionably a tribal experience that links people across the world; mention such names as James Bond or Indiana Jones, or Sean Connery or Harrison Ford in practically any city in the world and the result will likely be a knowledgeable conversation. But the tribal experience that movies are an extension of ends with the technologically updated sharing of mythologies and folk tales. Stories involving heroes from Hercules to Hansel (and Gretel!) that were passed down from parent to child throughout the ages have been replaced by stories involving heroes from Hopalong Cassidy to Nacho Libre. Cinema contains a void in the tribal experience that television was able to fill, however.
The tribal experience wasn’t just about passing along stories, it was also about passing along information. In some ways, then, television represents not just an extension of the tribal experience, but also an extension of methods of communication ranging from the talking drums of Africa to the smoke signals of the Native Americans . The power of television as a technological extension of the ability to spread information lies in its instantaneousness. Today, of course, the news of a butterfly flapping its wings in China can be sent to literally billions of people before its wings flap a second time. That image of people all around the world enclosed in a darkened theater cheering the exploits of Spiderman or Harry Potter would need to be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times to achieve equality with television. Television becomes an extension of the tribal experience multiplied exponentially; people everywhere around the world gather to receive and process information. Ironically, the rise of cable of satellite television, carrying with it the promise of ever more stations delivering ever more narrowed interests, contributed to the collapse of the tribal extension of television. When only three or four channels existed, tens of millions of people at a time were watching the same show and the next day that show became a topic of conversation. That next-day aspect was the only manner by which television could capture the missing component of the tribal experience and with the fragmentation of the viewing audience as a result of an ever-increasing number of channels, even that somewhat tenuous connection is rapidly in danger of being lost.
Reception and processing of information, of course, doesn’t adequately reflect the collective spirit of tribalism. Television’s great flaw is that it is a one way street; people can shout and argue with the images they see all they want, but access to responding to those images was limited at best. The internet, of course, fills the void. For the first time in history, the tribal spirit of reception and response has been given a technological makeover. Today the one way avenue of information provided by television has been transformed into a boulevard. Information can be shared all around the globe with a simple click of the button. That mouse button-or computer key or cell phone pad-is the fullest and most complete extension yet of the ancient power of merely sitting around a fire and swapping stories. Bluetooth technology connecting human beings physically to their instruments of communications represents the first step in the final stage toward cyborgian hybridization.