M.E. Monday #5

M.E. Monday #5 is proudly brought to you by Harold Innis:

"Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival" (Empire and Communications 1950).

How things have changed. What Innis was alluding to here is that without the invention of writing, or the means to mass produce it, communities relied on each other to keep their histories alive. One aspect of this was that the histories would be shaped into poetry and poetic stories that would be kept alive by the communal telling and re-telling. An active part of social belonging was to be a hearer and re-teller of the stories that had shaped, and through their re-telling continued to shape, the community.

And whilst Innis is focussed primarily on the shift to the private that the invention of writing brought, we are now well beyond that. Instead now, the private is public again, through the interconnected social media networks in which we participate. But the individual has not given rise to the collective. The history written in our threads and threads of information posted daily lacks the collective social capital of a history spoken in poetic prose.