A méhkas szelleme - ME.dok 2012/2

ME.dok • 2009/4
84
or alienate them from each other. The difference
is not only the medium itself or its content, but
the way one is thinking about it.
At the dawn of our media age, in the 19th century
it was thought telegraph, telephone, gramophone,
or photograph would offer a panacea for all
the problems and conflicts of the society, caused
by misunderstanding of the other. This expectation
has influenced the direction their inventors
had to conduct their further work and their users
had to lead their habits. Naturally, discussions
about the media have manifested themselves in
the contemporary mass media: in the newspapers
and in journals. On the one hand, journalists of
this period tried to present the inventions in the technology of communication
through the prism of their own hopes and contemporary expectations
towards the new media and they were keen to “invent” the everyday usage
of these. On the other hand, the characteristics of the new media shaped the
way one could think about them and what society could expect from them.
No media has been discovered simply because society needed it and no thirst
for communication of a society can be entirely quenched through one single
medium.
But these media were not always easy to define as individual entities
because they were developed at the crossroads of some completely different
directions of research and social needs and phenomena. The gramophone,
for instance, was developed because the need for a better dactylographic
technique met the philanthropic urge to integrate the deaf into society by
teaching them to speak. Furthermore, all these inventions were influenced by
the Zeitgeist of collecting and preserving. Today, some technological hybrids
seem to be an impasse, such as the Telefonhírmondó (Telephone Herald) in
Budapest, the first electric broadcast service ever. However, the contemporaries
had greeted it like the newspaper of the future. The media of modernity
do not have rigid borders, but are all the manifestations of the technological
optimism of that period which says that the development of the human
being is only possible through technology. This is the way I understand the
McLuhanesque sentence “The media is the message.”
The 19th The gramophone, for
instance, was developed
because the need for a
better dactylographic
technique met the
philanthropic urge to
integrate the deaf into
society by teaching them
to speak. Furthermore,
all these inventions
were influenced by the
Zeitgeist of collecting and
preserving.
century is the age of modernity, of a historical period with
blurred limits. One of the key elements of it is technological optimism – a
strong faith in the positive impact of the machines upon the life of society.
This is the dominant way one had seen new media in this period. However,
modernity is a Janus-faced phenomenon; it has also an immanent antagonistic
character that manifests itself in the main discourses about technical
inventions. Machines are not only invented “for” the common welfare, but
also “against” the blind and hostile forces of nature. One of these forces is
distance: first it had been seen as a mere geographical notion, then its meaning
was expanded on the time, and finally it became a metaphor for social
relations. This is the reason why the electric telegraph, the first media that
effectively separated content from its carrier, had been greeted enthusiastically
as the “annihilator of space and time.”