When introducing the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs referred to it as a revolutionary product that would change everything. He was more right than he knew. Before Jobs was even born, Harold Innis, the Canadian media and communication theorist, wrote about how the shift in our storytelling media causes disruptions in the power structures of society. Innis identified four temporal periods of civilizational impact: oral, scribal, print and electronic. The stories we told each other to pass on lessons changed drastically when they were written down by the religious institutions of the day, putting knowledge and power in the hands of those who could read and write. The balance of power that comes from having knowledge changed again when printed books replaced hand written scrolls, making knowledge more readily available, and again when mainstream broadcast media started to put the choices of what knowledge to provide in the hands of corporations with commercial interests.
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What happens when we stop telling stories?
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When introducing the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs referred to it as a revolutionary product that would change everything. He was more right than he knew. Before Jobs was even born, Harold Innis, the Canadian media and communication theorist, wrote about how the shift in our storytelling media causes disruptions in the power structures of society. Innis identified four temporal periods of civilizational impact: oral, scribal, print and electronic. The stories we told each other to pass on lessons changed drastically when they were written down by the religious institutions of the day, putting knowledge and power in the hands of those who could read and write. The balance of power that comes from having knowledge changed again when printed books replaced hand written scrolls, making knowledge more readily available, and again when mainstream broadcast media started to put the choices of what knowledge to provide in the hands of corporations with commercial interests.