both are round.
Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tipis were round like the nests of birds and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
— Heháka Sápa (Black Elk)1
In many ways, we are today experiencing a return to an auditory-based communications environment. However, lacking the terms to describe this shift, as well as a perceptual orientation to recognize it, we often fail to understand what is happening. If one keeps his ears to the wall, he will begin to hear this new base echoed in the language of the young. Here, people in agreement are “on the same wavelength” or “on the same frequency.” A person learns by “getting around.” Someone who “plays it by ear” is open to new possibilities that may emerge in a situation. Truth is conveyed by “telling it like it is.” An individual who learns how to behave properly in a situation “tunes in on what’s happening.” And effective communication “strikes a responsive chord.”
Our social organization clearly reflects the shift from a predominantly linear to an acoustic base in communication structure. Lines are disintegrating all around us. The NBC Today show has a one-handed clock that indicates minutes past the hour.
Since the program is viewed simultaneously in different time zones, it makes sense to tell the audience, “It’s ten minutes past the hour” and assume that they know which hour, rather than to state, “It’s ten past eight in the Eastern Standard zone, ten past seven in the Central Standard zone,” etc. This sharing of information across time zones demonstrates how time lines have lost significance. Indeed, two western states have petitioned to change their time zone because they receive most television programming from stations in border states with a different time zone. Also, Congress is considering a redistricting of congressional zones to match media districts. Similarly, instantaneous information has reduced the need for datelines in newspapers. One of the cornerstone assumptions in the transportation theory of communication—that a period of time is required for information to move across space—has been undermined by the near-instantaneous speed of electronic communication.
The line, as a means of social organization, is being replaced by acoustic space principles. The “Party line” no longer explains patterns of voting behavior. The railroad line no longer explains transportation patterns in our society. Even the lines or rows that organized seating patterns in schools, churches and theaters are giving way to new patterns.
Theater-in-the-round has returned. Conference tables and classroom desks are organized in circular patterns. And recently, the governor of a large eastern state defined his role as “Trying to tune government to the needs of citizens.”
The Auditory Base of Electronic Media
Television and film, as well as radio, tapes, and records, have contributed to a radical transformation in our perception of the world—from a visual, print base to an auditory base. Each of these media conditions the brain to receive and process all information in the same way it has always processed information received via the ear. The ear receives fleeting, momentary vibrations, translates these bits of information into electronic nerve impulses, and sends them to the brain. The brain “hears” by registering the current vibration, recalling the previous vibrations, and expecting future ones. We never hear the continuum of sound we label as a word, sentence, or paragraph. The continuum never exists at any single moment in time. Rather, we piece bits of information (millisecond vibrations) together and perceive the entire three-stage process as “hearing.”
The dispersal pattern of a radio signal is circular. Thus, while we pay taxes and vote within the irregular boundaries of city and state lines, we are united to those who share electronically mediated information with us by a circular pattern, the limits of the radio station’s audience. This experience has fostered a sense of community that resembles the days before print, when the circular dispersal pattern of a person’s voice, or drums, determined social patterns of interaction.
In auditory- based cultures, the flow of information is analogous to the dispersal pattern created by dropping a pebble in a bucket of water.
As a wider range of new material reached the public through telephone, radio, film, records, and television, we developed a stronger orientation toward the auditory mode of receiving and processing information. A greater percentage of the information that affected our lives was reaching us in auditory form. This was true not only for sound, but also for electronically mediated visual information, which is patterned like auditory information. Man had never before experienced a world of visual sensation patterned in an auditory mode.
Film transmits visual information by projecting a series of still pictures in rapid succession. Each still frame is projected for approximately one fiftieth to one seventy-fifth of a second. Following each frame, the screen is black for a nearly equal length of time. The same frame may then be projected a second time, or the next frame may be shown—depending on the projector. But in any one-second period, the screen is black approximately half the time. The brain “sees” motion by registering the current still picture, recalling previous frames, and anticipating future frames that will complete the movements. This differs considerably from visual experience in everyday life, where the eye is bombarded with a continuous stream of information, which is always emanating from the sources we are observing.
On film, the everyday visual experience is fractured, and the brain must function in a new way to “reconstruct” a continuous visual image. On television, the real-life visual image is fractured in a far more radical way. If we were to set up a series of two thousand still cameras focused on a TV, each shooting at one two-thousandth of a second and firing sequentially (so that we would cover a one-second time span completely), no single camera would record a picture. The image we “see” on television is never there. A still camera, shooting at one two-thousandth of a second, will capture only a few dots of light or perhaps a single line across the television. In everyday visual experience, of course, a still photograph of a landscape shot at one two-thousandth of a second will capture a complete visual image of the landscape.
A television set creates a visual image by projecting dots of light, one at a time, onto the front screen. The succession of dots moves across the screen and down alternate “lines.” In all, there are 525 such lines on American television sets. During each one-fifteenth of a second, the scanning process will have completed two sweeps, once on each alternate set of lines.
In watching television, our eyes function like our ears. They never see a picture, just as our ears never hear a word. The eye receives a few dots of light during each successive millisecond, and sends these impulses to the brain. The brain records this impulse, recalls previous impulses, and expects future ones. In this way we “see” an image on television. The process differs from film in that it requires much faster processing of information and more visual recall:
1.With film, the brain has to process twenty-four distinct inputs per second. With television, the brain has to process thousands of distinct inputs per second.
