History is the perception of reality from the media’s perspective. Media is a function of the reality owned by the “winners”, the dominant culture, within a society. From the very beginning, when the first merchant decided to press a piece of reed into a wet clay tablet or ball to count his goats, the dominant culture was exuding its influence. The dominant culture here being the culture of business. All that we can see on this end of history is that which has been left behind, whether that be a cave drawing, a news article, or a bone fragment in an ancient fire pit.
Any and all of these artifacts are up for interpretation, but what separates them is the degree of interpretation. The cave drawing is drawn according to the perspective of the artist and then interpreted by the archaeologist, while the bone shard and fireplace are left up to the sole interpretation of the archaeologist. Writings are the closest link we have to a direct record of history, and many times that written record was not produced for posterity, but in the necessity to keep oneself informed, as in the case of the merchant and his goats, or to keep others informed, as with the news article. These bits and bytes of information filter down through the years and become history. In a very real way media writes history.
The role of media has changed throughout time, at first being wholly practical. This is a point made on the basis that media is defined as the forms of mass communication. There are many theories as to what befell early humanity and what came first, but for the purposes of this paper cave drawings will be left up to interpretation as to what form of communication they provide, and consider the start of media as concurrent with the beginnings of pictographic writing in Sumer and Elam, in the Fertile Crescent c. 3500 BCE.
The advent of pictographic writing was an improvement on an earlier form of recording, one that had the merchant press clay tokens that represented goods, such as sheep or jars of oil, into a clay ball. The pictographs took the place of the tokens, and instead of pressing one piece of clay into another, the Sumerians pressed a tool into the clay in some form of what it was representing. So instead of a clay token, a picture of a sheep was drawn. This worked well for personal records, and such a powerful tool was not left to such a menial task for long.
This practical beginning soon morphed into what is the earliest discovered written document, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written c. 2800 BCE. This story describes the greatness of the King of Uruk, a city in ancient Sumeria, or present-day southern Iraq. This fantastical story of what is believed to be a real king shows us many of the beliefs of the Sumerians, their way of life, and a description of their city. Who knows how much of it is true. Remains of a very ancient city have been found in southern Iraq, which is believed to be Uruk, but other writings such as The Epic of Gilgamesh have not surfaced. In this respect, what is written in the Epic is “truth”. It may have been nothing more than a fanciful story, or what we would now call propaganda. No matter. It has become a part of the history of the Sumerians.
Much of what we now know comes from stories that were written within a culture. The poems written by Homer are an excellent example of how the meeting of two historical doctrines brought about a categorical change in how these stories and poems were treated. Archaeology and media came to a head in a lightly populated area on the Bosporus, where a mound in the landscape caught the attention of Heinrich Schliemann.
Using The Iliad and the Odyssey as a reference guide and map, Schliemann began an attempt to find the city of Troy. This had been attempted before, but without success. Many of his colleagues scoffed at the idea that Homer was writing about real events. The fantastical bits of the story, such as the god Apollo firing his arrows into the camp of the Achaeans due to the beseeching of a scorned priest was just a bit too far outside the box for the average scholar to believe any of it was true. Besides, if even a bit of this ancient document were true, what would that imply for other ancient documents?
Despite the guffaws of his colleagues and the aegis of the common thought that ancient texts were not to be regarded as true stories, the beleaguered German continued his search, and early in the 20th century, achieved the impossible: he found the lost city of Troy. Gone were the ramparts and the battlements, the soaring walls and the vast armies poised at the ready. What was left was enough archeological evidence to prove that what is written is not always to fantastic to exceed reality. Through the work of a pioneering German with a poem and a dream the world of history was turned on its side, opened now to the possibility that the written word, no matter how unrealistic, may contain some truth.
This further ties the influence of the media with the perception of history. From the standpoint of a pre-Schliemann scholar, Homer was a great poet and storyteller, but not a historian. At the same time, an entire people were stricken from the record, only existing as fanciful foes of the Greeks. But with a shovel and newsprint, the history of the Trojans has been born and retold in the last one hundred years. The use of media is a powerful tool.
A stark example of media power is the authoritarian control the Russian, then Soviet, governments asserted upon their media outlets. Many examples of Soviet media manipulation are relevant here, but it is interesting to note that this was done before the October Revolution of 1917. Media was used to reshape the people pf Russia to the end that the history of the people would change as well.
Peter the Great was a monarch descended from European blood, tutored by Europeans, and inspired by Europeans on his extensive travels through that continent. He brought shipbuilding, architecture, and fashion from his forays, bringing Scandinavians to teach his shipwrights, modeling his namesake city, St. Petersburg, on the canalled city of Venice, and ordering his denizens to dress according class. This last is the most directly related to the discussion of media and history.
Peter saw the French fashion as clothing of the truly aristocratic, and ordered his boyars (nobles) to follow suit. He issued a decree addressing the clothes to be worn by all of the citizens of Russia. The nobles were to dress as French nobles dressed, the merchants and soldiers were to dress as German or Prussian merchants/soldiers dressed, and the peasantry was to dress as Russian peasants. And be proud of it! Diagrams were posted for the multitudes that could not read, and the changes took effect immediately.
Peter the Great was trying to convince the world that he meant business, and to do this he wanted to rewrite Russian history, not to be descended from the conquered peoples of the Steppes and the Slavs that had originally settled in the Kievan Rus, but served by the labor of such people, since the hierarchy were all descended from European nobility, such as himself.
More pervasive still were the efforts of the fallen Soviet system to control any and all media throughout the whole of the USSR. During the lifetime of Stalin, he was to be portrayed as an uncle or benevolent grandfather figure, even being given the nickname Papa Joe. Of course, we now know how bloodthirsty his reign was, killing millions of his own people. But it was the needs of the system that dictated how he was portrayed. What the Soviets had was a malleable media, and thus a malleable history.
Other examples of this retrospective control exist in German and Japanese history, as well as American history. Tales of the Holocaust are slowly being phased out of German textbooks, Japan is changing its story on what happened in mainland China during World War II, and many American textbooks do not touch on the brutality of the first settlers on the American Indian. If future generations are kept in the dark about such events, are the events eventually erased? That is perhaps too philosophical of a question for this discussion, but the basic preface of the paper is brought up once again.
History is created. There are people that are constantly shaping and reshaping the clay that makes up human history. A purely objective archive of event after event does not exist. How could it? In every step of human history there is a dash of unpredictability, a dab of powerlessness, a touch of chaos. That is one of the basic tenets of the human condition, and should come as no surprise that it should be so prevalent in how we see ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment