CS100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Canadian Pacific Railway, Walter J. Ong, New Media
16 Sep 2013
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Large scale political organizations such as empires must be considered from a standpoint of two dimensions, those of space and time. When an empire choses a media, they chose one that allows them to remain powerful over time and space, there must be balance. Media either have a bias of time (seek to transcend time heavy and durable=clay and stone. Speech is also time biased in the form of oral culture, which can be passed down from generation to generation without encouraging territorial expansion. One must gather to hear speech so communities must not be spread out. ) Religion tends to favor the conquest of time, therefore religion survival prefers a bias of time as opposed to a bias of space via military expansion. The bible never changes, it stays the same throughout time. Or bias of space (associated with secular and territorial societies. Readily transportable but has a relatively short lifetime/easy to destroy.
