The cutting edge of media – in the 12th Century
This week, Lisa and I find ourselves living the Les Deux Abbesses, a hotel deep in the Haute Loire region of France.
The hotel is actually a converted 12th Century Abbey (and village) with, thankfully, 21st Century amenities.
(Let me take a moment here to STRONGLYÂ recommend the nearby Regis et Jacques Marcon, a 3-star Michelin restaurant where we had, what I think, may be the best meal I have ever eaten, anywhere.)
OK. Back to the topic at hand.
While we are staying at the Abbey, I have also been reading A World On Fire, by Amanda Foreman, a history of Britain’s involvement in the American Civil War.
These two things – the American Civil War and a 12th Century Abbey in France might seem totally disparate, but I don’t think so. I also think they have an enormous bearing on our own interest in the ongoing video revolution.
When the Abbey was built, Europe was in the throes of the Dark Ages. Learining had, for all practical purposes, ceased. 99% of the population was illiterate and there was little hope that any kind of civilization based on learning and intellectual endeavour could ever be re-established. Places like The Abbey were the only enclaves of learning or writing, and even that was based more upon the preservation of what had once existed (and the laborious copying by hand of what manuscripts there were) as opposed to any sort of new intellectual thought or any kind of teaching or expansion of knowledge.
Here, as elsewhere across Europe, the only ‘media’ that the western world knew, or would know for another 300 years, was being crafted by hand by a few sequestered Monks.
However, those who were living in that time did not say to themselves, ‘oops, too bad we have to live in the Dark Ages! I wish things were better!’. On the contrary, life went on and people tended to accept the reallity of the times as the way things were, and probably always would be. William Manchester wrote a wonderful book about this time period – and one of the books that I think had a seminal impact on me: A World Lit Only By Fire – The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, Portrait of an Age.
Spending time in the Abbey makes me think of Manchester’s portrayal of the Medieval world – one in which the very concept of time ceased to exist.
The arrival of the printing press in 1452 and the subsequent democratization of writing and thought was not universally hailed as a ‘great moment’. On the contrary, the Church and the Monarchies across Europe did everything they could to dampen down the arrival of a free and open press. They had lived in a very certain and static world for nearly a thousand years and they could not comprehend the impact that this new technology would bring, nor how to adapt to it or cope with it. Unable and unwilling to change, it was, in the end, the agent of their demise. Much to our benefit.
In much the same way, as I sit here ensconced in the 12th Century, reading about the battles of the American Civil War in the 1860s, I am equally taken with how both the armies of the Confederacy and of the Federalists were unable to grasp the impact of machinery and technology on warfare. Generals on both sides (though the Confederacy seems to have had the vastly superior Generals), were unable to fully understand what highly machined rifles and canon meant for warfare.
They were the products of more than a thousand years of battles in which the two sides lined up against one another and simply charged. This had been warfare since the time of Alexander the Great, and little had changed. But charging a line of Helots bearing spears and charging a line of Union or Confederate soldiers bearing rifle and canon was something else. Swords drawn and elan counted for little. It was the first time anyone would experience mechanized war, and with devastating results.
The British had had a foretaste of it in Crimea, where they suffered 25,000 casualties, a shocking number at the time, over four years. At one battle, Fredricksburg, which was a draw, there were 25,000 casualites in one day. Yet now one was able to stop. In the end, the Federalists one by simply being able to absorb more dead than the Confederacy could.
In the end, the total casualty count would be 625,000 killed and another 400,000 wounded. Today, by comparable population figures, that would be close to 10 million casualties.
Both the Monasteries of the Middle Ages and the general staffs of the Union and Confederate armies were products of a static time, a time which turned out to be not so static because of the arrival of a new technology that they could not resist and yet could not adapt to at the same time.
As I look around at the world of media today, it is still a world dominated by our own 21st Century (or should I say 20th Century) institutions – a handful of newspapers or TV networks who believe that it is they who decide and produce all that the rest of the world gets to see. They are the Abbeys and the Monestaries of our own age – anachronisms in their own time.
They see the world of new media all around them, yet, like the general staffs of the Civil War, they are unable to fundamentally come to grips with the impact of that technology and the vast changes it would require to embrace it.
As Lee threw Pickett’s troops, in wave after wave, against the Union Armies at Gettysburg, only to get mowed down in line after line, so too do TV networks throw variants of the same programming at their audiences in wave after wave, unable to think in any other way.
As we say in France, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
