ABSTRACT
Medium theorists’ most ambitious – and contentious – claims relate to the psychological effects of a new medium gaining widespread adoption. A further legitimate criticism of the medium theory approach is that its sequential view of media development overstates the disruptive impact of technological changes and underestimates continuities between new and old mediums. Implicit in the slow normalising of the print mindset, medium theorists suggest, has been a lack of attention to what print ‘costs’ a society, with all the focus on what it offers. From the foregoing survey of medium theory, it should be clear that its practice is fundamentally macro-oriented: it analyses the impact of communication technologies over vast epochs because the effects of such technologies may be so subtly pervasive that they go largely unnoticed by contemporaries. Literacy connotes social status as a form of communication not to be taken for granted in all normal adults but as a skill to be acquired over many years.
