## 2 Information as a Variable in Media Ecology Analysis
### Space  
The human species is believed to have originated in Africa, and spread from there to the four corners of the world, so that information can be carried along with human migration. That is, at least _in theory_, given enough time, information can be transmitted over almost any distance, even if the messenger travels on foot. In practice, information remains confined to local areas and the small networks of the clan, tribe, and village, as long as communication is conducted entirely by word of mouth. The game of telephone, originally developed to investigate the oral transmission of rumors, is a poor representation of communication within oral cultures, as it does not take into account mnemonic techniques adopted to increase redundancy and otherwise reduce noise in the transmission process. But there is no doubt that the invention of writing vastly increased our capacity to deliver messages over distance with complete fidelity. Writing is associated with the growth of settlements from small villages to the cities of the ancient world, and lightweight, easily transportable writing surfaces are closely connected to the rise of the empires of antiquity [19]. The invention of paper and its diffusion during the medieval period, and the development of the printing press with moveable type in the early modern period, each in its own way extended the reach of human communication. Both oral and written communication across space was entirely dependent on physical transportation up until the 19 th century, so that improvements in our ability to travel over land (e.g., Roman road building, and the building of railroads) and water (e.g., the introduction of carracks, caravels, and clipper ships) extended the distance over which information could be disseminated with relative ease and reliability.  
More recent progress in transportation is not without significance, but has been vastly overshadowed by the electronic media's ability to transmit information instantaneously. The telegraph was the first medium to split apart information transmission from physical transport, translating material objects (_i.e._, a written message) into energy (_i.e._, electrical signals), and in this sense presages the splitting of the atom, with similar explosive effect on human life. While the telegraph was said to have transformed the vast continental spread of the United States into a single neighborhood [18, 27], space was more broadly conquered by [PERSON]'s wireless. Satellite communications extended information's reach to the entire planet, giving us what [PERSON] termed the _global village_[28, 29, 30], with the internet and mobile devices filling in the gaps. Electricity truly marks the turning point in this regard, so much so that the _transmission_ view of communication originates in the 19 th century with the advent of telecommunications [18, 31]. In response to this historical development, [PERSON] echoes [PERSON]'s famous criticism of telegraphic communication in suggesting that the instantaneous transmission of information is characterized more often than not by irrelevance, and given our inability to act on the information, a sense of impotence [32,33].