It seems to me that there is an unspoken assumption in Media Ecology that there are no differences in the intellectual capabilities of peoples of different ages or technological achievement. By this I don't mean differences in sensory balances, which may be determined by the particular technologies or media of communication available, but rather differences in the basic structure and capacity of the human mind.
When we use the terms, "oral" or "literate" or "post literate" in lieu of "primitive" or "modern", we are not referring to intellectual complexity or intelligence, but rather the modes of thought, the uses of systems of symbols and the religious, social and psychology outlooks encouraged or discouraged by a media environment.
I therefore suggest that the foundations of Media Ecological epistemology would benefit by the inclusion of some of the ideas contained in some of the writings of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, including The Savage Mind, Totemism and any volume of Mythologiques, but especially, The Raw and the Cooked. Lévi-Strauss's work came at a time when anthropologists in general were abandoning the belief of James Frazer and the other pioneer anthropologists that pre-literate peoples were somehow more primitive, more childlike or less intellectually capable than modern man. (This viewpoint, by the way, still contributes to the foundation beliefs of all modern racism).
Lévi-Strauss's explorations of the structures of pre-literate societies demonstrated that there existed a complexity of thought and a subtlety of mind equal to our own. Some critics get hung up on discrepancies within the structural methodology which Lévi-Strauss used to explain mythology, totemic systems and kinship systems. Other criticism focus on how a particular interpretation doesn't fit the recorded ethnography for a culture. While the methodology itself, or its particular application may be subject to review and revision, what is important is that Levi-Strauss demonstrated that there is a universality to the human mind, and given sufficient symbolic material, all peoples, whether within an oral culture, a literate culture or our post literate culture still retain a commonality with can be explored through their symbol systems and perhaps understood in terms of the underlying structures transmitted via the stories we tell.
If it is possible to distinguish a "primitive" mind from our own then how could we apply Marshall McLuhan's Laws of the Media universally across all cultures and time periods? We can talk about the sensory impact of different types of communication media in different eras only if we accept that the basic mental equipment and the capacity for intellectual activity we are born with has been the same throughout all human history and everywhere in the world.
Lévi-Strauss's approach to the interpretation of so-called "primitive" cultures revealed the complex patterns of thought that went into the development of systems of myth and kinship. Building on the linguistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the evolutionary approach to cultural studies of Franz Boas, his work exposed our own biases in the use of terms such as "primitive" and "modern" (even though Lévi-Strauss himself used these terms), and paved the way for Walter Ong's distinction between orality, literacy and secondary-orality as more appropriate explanations for differing cultures.
Levi-Strauss's notion that "primitive" intellectual activities were equal to our "modern" systems of knowledge, just applied to differing objects, put the entire body of anthropological writings, going back to James Fraser's Golden Bough into a new perspective. Lévi-Strauss discovered and demonstrated connections between seemingly disparate mythic stories, and offered explanations for seemingly random elements of those stories. His methodology can be used as model for ways to interpret the products of contemporary culture, which, while seeming to be unrelated, actually constitute a system (or systems) of symbolic meanings.
I find the tools Lévi-Strauss provides useful in a number of ways. I also think that his notion of "things that are good to think with" as powerful as Neil Postman's question regarding a new technology: "What problem does it provide a solution to?" I like Lévi-Strauss's idea that a myth is not a "false" story or idle tale, but rather a dynamic technique which members of a culture use to address cultural discrepancies. To me, this is a compelling explanation for why myths persist in a culture. It may also explain how, if we know where to look, we can identify the mythic systems of our own culture that provide us with a coherent world view in the face of constant change and turmoil.
Myths cannot be considered one at a time. One must absorb the entire canon of a culture to understand all the connections and interactions. That may be why we can't analyze Greek mythology properly. Too little of it has come down to us, and the versions we read have undergone so many revisions that they may not truly represent the originals.
I know that structural anthropology has been somewhat in eclipse in academic circles lately; that Lévi-Strauss has been accused of a binary focus that, being Hegelian in origin, cannot apply to current thinking about media. I think that to write off Lévi-Strauss's methodology as a thesis/antithesis/synthesis intellectual game misses the subtlety of his analysis. A closer reading of all 2200+ pages of his Mythologiques shows that, while he may begin an analysis by identifying polar opposites, this is only a starting point. The analysis of a mythic system must account for far more that just a pair of opposites.
In the course of his analysis of the myths of the Tupi Indians, Lévi-Strauss moves spiral-like through multiple mythic variations and multiple opposing pairs and by proceeding A to B and B to C, etc., demonstrates internal consistencies within the mythic system that aren't immediately apparent to an outside observer. In other words, Lévi-Strauss provides a useful tool for analysis regardless of whether you wish to extrapolate the function of the method to the deeper structures of the human mind or not. I also find Lévi-Strauss's methodology completely compatible with McLuhan's Laws of the Media. Where McLuhan, via the Tetrad asks us to consider what a technology or medium enhances, obsolesces, retrieves and reverses into, Lévi-Strauss will start with a pair of opposites "A" and "B", but in the course of his analysis will present examples of what he calls " A' " (A prime) and " B' " (B prime) as recursive iterations of the original pair. Perhaps someone will someday conduct a Lévi-Straussian analysis of McLuhan's system of myths.
Lévi-Strauss is also compatible with Ong's notions of primary orality. Ong discusses how different human thought processes must be in a pre-literate society. Lévi-Strauss gives example after example of exactly how these thought processes work. Eric Havelock and Milman Perry developed the notion that the epic poetry of classical civilizations acted as a sort of "cultural encyclopedia" of acceptable norms and values, transmitted by fixed tropes and poetic phrases. I don't recall Lévi-Strauss discussing the poetry of the Tupi Indians as a means of perpetuating the culture, but he does demonstrate how interconnected myths, based on concrete elements taken from their environment, can act as intellectual place holders for a non-literate population to help them consider complex systems of thought.
Our current system of myths is not only presented verbally, but also via images, in print, and even in interplay of biases amongst all of our competing media. Since we may be relearning this manner of thinking as we move deeper into secondary orality, Lévi-Strauss provides us with a map of where we may be headed.
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