A New Tribe Era

The history of society has been developing with the development of media technology. Marshall McLuhan, the famous media theorist of Canada, takes communication as a culture phenomenon for the world as a whole. He argued that a new media brings about the changes of society, as well as community structure, regardless of the messages and information. The extension of man not only changes our mind and behaviors, but also changes our senses and lifestyles.Our society has born a history of four eras, including the Uncultured Tribe Era, the Civilized Tribe Era, the End of Tribe Era and the Returning of Tribe Era in terms of the development of media technology. However, McLuhan neglected the cell phones because of the limitation of science and society at that time. Nowadays, a new tribe era is appearing because cell phones are increasingly popular as a new media in daily life.On the basis of the theory of media evolvement, which is strongly believed by Harold Inness and Marshall McLuhan, and the theory of remedial medium, which is constructed by Paul Levinson, cell phone ends the media history because of its perfectibility. Cell phones ushered in a new era. This new era is characterized by the special community formed by the cell phone wireless web. It is an extremely new kind of community which can be called new tribe era because of democracy, harmonious and freedom. The development of cell phone manifests the progresses of civilization and technology we made. However, we should also realize that cell phone has some negative effects on our civilization and culture.This thesis is composed of three parts. The first part contains the analysis of society background which demonstrates the reasons of the popularity of cell phone. There are six reasons for the development of cell phone, including the technology development, the requirement of people, the maturity of the industry chain, the Beijing Olympic Games, the effects of consumer society and the experience economy.The second part did some researches on the differences of communicating modes between traditional media and cell phone. The process of cell phone communication is quite unique among all the traditional medium. Also, mobile TV, mobile newspaper, mobile movie and mobile novel are considered in this part. It can be concluded that cell phone ends the media evolvement because it contains all the media contents and it combines time & space, as well as ends the extension of man.The last part is based on the analysis above and discusses that everything is changing, including lifestyles, our behaviors, minds and even the whole society. The history of human beings can be divided into four tribe eras according to theory of McLuhan, followed by a new tribe era.During this new era, a kind of unusual and new culture will be cultivated by cell phone media. In addition, like every coin has two sides, there are some potentially negative aspects of culture in this new tribe era. The cell phone culture seems like a two-side coin which needs to be analysis and evaluated rationally and thoroughly. Mass medium is also called Culture Industry , pursuing profits and ignoring ethics. Sometimes, they erode the civilization and moral of our community. Our traditional culture is dying out in this new tribe era. So the cell phone culture is worth of researching in such circumstances.