Who argued that “technological changes in the ways in which we encode…

Concept

Media (technological) determinism holds that the dominant technology a society uses to encode, store and transmit information is itself a primary engine of social change. On this view the form of a medium — not only the content it carries — reorganises how people perceive, at what scale they associate, and how their institutions are built. Change the mode of encoding and you change the society, whatever messages happen to travel through it.

Applying the concept to this statement

The quoted proposition — that technological changes in the ways we encode information produce radical changes in society — is the central thesis of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian theorist of the Toronto School of communication. He compressed it in Understanding Media (1964) into the formula "the medium is the message": the real message of any medium is the change of scale, pace or pattern it introduces into human affairs. McLuhan accordingly periodised human history by its encoding technology, not by its content:

• Oral / tribal culture — information is encoded in speech and held in collective memory, so knowledge is communal, simultaneous and ear-centred.

• Phonetic alphabet and manuscript — encoding becomes visual and linear, favouring abstraction, detachment and the individual reader.

• Print — mechanised, repeatable encoding (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962) brings mass literacy, standardised vernaculars, nationalism and assembly-line thinking.

• Electronic media — instantaneous, all-at-once encoding collapses distance and "retribalises" experience into what McLuhan called the global village.

Cross-check against the other names offered

• Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model (1973) is about how meaning is fixed and contested inside a medium — producers encode a preferred reading, audiences decode it in dominant, negotiated or oppositional ways. It explains interpretation, not technology-driven social transformation.

• Manuel Castells' network society thesis (The Information Age, 1996–1998) locates change in the reorganisation of production, power and experience around information networks and a "space of flows" — a structural sociology of networked capitalism rather than a claim about the encoding technology as such.

• Howard Rheingold's work on the virtual community (1993) and smart mobs (2002) describes the social groups and coordinated action that emerge online — an ethnography of online sociability, not a general theory of media form and history.

Result: the statement belongs to Marshall McLuhan.