Chapter 3

_________________________________________________________________

Historical and Cultural ContextThis chapter will prepare students to:

• describe the major events and general trends in media history• recognize the milestones in the development of human communication• understand the role that these advances played in prompting significant changes

in our culture and society• learn that the emergence of new communications advances changes but does

not make extinct those communications that came before• understand that each advance in communication increases our power to convey

and record information

Chapter main points:• Printing made information available to a larger audience. It helped the

development of vernacular languages, aided the Protestant Reformation, and contributed to the spread and accumulation of knowledge.

• The telegraph and telephone were the first media to l=use electricity to communicate. They marked the first time the message could be separated from the messenger. The telegraph helped the railroads move west and permitted the newspapers to publish more timely news. The telephone linked people together n the first instance of a communication network.

• Photography provided a way to reserve history, had an impact on art, and brought better visuals to newspapers and magazines. Motion pictures helped socialize a generation of immigrants and became an important part of American culture.

• Radio and TV broadcasting brought news and entertainment into the home, transformed leisure time, and pioneered a new, immediate kind of reporting. Television has an impact on free time, politics, socialization, culture, and many other areas as well.

• The digital revolution changed the way information was stored and transmitted and made e-commerce possible.

• Mobile media have changed American culture and taken over some of the functions of mass media.

• The next communication milestone is the expanding use of social media.

IM3-1

• In general, it is difficult to predict the ultimate shape of a new medium. New media change but do not replace older media. The pace of media inventions has accelerated in recent years.

_______________________________________________________________

BEFORE MASS COMMUNICATIONThe birth of spoken language marked a major development in the evolution of the human race. By necessity, oral-based societies became very dependent upon their members to have exceptional memories. The challenge was to accurately pass down from generation to generation as much information as could be remembered. That limitation, however, caused our collective knowledge and information base to grow slowly.

As humans developed, the need for better record keeping spurred the development of writing, which probably began around 3500 BC in Sumeria (present day Iraq), followed a few hundred years later by other systems in China and Egypt. Writing created a privileged class of literate people whose access to information gave them power.

Early books, which became numerous in the Middle Ages, were hand-copied by scribes in monasteries. They were expensive and a medium of the elite.

PRINTINGThough early Asian variations of printing existed before Johann Gutenberg, his use of moveable metal type in 1453 revolutionized communication. Printing could become cheap, quick, and error-free.

Effects of the Gutenberg Revolution

The Gutenberg Revolution:

IM3-2

• helped standardize and popularize vernacular (everyday) languages (as opposed to Latin), which in turn helped spawn the growth of nationalism in Europe in the later Middle Ages

• allowed information to quickly become more accessible to a wider range of people

• produced more books, which fueled the demand for literacy, which in turn created a demand for more books

• generated new schools of social and religious doctrines during the Reformation era, such as Martin Luther’s Protestantism

• accelerated the publication of and interest in scientific research

• helped encourage exploration with the timely publishing of maps, geographical information, and the colorful accounts of early explorers

• had a profound effect on the growth of accumulated knowledge, with more books resulting in an increased number of scholars and students; helping make possible the Renaissance of the 16th Century

• led to the development of the current concept of “news”

Technology and Cultural Change

If we ascribe too much credit for cultural change to a specific technology, we risk viewing social development through the narrow lens of technological determinism, the belief that technology drives historical change. A more moderate position might suggest that technology functions with various social, economic, and cultural forces to help bring about those changes.

The birth of printing marks the start of what we generally define as mass communication, a critical event in Western history.

CONQUERING SPACE AND TIME:THE TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE

The telegraph and telephone were two technologies that led to many of today’s features in digital communication.

Development of the Telegraph

Before the telegraph, messages traveled only as fast as the fastest form of transportation; but with one invention the speed of communication went from 30 miles per hour (train) to 186,000 miles per second (the speed of light). It was the first device that made possible instantaneous point-to-point communication at huge distances. The word telegraph comes from Greek words meaning “to write at a distance.” It was also the first technology to use digital signals—dots and dashes.Using a device to vary the time an electric current was sent across the wires, the telegraph made point-to-point communication possible by sending codes across the wires. Samuel Morse’s code of telegraphic dots and dashes, still in use today, is the most famous.

IM3-3

Cultural Impact of the Telegraph

Because of the telegraph:

• by 1850, almost every city in the U.S. western frontier was linked with other cities

• in 1866, a trans-Atlantic cable was put into place to connect America with Europe

Parallel to the expansion of the railroads, the telegraph helped change the way we moved goods, coordinated services (particularly military actions), and helped speed up communication between buyers and sellers. Because of near-instant communication, market prices between cities were standardized and stabilized. The telegraph also affected the flow of news, making it both possible and a commercial “must” to carry up-to-the-day’s events from far distant points. News stories also became shorter due to the fact that telegraph services charged by the word.

Government and Media

Unlike other countries where the telegraph was seen as an extension of the postal service, and therefore under logical control and operation of the government, the United States followed a model of private ownership and commercial development.

A Change in Perspective

The telegraph changed how people thought of distance; as the new device reconfigured old concepts of space and time, every “there” became a “here.” We began thinking of our world, as mass media writer Marshall McLuhan came to describe it, as a global village. Thanks to the telegraph system, most countries on the planet became inextricably linked together.

Soon after the telegraph, the telephone began linking people together by voice, eliminating the need to understand telegraphic codes. Its ability to network and offer private communications made it a “must have” in homes and businesses. And just as big business came to dominate the telegraph industry (Western Union), AT&T (which later acquired Western Union) quickly became the giant of the telephone industry.

CAPTURING THE IMAGE:PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOTION PICTURES

Early Technological Development

Two things are needed to permanently store an image:

• a way to focus light rays from a subject onto a surface

• a way to permanently alter that surface

IM3-4

In the 16th century artists discovered that they could project an inverted image of a subject in the end of a dark box through a pinhole at the other end of the box, a device called the camera obscura (dark chamber).

In the 1830s, Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre found a way to capture images on glass plates treated with silver iodide. Early photos (Daguerreotypes) required long exposure times, and were particularly suitable for portraits. At about the same time William Fox Talbot found a way to store images (and subsequently produce multiple copies) on paper. In the 1890s, George Eastman introduced and marketed his new box camera, thus making photography accessible to the masses.

Photorealism and Mathew Brady

Brady was the first to capture war extensively on film. His photographs of the U.S. Civil War gave a grisly, rather than glorified, record of war.

Photography also affected art, freeing artists to interpret the world and events in new and unique ways. Photography itself became its own art form, however, and spawned such noted photographers as Alfred Steiglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, and Edward Steichen.

Photography’s Influence on Mass Culture

Once in the hands of the masses, photography enabled people to create a permanent record of their personal histories. Printing advances made it easy to publish photographs in magazines and newspapers, creating a new profession – photojournalism. The 1920s saw a surge in time-saving devices, and the spread of photographic news added to that movement; Americans could now see, rather than have to read, newsworthy events. Our definition of news changed, too, and became visually biased; news became that which could be shown. More recently, the use of modern cell phone cameras has become very popular and has raised privacy concerns.

Pictures in Motion

Helped by the emergence of three significant trends (industrialization, urbanization, and immigration), the demand for film entertainment flourished in crude store-front theaters around the 1900s. By 1910 there were over 10,000 of these nickelodeons, which helped create the motion picture industry.

Motion Pictures and American Culture

Eventually, only the large companies who could afford to produce feature length films survived. They soon dominated the production, distribution, and exhibition of movies. The film industry forever altered our concept of leisure time activities. Hollywood produced cultural icons, and the movies helped bring about the notion of a popular culture.

Although film was primarily an entertainment medium, it also influenced journalism in the form of newsreels, ten-minute short takes of various news, sports, weather, and human interest stories. Dying out in the 1950s under pressure from TV news, newsreels continue to influence

IM3-5

the conventions of broadcast news reporting.

NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT AT HOME:RADIO AND TELEVISION BROADCASTING

Radio was the first medium to bring live entertainment into the home. In World War I military planners quickly saw radio’s applicability to warfare, thus encouraging both research and development in the medium while at the same time ending some long-standing patent wars that had delayed radio’s development.

Radio Broadcasting

By the 1930s, broadcasting became a national craze. Modern radio was born in the Roaring Twenties out of vigorous economic conditions that easily allowed radio to support itself with advertising.

Radio growth boomed, and as a result the government was forced to intervene in 1927 by establishing the Federal Radio Commission to regulate radio’s technical side. The FRC and its successor the Federal Communications Commission generally take a hands-off approach to radio content, leaving radio’s fortunes in the hands of business.

Paralleling an era of newspaper consolidation, two national radio networks (later three) emerged. Radio content quickly moved toward mass appeal programs, which provided huge audiences for major advertisers. During the 1930s, economic pressures from the Great Depression led many out-of-work Vaudeville performers to enter radio, thus increasing the level of professionalism and appeal of network programming. By the late 1930s, radio became a more important source of news than the newspaper.

Cultural Impact of Radio

• helped popularize different kinds of music

• introduced a new entertainment genre, the soap opera, which by 1940 accounted for some 60 percent of all daytime network programming

• was first medium to introduce mass content aimed at children, thus recognizing children as a viable commercial market

• was first to introduce situation comedies, a program genre that is a staple on television

• news came of age in the 1930s-40s as a result of serious world events

• personalized news, giving rise to trusted and well-known news celebrities

• changed how Americans spent their free time – by the 1930s-40s, radio had become the prime source of American entertainment and news during the early evening hours known as prime time

IM3-6

Television Broadcasting

Halted during WW II, television’s growth surged during the prosperous era of the early 1950s. Pent up consumer demand fueled spending following the war years. Sales of TV sets took off (it took only 10 years for TVs to be in 85 percent of U.S. homes), and an increasing amount of American leisure time was now being spent in front of the TV set.

Cultural Impact of TV

Television is in 99 percent of all households, where the set is on for an average of over eight hours a day. It has become our third largest time consumer (third only to sleep and work), and in the process it has transformed almost every aspect of our culture, from politics, to religion, to news, and to the way we learn.

Today we routinely expect live coverage of events from anywhere at anytime. Time and space no longer seem important, and we have all come to share a national, even global, consciousness through the common visual icons provided by television – President Kennedy's funeral, the Apollo moon landings, the Challenger explosion, the planes striking the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the BP undersea oil leak.

THE DIGITAL REVOLUTIONNicholas Negroponte, MIT’s Media Laboratory Director, summed up the digital revolution as the difference between atoms and bits. Information, once solely comprised of atoms (material goods such as paper, film, tapes, and CDs) and moved to and from the marketplace relatively slowly, is rapidly being replaced by the instantaneous transfer of bits – electronic zeros and ones.

Digital technology is a system that encodes information – sound, text, data, graphics and video — into a series of on-and-off pulses, denoted as zeros and ones. Once digitized, information can easily be copied and transported at extremely low costs. Digital technology and the Internet have triggered a revolution in the way information is stored and transmitted.

The Digital Revolution has not only affected mass media, but also general business owners. It has empowered the individual audience member. There are numerous social and cultural implications of the digital age:

• the notion of what “community” means may have to be rethought, with relationships that can be formed on the basis of needs and interests rather than locale

• digital technology allows everyone to be a mass communicator, which is having a huge impact on how people get news, opinion, and entertainment

• the digital age might mean significant changes for politics; perhaps representative democracy could be rivaled by a digital democracy made possible by direct and instantaneous links between the people and their government

• the arts have entered the digital age

IM3-7

On the downside:

• the digital revolution has resulted in an information glut

• there’s the problem of the digital divide, or the problem of the “have” and “have-nots” –those who can afford the technology and have the training to use it, and those who can’t and don’t

MOBILE MEDIACell phones, laptop computers, and e-readers share common characteristics:

• they use wireless technology

• they are portable and allow users access to information from anywhere

• they are interconnected and allow users to hook into the worldwide phone network or the Internet

• they blur the distinction between mass communication and interpersonal communication

The dominant TV and computer screens in American life have been joined by a third screen: cell phones. This third screen could drastically transform traditional media and American culture.

Mobile media serve some of the traditional media functions discussed in Chapter 2.

Surveillance. Audiences no longer need to turn to radio or TV stations for weather, traffic, sports, etc. They can subscribe to services which send the information they want to their cell phones. Additionally, cell phones with still or video cameras can post images on the Web in seconds, before the media can arrive on the scene. Text messages can spread news. In the future we will all be reporters.

Entertainment Almost all cell phones come with games. Many have MP3 players. TV and film content can be downloaded to phones and iPods.

Linkage. Being connected to millions of other people all over the world can make everyday life easier. We can read documents, send email, etc. faster and less expensively than ever before. Cell phones can increase safety and security – more than 30 percent of all 911 calls come from cell phones.

Culture. New rules of etiquette were developed after cell phones became widespread (turn off the phone in movies, don’t shout, etc.). The devices themselves have symbolic properties and users customize their phones to reflect their individuality or status. Family life is altered – cell phones have given rise to mobile parenting, or parental monitoring of children via phone rather than in person. Cell phones have also created a phenomenon called time softening. You call your friend to say you’re running late. If you’re in contact, are you really late?

IM3-8

However, mobile media have a downside. Driving while talking on the phone can lead to accidents. Attacks have been coordinated over cell phones. Camera phones raise privacy issues. Cell phones can intrude into conversations, classrooms and other interactions. And the new mobile media can be expensive, potentially increasing the digital divide.

SOCIAL MEDIAThe first tool for social media was the telephone. The birth of the Internet opened up new channels for social media: SixDegrees.com, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, among others. The primary impetus behind the growth of social media was the development of the World Wide Web.

Although social media is still evolving, it:

• has changed the idea of community

• has changed how we define privacy

• has made history more permanent

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONSOverall themes in mass communication within include:

• it’s difficult to accurately predict the ultimate use of any new medium

• it appears that the emergence of any new communication advance changes but does not make extinct those advances that came before it

-- End of Chapter 3 --

IM3-9