Evolution of Media
Theory of Media Evolution
According to
McLuhan, it’s not technological abnormality that demands our attention, since
it’s hard not to notice the new and different. Instead, we need to focus on our
everyday experience of technology. A medium shapes us because we partake of it
over and over until it becomes an extension of ourselves. Because every medium
emphasizes different senses and encourages different habits, engaging medium
day after day conditions the senses to take in some stimuli and not register
others. A medium that emphasizes the ear
over the eye alters the ratios of sense perception. Like, a blind man who begins
to develop a heightened sense of hearing, society is shaped according with the
dominant medium of the day.
It’s the
ordinariness of media that makes them invisible. When a new medium enters
society, there’s a period of time in which we’re aware of its novelty. It’s
only when it fades into the background of our lives that we’re truly subjected
to its patterns- that is, its environment influence. In the same way that a
girl growing up in California may unconsciously absorb the West Coast attitude,
a boy growing up in our electronic age may unconsciously absorb a digital attitude.
Complexity of
Environments
In the “An
Inconvenient Truth”, Gore offers scientific evidence that the planet is experiencing
a critical change in climate. Even when global warming skeptics grudgingly
admit a rise in average temperature, they suggest that there is no direct
relationship between this change in climate change and the emissions of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities. Because environments are incredibly
intricate, there are always a number of factors and conditions that opponents
can claim are contributing to the climate. Systems theorist call this overdetermination,
or equifinality. When it comes to the environment there is no easy formula for
a cause-and-effect relationship such as global warming increase 0.0001 degrees
for every million gallons of gasoline burned.
This lack of
one-to-one relationship is also why it’s so easy to ignore our contributions to
global warming. If the sun got brighter and hotter every time we used our cell
phone, we’d surely take notice. Understanding the influential relationship
between the media environment and society is a subtle yet crucial endeavor that
demands a complex sense of both incremental and sudden change. For this reason,
McLuhan traced the major ecological shifts in media throughout history.
A MEDIA ANALYSIS OF
HUMAN HISTORY
McLuhan was
critical of social observers who analyzed the Western world but bypassed the
effects of symbolic environments – be they oral, print, or electronic. He
specifically accused modern scholars of being “ostrichlike” in refusing to
acknowledge the revolutionary impact of electronic media on the sensory
experience of contemporary society.
In the figure
below, McLuhan divided all human history into four (4) periods, or epochs – a tribal
age, literate age, print age, and an electronic age. According to McLuhan, the
crucial inventions that changed life on this planet were the phonetic alphabet,
the printing press, and the telegraph. In each case the word wrenched from one
era into the next because of new developments in media technology. Those of us
born in the twentieth century are living through one of those turbulent
transitions – from the tail end of the print age to the very beginning of the
electronic age.
1. The Tribal Age: An Acoustic Place in
History
 |
According to McLuhan, the tribal village was an acoustic place where the
senses of hearing, touch, and smell were developed far beyond the ability to
visualize. In untamed settings, hearing is more valuable than seeing because it
allows you to be more immediately aware of your surroundings. With sight, we
are limited to direction and distance. We can only sense what is clearly in
front of us. If a preying animal is behind us or hidden behind a tree, we are
hopelessly unaware without sensitivity to sound or smell. Hearing and smelling
provide a sense of that which we cannot see, a crucial ability in the tribal
age.
The omnidirectional quality of sound also enhances community. The spoken
word is primarily a communal experience. To tell a secret, we must whisper or
speak directly in someone’s ear or make sure that no one else is listening. The
sense of sound works against privatization. Listening to someone speak in a
group is a unifying act. Everyone hears at the same time.
The spoken word is also immediate and alive. It exists only at the
moment it is heard. There is no sense of the word that something fixed or
objectified. Spoken words lack of materiality. In order to keep an idea or an
event alive, it must constantly be shared or reiterated and passed down. The
ethereal quality of doesn’t allow for speech analysis. In a tribal age, hearing
is believing.
McLuhan claimed that “primitive” people led richer and more complex
lives that their literate descendants because the ear, unlike the eye,
encourages a more holistic sense of the world. There is a deeper feeling of community
and greater awareness of the surrounding existence. The acoustic environment
also fosters more passion and spontaneity. In that world of surround sound,
everything is more immediate, more present, and more actual.
Then someone invented the alphabet.
2. The Age of Literacy: A Visual Point of View
Turning sounds into visible objects radically altered the symbolic
environment. Suddenly, the eye became the heir apparent. Hearing diminished in
value and quality. To disagree with this assessment merely illustrates McLuhan’s
belief that a private, left -brain “point of view” becomes possible in a world
that encourages the visual practice of reading texts.
Words fixed on a page detached meaning from the immediacy of context. In
an acoustic environment, taking something out of context is nearly impossible.
In the age of literacy it is reality. Both writer and reader are both separate
from the text. Words are no longer alive and immediate. They can be read and
reread. They can be thoroughly analyzed. Hearing is no longer trustworthy. “Seeing
it in writing” becomes proof that it is true.
McLuhan also claimed that the phonetic alphabet establish the line as
the organizing principle in life. In writing, letter follows letter in a
connected, orderly line. Logic is modeled on that step-by-step linear
progression. According to McLuhan, when literate people say “I don’t follow
you,” they mean, “I don’t think you are logical”. He alleged that the invention
of the alphabet fostered the sudden emergence of mathematics, science, and philosophy
in ancient Greece. He cited the political upheaval in colonial Africa as
twentieth- century evidence that literacy triggers an ear-to-eye switch that
isolates the reader. When oppressed people learn to read, they became
independent thinkers.
3. The Print Age: Prototype of the Industrial
Revolution
He saw other unintended side effects of Guttenberg’s invention. The homogenization
of fluid regional tongues into a fixed national language was followed closely by
the rise of nationalism. Concurring with these new sense of unification was a
countering sense of separation and aloneness.
Many libraries have the words “The truth will set you free” carved in
stone above the main entrance. From McLuhan’s perspective, libraries provide
readers with freedom to be alienated from others and from the immediacy of
their surroundings.
4. The Electronic Age: The Rise of Global
Village
With the tap-tap-tap of the telegraph, the power of the printed word
lost its bearings. Of course, Samuel Morse’s invention was only the first of
the new electronic media devices that would make corner Radio shack seem, to
previous generations like a magic shop.
McLuhan insisted that electronic media are retribalizing the human race.
Instant communication has returned us to pre-alphabetic oral tradition where
sound and touch are more important that sight. We’ve gone “back to the future”
to become a village unlike any other previous village. We’re now a global
village.
Electronic media bring us in touch with everyone, everywhere,
instantaneously. Whereas the book extended the eye, electronic circuitry extended
the central nervous system. Constant contact with the world becomes daily
reality. All-at-one-ness is our state of being. Closed human systems no longer
exist. The rumble of empty stomachs in Bombay and roadside bombs in Baghdad
vibrate in the living rooms of Boston. For us, the first post literate
generation, privacy is either a luxury, or curse of the past. The planet is
like a general store where nosy people keep track of everyone else’s business –
a 12 – way party line or a “Dear Abby” column writ large. “The New tribalism is
one where everyone’s business is everyone else’s and where we all are somewhat
testy.” Citizens of the world are back in acoustic space.
Linear logic is useless in the electronic society that McLuhan
described. Acoustic people no longer inquire, “Do you see my point?” Instead we
ask “How does that grab you?” What we feel is more important than what we
think.
5. The Digital Age: Rewiring the Global
Village
When wired, magazine on digital culture, was launched in 1992, the
editors declared Marshall McLuhan the magazine’s “patron saint.” There was a
sense that another revolution was looming, as many returned to the words of
McLuhan for guidance. However, digital technology doesn’t pull the plug on the
electronic age, because, quite frankly, it still needs its power source. The
digital age is wholly electronic.
With that said, there’s no doubt that the introduction of digital
technology is altering the electronic environment. The mass age of electronic
media is becoming increasingly personalized. Instead of one (1) unified
electronic tribe, we have a growing number of digital tribes forming around the
most specialized ideas, beliefs, values, interests, and fetishes. Instead of
mass consciousness, which McLuhan viewed rather favorably, we have the emergence
of tribal warfare mentality. Despite the contentious nature of this
tribalization of differences, many see benefit in the resulting
decentralization of power and control.
Were he alive today, McLuhan undoubtedly would have spotted other ways
that digital media are altering our present environment. He would probably
speculate on whether the electronic environment is the destiny of humankind, or
if there’s another media force waiting to upset the ecology of the previous
century.
6. Ethical Reflection: Faustian Bargain
McLuhan’s probes stimulated others to ponder whether specific media
environments were beneficial or destructive for those immersed in them. Neil
Postman founded the media ecology program at New York University and was
regarded by many as McLuhan’s heir apparent. Like McLuhan, Postman believed
that the forms of media regulate and even dictate what kind of content the form
of a given medium can carry. For example, smoke signals implicitly discourage
philosophical argument.
Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to
express ideas on the nature of existence and even if they were not, a Cherokee
philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached
his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the
content.
But unlike McLuhan, Postman believed that
the primary task of media ecology is to make moral judgements. “To be quite
honest about it,” he one proclaimed, “I don’t see any point in studying media unless
one does so within a moral or ethical context.”
According to Postman, a new technology
always presents us with a Faustian bargain – a potential deal with the devil.
As Postman was pond of saying, “Technology giveth and technology taketh away… A
new technology sometimes creates more that it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys
more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.” His media ecology approach
asks:
What are moral implications of this bargain?
Are consequences more humanistic or antihumanistic? Do we, as a society, gain
more than we lose, or do we lose more than we gain?
Postman argued that television is
detrimental to society because it has led to the loss of serious public
discourse. Television changes the form of information” from discursive to
nondiscursive, from propositional to presentational, from rationalistic to
emotive. “Sesame Street, 60 Minutes, and Survivor all share the same ethos – amusement.
The environment of televisions turns everything into entertainment and everyone
into juvenile adults. Triviality trumps seriousness.
Shortly before the 2004 U.S.
presidential election, Daily Show comedian Jon Stewart shocked TV audiences by
confronting the host of Crossfire for hurting public discourse in America. He
suggested that their program yurned debate into theater and “partisan hackery”.
Some compared Stewart’s criticism to Neil Postman’s sentiments in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Stewart’s
criticism seemed warranted, but it was significantly different than Postman’s
critique of television new shows. Whereas Stewart argued that shows like Crossfire should be more responsible,
Postman believed that, on television panelists are unable o respond in a
serious manner. Crossfire which is no
longer on the air, was bad at public discourse because, for a while, it was
good at being television – silly and shallow.
Reference:
Khan, R. E.
(2015). Media and Information Literacy Handbook.
In R.
E. Khan, Media and Information Literacy
Handbook
(p.8).
Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing Inc.
Researched by:
Mc Ronel Olivario & Ralph Aure
What Does Media Do for Us?
Media fulfills several basic roles in
our society. Media can provide information and education. Information can come
in many forms, and it may sometimes be difficult to separate from
entertainment. Today, newspapers and news-oriented television and radio
programs make available stories from across the globe. Books and magazines
provide a more in-depth look at a wide range of subjects. The free online
encyclopedia Wikipedia has articles on topics from presidential nicknames to
child prodigies to tongue twisters in various languages. The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) has posted free lecture notes, exams, and audio
and video recordings of classes on its Open Course Ware website, allowing
anyone with an Internet connection access to world-class professors.
Another
useful aspect of media is its ability to act as a public forum for the
discussion of important issues. In newspapers or other periodicals, letters to
the editor allow readers to respond to journalists or to voice their opinions
on the issues of the day. These letters were an important part of U.S.
newspapers even when the nation was a British colony, and they have served as a
means of public discourse ever since. The Internet is a fundamentally
democratic medium that allows everyone who can get online the ability to
express their opinions through, for example, blogging or podcasting—though
whether anyone will hear is another question.
Media also can be used to monitor government, business, and other
institutions.
History of Media
Researched by:
Kathleen Barbosa
The Disadvantages of Evolution of Media
Disadvantages
1. It leads to individualism. People spend too much time on
the internet and watching television. As a result, socialization with friends,
family and neighbors is affected.
2. Some media contents are not suitable for children.
Limiting children’s access to such content can be difficult.
3. Newspaper is geographically selective.
4. Increase in advertisements in television and radio is
making them less attractive.
5. Internet as a form of media opens up possibilities of
imposters, fraud and hacking.
6. Media can be addictive, e.g. some television programs and
internet. This can lead to decrease in people’s productivity.
7. Health problems. Prolonged watching of television can
lead to eyesight problems and radio listening using earphones exposes one to
possible hearing defects.
8. It glamorize drugs and alcohol. Some programs make the
use of these things appear cool’.
9. It can lead to personal injury. Some people decide to
follow the stunts that are showcased in the media. This can lead to injuries.
10. It can lead to ruin of reputation. It is possible for
one to create an anonymous account. Such accounts can be used to for malicious
reasons such as spreading rumors. This can lead to ruin of reputation of an
individual or a company.
Research by:
Piero Gutierrez
How does media affect our lives?
Media plays very a
important role and has influence in virtually every aspect of our lives. It is
considered as the best source to know about the happenings of world. Newspaper,
magazine, radio, television and internet are the different types of media. It
greatly affects our lives because media has the power to influence our
thoughts. This influence is sometimes positive and sometimes negative.
Negative Effects
Media
is the most influential one for the people to resort violence. Studies have
suggested that the exposure to violence on television, movies and video games
make the children more aggressive, fearful, less trusting and more accepting of
violence. This does not mean that they will start bringing weapons in the
school but they will be more aggressive and less trusting towards their
friends, teachers and siblings. Some of them may carry out same violent act
that they see in the violent programs and eventually become more disposed to
commit acts of violence.
In the past,
news about some murder, accidents etc. were used to be published in simple
sentences or we can say in a way to just inform the people about a particular
happening. But now all has changed. Today news is published in an exaggerated
manner to attract the attention of people. This is against the ethics of journalism.
So instead of being constructive, media plays a destructive role. People who
read much of these news or view excessive violence on television, trust less
and take the world more frightening than it is.
Sex and violence
in media also lead towards the sex crimes in the society. It traumatizes
youngsters which result in abuse in the home, streets, towards children etc.
Some
advertisements try to influence the people by telling them the importance of
branded items. As a result children and youngsters become status conscious and
thinks that by using these items they can show their high status in the
society. To fulfill their needs or to impress others they many times go violent
to get money.
Positive effects
Every
coin has two sides, similarly media also affects positively on the society and
people.
Earth
has become a global village due to media. We can know about any part of the
world within minutes through television and internet. Media is the best way to
spread knowledge, information and news from one part of the world to the other.
Media educates
the people to know about their basic rights and how to use them. It is also a
link between the government and people because all the policies and activities
of government are conveyed through media. It has such a great influence that it
can make or break government.
Education programs help the people to learn anything through internet,
television and radio. Children can develop their skills and intellect by
watching these programs because audio and visual media makes it quite easy to
understand.
Advertisements
help us to know the different products in the market and we can easily make our
choices according to our needs.
Weather forecast
programs tell us about the weather so that we can take precautions or plan accordingly.
So we can say that media greatly affects our
lives both negatively and positively. It must give us factual information and
fair analysis of a situation, news etc. Media also works in the way to help,
liberate and empower the people.
Reference:
http://www.letusfindout.com/how-does-media-affect-our-lives/
Researched by:
Ralph Aure
Technological Transitions Shape Media Industries
New media technologies both spring from and
cause social changes. For this reason, it can be difficult to neatly sort the
evolution of media into clear causes and effects. Did radio fuel the
consumerist boom of the 1920s, or did the radio become wildly popular because
it appealed to a society that was already exploring consumerist tendencies?
Probably a little bit of both. Technological innovations such as the steam
engine, electricity, wireless communication, and the Internet have all had
lasting and significant effects on American culture. As media historians Asa
Briggs and Peter Burke note, every crucial invention came with “a change in
historical perspectives.” Electricity altered the way people thought about time
because work and play were no longer dependent on the daily rhythms of sunrise
and sunset; wireless communication collapsed distance; the Internet
revolutionized the way we store and retrieve information.
The
transatlantic telegraph cable made nearly instantaneous communication between
the United States and Europe possible for the first time in 1858.
Amber Case – 1858 trans-Atlantic telegraph cable route –
CC BY-NC 2.0.
The contemporary
media age can trace its origins back to the electrical telegraph, patented in
the United States by Samuel Morse in 1837. Thanks to the telegraph,
communication was no longer linked to the physical transportation of messages;
it didn’t matter whether a message needed to travel 5 or 500 miles. Suddenly,
information from distant places was nearly as accessible as local news, as
telegraph lines began to stretch across the globe, making their own kind of
World Wide Web. In this way, the telegraph acted as the precursor to much of
the technology that followed, including the telephone, radio, television, and
Internet. When the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, allowing nearly
instantaneous communication from the United States to Europe, the London Times described
it as “the greatest discovery since that of Columbus, a vast enlargement…given
to the sphere of human activity.”
Not long
afterward, wireless communication (which eventually led to the development of
radio, television, and other broadcast media) emerged as an extension of
telegraph technology. Although many 19th-century inventors, including Nikola
Tesla, were involved in early wireless experiments, it was Italian-born
Guglielmo Marconi who is recognized as the developer of the first practical
wireless radio system. Many people were fascinated by this new invention. Early
radio was used for military communication, but soon the technology entered the
home. The burgeoning interest in radio inspired hundreds of applications for
broadcasting licenses from newspapers and other news outlets, retail stores,
schools, and even cities. In the 1920s, large media networks—including the
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System
(CBS)—were launched, and they soon began to dominate the airwaves. In 1926,
they owned 6.4 percent of U.S. broadcasting stations; by 1931, that number had
risen to 30 percent.
In the 1960s, the concept of a useful portable computer
was still a dream; huge mainframes were required to run a basic operating
system.
In 1969,
management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that the next major technological
innovation would be an electronic appliance that would revolutionize the way
people lived just as thoroughly as Thomas Edison’s light bulb had. This
appliance would sell for less than a television set and be “capable of being
plugged in wherever there is electricity and giving immediate access to all the
information needed for school work from first grade through college.” Although
Drucker may have underestimated the cost of this hypothetical machine, he was
prescient about the effect these machines—personal computers—and the Internet
would have on education, social relationships, and the culture at large. The
inventions of random access memory (RAM) chips and microprocessors in the 1970s
were important steps to the Internet age. As Briggs and Burke note, these
advances meant that “hundreds of thousands of components could be carried on a
microprocessor.” The reduction of many different kinds of content to digitally
stored information meant that “print, film, recording, radio and television and
all forms of telecommunications [were] now being thought of increasingly as
part of one complex.” This process, also known as convergence, is a force
that’s affecting media today.
Reference:
Researched by:
Lester Alva
Media evolution
1. Media Evolution
2. Why is media so important?• All media have their
importance and usefulness. The media serve to keep us informed of current
issues.• And the development of a better society through an informed public
opinion.
3. • The beginning of human communication dates back to
ancient cave paintings, drawn maps, and writing.
4. • However, today we associate the word mass media to computers,
internet, newspapers, magazines, mobile phones ...
5. • The highest level media revolutions, doubts are
being the invention of paper, phones, television, radio, computer and of course
the internet.
6. • Over time, the mass media has evolved, and the
reaction of society and accessibility to them.
7. In the Caves• Man has always had a need to communicate
8. Earliest forms of writing• Papyrus : • Role :Appeared
in egypt and its Originated in china in theage is unknown. year 123 a.C
9. First printing press• Gutenberg was the first European
to use the impression in 1439
10. Newspapers• In the West, the first newspaper appeared
even in antiquity, under the command of Julius Caesar in ancient Rome.
11. Phone• Device invented around 1860 by Italian Antonio
Meucci.
12. Radio• Was invented by the German Heinrich Hertz in
1888.
13. Television• The first semi-mechanical analogue
television was shown in London in February 1924, and later moving images on
October 1925.• The color television came in 1954..
14. Computer• The first electro-mechanical computer built
by Konrad Zuse in 1910-1995.
15. Internet• The origin of the global communications
network, as it is also known, was in the military.
Research by:
Jimuel Salcedo
Key Takeaways
·Media fulfills several roles in society,
including the following:
· entertaining and providing an outlet for the
imagination,
· educating and informing,
· serving as a public forum for the discussion of
important issues, and
· acting as a watchdog for government, business,
and other institutions.
· Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing
press enabled the mass production of media, which was then industrialized by
Friedrich Koenig in the early 1800s. These innovations led to the daily
newspaper, which united the urbanized, industrialized populations of the 19th
century.
·In the 20th century, radio allowed advertisers
to reach a mass audience and helped spur the consumerism of the 1920s—and the
Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, television boomed in the
United States and abroad, though its concentration in the hands of three major
networks led to accusations of homogenization. The spread of cable and
subsequent deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s led to more channels, but not
necessarily to more diverse ownership.
·Transitions from one technology to another have
greatly affected the media industry, although it is difficult to say whether
technology caused a cultural shift or resulted from it. The ability to make
technology small and affordable enough to fit into the home is an important
aspect of the popularization of new technologies.
Research by:
Godjemar Calinao
Theories of Media Evolution
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
—George Santayana
History does not repeat, but it does rhyme.
—Mark Twain
Our muse for this volume might well be the two-faced god
Janus of the Roman pantheon who famously looked both forward and backward, the
patron of beginnings, transitions, and new plantings. His name is the
linguistic root for the month we call January. We will make the case here that
the ongoing digital revolution in present-day media technology represents an
important new beginning in public life and is likely to have a fundamental
influence on how individuals, social groups, and societies define themselves,
how individuals come to know the world around them, and whether further
generations succeed in sustaining an energetic public sphere and open
marketplace of ideas. If these technical transitions offer us an opportunity to
collectively construct institutions and digital systems that best serve our
shared (although frequently contested) ideals of the public good, how might we
proceed most thoughtfully, realistically, and successfully? Our muse suggests a
very careful look at the recent past. If we want to understand how the Internet
is likely to evolve, perhaps we should take a long, hard look at the bizarre
evolution of the infrastructures and institutions of the past
century—newspapers, telephony, movies, radio, television, satellite-based cable
TV, early digital networks.
Bizarre? That is a rather strong descriptive term to try
to capture the essence of entire century of technical, economic, institutional,
and cultural history. The term implies a notion of something freakishly out of
the ordinary, unexpected, weird, not according to plan. At first glance, such a
characterization would seem to be a poor match for what we know of newspapers,
radio, and TV—humdrum, predictable, taken-for-granted elements of our daily
lives. The last two centuries trace a now celebrated succession of genius
inventors. Samuel F. B. Morse invented the telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell the
telephone, Edison movies, Marconi radio, Farnsworth TV. These heroic
visionaries knew what they were doing and their visions changed our lives. Yes?
Well, not exactly. As we will see in the pages ahead,
most of those we now find it convenient to celebrate as genius inventors had
notions about what they were building that turned out to be at some variance
from what eventually evolved into working technologies and institutions of mass
communication. When we take the time to look back carefully, we come to
understand that it could have been otherwise, sometimes dramatically so. What
we assume to be an inevitable technical progression is actually the result of
accidental sequences of events and diverse political battles won and lost. In
other words—bizarre happenstance.
It could have been otherwise. What we know as newspapers,
radio, and television were socially constructed, not technologically determined
by the nature of printing and of electromagnetic transmission through the air.
That lesson will become a key element of our look forward to a world defined by
ubiquitous digital broadband nodes and networks. The general term for our
approach to these curiously repeating patterns is the social
construction of technology (frequently abbreviated SCOT), a model of
historical analysis popularized by Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch in their
influential 1987 volume on the technological innovation. SCOT is a theoretical
perspective, an overarching label for a series of more focused theories about
the interaction of cultural presumptions, the radical new ideas of innovators
and the constraints exerted by entrenched interests and political economy of
technical change. We will introduce each of these theories briefly in this
introductory chapter and then they will be put to work in the chapters that
follow.
Bijker and colleagues reviewed a broad array of
technologies and historical transitions. Here we will focus on seven dominant
modes of communication, primarily mass communication that have in many ways
come to define the character of American industrial society over the last two
centuries, as summarized in figure 1. We have assigned each of
Fig. 1.
Timeline of American Media
these media an official birthday, although as we will see
shortly there is typically ambiguity, controversy, and a delay of varying
numbers of years between technical invention and social utilization. We shall
see that the history of innovation brings to light many examples of
considerable confusion, false starts, and conflict.
References
Anderson, Chris. 2006. The Long Tail: Why the Future of
Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.
Bagdikian, Ben H. 2004. The New Media Monopoly. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Research by;
Harly Anca
A Succession of the New Media of Their Time
The steam-driven cylindrical
rotary press made the modern mass-circulation newspaper possible. So although
we celebrate Gutenberg’s innovations of the fifteenth century, we will
designate 1833 as the historical birth year of the modern newspaper because of
Richard Hoe’s invention of the modern rotary press and Benjamin Day’s dramatic
decision to sell the New York Sun for only a penny, making it
economically available to a mass readership. For telephony we use 1876, the
year of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent application. In the early days of
telephony many anticipated its use as a broadcast public-address style
technology for concerts and speeches, a social definition that would strike
most modern telephone customers as quaint. It would take three-quarters of a
century before in-home telephony started to reach near universal penetration.
The technology of motion picture photography and projection was developed by
the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison in the 1890s, but to signal the birth of
commercial motion pictures we point to thePage 4year 1913, when the first
commercial motion picture venue opened in the United States and movies moved
from the nickelodeon arcade to the theater.
KDKA operated by Westinghouse in
Pittsburgh is credited with being the first commercial radio station with
regularly scheduled broadcasts in 1920. The corresponding date for commercial
television was 1941, when NBC and CBS commenced limited wartime television
broadcasts in New York. Cable, born originally as CATV, for community
antenna TV, was first tested in the mountains near Philadelphia in 1948. It
would take almost thirty years for cable to move from retransmitting a few
regional TV stations to multiple channels of independent television
programming. And finally, we mark the birth of the modern Web with the release
of the first user-friendly web browser at the University of Illinois in 1993.
The Mosaic browser built on the recent ideas of Tim Berners-Lee and, of course,
the fundamental technologies of the Internet Protocol invented three decades
earlier for military purposes. The seven chapters following this introduction
look through a variety of theoretical lenses to review the overlapping
histories and futures of these media, and the two subsequent chapters address
public policy questions that arise as each of these media confront an
increasingly digital world.
Figure 1 arrays each of these media in a straightforward
timeline from their designated birth years. It is an uncomplicated diagram
because for the time span of each medium, the basic technology, the stylized
content, and the social definition of appropriate media use was a largely
unchanged and consistent historical arc. Newspapers shifted from a flirtation
with dramatically yellow journalism to the modern principles of professional
journalistic practice at the turn of the century. Broadcast telephony never
took off. Movies added sound in 1926. Radio migrated from the living room to
the bedroom, kitchen, and car in response to competition from television in the
1950s. But the basic social definition of reading a newspaper or listening to
radio or watching television remained unchanged.
Figure 1 depicts each medium as
an arrow moving forward into the twenty-first century, but therein lies a
central puzzle and a principal motivation for this volume. Many observers are
predicting that these historically defined media will converge into a single
digital medium—the medium we now refer to as the Internet or simply the Web. We
see thePage 5outlines of this process in the multipurpose portable
devices like the iPhone or Blackberry that function as telephones, cameras, web
browsers, and audio and video players. Skeptics have raised doubts about this
convergence, pointing out that newspapers survived the advent of radio news in
the 1920s and movies survived competition from television. But this
technological revolution may represent a different historical case because the
Internet does not simply compete with its predecessors, it subsumes them. Is
such a process really under way? Will it represent a collective opportunity for
us to review the architecture of public communication to ensure that it best
serves the public interest? The tradition of American mass communication is
famously an intersection of the civil public commons and the realm of
advertising and private enterprise. Will Internet radio and Internet newspapers
simply mimic their commercial predecessors or develop new voices and functions
perhaps derived from social networking web sites? Our strategy to assess these
important questions is to draw on the recent past and exploit the best standing
hypotheses and theories of technological evolution the literature provides us.
This first chapter will introduce the toolkit of concepts
and theories the authors in this volume variously put to work. Toynbee famously
chastised historiography as just the documentation of “one damned thing after
another.” We aspire to a somewhat higher level of organization. A frequent
strategy in organizing these compelling tales is the thematic of human
initiative pitted against powerful forces perceiving novelty as threat. Another
strategic approach to theorizing is to focus on structural factors and systemic
dynamics. All of the chapters confront the issue of technology, especially
critical points in technical evolution. These are studies of coevolving media
institutions, human initiative, technological capacities, and a changing
society. I hasten to point out that none of the authors subscribes to any
variant of technological determinism. Unfortunately, this specter of
ill-considered causal attribution continues to plague this field of scholarly
inquiry. Those of us who study changing technologies in historical context have
grown accustomed to addressing this unfortunate and nearly inevitable epithet
in most scholarly forums. None of the authors here succumb to such
technological monism. None diminish the importance of human agency or the
dynamic two-way interaction of technical design and cultural perspective. Most
would agree with Castells’s dictum: “Of course, technology does not determine
society” (1996, 3).
The physical properties of
alternative technical systems, however, doPage 6make a difference. They
prove to be variously constraining and empowering of diverse human activities.
Centralized printing and publishing is by its nature prone to one-way
communication and is subject to censorship. Communication via the Internet is
inherently bidirectional, decentralized, and less easily monitored and
censored. But to constrain or facilitate is not to determine. Ignoring the
character of technological systems is as shortsighted as unthinking
deterministic attribution. The pages ahead will address the interaction of
technical capacity and cultural initiative at length, not as a deterministic
process but rather as a form of coevolution (Durham 1991; Garud and Karnøe
2001). As appropriate, authors use such terminologies as a technological
affordance or socially constructed use to capture
this technological-cultural interaction (Hutchby 2001; Bijker, Hughes, and
Pinch 1987). In some more philosophically oriented analyses of technical
history, the character and directionality of constraining forces is more
central to the analysis. One such tradition of scholarship is actor network
theory, frequently abbreviated ANT (Latour 1987). Latour and colleagues
Michel Callon and John Law may have been reacting in part to the technological
determinism critique and wanted to bring technical properties “back in” to
theorizing without ignoring the critically important elements of social
construction. Another tradition follows from Anthony Giddens’s concept of structuration (1984).
Giddens draws attention to the ironic fact that individual agents are both
constrained by social structures and, through their routine behavior,
powerfully reconstitute these structures. Accordingly, we come to understand
that the power of the traditional mass media relies on the fact of massive
public habitual reliance more than any fundamental technical capacities. As it
turns out, none of our authors use Latour’s or Giddens’s work formally and
explicitly, but the perspectives they have advocated and their concern about
interactive causal connections inform the work in each of these chapters.
The heroes of these stories of
media evolution as they are most often told are those who support innovation,
competition, a vibrant and inclusive public sphere, and an open marketplace of
ideas. These include inventors, innovators, investors, insightful public
servants, policy advocates, academic researchers, philosophers, and risk-taking
entrepreneurs. The requisite villains, as these accounts progress, are the
skeptical conservative forces, energetically protecting their profit margins,
threatened byPage 7and resistant to the prospect of change in traditional
patterns of public communication. The distinction, however, is far from
clear-cut. The leading actors seldom conveniently identify themselves with
white or black hats. Some established (and profitable) institutions provide
important functions very much worth sustaining. One thinks of the importance of
competitive and self-sustaining independent journalism, what we have come to
label the “fourth estate” in modern liberal industrial democracies (Hallin and
Mancini 2004). It is far from clear how independent professional journalism
will sustain itself if the advertising-driven ink-on-paper news business model
fails. One thinks also of numerous institutions associated with sustaining
community arts and indigenous and classical arts and literatures. And some
innovators have designs on constraining diversity, exploiting stereotypes and
extracting oligopolistic profits.
We often confront, as well, two
other forms of potentially self-serving villainy that may transcend the
behavior of individual actors. The questions these behaviors raise are
fundamental to the field of political economy—the study of the border between
political and economic institutions. The first is the prospect of the excesses
of an unconstrained and ill-behaved marketplace. The second is the prospect of
an equivalently unconstrained and repressive political regime. Public
communication and active mass media lie at the core of a successful polity.
Governments regulate spectrum, rules for intellectual property protection,
limitations on public speech, electoral processes, media ownership, and
guidelines for individual privacy. The media marketplace, much more than the
market for, say, golf balls or cardboard boxes, is wholly permeated with political
and regulatory involvement. Historically, it might be modeled as a “tipping” or
“slippery slope” problem—once big business or big government becomes
all-powerful, the prospect of using that power to preclude any challenge to
dominance is irresistibly seductive. Totalitarian state systems that deflect
criticism from citizens and confine the potential of an adversarial and
independent press represent one troubling exemplar (Pool 1973). Correspondingly
dominant capitalist ideology and unchallenged manipulation of political
institutions represents another, one that continues to attract a great deal of
attention in the tradition of critical theory (Habermas 1989; Schiller 1989;
Bagdikian 2004).
References
Beniger, James R. 1986. The Control Revolution:
Technological and Economic Origins of the
Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bijker, Wiebe E., Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch,
eds. 1987. The Social Construction of Technological Systems. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Research by:
Christian Campos & Charles Baliber
