Historical and Cultural Context

Historical and Cultural Context

1. LANGUAGE
The birth of spoken language marked a major development in the evolution of our species. 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 hunter-gatherer societies evolved into more complex agricultural societies, our need for better record keeping intensified.


2. WRITING
Two problems needed to be solved before writing emerged: (1) what symbols to use to represent sounds and ideas, and (2) upon what type of surface could these symbols be recorded.

Sign Writing vs. Phonetic Writing
The first problem was solved in two ways: (1) with systems that used graphic symbols to represent objects, sounds and ideas, e.g., Chinese pictographs and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and (2) with systems that used symbols (later known as alphabet letters) to primarily represent sounds; groups of letters made a word and groups of word made a sentence, a complete thought. The Phoenicians are generally credited for creating the first alphabet. The Romans later modified our alphabet to its present 26 characters.

Clay vs. Paper
Writing surfaces evolved. In Sumeria, soft clay tablets were inscribed with wedge-shaped tool. Egyptians wrote on woven papyrus plants made semi-smooth by rock polishing. Greeks used parchment made from sheep or goat hides; parchment sheets could be stitched together to form scrolls. The Chinese made paper from a pressed pulp made of tree bark and fibrous materials; in use by 100 AD, but unavailable in Europe for another 1,000 years.

Social Impact of Writing:

. created a new division among people; those who could write and read, and those who
  could not, the result was an access or non-access to power garnered through knowledge
. facilitated the birth, growth, and maintenance of powerful ancient empire civilizations
. knowledge could be accumulated by preserving and passing it down to new generations
. laws could be codified and applied consistently throughout the land

The Middle Ages

Began with the fall of Rome in the 6th century. Demand for books continues to rise, but the slow, error-prone, expensive, method of hand-copying each manuscript kept supplies minimal.
Monks in monasteries often took a year to copy just one commissioned book. Mistakes were common and cumulative, and there was no standard book filing or cross-indexing system in use.

By 1150, trade routes were expanding, the idea of universities was emerging, strong central governments began forming, and the need to accumulate information continued to grow. Over the years the demand for more books continued to increase, and eventually book production moved from the religious to the secular arena. Helped by the widespread introduction of paper from China, writing shops, or scriptoria, opened all across the European continent. Nonetheless, supplies were still limited by the number of books that scribes could hand-produce.


3. PRINTING
Though 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

. 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
. information quickly became more accessible to a wider range of people
. more books 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 by 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; helped make possible the Renaissance of the 16th Century
. led to the development of 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 view 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 introduction of moveable type marked the start of what we generally define as mass communication, a critical event in Western history.



4. THE TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE

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.

Cultural Impact of the Telegraph

. by 1850, almost every city on our Western frontier was linked with other cities
. in 1866, the U.S. laid a trans-Atlantic cable connecting 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 rethinking 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.


5. PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOTION PICTURES

Early Technological Development

Two inventions were needed to make photography a reality:

. a way to focus light rays from a subject onto a surface
. a way to permanently store (and copy) those images

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, two Frenchmen, Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre, found a way to capture images on glass plates treated with silver iodide. Early photos (called Daguerreotypes) required long exposure times, and made them particularly suitable for portrait work. At about the same time William Fox Talbot, from England, 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, the Brownie, thus making photography accessible to the masses.

Mathew Brady

Brady was the first to capture war—in this case our Civil War—on film, giving a more accurate, rather than glorified, record of what war was actually like. Though most of his glass plate negatives were lost, enough survived to show generations then and now the real horrors of warfare; his pictures, and their impact on the public, were a forerunner to what television would show us 100 years later in the Vietnam war.

Photography also affected art, dispensing with any need art may have had to accurately depict the real word. Photography freed 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, Edward Steichen, and Ansel Adams.

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. Printed columns soon decreased while space devoted to pictures increased; the movement later gave birth to such popular picture magazines such as Life and Look. Partly as a result, our definition of news became visually biased; news became that which could be shown.

Pictures in Motion

Helped by the advent of three great social movements (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 killed Vaudeville and forever altered our concept of leisure time activities. In part due to photography and the  mass appeal newspaper, a mass culture of idolized film stars, movie images, and popularized portrayals of model “American” values and cultural icons was created.

Film gave impetus to a perceived need to study what impact motion pictures (and later other media) might have on the public psyche; the 1930s Payne Fund was one of the first serious efforts to investigate the media’s potential effects. During the 1930s film also injected itself into 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, the newsreel format continues to influence the conventions of present day TV news formats.

6. RADIO AND TELEVISION BROADCASTING

A byproduct of electromagnetic research in physics, the advent of radio (or wireless as it was first known) in the 1910s made it possible for one source to send a message to multiple receivers. 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.

Broadcasting

Radio’s one-to-many communication format, known as broadcasting, was the first medium to bring sports, music, talk, and news into the American living room. Manufacturing radio sets, the original profit motive for radio, was soon replaced in the 1920s by advertising (selling air time, or rather supplying audiences to businesses for a fee).

Radio growth was so frenzied, however, that the government was forced to intervene in 1927 by establishing the Federal Radio Commission to regulate radio’s technical side. In 1934. the FRC was replaced by the Federal Communications Commission; after that, the government opted to 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 forced many out-of-work Vaudeville performers to enter radio, thus increasing the level of professionalism and appeal of network programming. In the late 1930s, radio journalism came into being as a new and strong news medium and strongly rivaled the newspaper industry.

Cultural Impact of Radio

. radio helped popularize different kinds of music
. radio introduced a new entertainment genre, the soap opera, which by 1940 accounted for
some 60 percent of all daytime network programming
. radio was first medium to introduce mass content aimed at children, thus recognizing
children as a viable commercial market
. radio was first to introduce situation comedies, a program genre that’s become a staple on
television
. radio news came of age in the 1930s-40s as a result of serious world events.
. radio personalized news, giving rise to trusted and well-known news celebrities
. radio changed how Americans spent their free time – by the 1930s-40s, radio had become
the prime source of American entertainment and news in usually during the early evening hours, later known as prime time.

Television

Halted during WW II, television’s growth surged during the prosperous era of the early 1950s. Pent up consumer demand fueled spending (and thus TV ad dollars) following the war years. Sales of TV sets took off (it took only 10 years 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, and the set is on for over seven hours a day. It’s become our third largest time consumer (third only to sleep and work), and in the process it’s transforming 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—the Japanese Tsunami, the Arab Spring, President Kennedy's funeral, the Apollo moon landings, the Challenger explosion, and the planes striking the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, etc.


7. THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Nicholas 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 which 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 be easily copied and transported at extremely low costs. Digital technology and the Internet have triggered a revolution in the way information is stored and transmitted.

Digital technology is now mainstream (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, DVR, Digital TV, HDTV, Hulu, etc.).


Social and cultural implications of the digital age are considerable.
. many of the creative arts have embraced digital technology.
. 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
. consider what the digital age might mean 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.
. 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.

8. WIRELESS HANDHELD MEDIA

Smart phones, laptop computers, and tablet computers share common characteristics:

. they are linked together using wireless technology
. they are portable and allow users to access information from anywhere
. they are interconnected and allow users to hook into the worldwide phone network or the
Internet
. they combine features of mass communication and interpersonal communication

These devices will eventually merge into one, and have the potential to transform traditional media drastically and to alter American culture. Some of the changes we've already seen include:

. they have changed the practice of journalism, replacing pencil and paper as the tools of the
trade, and allowing reporters to send text, audio, and pictures from the field
. many media organizations are distributing content to wireless media
. wireless mobile media have taken on some of the surveillance functions of the media
. they facilitate mobile parenting
. they have "softened" the concept of time
. on the downside, they allow people to coordinate illegal activities, they can impair driving,
they can create social annoyance, and they cost money – will the digital divide increase?


CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

. 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.