Rc 0.1.c.media history.overview
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Introductory material for a university course in media history by Prof. Bill Kovarik, based on the book Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2015).
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Rc 0.1.c.media history.overview
- 1. Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age Slides based on the Bloomsbury book by Bill Kovarik Revolutions in Communication About Media History -- #3
- 2. Web site & textbook Textbook: 1st edition – 2011 2nd edition – 2016 http://www.revolutionsincommunication.com
- 3. This lecture is about … Historiography of Media ◦ Social histories and critiques of media ◦ Four revolutions in mass media And related / competing ideas ◦ Early media historians ◦ Walter Lippmann ◦ Elizabeth Eisenstein ◦ Harold Innis – Empire and communication ◦ Marshall McLuhan – theories of media change and influence
- 4. Media historians S. Palmer ◦ General History of Printing ◦ London, MCCXXXIII
- 5. Supporting the temple of memory, We transmit the facts to posterity, The arts, the sciences, history, We have immortality Pierre Fourdriner Manuel Typographique, 1737
- 6. US Media historians Isaiah Thomas ◦ History of printing in America, 1808 James Parton ◦ Life of Horace Greeley, 1855 James Melvin Lee ◦ History of American Journalism, 1917
- 7. Media history textbooks American Journalism, a History, 1690- 1960 ◦ -- Frank Luther Mott 1962 Men and Machines of Am Journalism ◦ - Peter C. Marzio, 1973 The Press and America ◦ – Edwin Emery 1976 Voices of a Nation ◦ Jean Folkerts 1988 Mainstreams of American Media History ◦ – Hiley Ward 1990 Media in America – Wm. Sloan 1999
- 8. MEDIA HISTORY Current Trends: From national to international From only journalism to all fields From political to tech & culture From Euro / male to inclusive From “great men & machines” to cultural and social histories
- 9. What’s a revolution? Sudden change in status quo Profoundly upsets social / economic / cultural order
- 10. Four media revolutions Printing ◦ Moveable type – 1455 Associated with religious revolution 1500s – 1700s ◦ Industrial scale printing Associated with political revolutions 1700s – now Imaging ◦ Engraving, photography and cinema ◦ Ads and PR as image making Both associated with popularization of media Electronic – radio, TV, satellites Associated with nationalization of media Digital – computers, networks Associated with emerging global culture
- 11. Alternate approaches … Language / Human ◦ Natural ability Writing / Literate ◦ Has to be learned Typographic Hypergraphic Electronic Cybernetic
- 12. Five noted media historians Wilbur Schramm Walter Lippmann Elizabeth Eisenstein Harold Innis Marshall McLuhan
- 13. Wilbur Schramm (1907-1987) The story of human communication (Harper Collins 1988) Images -- Cave paintings, calendars Writing – from symbols to phonetics Mass media, news, ads, pr, elite & popular press Sound, film, radio, TV, photography, phone Microelectronics, satellites
- 14. Lippmann’s 4 stages of media history ◦ Authoritarian (censored) ◦ Partisan (political parties) ◦ Commercial / Penny Press (often sensationalistic) ◦ Organized intelligence (future development) Walter Lippmann Public Opinion, 1922
- 15. Elizabeth Eisenstein (1923–2016) • Theme was the printing press as an agent of social change • Role of press especially important during the Protestant Reformation • Noted effects of printing: dissemination, standardization, and preservation of information • Observed that recovery of previous cultures (Greek, Roman) was the first major task of printing • Saw printing as one of the major influences in the Protestant Reformation and the formation of the modern world
- 16. Harold Innis (1894 – 1952) Empire and Communications Stressed balance between: Durable, time – binding media (including oral culture) Flexible, space – binding media Both needed for “empire building” but lack of balance led to loss of empires
- 17. Marshall McLuhan (1911- 1980) Foresaw enormous changes in & with media Wrote Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media “Medium is the message” Deterministic view of media type as shaping the content of a message Printing had a huge impact in de-tribalizing people Radio re-tribalized people Hot and cool media “Hot” media immerses audience and allows less participation – cinema “Cool” media requires involvement and thought -- printed media, possibly radio
- 18. McLuhan’s technology tetrad 1. Enhance What does the new medium enhance or amplify? 2. Make obsolete What becomes obsolete or reduced in prominence? 3. Retrieve What is retrieved from an earlier time that had nearly been forgotten? 4. Reverse How does the medium “overheat” or warp under pressure?
- 22. Useful basic concepts Tech. determinism vs social construction ◦ Does the technology advance due to its own properties or do social, political and economic forces shape the technology? Utopians versus Luddites ◦ Will a new technology improve things or make them worse? Technological fallacies ◦ Predictions about future uses for technology that turn out to be off base
- 23. Sociological historians & critics Upton Sinclair -- The Jungle, The Brass Check, Muckraker, press critic 1900s – 1930s A. J. Liebling -- New Yorker media critic 1940s I. F. Stone, also George Seldes ◦ Independent editors and press critics 1950s – 70s Ben Bagdikian – 1970s – 90s ◦ Media Monopoly, press concentration Neil Postman -- 1980s - 90s ◦ Amusing Ourselves to Death
- 24. Critical theorists as historians Sociologists -- Max Weber and Michael Schudson ◦ Ideational model helps observe the clash of ideas around social reform Communications theorists -- Michel Foucault ◦ Discourse analysis to understand the information content and structure of mainstream cultural products and “subjugated knowledges.” Critical theorists ◦ Frankfurt School -- Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas Conflict of classes / Marxist analysis Mass media is structured to subvert identity and assimilate individuality into the dominant culture ◦ Noam Chomsky -- libertarian socialist propaganda model – media supports ruling elites.
- 25. Review: People Isaiah Thomas, James Parton, James Melvin Lee, Walter Lippmann, Wilbur Schramm, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Upton Sinclair, Jurgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky
- 26. Review: Concepts History becoming more inclusive of women and minorities, more international, more interdisciplinary; Determinism vs social construction; utopians vs luddites; technological fallacies; durable media vs flexible media Medium is the message, hot and cool media, global village, technology tetrad Sociological and critical theory about
- 27. Next: Chapter 1 The printing revolution
Editor's Notes
- This lectures takes us from general ideas about history to specific ideas about media history.
- One of the earliest histories of printing was from 1733 ( MCCXXXIII ) This and others are available on Google Books as free downloads Palmer credits Marco Polo with bringing back the idea of moveable type and stamps to Venice from China in the 1200s and credits John Faust more than Johannes Gutenberg as the inventor of moveable type.
- Some histories were emotional and over-wrought. Leo Marx, in his 1964 book Machine in the Garden, called the “Rhetoric of the technological sublime” Fournier developed the system of typography we use today, with point sizes and the idea of minimizing space between letters to the point where they were still legible.
- ALL of these are available on Google Books as free downloads by the way. Thomas was the first American printer to report on the battles of Lexington and Concord in April, 1775. James Parton said this about 19th century publisher Horace Greeley: The family were so poor that it was a matter of doubt sometimes whether they could get food enough to live through the long winter; and so Horace, who had learned the printer's trade in Vermont, started out on foot in search of work in a village printing-office. He walked from village to village, and from town to town, until at last he went to Erie, the largest place in the vicinity.
- Focus is always on the US, and mostly on the press and events covered by the press. You’d never know there was a revolution going on out there.
- But the current need is to understand media in an international context, and to include all the fields, not just journalism.
- Courtesy of the Simpsons of course.
- This is our book’s approach to media revolutions, and although it is not the only approach, it is comprehensive and thematically coherent.
- So just because Prof. Kovarik divides it up one way doesn’t mean its right. It’s just another way of looking at things. Wilbur Schramm, a great communications theorist, started with writing as the first revolution in his highly recommended The Story of Human Communication: Cave Painting to Microchip, Harper & Row, 1988 Terrence Moran’s of NYU has six revolutions: Language, literacy, tyopgraphic, hypergraphic, electronic and cybernet. Introduction to the History of Communication, Peter Lang, 2010 Prof. Kovarik (author of these Slides and book Revolutions in Communciation) uses pretty much the same group but (for the sake of brevity) focuses on the mass media, and so excludes writing and language.
- "Communications has helped to cement the connection of ideas and knowledge, the history of human communication is really a history, not of action, but of interaction"---Wilbur Schramm. Wilbur Schramm was an early leader in the field of communications and did a lot in the development of the field of communications. He was the one, who shaped the study of communication, as it is understood today. His book "The Story Of Human Communication" focuses on the evolution of communication from cave painting to the mid-20th century. Schramm also outlined the study of communications in “The beginnings of communication study in America: A personal memoir,” Sage, 1997.
- Walter Lippmann took an essentially political approach with Public Opinion in 1922. Several questions: -- Is this a real evolution or is it Whig history? -- Do different countries go through these stages at different times ? -- When the commercial media gets into trouble, does it tend to become more partisan, in other words, to “regress?” -- What is organized intelligence? Lippmann did not give much of a clue about what he thought about that. What might it be?
- “We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.” -- Francis Bacon, Novum organum, 1620
- Innis’ ideas are among the most important and least understood of media history, partly because his life ended before he had time to fully explore the directions his scholarship was taking.
- Perhaps the best known media historian was Marshall McLuhan, widely referred to in his day as a “media guru.” McLuhan threw a grab bag full of media and technology ideas up into the air, leaving it for others to try to make more sense of the intellectual frontiers he was exploring.
- McLuhan’s tetrad of technology change This is one way of seeing and considering the effects of new communications technologies. Take radio, for instance. We might say radio enhanced news and music, it obsolesced (or made less prominent) print and visual media; it retrieved the spoken word and music hall shows; and it reversed (when pushed to its limits) into television (McLuhan, 1992). We might also say that television enhanced the visual, obsolesced the audio, retrieved theatrical spectacle, and reversed into “500 channels with nothing on.”
- While McLuhan’s Tetrad explains the inter-relationship of many types of changing media, this model considers the directions and receptions of all information traffic through all kinds of media. What we see is a change from “top-down” programs to social media programs.
- What the digital revolution allowed was the transition from top-down control of linear programs to user-controlled rich content (blue arrow). Increasingly, however, media is becoming more like a virtual marketplace and more social.
- None of the new social media would be possible without the digital revolution.
- Optional Trim
- Optional Trim