Transcript PowerPoint

From Oral to Electronic
Culture
Modernity and the Rise of the
Mass Media
Spring 2007
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Agenda
• In the first hour:
– Explore how the history of
communication in Canada typifies the
transmission model of communication
• In the second hour:
– How is the history of communication
told over wider space and time?
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STUDY QUESTIONS FOR
THIS WEEK
• Why are Canadian media( esp. radio)
central to the stories of Canadian nationbuilding?
• What are narratives and why are they
important in the study of communication
history?
• What is ‘modernity’ and how are
communication media implicated in the
emergence of ‘modernity’?
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History of Study in Canada
• Originally tied to policy studies in the university
– ( policy, political economy and geography
disciplines)
– SFU’s school created in 1983
• Focus on transmission, the medium, the physical
difficulties of communication over vast space & time
• Thus, focussed on media and the emergence of the
nation state
• CANUCK QUIZ Q: WHAT IS THE FIRST NATIONAL
POLICY?
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History of Canadian
Communication Studies
• Originally tied to policy studies in the university
– ( policy, political economy and geography disciplines)
– SFU’s school created in 1983
• Focus on transmission, the medium, the physical
difficulties of communication over vast space & time
• Thus, focussed on media and the emergence of the
nation state
• CANUCK QUIZ Q: WHAT IS THE FIRST NATIONAL
POLICY?
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The Second National Policy
•
like the railroad, communication seen as important for the
transmission and reception of ideas, goods and services
throughout Canada
• central to:
• Western settlement
• Economic infrastructure
• Social development
– Much early spending by the Canadian State was to connect
cities, peoples and markets
• rail, hydroelectric power, telegraph, post system, heavy
regulation of telephones to ensure extension of service, and
provision of public radio
– An early Tariff Wall until the 1930s to stimulate national
business and manufacture ( See CC: 26-30)
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A Multi Party Pact
• The Second National Policy sustained high political consensus
• Overspill of US radio signals and predatory competition,
combined with the social needs of Canadian citizens led to
creation of the Aird Committee and unanimous resolution to
create a public radio corporation
– Widespread public movement’s rallying cry was: ‘The State or the
United States’ ( Graham Spry: see Spry foundation
www.com.umontreal.ca/spry
•
A national royal commission studied the “National Development
of Arts and Letters” ( Massey Commission) and argued for a
national interest in unity and identity in 1952-- values embedded
in successive broadcast acts since with multi party consensus
until the 1990s
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Framing the Canadian History
• The Mass Media were seen through the lense of a
history of ‘cultural nationalism’, focussed on sending,
and receiving Canadian information, ideas and
entertainment
• But, they were also seen through a lense of fear of
fascism ( CC: 52)
– That new technologies like radio could make the individual
part of a mass, undifferentiated, unsupported, and easy prey
for authoritarian appeals.
– That “mass” media would inevitably carry “low” social status
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Canadian Transmission
Model
• Defining markers of transmission model:
– Size of country: second largest land mass in the world
– Low population density: 32 million or about 3 people per sq
k: among the lowest in the world
– 200 mile corridor along the 49th parallel: US
– Initially dependent upon natural resource ( staple) exports,
needing good communication links to imperial country
– What Aitken, a noted economist calls Canada
tradition of ‘defensive expansionism’
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Adoption of Innovation
• Telegraph & rise of international news agencies 1850s-1900s
– Canada longest telegraph network in the world
– A Canadian invented standardized time
• Sir Sandford Fleming
• Telephony-1900s
– Canada site of first transatlantic phone message
• ( Cape Breton: Alexander Graham Bell)
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Adoption Cont’d
• Radio-1930s-50s
– Canada first public monopoly radio service on its rail service
(CNR)
• Television-1950s-70s
– First and fastest nation to widely disseminate cable
television
• Satellite—1980s
– Canada first geostationary domestic satellite system
• Internet—1990s
– Canada among fasted adopters of Internet: now over 3 in 4
citizen users
– Among first 3 nations to wire up all schools ( School Net)
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Adoption/ Cont’d II
• Canada is among the most developed
communications infrastructures in the
world
• Many key inventors, medium theorists,
rapid adoption of communication
technologies, often promoted by the
State
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Paradoxes
• Paradox: Canada is not a major
manufacturer of communication technologies
• dependent on imports for TV equipment,
computer signalling equipment, satellites,
although emerging in fibre optics & blackberry
handset etc
• Paradox: content development ( message,
production) not kept up with
transmission/distribution development– eg.
School Net
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Fast Facts
•
•
•
•
Canadian Share of Prime Time English TV Entertainment …9%
Canadian Share of Sound recording..11%
Canadian Share of Film: 3%
Canadian per capita advertising is ¾ that of the US
– Suffers the small market problem
– Overspill from the US
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A Canadian Thumbnail History of a
Medium
•
Radio:
– As a technology, uses the electromagnetic spectrum
• Considered a scarce resource
• Compelled nations to cooperate to allocate it territorially
• Compelled rationing of licenses thus a form of ‘regulation’
– Radio first used as a marine navigational aid in 1905
– The War demonstrated the even greater importance of radio to national
security
– RCA/Westinghouse emerged from WWI as major electrical manufacturers
in the US who had branch plants in Canada ( CC: 74)
– Marconi in Montreal set up the first Canadian radio station ( CFCF)
– By 1923 …30 stations in operation..growing to 60 by 1930 when about one
in three Canadians had a radio set
– But with a limited capital base, stations turned to advertising, or joined US
radio networks NBC and CBS
– “non aligned” stations were knocked off their frequencies by US superradiostations
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Thumbnail Cont’d
•
•
•
Market chaos and the absence of Canadian programming precipitated
demands for a Royal Commission hearing
A proposal to ‘nationalize’ radio
Caused a debate for citizens at the time:
–
–
–
–
•
•
•
Is it important for Canada to have its own mass media?
Who should own the mass media?
Who should control them?
How should they be financed?
The answers: Yes, Government, and tax or licence fee money
But, expropriation never occurred, and through a lack of political will
subsequently the CBC became reliant on private stations to reach
coast to coast to coast, and then reliant on advertising
Canada had a mixed system from the outset, but did borrow from the
Imperial model of the BBC
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Thumbs and nails 3
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
As a medium, broadcasting then, took very different path than print
It was seen as too important to be left to the market
The Canadian government, like many around the world, broke with the
pattern of private ownership
Radio could be the 20th century equivalent to the railroad, reasoned
then PM Bennett
A very special industry in its ability to foster nationwide intercommunication (CC:73).
Given the protective language barrier in Quebec, french radio thrived,
even producing dramas
A nationalist, middle class elite later argued:
– “there are important things in the life of a nation which cannot be weighed or
measured”
– National traditions, national unity, national pride and national identity exist
not only the material sphere but in the realm of ideas
– Saw broadcasting as quintessentially a cultural policy: a “public trust” and
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“public service”
– With extensive social responsibilities: to educate, uplift, and entertain
Thumbs and Nails 4
• To reinforce the nation-building cultural
responsibilities, the Canadian government:
– Passed a Broadcasting Act
– Established a public corporation
– Required private broadcasters to air 35%
Canadian music over the day since 1971
•
•
•
•
•
Spring 2007
MAPL
Music: composed by a Canadian
Artists: artists performing lyrics are Canadian
Performance: in or recorded in Canada
Lyrics: written by a Canadian
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Fast Forward
• Canadians listen to 19 hours of radio a week
• There are 913 English stations, 275 French
and 35 third language stations
• Total revenues around $1.3 billion with about
$277 million in profit
• $78 million is paid by private stations to
promote Canadian artists
– Source: CRTC Broadcast Monitoring Report, 2006
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History of Communication
Re-entering the Time Machine
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Today’s Agenda
• Historical Narratives: Media and
Modernity
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STUDY QUESTIONS
• What are Narratives?
• Identify Three Main Epochs of
Communication
• What is ‘technological determinism’?
What is the cultural critique of it? ( CC:
58-59)
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Big Picture Ideas Today
1. History of Communication involves a Selective Story
or Narrative
- Narrative:a story or depiction of actual or fictional events
- Narrative: the telling of a story in a certain way
2. The Story revolves around communication
technology and its relationship to society and culture
1. Story can be technology centric--even determinist
2. Story can have broader focus on social change: the
emergence of modernity
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Ideas II
1. Canada’s story is one of technological nationalism
- Use of communication technologies to settle the country
from sea to sea
- Associated with national railroad( telegraph)(national public
radio: CBC)
- Assertion and protection of national sovereignty in journey
from colony to nation
- reflected in the policy focus in the study of communication
itself
But what is the Global Story?
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Social Histories: ‘Narratives’
• Mediamaking ( Grossberg et al, 2000) argues typically that the
history of communication is presented as a ‘march of progress’
or ‘triumph of National Will”
• a series of adoptions of technological inventions—which then
shape the movement from oral to print to electronic cultures of
communication
• This tendency to technological determinism is at the heart of a
transmission model of communication
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Key Concept
• Technological Determinism
– Ascribing the main cause of social change
to technology
– In this case, communication technology
– Thus, a theoretical or academic point of
view that prioritizes the causal influence of
communication media, and especially
mass media, in social change
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Canadian Communication
Thinkers
• Two key historians focus on the specificity of
the communication media
• Pioneers of the study of medium &
technology theory
• Often seen as determinist
– Harold Adams Innis
• The Bias of Communication
• Empire and Communication
– Marshall McLuhan
• The Gutenberg Galaxy
• Cited extensively by Grossberg et al
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Overview of Medium Theory
• Origin of Communication
– Oral,
– writing and
– electronic forms of culture
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Origin of Communication
• People have always ‘communicated’:
• Used non verbal signs, language and later symbols to exchange
meaning in all agrarian and hunting societies
– To exchange meaning the two people have to share assumptions
about what the words or symbols mean, to agree that they mean
the same thing to both
– Exchange of meaning then depends not only the word but its
cultural, economic and social context
• As technology begins to mediate communication, the relation of
the words to their context changes: another person distant over
space and time may experience a word or meaning fragment
from a totally different context
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Oral Culture
• Face to face interaction
• A different sense of time
-
No record or fixation, thus history resides in the moment
Myth and fact intertwined
No concept of authorship: there is only performance
Social, interactive, collective
Elders become the repositories of knowledge, so may be resistant
to change
- Source: Walter Ong (CMNS 110: see CC: 55)
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Writing Culture
• Invention of the alphabet, and ways to ‘fix’ print in clay tablets,
then papyrus, and then paper, change culture
• Changes way of thinking:
– No longer face to face, so can reach larger audiences: the concept
of space and time enters
– Fixation allows writer to ensure story how it intended to be; so the
idea of individual authorship emerges
– Texts allow fixed, written or permanent codes or rules of law to
develop
– Texts can now be verified, separate from the subject, allowing for
the separation of ‘object’ from ‘subject’ and scientific discovery
– Allows for linear thought: a fundamentally different kind of
consciousness ( McLuhan) CC: 56-57
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Print Culture ( emergence of
Modernity)
• Writing changes relationship between communicator
and audience
• Can widen over space and time
• Early print media centralized and made knowledge
hierarchical
The beginning of Empire: ( Innis, quoted in Grossberg
et al, p. 41).
• In a writing culture, fixed written rules or codes of law
can develop
• The individual reader emerges as separate from the
community
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Print Culture/Cont’d
• Literacy allows power to be hoarded
• This transformed with Gutenberg/ but printing press
allowed the emergence of new classes ( no longer
priest but merchant classes) but then a rehoarding of
power
• Innis: monopolies of knowledge can develop/be
challenged and reemerge which challenge the rigid
hierarchies of Church or State
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Impact of the Printing Press
• Control of writing harder to monopolize by elites or the Church
• Allows for consumption of communication in private & spread of
literacy
• Allows the emergence of newspaper and novel
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Gutenberg
• The inventor of moveable type in Europe
• Celebrated as a western invention
• Celebrated as a democratic one: breaks elite church
or feudal monopoly over communication
• Seen as the turning point of modern communication
• Positive/Progressive narratives abound
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Against Gutenberg I
• Innis:
– The conditions of freedom of thought are in danger of being
destroyed by science, technology and mechanization of
knowledge
• In Empire and Communication
– Why? The printing press ( has) permitted the production of words
on an unprecedented scale and increased the difficulties of
thought: words have become powerless,
– Gutenberg succeeds only in the devaluing of words, information
and knowledge
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Against Gutenberg II
• Communication history criticized for its Western bias
– Asian Scholars: printing press not a Western invention:
existence in China centuries before did not have the same
social consequence—therefore Gutenberg /technological
determinism less strong than supposed
-Michele Martin page 18-19
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Electronic Culture
• Emergence of electrical messages (
telegraph)
• Allowed almost instantaneous
transmission over space and time
• Fostered international rationalization of
time ( standard time a Canadian
inventors’ invention)
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Electronic Cont’d
• Carey thesis quoted in Grossberg et al:
– Telegraph (1840s)marked the decisive separation of ‘transportation’
and ‘communication’
– Telegraph key to rise of international news/newspaper industry
– Finalised the transformation of information into a commodity or
thing
– Together with the institution of advertising, contributes to rise of
mass marketing, Industrialization
– Rise of computers, satellites, internet further compress space and
time
• Early electronic era ( radio, TV) organized around nation states,
and national masses
• Search for larger markets/theory of mass society
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Electronic Cont’d
• Characterised by general interest /mass
communication
• Late electronic era ( satellite, internet)
organized globally, and with global individuals
• Characterized by specialised, personalised
contents
• Rarely linear or logical: more of a role for
emotion and affect
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Problems with Medium Theory
• Speculating how the form and
technology of communication changes
culture often ascribes it a total power
• Can lead analysts to say content &
context are irrelevant
• This is too simple a model of social or
cultural causality
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Major Epochs of
Communication History
• Pre Modern
– ( oral and early print media)
• Modern
– ( late print and electronic media)
• Post Modern
– ( digital media)
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Pre Modern ( 1000 BC to
1500s)
• Pre Modern
– Close association of control of
communication with Church or rulers or
monarchs
– Agrarian, dispersed societies
– ‘divine right’—rulers chosen by god
– Elite production and dissemination of
communication ( poets,scribes, monks,
priests work by hand)
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Pre Modern Cont’d
• Much reliance upon spoken word
– Transmission of values by word of mouth, elders
– oral communication
– Epic poems, sacred myths, storytelling
– Focus on flexibility, traditional community knowledge
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Pre Modern Con’td
– Major historical event: invention of the alphabet and rise of
clay tablets, parchment manuscripts
– Custom, cosmology ( or coherent world view), unwritten
rules
– Time bias: social goal is to conserve and transmit core
values of a society over generations ( (Innis in The Bias of
Communication)
– Oral communication has its limits:
– Oral communication lasts only as long as it takes one to speak
and it only reaches those within earshot
– Yet social organizations have an eternal drive to communicate
with long lasting and ever more far reaching effect
Spring 2007
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Modern Epoch
• Dates from the Enlightenment and
challenge to Church and rulers
• 1700s-20th century
• The twin economic and political process
of modernization
• Accelerates after the invention of the
Gutenberg Press and wider
dissemination of knowledge
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Modernization
• In economic organization, the changes to forms of
capitalist production
• the emergence of machineries applied to increase
the scale of production: industrialization
• Routinization of labour, processes to maximize profits
& develop access to larger markets
• Urbanization, transportation and communication
essential to develop mass markets
• Political modernization discussed next week
• Modernization, however, creates a social institution
with the characteristics of modernity
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The Enlightenment and Modernity
• an idealist vision of humans as rational creatures, capable of
choosing between right and wrong
• Refers to a period characterized by:
– End of the Middle Ages and rise of the Renaissance where a ‘great
chain of being’ ( vertical in line to a divine authority) placed man in
a subservient position
– Ideal of the ‘free’ and ‘creative’ man: humanistic vision
– As the printing press spreads, so to does literacy and thirst for
ideas
– The rise of the individual author/freedom of expression emerges
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Features of the Enlightenment
• The enlightenment (1700 and 1800s) features the rise of
science over religion:
– rule of reason, scientific experimentation and proof, notion of
science, technology and progress ruling society
• The enlightenment gives rise to scientific experimentation
• Rise of electricity, experiments with sending sounds and images
over the electromagnetic spectrum and broader technical
dissemination of communication
• The Enlightenment sets the stage for invention of printing press,
and successive waves of technological innovation/ displacement
of technologies over time
• Related to the historical construction of Modernity
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What do We Mean by
Modernity?
• An Epoch
• A set of qualities associated with the
condition of modern or recent times
•
refers to a constellation of social,
economic,philosophical changes associated
with modernization and modernism
• It emphasizes Science and Reason
– Science and Reason could challenge established
orthodoxies ( eg. Galileo said the earth revolved
around the sun and was persecuted during the
Catholic Inquisition for his sins)
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The Transformations of
Modernity
• From:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Religion to science
Agrarian to industrial economies
Small scale to large scale production
Rural to urban cities
Communal to Individual Values
Kinship to Distributed Networks
Tribal or feudal to democratic politics
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The Mass Media and
Modernity
• As technological inventions, a product of the Enlightenment
• And rise of Modern Science
• Mass media can be regarded as one of the most powerful
expressions of the “spirit” our age
• Part of economic modernization/development process
• But also part of political modernization/development process
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The Cultural Expression of Modernism
• Modernity is associated with modernism, or its cultural or
symbolic expression
–
–
–
–
–
Impressionism, abstract
Clean, simple lines in architecture
A set of authors or schools or traditions in literature
Jazz
Emergence of new popular forms like the dime novel or Hollywood
film CC:61
– Modernism and its opposite, post modernism are the focus of
cultural studies
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“Post Modern Epoch”
• Corresponds to digitization, internet and beyond in media
technology
• Post industrial capitalism: flexible production, consumption,
individuation
• Shift from nation state to global governance
• Increasing mobility of people and communication
• The penetration of capitalism into every aspect of everyday life
CC: 61
• Global village: versus villages
• An historical argument over whether there is a radical,
discontinuous rupture in postmodernism, or a gradual change
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Conclusions
1. History of Communication involves a
Selective Story
2. The Story most often revolves around
technology and the relationship to society
and culture
3. The development from oral to print to
electronic cultures, must be understood in
the context of Modernity
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Conclusions II
1. Canada’s story is one of technological
nationalism/protection of sovereignty in
journey from colony to nation reflected in the
policy focus in the study of communication
itself
2. Canada has two of the most famous
communication historians and medium
theorists in the field: Harold Innis and
Marshall McLuhan
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QUOTES OF THE WEEK
• History is a retelling of the past…but the story of the past can be
told in many different ways…CC:33
• History is a useful guide to understanding the present and the
future… CC:33.
– IRONY:
• Most mass media content is ephemeral. Studies of the
news and prime time entertainment in Europe, for
example, show less than 15% of the content actually
refers to the past ( source: Eurofiction,2000)
• Narratives of media history offer insights into the role of the
forms and modes of communication in human history…CC:63
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TUTORIAL TIP
Start reading Chomsky and
Herman’s Propaganda Model of
Communication as a variant on
the Transmission Model
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WRITING TIP
• Space and time are important concepts
in communication.
– Watch your sense of place: North America?
Canada? Much literature hides mention to
place, but is written from a US perspective
– Watch your use of verb tenses.
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