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Impact of Media Evolution on Politics

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.

When Old Technologies Meet New

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.

DMU Timestamp: November 09, 2018 23:10





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