The Routledge Companion to British Media History

Martin Conboy, John Steel, Martin Conboy, John Steel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415537186
• eBook ISBN: 9781317629467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to British Media History provides a comprehensive exploration of how different media have evolved within social, regional and national contexts.

The 50 chapters in this volume, written by an outstanding team of internationally respected scholars, bring together current debates and issues within media history in this era of rapid change, and also provide students and researchers with an essential collection of comparable media histories.

The Routledge Companion to British Media History provides an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates in the field.

Chapter 40 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315756202.ch40

Part I

MEDIA HISTORY DEBATES

1

The devaluation of history in media studies

Michael Pickering

In the early 1980s, I reviewed a book by Peter Golding and Sue Middleton (1982) entitled Images of Welfare, recommending it for its general historical range and praising its use of historical evidence in showing that the ‘scroungerphobia’ moral panic of the late 1970s was an extension of a long tradition of public hostility to the poor in English society.¹ By developing a historical perspective, Golding and Middleton clearly established the resilience of particular assumptions, myths and stereotypes about poverty and welfare. These, as they put it, have “lengthy pedigrees in popular consciousness” (1982: 48). I start with this example not only because of its relevance to the issue of welfare in contemporary British politics, particularly around the cynically labelled ‘something for nothing’ culture, but also because it is a historical perspective of this kind that is lacking in much of the media studies work of the past 30 years.² The devaluation of history in the field is an entrenched problem that has been identified and remarked upon at various times, and the periodic complaints that have been made of it clearly demonstrate that it is a recurrent characteristic, if not endemic, then certainly persistent within the field. James Curran, for example, has called history the “neglected grandparent of media studies”; John Corner has referred to the “frantically contemporary agenda” of media studies; and Nick Garnham has described the bulk of media studies as “enraptured by the new and the ephemeral”, exhibiting “an almost willed amnesia that amounts to what one might call a nostalgia for the future” (Curran, 1991: 27; Corner, 1999: 126; Garnham, 2000: 24). Despite such criticism, little has changed across or since the various times it has been made.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss this problem and call for an end to, or at least a diminution of, history’s devaluation in media studies. This has not been consistently evident and indeed those just cited have themselves engaged in important historical work, but such work figures minimally in the field’s roll of achievements. The lack of historical reference and scope in media studies has a number of causes, but certainly the postmodernist attack on history’s credentials as a form of knowledge and the relentless adoption in media studies of resolutely synchronic methodologies, along with a continual skewing of attention towards the latest issues and developments in communications, have encouraged an assumption of the past as settled and over, and so of little relevance to what is happening today.³ This assumption provides the rationale for present-centredness, an adjacent problem stemming from researching and studying communications and media culture in the short term, in a narrow temporal ambit of recency or even immediacy.

Present-centredness is manifest in an obsession with the waves just breaking at our feet, regardless of how long those waves have travelled in their movement towards the present. Its watchwords are newness and nowness. When these watchwords command analytical practice in the field, amnesia is induced by a process which seizes on what is, or what seems, emergent; hustles it into greater prominence than it would deserve in the longer term; and pronounces upon its epochal significance, sometimes endorsing this with a claim for an irrevocable break with the past. The historical irony is that if this claim is true, it can only be made once, at least within specific historical periods, yet perversely, trend-spotting in media and cultural studies is by definition recurrent and so continually runs the risk of becoming a reflex academic imitation of that which it identifies as replete with the alluring qualities of newness and nowness.

There is always a grandiloquent appeal in such claims, despite the fact that they are usually empirically unsubstantiated and the grounds on which they are being made are hazy and unclear. This is hardly surprising. Over 30 years ago, Raymond Williams (1977: 123) referred to the difficulty in distinguishing between what is truly emergent and what is merely novel. In a frequent iteration, that which seems truly emergent turns out, in time, to be merely novel. This happens because what is already established sets limits and conditions for how the emergent is able to develop, or because of the subsequent incorporation of emergent alternatives into what is already established, but the source of the confusion between what is emergent and what is novel lies most of all in the lack of investigation into their development in the longer term, and their place in a more abiding pattern. The broad historical framework needed for discerning either development or location within the pattern is absent, and that absence is central to the syndrome of newness and nowness. The syndrome justifies itself by reference forwards, with a strident emphasis on gauging the future, the way things are currently turning for good or ill. An example of this occurs at the start of what has been hailed as a contemporary classic, with Ulrich Beck announcing that what “is to follow does not at all proceed along the lines of empirical social research. Rather, it pursues a different ambition: to move the future which is just beginning to take shape into view against the still predominant past” (1992: 9). This approach can easily descend into sociological soothsaying and it is closely related to the prevalent tendency in media studies of trying to move the future into view on the basis only of recent trends and developments. The still predominant past is a token acknowledgement; it is attended to only in a vague, gestural manner. That is why there is such readiness to claim that nowness and newness represent some unheralded rupture with what has gone before. It is this which creates a condition of being haunted by the future, a condition which doesn’t require empirical social research because it dances to a different ambition.

Radical claims for newness depend upon an abrupt dichotomizing between ‘then’ and ‘now’, with what is claimed as new being held in stark contrast to what is claimed to be old. The sense conveyed in this common rhetorical strategy is that ‘new’ media have broken with the past and we are entered into a new age – Mark Poster (1995) presumptuously called it the Second Media Age – in which the internet and interactive media totally alter the ground rules of social communication. This is what being dazzled by newness and nowness entails: not only an exaggeration of any shift or change that is occurring, but also a distortion of historical development, as if all that has happened in the past has been leading up to this New Age, this whiggish culmination of all previous movement. When new media are seen only in terms of their alleged newness, the lack of any cross-temporal perspective leads to a fixation on media themselves. We then stand just one step away from technological determinism, paying little if any attention to the broader historical contexts in which media develop because of an underlying assumption that it is the technology which drives such development. Communications technologies are seen not as an integral feature of change but its impelling force. The consequence of such a view is always an abbreviation of historical process as well as an abnegation of human responsibility for social transformations.⁴

The establishment of a communications medium around the manufacture of its associated hardware and software, along with the ensuing patterns of consumption and usage, does not mark the historical beginning of that medium. It marks its historical consolidation. But even seeing it as a historical consolidation is to point our understanding too much in the direction of the technology. Communications technologies do not create their institutional forms or their social uses. They have to be understood instead in the ways they operate as historically specific resources for, say, cultural processes of encounter, exchange and representation, or political structures of surveillance, power and control. They may indeed be diverted away in their social uses from their intended application, as was famously the case with the phonograph, which, among other things, Edison considered would be adopted as early forms of the dictaphone, audiobook and speaking clock. “Even though it would remain largely in the grip of corporate interests”, phonography “was a medium deeply defined by its users and the changing conditions of use” (Gitelman, 2008: 83–84). Communications technologies have also to be understood for the ways they are adapted to existing social practices and cultural conventions, and for how continuities as well as changes are negotiated through them, so that while there is short-term displacement and replacement, there is also on the one hand antecedent occurrence and prefiguring, as for example in the widely recognized lines of continuity between telegraphy and the internet or the barely acknowledged anticipation of the basic elements of digitization in the paper rolls of player-pianos, and on the other hand long-term extension and renewal, as for example with radio moving from its initial communicative form as wireless broadcasting to “forms such as AM and FM technologies, maritime navigation, Radar, the microwave oven, low-power broadcasting and mobile telephony” (Standage, 1998: 193–98; Suisman, 2010: 24; Peters, 2009: 23).⁵

Assuming acceptance of these various points, and bearing in mind that it is always individuals, groups and institutions who create and use any communications technology, we can agree that “what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 15, 78). This two-way influence may of course be superseded as the distinctiveness of new media becomes more fully realized over the course of time, while older media may over time come to seem quite obsolete or definitely relegated to the past, as with wax cylinders or silent film, but this can never be guaranteed, for what seems to have been so relegated may in time be conceived anew, moving into some different configuration of application or intent.⁶ The mutualism of ‘old’ and ‘new’ then becomes temporally more extensive, as dimensions of evolving tradition and more sharply identifiable change:

Old media rarely die; their original functions are adapted and absorbed by newer media, and they themselves may mutate into newer cultural niches and new purposes. The process of media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, always declaring for evolution, not revolution.

(Thorburn and Jenkins, 2003: 12)

So it is always a question of how the established and emergent interact at any particular time, whether this involves the responses of painterly art to photography, the modelling of steam-driven railway coaches on horse-driven stage coaches, or the adaptation of theatrical traditions in early cinema. This is one important perspective which a historical approach can bring to media studies, but of course at times it can and should be turned around, for just as important as seeing the old in the new is finding the new in the old. It is the task of historical cultural analysis to do both, for it is only when we move in both ways that we shall be able to fully grasp the dynamics of cross-temporal relations.

Developing a concerted historical perspective means that we change our approach to any contemporary media phenomena by asking not only about their constitutive features and conditions but also how they came to be this way over the course of time. Answering this question may include attending to their political, economic, technological, cultural and aesthetic dimensions, but primarily it means looking at ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, and more broadly at past unfoldings and present issues, through the prism of each other, as for example in thinking about the past when it was present, the old when it was new, so that they can be made to cross-refer and cast light on each other across a series of temporal folds and loops, rather than in terms of linear chronological progression. The work of Carolyn Marvin (1988) and Lisa Gitelman (2008) is exemplary in this respect, encouraging us to move beyond simplistic narratives of media development from primitive progenitors to their culmination in classic forms. Another interesting example of this is Siegfried Zielinski’s (1999) conception of cinema and television – the predominant industries for audiovisual media in the twentieth century – as entr’actes, rather than finished stages, in a longer durée of mediated ways of looking. This allows us to see anew such pretwentieth-century optical devices and instruments as the panorama, diorama, zoëtrope, magic lantern and stereoscope, rather than having them relegated to shadowy positions within a vaguely outlined period prior to the advent of cinematography. Historically, they are far too differentiated and significant for that, and in any case the apparatus of optical communications which accumulated across the nineteenth century testifies to the gradual shift to a more visually oriented everyday culture. Both cinema and television need to be understood as part of this larger pattern, and in themselves as historically delimited, finite and in their times only relatively new as cultural forms. This is especially so now that the heyday of television is over, superseded by new media just as television superseded, but did not supplant, the preceding visual medium of cinematography. This in turn suggests that the story of convergence stretches back a good deal further than is commonly presumed.⁷

Contrary to the entire spirit of this, the tendency that follows from a blinkered focus on the unadulterated newness of new media technologies is to see change as inherent in them rather than being contingent upon a wider social, cultural, economic and political context, or being embedded within a matrix of longer-term historical forces. The claim, implicit or otherwise, is that ‘new’ media can only be understood in terms of their newness. All previous development leads to this point, but this point is utterly new. Such a conception is not only historically illiterate; it is also conceptually naïve. If anything was ever utterly new, recognition of it would be impossible. New and old are temporally relative notions. They require and necessitate each other, and if as temporally relative terms they are to acquire any analytical traction, what is meant by new and old needs to be empirically identified and investigated, in particular contexts and in particular periods of time. Change is only meaningful in terms of prefigurations, antecedents and continuities. When it is viewed primaril...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: British media and mediations of the past
• PART 1 Media History Debates
• PART II Media and Society
• PART III Newspapers
• PART IV Magazines
• PART V Radio
• PART VI Film
• PART VII Television
• PART VIII Digital Media
• Index