Explorations in Communication and History

Barbie Zelizer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415777346
• eBook ISBN: 9781135969585
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

When and how do communication and history impact each other? How do disciplinary perspectives affect what we know?

Explorations in Communication and History

addresses the link between what we know and how we know it by tracking the intersection of communication and history. Asking how each discipline has enhanced and hindered our understanding of the other, the book considers what happens to what we know when disciplines engage.

Through a critical collection of essays written by top scholars in the field, the book addresses the engagement of communication and history as it applies to the study of technology, audiences and journalism. A comprehensive introduction by Barbie Zelizer contextualises these debates and makes a case for the importance of disciplinary engagement for teaching as well as research in media and cultural studies and each section has a brief introduction to contextualise the essays and highlight the issues they raise, making this an invaluable collection for students and scholars alike.

Part 1
Overview

Communication and history

Introduction

Communication and history

Josh Lauer

Historical inquiry is a decidedly modern and tragically human enterprise. The idea of the past as a vast repository of evidence to be discovered, reconstructed, and cumulatively archived is only several centuries old, and its impetus in the dream of perfect knowledge belies the existential anxiety of modernity. The damned project of historical representation is well illustrated by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist who understood the paradoxes of memory and perception perhaps better than anyone. In one of his many brilliant fictive fragments he recounts the work of ancient cartographers who, seeking to produce a perfectly accurate map of their empire, construct a map that corresponds to the exact dimensions of the empire itself. The absurdity of this undertaking exposes the limits of human comprehension. The whole truth – lived reality in its material, temporal, and experiential entirety – corresponds to the full dimensions of reality itself. Mere mortals must content themselves with something far less, or succumb to the cartographers’ folly.

These three essays provide the groundwork for thinking about the limits and possibilities of communication history. Each regards the history of communication as one of many possible histories, and each demonstrates how the communication histories we have are shaped by the interests and very historicity of their authors. Together Peters, Starr and Curran draw pointed attention to the biases of communication history. Historical inquiry is by necessity selective, reductive, incomplete, partial – in a word, biased. The concept of communication bias derives from Harold Innis, the Canadian economic historian whose media-centric interpretation of world civilization is now classic. Yet “bias” has an unfortunate pejorative ring; it bears an association with error, and in particular error borne of human fallibility in the context of dispassionate scientific inquiry. Bias, in this light, refers to the investigator’s failure to probe the object of study with proper neutrality; it is a misinterpretation, a false-reading as a result of mishandled evidence or instrumentation. But as Peters, Starr and Curran suggest, bias is not only inevitable in all domains of human inquiry (including the scientific), it may also be productive. To note that history – and communication history specifically – is biased is not to disparage the significance of the past, but to acknowledge its dynamism.

Peters offers a rich historiography of communication that not only explodes conventional notions of media history but, bounding past Innis, places the history of media at the center of historical inquiry itself. Peters observes that the problem of historical inquiry bears striking resemblance to the problem of communication in that, at a fundamental level, the historian’s task is to conjure the conditions for perfect communication with distant others – namely the dead. The historian’s medium is the record of the past, the body of evidence that he or she painstakingly disinters, assembles, and interprets, and through which the dead are re-presented. Evidence, however, is characterized by a curious ontology. Records of the past (as well as telling lacunae) are continually coming into being as a result of new technologies, methodologies, and historical interests that make them intelligible. Paradoxically, Peter notes, technological advances may be only nominally futuristic. Recent developments in DNA analysis, for example, permit dead men (and women) to speak again. The temporal direction of progress, after all, may be backward, toward the revivification of the past. Peters’ radical insight reveals the parallel concerns of communication and history, as found in their shared concepts of recording, transmission, and interpretation.

While Peters argues for a more expansive and imaginative conceptualization of media, Starr draws close attention to the political stakes of communication history. Noting that historians are all too eager to elide questions of political theory in their studies of the past, Starr asserts that media history is deeply implicated in the ongoing struggle over democracy in the United States. Communication history is not simply a chronicle of technological change and cultural experience, but also a history of the idea of communication as a political right. Starr identifies three vying theories of democracy – minimalist, radical, and deliberative – and illustrates how their respective understanding of key moments in American media history informs their divergent visions of government, citizenship, and the circulation of information in a democratic society. The debate over contemporary media policy – whether media conglomerations are a legitimate result of market forces or a pernicious aberration – is thus contingent on one’s interpretation of the past, even when many important “facts” are generally agreed upon by all involved. Starr’s analysis reminds us that no history, media history included, is innocent. To recount the past is to interpret it. In this way history and historiography are two sides of the same coin. One’s theoretical perspective dictates the selection (and exclusion) of evidence and the conclusions one draws from its interpretation.

Curran, like Peters and Starr, is keenly attentive to the biases of communication history. Noting the increasingly global perspective of mainstream communication studies, Curran observes that Anglo-American media history remains hidebound in its conventional focus on a single communication technology – newspapers, radio, or film, for example – in isolated national contexts. The blindness of such “national introversion,” he argues, is compounded by a proliferation of media subspecialties, from book history to television history, that further encourage insularity and inhibit comparative or synthetic histories of media across time and geography. Moreover, Curran observes, where media historians have failed to address large-scale, transnational developments in communication history, the work of world-historical explanation has fallen into the hands of technological determinists. If the limitations of media micro-history are glaring, they pale in comparison to the biases of technological determinism at their worst, which Curran enumerates and summarily dismantles. The real poverty of “techno-history,” however, is not to be found in the work of erudite determinists such as Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Neil Postman, but in the pronouncements of overzealous new media scholars who champion the latest technology – notably the internet – as an agent of revolutionary human change. The central problem of technological determinism, Curran shrewdly notes, is not simply its monocausal interpretation of the past but its naïve extrapolations into the future. If historians have learned anything from positivist critique (or Marx, for that matter), it is that they tread into the future at their own peril.

Each author foregrounds selection as a determining factor in historical inquiry and underscores its significance for communication history. Finite existence demands parsimony; for historians this is achieved through decisions about which evidence to use and which to put aside. In effect, selection is as much a form of willed ignorance as it is a display of mastery in one’s chosen specialization. (Ignorance, like bias, also bears an unfortunate negative connation that mistakes the fertility of the unknown for barrenness.) All history is a history of this and not that. The problem of selection is central to Curran’s criticism of contemporary media history. As he notes, the choices one makes in terms of which media to study, where, when, and in what location have profound implications. The experiences of entire regions and huge populations may be invisible to the history of communication if they happen to exist in places that are not North American and not Europe. Likewise, in advocating for deliberative democracy Starr illustrates how partisans at opposite ends of the political continuum select (or ignore) different elements of American media history to legitimize their respective policy agendas. The rise of commercial media may be viewed as a Whiggish story of mass enlightenment or a dystopic story of mass control. Neither version is entirely false, yet the truth is in the telling. The problem of selection, as Peters notes, carries weighty ethical baggage. By framing the past as “otherness,” human otherness in particular, he argues against the extremes of historical relativism and its cynical amorality.

Historical inquiry, as these authors attest, reveals as much about the present as it does about the past. There is no single unified past to be discovered, but many pasts, each informed by the questions that are asked and the evidence that is both available and deemed meaningful. Though the history of communication is inherently interdisciplinary – the field of communication has no special purchase on the subject – interest in the study of media past has special urgency for communication scholars. Together these three essays cast a bright light on one of the most grievous features of contemporary communication studies: its presentism. The field of communication, in all of its disparate and confusing splendor, suffers from a myopic preoccupation with the here and now. Those who seek to understand the theoretical principles, processes, effects, institutions, and technologies of communication do not look backward often enough. Time is a powerful variable, and the material culture, social structures, and mentalities of the past offer useful comparative lenses through which to view the world we happen to inhabit at the moment. The study of communication history, as Peters, Starr and Curran show us, offers deep insight into the conditions of life and in its infinite variety in contexts ranging from the local to the global and, indeed, the cosmological.

Chapter 1
History as a communication problem

John Durham Peters

The study of communication history is itself historically recent. Until the late nineteenth century, no one thought of communication as an entity unto itself that was distinct from domains such as transportation, publishing, exchange, language, or speech. The idea that there was such a thing as communication and that it had a history emerged in nineteenth-century history and political economy among figures such as Tocqueville and Guizot in France, Mill in England, and Knies and Schäffle in Germany. Two representative figures who consolidated this work sociologically in the early twentieth century were Charles Horton Cooley in the United States and Werner Sombart in Germany. Cooley’s dictum that “transportation is physical, communication is psychical” was one stop in the long journey of the concept of communication from material to metaphysical modes of carriage.¹ By the 1930s, outlines for a ...

Table of contents

• Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies
• Contents
• When disciplines engage
• Part 1 Overview
• Part 2 Audiences
• Part 3 Technology
• Part 4 Journalism
• Index