The Synchronized Society

Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet

Randall Patnode

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781978820098
  9781978820104
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978820111
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

The Synchronized Society traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteenth-century industrialists, political thinkers, and social reformers to tame an unruly society by controlling how people used their time. The idea manifested itself in the form of the broadcast schedule, a managed flow of information and entertainment that required audiences to be in a particular place – usually the home – at a particular time and helped to create "water cooler" moments, as audiences reflected on their shared media texts. Audiences began disconnecting from the broadcast schedule at the end of the twentieth century, but promoters of social media and television services still kept audiences under control, replacing the schedule with surveillance of media use. Author Randall Patnode offers compelling new insights into the intermingled roles of broadcasting and industrial/post-industrial work and how Americans spend their time.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. The Bizarre Model of Broadcasting
• 2. The Evolution of Time Consciousness
• 3. Roots of the Synchronized Society
• 4. The Rationalization of Radio
• 5. The Synchronized Society
• 6. Learning to Love the Clock
• 7. Television and Latter-Day Synchrony
• 8. The Decline of Synchrony
• 9. The Arrhythmic Society
• 10. From Clock to Click
• 11. Moving Ahead While Looking Backward
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author