A Social History of the Media

Asa Briggs, Peter Burke, Espen Ytreberg

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509533749
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Étude des média

The first three editions of this bestselling book have established A Social History of the Media as a classic, providing a masterful overview of communication media and of the social and cultural contexts within which they emerged and evolved over time. This fourth edition has been revised and updated throughout to reflect the latest developments in the field. Additionally, an expanded introduction explores the wide range of secondary literature and theory that inform the study of media history today, and a new eighth chapter surveys the revolutionary media developments of the twenty-first century, including in particular the rise of social and participatory media and the penetration of these technologies into every sphere of social and private life. Avoiding technological determinism and rejecting assumptions of straightforward evolutionary progress, this book brings out the rich and varied histories of communication media. In an age of fast-paced media developments, a thorough understanding of media history is more important than ever, and this text will continue to be the first choice for students and scholars across the world.

1
Introduction

Although the phrase ‘the media’ only came into use in English in the 1920s, a concern with the means of communication is very much older. Rhetoric, the art of oral and written communication, was taken very seriously in ancient Greece and Rome. It was studied in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and it was still taken seriously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The concept ‘public opinion’ appeared in the late eighteenth century, together with the idea of political ‘propaganda’, which emerged during the French Revolution. A concern with the so-called ‘masses’ can be traced from the early nineteenth century onwards, at a time when daily newspapers were helping to shape national consciousness by making people aware of their fellow readers, viewing the same items of news at more or less the same moment.

Journalism became an academic subject early in the twentieth century. The first school of journalism in the USA was founded in 1908, at the University of Missouri, and the first in Germany (the Institut für Zeitungswissenschaften) was founded in Leipzig in 1915. With the rise of radio and television, universities established departments of communication (or communications). For example, the Annenberg School of Communications (now ‘Communication’ in the singular) was established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958.

More recently, some ambitious theorists, from the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) to the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–98), have extended the concept of ‘communication’ still more widely. Lévi-Strauss wrote about the exchange of goods and women, Luhmann about power, money and love as so many ‘media of communication’. Readers may already be asking themselves, what does not count as communication? This history will deal primarily with the spread of information, ideas and forms of entertainment in words and images by means of speech, travel, writing, music, print, telegraphy and telephony, radio, television and, most recently, digital, social, mobile and locative media (a term that we shall be using in the plural to refer to these different means of communication).

This introductory chapter first introduces the deeper history of communication preceding these media, before discussing orality, literacy and secondary orality as an overarching set of concepts for synthesizing communication history. It then explains how a wider definition of the medium concept has been used in more recent media-historical work. This chapter contains an up-to-date review of theoretical work on media history, while later chapters concentrate chronologically on the real-historical developments of media in society.

Communication in History, History in Communication

Significantly, it was in the age of radio that scholars began to recognize the importance of oral communication in ancient Greece and in the European Middle Ages, as well as in Africa and elsewhere. The First World War and the rise of communism and fascism encouraged the study of propaganda, neatly defined by the American journalist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) as ‘the manufacture of consent’. A classic study by another American, the political scientist Harold Lasswell (1902–78) bore the title Propaganda Techniques in the World War (1927), while another classic, by the Austrian Edward Bernays (1891–1995), was called simply Propaganda (1928). After the Second World War, members of the so-called Frankfurt School, notably Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Leo Lowenthal (1900–93), developed a ‘critical theory’ of what they called ‘mass culture’ or the ‘culture industry’. The beginning of the television age in the 1950s brought in visual communication as well, and also stimulated the rise of interdisciplinary theories of the media.

Contributions were made from economics, history, literature, art, political science, psychology, sociology and anthropology, and led to the emergence of academic departments of communication and cultural studies. Striking phrases encapsulating new ideas were coined by Harold Innis (1894–1952), who wrote of the ‘bias of communication’; by Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), who spoke of the ‘global village’; by Jack Goody (1919–2015), who traced the ‘domestication of the savage mind’; and by Jürgen Habermas (1929– ), the German sociologist, once associated with the Frankfurt School, who identified the ‘public sphere’, a zone for ‘discourse’ in which ideas are explored and views expressed. This book argues that, whatever the starting-point, it is necessary for people working in communication and cultural studies – a still growing number – to take history seriously, as well as for historians – whatever their period and preoccupations – to take serious account of communication, including both communication theory and communications technology.

Some phenomena in the media are older than is generally recognized, as two examples may suggest. Today’s television serials follow the model of radio serials, which in turn follow the model of the stories serialized in nineteenth-century magazines (novelists from Dickens to Dostoevsky originally published their work in this way). Again, some of the conventions of twentieth-century popular culture draw directly or indirectly on an even longer visual tradition. St Mark, in the painting by Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–94) known as St Mark Rescuing a Slave, is presented diving head first from Heaven to rescue a Christian captive, much like Superman saving the day in comics four hundred years later (Figure 1a/b).

Denunciations of new media follow a similar pattern, whether the object of these denunciations is television or the Internet, and they take us back to debates about the unfortunate effects of romances on their readers and of plays on their audiences as early as the sixteenth century: their authors were accused of stimulating the passions. San Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), archbishop of Milan, described plays as the ‘liturgy of the devil’. The first chapter of Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977) was entitled ‘The Belly of the Beast’. In the period marked by digitalization, there have been calls for ‘digital detox’, implying that there is something toxic about digital media. The role of the press, and of the journalists who earn their living from it, has always been controversial: the unreliability of the ‘gazetteers’ was already a commonplace in the seventeenth century. The charge of ‘muck-raking’ is also an old one.

Despite all such continuities, this book will concentrate on changes in the media; in presenting them, an attempt will be made to avoid two dangers – that of asserting that everything has got worse and that of assuming that there has been continuous improvement. Either way, the implication that trends have moved in a single direction must be rejected, although writers trusting in it have often been eloquent and distinguished in their own fields. Thus, the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla, in his study Literacy and Development in the West (1969), stressed the contribution of literacy to industrialization and more generally to ‘progress’ and to ‘civilization’, suggesting that ‘widespread literacy meant … a more rational and more receptive approach to life’.

In this respect, Cipolla’s work is representative of a mid-twentieth-century faith in ‘modernization’, a faith that underlay the literacy campaigns organized by UNESCO and by the governments of developing countries such as Cuba as well as books such as Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society (1958), a now dated study of the modernization of the Middle East that paid particular attention to what the author called ‘media participation’. We should remember, though, that the term ‘modern’ (coined, paradoxically enough, in the Middle Ages), has many meanings and a long history.

Fig. 1a Tintoretto, St Mark Rescuing a Slave, 1548.

Fig. 1b Superman.

The problems raised by this kind of approach demand discussion. That is just as much true of the Internet, which has been surrounded both by high hopes of ‘democratization’ and strong fears about surveillance, distortions of fact and the fragmentation of publics. It is not possible at this point in the Internet’s history to conclude whether the widening of access and its transformation ‘from below’ or surveillance and manipulation from above will be the stronger tendency. Still, the combination of media saturation, speed of distribution and complexity of actors in the time of the Internet makes debates about media as pressing and demanding as in any previous period in media history.

A relatively short history like this must be extremely selective and must privilege certain themes, like the role of the public sphere, the supply and diffusion of information, the growth of communications infrastructures and networks, and the rise of mediated entertainment. It must also concentrate on change rather than continuity, although readers will be reminded from time to time that, as new media were introduced, older ones were not abandoned but coexisted and interacted with the new arrivals. Manuscripts remained important in the age of print, as books and radio did in the age of television. This book holds that media need to be viewed in a wider sense, as presenting a set of relationships that are in perpetual change, including technological change.

What follows is essentially a social and cultural history with the politics, the economics and – not least – the technology put in. It resists technological determinism, the notion that technology acts one-sidedly as a cause of effects in society. We call the book ‘a’ social history of the media, not ‘the’ history, because we believe that there is no single correct way to write about the past, which, like the present, has been regarded and will continue to be regarded from different points of view. It is a ‘social’ history in the sense of attempting to place the media in the context of society as a whole. The media shape society, but society also shapes the media.

We were influenced at the outset by the simple but deservedly famous classic formula of Harold Lasswell, describing communication in terms of who says what to whom in which channel and with what effect. It is, however, necessary to extend Lasswell’s formula to include the intentions of the sender (For What Purpose?); the style or rhetoric of communication, which is part of the message (How?); the moment that the message was sent (When?); and the place or places where it was received (Where?). The responses of different groups of people to what they hear, view or read always demand study – and have been studied, as in the classic case of the late twentieth-century US soap opera Dallas, which was a global success but was viewed in very different ways in different parts of the world. How big the different groups are – and whether they constitute a ‘mass’ – is also relevant. The language of the masses emerged in the course of the nineteenth century and reminds us to consider Lasswell’s ‘whom’ in terms of ‘how many?’

The immediate intentions, strategies and tactics of communicators need at every point in the story to be related to the context in which they are operating – along with the messages that they are communicating. The long-term effects, especially the unintended and sometimes surprising consequences of the use of one means of communication rather than another, are more difficult to separate, even with the gift of hindsight. Indeed, whether ‘effects’ is the right term, implying as it does a one-way cause–effect relationship, is itself a subject of controversy. The words ‘network’ and ‘web’ were already in use in the nineteenth century.

Media of Communication before Print

This book concentrates on the modern West, from the late fifteenth century onwards. It also deals with some of the vital relationships between the West and other parts of the world, and highlights certain important developments in the latter, particularly in later periods when global interconnectedness became acute. The book’s narrative begins with printing (c. AD 1450) rather than with the alphabet (c. 2000 BC), with writing (c. 5000 BC) or with speech, but despite the importance often attributed to Johann Gutenberg (c. 1400–68), whom readers of one British newspaper voted ‘man of the millennium’ (Sunday Times, 28 November 1999), there is no clean break or zero point at which the story begins, and it will sometimes be necessary to refer back briefly to the ancient and medieval worlds.

In those days, communications were not immediate, but already reached to all the corners of the known world. The twentieth-century Canadian Harold Innis was one of several scholars who noted the importance of the media in the ancient world. Trained as an economist, he made his reputation with the so-called ‘staple theory’ of Canadian development, noting the successive dominance of the trade in furs, fish and paper, and the effects of these cycles on Canadian society. ‘Each staple in turn left its stamp, and the shift to new staples invariably produced periods of crisis.’ The study of paper led him into the history of journalism, and the study of Canada, where communications mattered profoundly for economic and political development, colonial and postcolonial, drew him to the comparative history of empires and their media of communication, from ancient Assyria and Egypt to the present. In his Empire and Communications (1950), Innis argued, for instance, that the Assyrian Empire was a pioneer in the construction of highways: it was claimed that a message could be sent from any point to the centre and an answer received within a week.

As a good economic historian, when he wrote of ‘media’, Innis meant the materials used for communication, contrasting relatively durable substances such as parchment, clay and stone with relatively ephemeral products such as papyrus and paper. He went on to suggest that the use of the heavier materials, as in the case of Assyria, led to a cultural b...