Introductory material for a university course in media history by Prof. Bill Kovarik, based on the book Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2015).
Disha NEET Physics Guide for classes 11 and 12.pdf
Rc 0.1.c.media history.overview
1. Media History from
Gutenberg
to the Digital Age
Slides based on the Bloomsbury book by Bill Kovarik
Revolutions in
Communication
About Media History -- #3
2. Web site & textbook
Textbook:
1st edition – 2011 2nd edition – 2016
http://www.revolutionsincommunication.com
3. This lecture is about …
Historiography of Media
◦ Social histories and critiques of media
◦ Four revolutions in mass media
And related / competing ideas
◦ Early media historians
◦ Walter Lippmann
◦ Elizabeth Eisenstein
◦ Harold Innis – Empire and communication
◦ Marshall McLuhan – theories of media
change and influence
5. Supporting the temple
of memory,
We transmit the facts
to posterity,
The arts, the sciences,
history,
We have immortality
Pierre Fourdriner
Manuel Typographique, 1737
6. US Media historians
Isaiah Thomas
◦ History of printing in America, 1808
James Parton
◦ Life of Horace Greeley, 1855
James Melvin Lee
◦ History of American Journalism, 1917
7. Media history textbooks
American Journalism, a History, 1690-
1960
◦ -- Frank Luther Mott 1962
Men and Machines of Am Journalism
◦ - Peter C. Marzio, 1973
The Press and America
◦ – Edwin Emery 1976
Voices of a Nation
◦ Jean Folkerts 1988
Mainstreams of American Media History
◦ – Hiley Ward 1990
Media in America – Wm. Sloan 1999
8. MEDIA HISTORY
Current Trends:
From national to international
From only journalism to all fields
From political to tech & culture
From Euro / male to inclusive
From “great men & machines” to
cultural and social histories
9. What’s a revolution?
Sudden change in status quo
Profoundly upsets social / economic /
cultural order
10. Four media revolutions
Printing
◦ Moveable type – 1455
Associated with religious revolution 1500s – 1700s
◦ Industrial scale printing
Associated with political revolutions 1700s – now
Imaging
◦ Engraving, photography and cinema
◦ Ads and PR as image making
Both associated with popularization of media
Electronic – radio, TV, satellites
Associated with nationalization of media
Digital – computers, networks
Associated with emerging global culture
11. Alternate approaches …
Language / Human
◦ Natural ability
Writing / Literate
◦ Has to be learned
Typographic
Hypergraphic
Electronic
Cybernetic
12. Five noted media historians
Wilbur Schramm
Walter Lippmann
Elizabeth Eisenstein
Harold Innis
Marshall McLuhan
13. Wilbur Schramm (1907-1987)
The story of human communication
(Harper Collins 1988)
Images -- Cave paintings, calendars
Writing – from symbols to phonetics
Mass media, news, ads, pr, elite &
popular press
Sound, film, radio, TV, photography,
phone
Microelectronics, satellites
14. Lippmann’s 4 stages of media
history
◦ Authoritarian
(censored)
◦ Partisan
(political parties)
◦ Commercial / Penny Press
(often sensationalistic)
◦ Organized intelligence
(future development)
Walter Lippmann
Public Opinion, 1922
15. Elizabeth Eisenstein
(1923–2016)
• Theme was the printing press
as an agent of social change
• Role of press especially
important during the
Protestant Reformation
• Noted effects of printing: dissemination,
standardization, and preservation of information
• Observed that recovery of previous cultures
(Greek, Roman) was the first major task of
printing
• Saw printing as one of the major influences in the
Protestant Reformation and the formation of the
modern world
16. Harold Innis (1894 – 1952)
Empire and Communications
Stressed balance between:
Durable, time – binding media
(including oral culture)
Flexible, space – binding
media
Both needed for “empire building”
but lack of balance led to loss of
empires
17. Marshall McLuhan (1911-
1980)
Foresaw enormous changes in & with media
Wrote Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media
“Medium is the message”
Deterministic view of media type as shaping the
content of a message
Printing had a huge impact in de-tribalizing people
Radio re-tribalized people
Hot and cool media
“Hot” media immerses audience and allows less
participation – cinema
“Cool” media requires involvement and thought
-- printed media, possibly radio
18. McLuhan’s technology tetrad
1. Enhance
What does the new medium
enhance or amplify?
2. Make obsolete
What becomes obsolete or
reduced in prominence?
3. Retrieve
What is retrieved from an earlier
time that had nearly been
forgotten?
4. Reverse
How does the medium “overheat”
or warp under pressure?
22. Useful basic concepts
Tech. determinism vs social
construction
◦ Does the technology advance due to its
own properties or do social, political and
economic forces shape the technology?
Utopians versus Luddites
◦ Will a new technology improve things or
make them worse?
Technological fallacies
◦ Predictions about future uses for
technology that turn out to be off base
23. Sociological historians &
critics
Upton Sinclair -- The Jungle, The
Brass Check, Muckraker, press critic 1900s –
1930s
A. J. Liebling -- New Yorker media critic
1940s
I. F. Stone, also George Seldes
◦ Independent editors and press critics 1950s – 70s
Ben Bagdikian – 1970s – 90s
◦ Media Monopoly, press concentration
Neil Postman -- 1980s - 90s
◦ Amusing Ourselves to Death
24. Critical theorists as historians
Sociologists -- Max Weber and Michael
Schudson
◦ Ideational model helps observe the clash of ideas
around social reform
Communications theorists -- Michel Foucault
◦ Discourse analysis to understand the information
content and structure of mainstream cultural products
and “subjugated knowledges.”
Critical theorists
◦ Frankfurt School -- Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas
Conflict of classes / Marxist analysis
Mass media is structured to subvert identity and assimilate
individuality into the dominant culture
◦ Noam Chomsky -- libertarian socialist
propaganda model – media supports ruling elites.
25. Review: People
Isaiah Thomas, James Parton, James
Melvin Lee, Walter Lippmann, Wilbur
Schramm, Elizabeth Eisenstein,
Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan,
Upton Sinclair, Jurgen Habermas,
Noam Chomsky
26. Review: Concepts
History becoming more inclusive of
women and minorities, more
international, more interdisciplinary;
Determinism vs social construction;
utopians vs luddites; technological
fallacies; durable media vs flexible
media
Medium is the message, hot and cool
media, global village, technology
tetrad
Sociological and critical theory about
This lectures takes us from general ideas about history to specific ideas about media history.
One of the earliest histories of printing was from 1733 ( MCCXXXIII )
This and others are available on Google Books as free downloads
Palmer credits Marco Polo with bringing back the idea of moveable type and stamps to Venice from China in the 1200s and credits John Faust more than Johannes Gutenberg as the inventor of moveable type.
Some histories were emotional and over-wrought. Leo Marx, in his 1964 book Machine in the Garden, called the “Rhetoric of the technological sublime”
Fournier developed the system of typography we use today, with point sizes and the idea of minimizing space between letters to the point where they were still legible.
ALL of these are available on Google Books as free downloads by the way. Thomas was the first American printer to report on the battles of Lexington and Concord in April, 1775. James Parton said this about 19th century publisher Horace Greeley: The family were so poor that it was a matter of doubt sometimes whether they could get food enough to live through the long winter; and so Horace, who had learned the printer's trade in Vermont, started out on foot in search of work in a village printing-office. He walked from village to village, and from town to town, until at last he went to Erie, the largest place in the vicinity.
Focus is always on the US, and mostly on the press and events covered by the press. You’d never know there was a revolution going on out there.
But the current need is to understand media in an international context, and to include all the fields, not just journalism.
Courtesy of the Simpsons of course.
This is our book’s approach to media revolutions, and although it is not the only approach, it is comprehensive and thematically coherent.
So just because Prof. Kovarik divides it up one way doesn’t mean its right. It’s just another way of looking at things. Wilbur Schramm, a great communications theorist, started with writing as the first revolution in his highly recommended The Story of Human Communication: Cave Painting to Microchip, Harper & Row, 1988
Terrence Moran’s of NYU has six revolutions: Language, literacy, tyopgraphic, hypergraphic, electronic and cybernet. Introduction to the History of Communication, Peter Lang, 2010
Prof. Kovarik (author of these Slides and book Revolutions in Communciation) uses pretty much the same group but (for the sake of brevity) focuses on the mass media, and so excludes writing and language.
"Communications has helped to cement the connection of ideas and knowledge, the history of human communication is really a history, not of action, but of interaction"---Wilbur Schramm. Wilbur Schramm was an early leader in the field of communications and did a lot in the development of the field of communications. He was the one, who shaped the study of communication, as it is understood today. His book "The Story Of Human Communication" focuses on the evolution of communication from cave painting to the mid-20th century.
Schramm also outlined the study of communications in “The beginnings of communication study in America: A personal memoir,” Sage, 1997.
Walter Lippmann took an essentially political approach with Public Opinion in 1922. Several questions:
-- Is this a real evolution or is it Whig history?
-- Do different countries go through these stages at different times ?
-- When the commercial media gets into trouble, does it tend to become more partisan, in other words, to “regress?”
-- What is organized intelligence? Lippmann did not give much of a clue about what he thought about that. What might it be?
“We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.” -- Francis Bacon, Novum organum, 1620
Innis’ ideas are among the most important and least understood of media history, partly because his life ended before he had time to fully explore the directions his scholarship was taking.
Perhaps the best known media historian was Marshall McLuhan, widely referred to in his day as a “media guru.” McLuhan threw a grab bag full of media and technology ideas up into the air, leaving it for others to try to make more sense of the intellectual frontiers he was exploring.
McLuhan’s tetrad of technology change
This is one way of seeing and considering the effects of new communications technologies. Take radio, for instance. We might say radio enhanced news and music, it obsolesced (or made less prominent) print and visual media; it retrieved the spoken word and music hall shows; and it reversed (when pushed to its limits) into television (McLuhan, 1992). We might also say that television enhanced the visual, obsolesced the audio, retrieved theatrical spectacle, and reversed into “500 channels with nothing on.”
While McLuhan’s Tetrad explains the inter-relationship of many types of changing media, this model considers the directions and receptions of all information traffic through all kinds of media. What we see is a change from “top-down” programs to social media programs.
What the digital revolution allowed was the transition from top-down control of linear programs to user-controlled rich content (blue arrow). Increasingly, however, media is becoming more like a virtual marketplace and more social.
None of the new social media would be possible without the digital revolution.