Historical and Cultural Context
Chapter 3
© 2009, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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CHAPTER OUTLINE
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Language
Writing
Printing
Conquering Space and Time: The Telegraph and
Telephone
Capturing the Image: Photography and Motion Pictures
News and Entertainment at Home: Radio and Television
Broadcasting
The Digital Revolution
Mobile Media
Concluding Observations
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LANGUAGE
• Major development in evolution of human
race
• Oral cultures required good memories
• Knowledge and information base grew
slowly
• Accuracy was a challenge
• Record keeping was difficult
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WRITING
• As the need for better record-keeping
grew, two problems needed to be solved:
– What symbols to use to represent
sounds/ideas
– On what surface to record these symbols
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Sign Writing vs. Phonetic Writing
• Sign writing
– Graphic symbols represent objects, sounds,
ideas
• Chinese pictographs;
Egyptian hieroglyphics
• Phonetic writing
– Symbols represent sounds, grouped to make
words, grouped to make sentences
• Phoenician alphabet
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Clay vs. paper
• Evolution of writing surfaces:
– Soft clay tablets
– Woven papyrus plants
– Parchment (sheep, goat)
– Paper from tree bark pulp
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Social Impact of Writing
• New social division based on ability to
read
– Unequal access to power via knowledge
• Birth, growth, maintenance of powerful
empires
• Accumulation and preservation of
knowledge
• Codification of laws, consistently applied
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The Middle Ages
• 6th century: demand for books rose but
supply was low, and copies had errors
– Monks hand-copied each manuscript
– No standard filing or cross-referencing system
• By 1150: more need to store information
– Developments include trade routes,
universities, strong central governments,
secularization of books, widespread
introduction of paper, scriptoria (writing shops)
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PRINTING
• China: Paper; Block printing (oldest
surviving book 9th Century); Movable type
• Korea: Metal movable type (15th Century)
• Germany: Gutenberg (15th Century)
movable metal type printing press
– Gutenberg’s use of movable metal type
revolutionized communication
– Communication could be cheap, quick, errorfree
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Effects of the Gutenberg Revolution
• Standardized and popularized vernacular
languages; spawned growth of nationalism
• More accessible information
• Literacy increased
• New schools of thought (Luther’s Protestantism)
• Encouraged exploration
• Increased growth of accumulated knowledge
• Led to development of concept of “news”
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Technology and Cultural Change
• Technological Determinism
– The belief that technology drives historical
change
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CONQUERING SPACE AND TIME:
THE TELEGRAPH AND
TELEPHONE
• These two related technologies foretold
many features of today’s media world
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Development of the Telegraph
• Speed of communication increased from
30 mph to 186,000 miles per second
• Telegraph: Greek for “to write at a
distance”
• Digital technology: dots and dashes
– Morse code
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Cultural Impact of the Telegraph
• By 1850, most Western frontier cities were
linked with other cities
• 1866: trans-Atlantic cable
• The telegraph affected
– How we moved goods
– How we coordinated services
– Standardization of market prices
– News flow and news story length
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Government and Media
• Some countries saw telegraph as
extension of postal service
• U.S. followed model of private ownership
and commercial development of the
telegraph
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A Change in Perspective
• The telegraph changed how we thought of
distance
– Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village
• Soon after the telegraph, the telephone
began linking people
– People didn’t need to understand telegraphic
codes
– The telephone industry became dominated by
big business
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CAPTURING THE IMAGE:
PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOTION
PICTURES
• Advances in the field of chemistry allowed
photography and motion pictures to
develop
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Early Technological Development
• Two things needed to permanently store
images
– A way to focus light rays from a subject onto a
surface
– A way to permanently alter the surface
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16th Century: camera obscura
1830s: daguerreotypes
1830s: ability to store images
1890: box camera
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Mathew Brady
• Brady was the first to capture war
extensively on film
– U.S. Civil War photographs gave accurate
record of war
• Photography also affected art
– Artists freed to interpret the world in new ways
– Photography became its own art form
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Photography’s Influence on Mass
Culture
• Allowed people to keep permanent
records of personal histories
• Created profession of photojournalism
• Photographic news as timesaving device
• Changed definition of news
• Cell phone cameras: privacy concerns
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Pictures in Motion
• Demand for film entertainment helped by
– Industrialization
– Urbanization
– Immigration
• Nickelodeons: 1900s crude store-front
theaters
– Helped create motion picture industry
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Motion Pictures and American
Culture
• Large film companies survived and dominated
film production, distribution, exhibition.
• Film industry altered concept of leisure activities.
• Hollywood produced cultural icons, helped bring
about concept of popular culture
• 1930s: Payne Fund studied media effects
• Through 1950s: Newsreels continued to
influence broadcast news reporting
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NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT AT
HOME: RADIO AND TELEVISION
BROADCASTING
• Radio was first medium to bring live
entertainment into the home
• World War I: Radio seen as useful to
warfare
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Broadcasting
• By the 1930s
– Broadcasting was a national craze
– Radio boomed, leading to creation of Federal
Radio Commission (FRC)
• FRC is precursor to current FCC
– Two national radio networks emerged (later 3)
– Content moved to mass appeal programs
– Professionalism and appeal increased
– Radio became more important news source
than newspapers
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Cultural Impact of Radio
• Popularized different kinds of music
• Introduced new entertainment genre, the soap
opera
• Introduced mass content for children
– Saw children as viable commercial market
• Introduced situation comedies
• Radio news came of age in 1930s-40s
• Radio personalized news, created news
celebrities
• Radio changed how people spend free time
– Became prime source of entertainment
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Television
• 1950s
– Following World War II, television’s growth
surged
• Sales of TV sets
• Amount of time watching TV
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Cultural Impact of TV
• Television is in 99% of households
• Set is on over 8 hours per day
• Third-largest consumer of time
– Only sleep and work consume more time
• Transformed almost every aspect of our culture
• We expect live coverage of events from
anywhere, at any time
• We can share a national or global
consciousness
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THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
(1 of 2)
• Nicholas Negroponte: Digital revolution is
the difference between atoms (material
goods) and bits (electronic 0s and 1s)
• Digital technology: system of encoding
information as series of off-on pulses (0, 1)
– Digitized information is easy to copy and
transmit
– Digital revolution affected mass media,
business owners, audience members
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THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
(2 of 2)
• Social/cultural implications of the digital
age
– Rethink notion of community
– Everyone can be a mass communicator
– Effects on politics
• Is a true direct democracy possible?
– Effects on the arts
– Information glut
– Digital divide
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MOBILE MEDIA
(1 of 2)
• Cell phones, laptop computers, PDAs
(personal digital assistants)
– Wireless technology
– Portable, allowing access to information from
anywhere
– Interconnected
– Blur distinction between mass communication
and interpersonal communication
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MOBILE MEDIA
(2 of 2)
• Serve some of traditional media functions
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Surveillance
Entertainment
Linkage
Culture
• Mobile parenting
• Time softening
• Downsides
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Driving distractions
Privacy issues
Interfere with interactions
Cost
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CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
• Predicting the ultimate use of any new
medium is difficult
• Any new communication advance may
change, but does not make extinct, the
advances that came before.
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