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Historical and Cultural Context
Chapter 3
© 2009, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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CHAPTER OUTLINE• 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, error-
free
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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
• 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– Surveillance– Entertainment– Linkage– Culture
• Mobile parenting• Time softening
• Downsides– 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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