A History of Mass Communication: Six Information Revolutions PDF

A History of Mass Communication Six Information Revolutions A History of Mass Communication Six Information Revolutions Irving Fang Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1997 This edition published 2...

Communication Six Information Revolutions A History of Mass Communication Six Information Revolutions Irving Fang Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1997 This edition published 2015 by Focal Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA First issued in hardback 2016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor Copyright © 1997, Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of form or by any electronic, mechanical, cluding photocopying and recording, out permission in writing from the Notices Practitioners and researchers must evaluating and using any information, herein. In using such information the safety of others, including Product or corporate names may be for identification and explanation Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Fang, Irving E. A history of information revolutions p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ISBN-13: 978-0-240-80254-1 ISBN-10: 1. Communication-History. I. Title P90.F26 1997 302.2'09-dc20 96-36527 CIP ISBN-13: 978-0-240-80254-1 ISBN-10: 0-240-80254-3 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication A catalogue record for this book ISBN 13: 978-1-138-17374-3 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-240-80254-1 (pbk) Contents Acknowledgments xiv What Are Information Revolutions? xv Defining an Information Revolution Six Information Revolutions xvii Shared Characteristics xviii The Power of Information xix Highway and Village xx Sorting Media from Content xx Replacing Transportation xxi Shaping and Being Shaped xxi Difficult Beginnings xxii Life Is Different xxii Political Tools and Weapons xxiii Arresting Gorbachev xxiv Tiananmen Square xxiv The Infection of Mass Communication Terrorism and the Media xxvii Clandestine Radio xxvii Middle Eastern Examples of New World Information Order xxviii Cultural Imperialism xxix Economic Freedom with Political Altering American Politics xxxi The Gulf War xxxi Notes xxxiii 1 Writing The First Revolution 1 The Invention of Writing 1 Writing on Clay 1 Advancing Knowledge 2 vi CONTENTS Skin and Bones and Papyrus 3 Papyrus in Egypt 4 Papyrus in Greek Hands 5 Parchment 6 Other Writing Surfaces 7 The Greeks 7 The Alphabet 8 Out of the Dark Ages 8 A Time of Turmoil 10 Supplementing an Oral Culture 11 The Warning of Socrates 12 From Greece to Rome 12 The First Libraries 12 The Lamp of Reason 14 Carrying the Message 14 Notes 16 2 Printing The Second Revolution 18 Turbulent Europe 18 Sources of News 19 Reformation and Renaissance 20 A Gift from China 20 Origins 21 No Information Revolution 22 Paper Moves West 22 300 Sheep Skins for One Bible 23 Books and Universities 23 The First Universities 24 The New Book Culture 25 Censorship 26 Punishment for Publishing 27 Mail in the Middle Ages 28 Postal Services for Town and Gown 28 Postal Service as a Business 29 Here a New, There a New 30 Forerunners of Newspapers 31 The First Newspapers 31 Unintended Consequences 32 Printing and Literacy 32 Vernacular Printing 32 Why Bother to Read? 33 The Engines of Printing and Literacy and Equality 34 Did Gutenberg Know About China? 35 European Ferment 36 What Did Gutenberg Know? 36 Movable Type in China and Korea 38 Gutenberg's Achievement 38 Notes 41 3 Mass Media The Third Revolution 43 The Turmoil of a New Age 43 The Shift to Cities 43 It Also Brought Misery 44 Three Revolutions 44 Child Labor 45 Social Changes 46 Mass Dependencies 46 Printing for Everyone 47 Printing Changes 47 Stereotyping 48 Setting the Type 48 Offset Lithography 49 Paper for Everyone 49 A Continuous Sheet of Paper 49 A Lesson from a Wasp 50 The Information Pump 51 The Business of Newspapers 51 The Penny Press 52 Reporting 52 The Birth of Objectivity 53 Improvements in the Composing Room 54 Photographs in Newspapers 54 Free Presses 55 Controlled Presses 55 The Muckrakers 56 Women Can Type 57 Helping to Bring Women Out 57 The Old Office 57 Inventing a Writing Machine 58 The Sholes Machine 58 Women Mean Business 59 QWERTY 59 "If Anyone Desires..." 60 Creating Demand 60 Origins of Advertising 61 The Word Is "Advertising" The Advertising Agency 62 Catalogs and Patent Medicines 63 Brand Names 63 More Advertising Tools 64 viii CONTENTS Radio Advertising 64 Televising Advertising 64 Setting Standards 65 Solving Postal Problems 65 Postmasters and Publishers 66 Postal Services for Newspapers 67 Transporting the Mail 67 International Agreement 68 Photography 69 Ancient Roots 69 The Chemical Basis of Photography Daguerre and Talbot 70 Wet-Plate Photography 72 Photographing the World 72 The Muckrakers' Photos 74 Photoengraving 74 The Copier 75 Looking Ahead 76 Current News 77 Newspapers Change 77 Ancient Signals 77 The First Telegraphs 78 "What Hath God Wrought?" Western Union Takes the Lead 79 Its Role in Transmitting News 80 News Agencies 81 Changes in Service 82 Voices on a Wire 83 Intruder and Rescuer 83 "Mr. Watson, come here. Can the Lower Classes Use It? 86 The Telephone As an Early Radio 86 Telephone Operators 87 Into the Twentieth Century 88 Signals in the Air 89 Some of Radio's Societal Origins of Radio 90 Marconi 90 Competition 91 The Titanic 92 Voice 92 Hobbyists Tune In 93 Movies Are Born 95 Movies As a Communication Medium 95 How Movies Began 96 Edison Orders an Invention 97 Motion Picture Projection 97 Projected Movies Come to America 98 The Earliest Films 98 Notes 99 4 Entertainment The Fourth Revolution 101 Public Recreation 101 Money from the Poor 102 Entertaining Newspapers 103 Adding Color 103 Magazines for the Fragmented Public 104 English and Colonial Beginnings 104 Plagiarism Was Common 105 The Nickel Magazines 106 The Novel 106 Entertainment on a Plate 107 The Start of Recorded Music 107 Nothing Ever Like It 108 Phonograph Parlors 109 The Phonograph as Furniture 109 Dancing and Jazz 110 High Fidelity 111 Portable Recording 112 The Story of Audiotape 112 Germans Move Ahead 113 A Tool for Journalists 113 New Formats 114 Broadcasting 114 Isolating Listeners 115 The Radio Act of 1927 116 Commercials 117 Broadcasting Policy in Other Networks 118 Owning Cameras 119 Technical Improvements 119 The Kodak 120 More Improvements 121 Pictures that Lie 121 Holograms 122 Movies Tell Stories 123 Nickelodeons 123 Fear of Revolutionary Ideas 125 A Market for Simple Stories 126 The Actors 127 Assembly Line Production 128 Motion Pictures in Other Countries 129 The Coming of Sound 130 x CONTENTS The Coming of Color 131 The Stars and Their Films 132 Censorship 133 Political Issues 133 The Drive-In 134 Enter Television 134 The Distribution Schedule 135 Making Movies Cheaply 136 Notes 137 5 The Toolshed Home The Fifth Revolution 138 The Communication Toolshed 138 What Makes a House a Home? 138 Contacts Decrease 139 Extending the Toolshed Home 140 Problems with Heavy Media Usage 141 Home Mail Delivery 142 Free Home Delivery 142 Parcels, Catalogs, and Junk Mail 143 Changes 144 New Uses for Phones 145 Telephone Company Reorganizations Cellular Phones 146 Pocket Phones 146 The New Picturephones 147 A Variety of Uses 147 Reach Out Without Touching 148 "Free" Entertainment 148 Political Broadcasts 149 Cultural Influence 149 Improving the Sound 150 Radio Reinvents Itself 150 Citizen's Band 151 Looking in Radio's Crystal The Benefits of Broadcasting 151 Pictures in the Parlor 152 Time Spent Watching 153 The Scientific Roots of Television Electronic Television 154 The Public Is Introduced to The Fight Over Standards 157 HDTV 158 The Commercial Basis 158 Programming 158 Settings and Plots 159 Soap Operas 159 The Sitcoms 160 What Is for Children? 160 Talk Shows and "Infotainment" Paying for Programming 161 The Decline of Broadcasting 162 Tragedy in the Parlor 162 Radio News 163 Two Roots of Television News 164 Kennedy Assassination Coverage 165 The Civil Rights Movement 165 Anti-War Demonstrations 166 "The Living Room War" 167 Not Newspaper Journalism 168 Sometimes a Global Village 168 Wiring the Toolshed 169 Two Trojan Horses 170 How Cable Began 170 CATV Pioneers 171 Originating Programming 172 Cable's Early Growth 172 City Franchises 173 Pay-TV Without Cable 174 Videotape, a New Book 174 Advantages of the Home VCR 174 Trying to Record Television 175 The First Videotape Machines 175 Electronic News Gathering 176 Going to the Movies at Home 177 The Near Future 178 Spreading Worldwide 179 Broadening the Video Journalist Video Piracy 180 "Cultural Imperialism" 181 Video Production Diffusion 181 Setting New Records 182 Radio and Recording 183 High Fidelity 184 We Still Have Books 185 Notes 187 6 The Highway The Sixth Revolution 189 Heavy Traffic 189 Choices 190 Interactivity 191 Separated by Communication 192 Distant Connections 193 xii CONTENTS Computer at the Wheel 194 A Tool of Communication 194 How It All Began 195 Desktop Publishing 195 Magazines Target Their Readers 197 Multimedia, a Newer Book 198 What Is Multimedia? 198 CD-ROM 199 CD-ROM Zines 200 Cable Narrowcasting 201 Ted Turner Moves In 201 New Channels 202 Home Shopping 203 Cable Franchises 203 Pay Cable 204 Wireless Cable 205 Fiber Optics 205 Programming Through Optical Footprints on the Globe 207 Geopolitical Considerations 207 A Split-Second Apart 208 Changes in News Reporting The Beginnings 209 INTELSAT 210 Video Teleconferencing 211 Direct Broadcasting 211 C-Band and Ku-Band 212 Scrambling the Signal 213 Teleports 213 A Limit to Infinite Space 213 Electronic Commuting 214 Who Works at Home? 215 Advantages of Working from Home 215 The Telecenter 216 Where Will We Live? 216 What Will Happen to Cities? 217 The Internet 217 Who Owns the Internet? 218 The World Wide Web 219 Electronic Cash 220 Bulletin Boards 220 Exercising Control 221 Knowlege Groups 222 Advertising 222 Chat Lines 223 Social Implications 223 Radio on the Internet 224 Mailbox in the Computer 225 Faxing 226 Speed of Facsimile 227 "Fax" Is More Than Facsimile's Origins 227 A Variety of Uses 228 Going Up the Highway 229 The Qube Experiment 230 Teletext and Videotex 231 Online Services 232 Other Interactive Operations 232 Interactive Possibilities 232 Manipulating Television Programs 233 News Online 234 The Electronic Newspaper 234 Telcos, Newspapers, and Newscasts 234 Selling News Instead of Newspapers The Computerized Newspaper 236 National Distribution 236 Notes 237 A Summing Up 239 Revisiting the Six Information Communication in Three Eras 241 Notes 243 Bibliography 244 Communication Timeline 255 Index 268 Acknowledgments This book is an attempt to find common themes in the long and complex history of communication. It endeavors to show how the means of communication grew out of their eras, how the tools were developed, how they influenced the societies of those eras, and how they have continued to exert influence upon subsequent generations. The book is divided into six periods that are identified as information revolutions, recognizing that the events that constitute an information revolution defy neat cate- gorization. For example, motion pictures are both mass information and packaged entertainment. Placing certain events within a particular movement became a necessity for the sake of clarity and narra- tive flow. Because the author has not found it pos- sible to have a sufficiently detailed knowl- edge of the entire sweep of history covered by this volume, he has relied on the exper- What Are Information Revolutions? Year by year more people are saying more over more channels on more topics to a bigger total audience. The Internet is ex- ploding. The talk in cable television is of 500 channels. Videotape stores sell used tapes to clear their crowded shelves. Desk- top publishing pours out newsletters, self- published books, magazines, and multi- media presentations, with no end in sight. New computer software arrives every day. In free industrial nations, bookstores and magazine stands are jammed with product. Libraries hardly know what to do with all their books. It has been true for decades that anyone can own a book. Now, in indus- trial societies, almost anyone can own a movie. Meanwhile, more movies are being shot than ever. And desktop video is bring- ing a budget version of Hollywood to Main Street. Meanwhile, home computers ex- pand information use in ways only recently undreamed. Even if it were nothing else, our Infor- mation Age is the latest in a series of social revolutions that define and span recorded history. A desire to produce communica- tion as well as to consume it has been xvi A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION What would constitute an information revolution? The word revolution implies a sudden and often violent change, but revo- lutions can be more subtle, evolving over decades, even centuries.' In the general parlance, revolution is an overwrought de- scription of any societal developments. The word long ago became a cliché. Con- sider it here in the sense of profound changes involving new means of commu- nication that permanently affect entire so- cieties, changes that have shaken political structures and influenced economic devel- opment, communal activity, and personal behavior. Unlike so many of our wars and switching of rulers, information revolu- tions create changes, intended or not, that stick. The new media of information be- come part of the changing society. It appears evident that for an information revolution to succeed, media that will pro- vide new means for communication must be disseminated within societies already un- dergoing change. Communication technolo- giesby themselves are not enough. The media both aid and are aided by whatever has shaken the existing order, for those who seek change will reach out to grasp what- ever means become available to gain sup- port for their opinions. This is not a new idea. A Chinese of the Tang dynasty (7th to 10th centuries A.D.) wrote, "When customs change, writing changes." 2 As those opinions spread, so does awareness of the media themselves. From awareness comes use by other hands. The interwoven cause and effect relationship between social change and media development has continued since the beginnings of recorded history. The argument maybe stated this way: if you build a better mousetrap, the world will not beat a path to your door unless the world can be shown that there are mice to be caught. That has been the story of the tools of communication, the "better mousetraps." They have affected much in our lives, but inventions by themselves do not change society. When people want change enough to take action, an invention helps. In the industrial nations throughout the century that we are now completing, change has been constant and constantly desired. sion across all layers of contemporaneous society. Of course, changes in communication occurred during quieter periods as well, but those identified here took a role in creating a qualitative difference in society. The change has always led toward an equalizing of the status of members of society, the road toward democracy. That there has never in human history been true equality should not detract from an appreciation of genuine improvement in human affairs. Six Information Revolutions This book identifies six periods in Western history that fit the description of an infor- mation revolution. The periods range in time from the eighth century B.C. to the near future. The first of the six information revolu- tions may be characterized as the Writing Revolution. It began primarily in Greece about the eighth century B.C., with the convergence of the phonetic alphabet, an import from Phoenicia to the east, and pa- pyrus, an import from Egypt to the south. With writing used to store knowledge, the human mind would no longer be con- strained by the limits of memory. Knowl- edge would be boundless. The second information revolution, the Printing Revolution, began in Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century, with the convergence of paper, an import origi- nally from China, but proximately from the Arab and Moorish cultures, and a printing system that the German goldsmith Johan- nes Gutenberg assembled, perhaps from a variety of sources. With printing, informa- tion spread through many layers of society. Printing lent itself to massive political, re- ligious, economic, educational, and per- sonal alterations. We have called these changes the Reformation, the Renaissance, humanism, mercantilism, and the end of feudalism. Printing marked the start of the modern world. The third information revolution, the Mass Media Revolution, began in western Europe and the eastern United States dur- ing the middle of the nineteenth century, xviii A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION anywhere, doubt arises about the future of our cities, which grew with the centripetal demands of the Industrial Revolution cou- pled with sharp population increases. If economies depend upon information, what does the future hold for vast areas of the globe that are not fully plugged into the information streams? What will happen to our interdependent world of instant com- munication and weapons of mass destruc- tion if these areas continue to respond with economic stagnation, environmental de- struction, and overpopulation? Can we af- ford to let the Information Highway bypass any communities? The pace of information revolution is speeding up. The second revolution ar- rived 1,700 years after the first crested. The last four, each quite distinct, have over- lapped during the last two centuries.3 Shared Characteristics Each information revolution appears to share certain characteristics with the others: Each is based upon the invention of more than one tool of communication, such as papyrus and the phonetic alphabet, paper and printing, or television and satellites. Their convergences have had powerful effects. Each took place where change of a differ- ent sort was stirring the society and where a social structure existed that en- abled change to occur, such as those in modern Western democracies. The tools of communication gave social and political changes added dynamism and were themselves given a forward thrust by those other changes, a symbi- otic relationship of cause and effect.4 Information revolutions tended toward some leveling of conditions for those who participated in them. Their results tended to be egalitarian. They pointed toward a greater degree of democratization or sharing of influence than previously ex- isted. Where the use of the tools has been limited, both in ancient times and now, human beings have been less free. The changes wrought by these disper- sions led toward a greater sharing and mocracies, many of the tools are avail- able to those who want them. Changes in communication encountered opposition from those who, for political or financial reasons, disliked the changes taking place. Reaction was inevitable from those who must surrender a share of influence and power. They responded both by using the media themselves and by trying to control their use by others. However, given enough time media availability has continued to spread. New literacies have arisen to accommo- date the new communication technolo- gies, from the phonetic alphabet of the first information revolution to the com- puter codes of the latest. With each new language has come a new class of experts fully aware of the advantage emanating from the hoarding of their knowledge. As to the belief that the average citizen lies increasingly helpless under the heel of political and economic tyrants who dominate the media and suppress free- dom of thought, history tells the opposite story. The dissemination of the tools of mass communication has increased the potential for social protest, and to that extent it has made humankind more free, not less. Their limitation has the opposite result. Tools of communication were influenced by marketing considerations. Within the boundaries of available technology and scientific possibility, communication tools ultimately have become what their users wanted. The technology has changed markedly, but not people's tastes or interests. The old wine is poured into the new bottles. Use of communication media, their ef- fects multiplied by their convergence, led inevitably to the separation of their users. Herein lies a dilemma. The tools have given us communication without transportation, yet we still possess a hu- man need for face-to-face contact. Heavy personal use of the tools of com- munication has been accompanied by less social activity. The more time spent with mass communication, the less time has remained for face-to-face communi- xx A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION felt more than on the public perception of technology.' Highway and Village Much consideration will be given in this book to what is called the Information Highway. lb abuse an overworked meta- phor, let us note that highways have direc- tions, and their travelers have points of departure and destinations. As the tele- phone companies, cable companies, and broadcasting companies pour the cement, there are strong indications that this new highway is not coming from the public library or the news office despite the pub- licity releases, as much as it is the cinema, the shopping mall, and the video arcade. What we, the audience, want is oftentimes the stuff of dreams. And where is this information highway going? It is not heading toward the "global village." Marshall McLuhan was correct in foreseeing the technological possibility of a "global village" in which most of human- kind could share information.' However, his metaphor of a village, where folks nor- mally communicate by talking face to face, presumes that radio and television are re- turning us to an oral culture; for example, "...the electric implosion now brings oral and tribal ear-culture to the literate West."8 Yet, broadcasting although it strikes the ear, has not returned us to an oral culture, which is based upon a two-way, limited scale of information on a human dimen- sion. Instead, one-way radio and television, plus their content of recordings and motion pictures, are oral versions of the limitless quantity of information that identifies a written culture that no single human being can absorb in its totality. A further reality has been that only on rare occasions, such as a lunar walk, the Olympic Games, or the Gulf War, do we venture together into the shared space of a global village. Mostly, we prefer to retreat into our homes, where we now spend so much of our time with so many communi- cation media that our homes can be thought of as communication toolsheds, which is another focus of this book. It is to that society, especially producers and edu- cators, has not fully marshaled its re- sources to use the television medium wisely, or in fact to consider this medium the way we regard the medium of books as existing for more than financial gain. Yet, a visit to the paperback racks of any drug- store will remind us that books are not always used as means of acquiring knowl- edge. It is useful to distinguish content from the carriers of content, media. Replacing Transportation Through recorded time, most communica- tion depended upon transportation. Infor- mation was bound by human limitations, the sound of a voice, the time it took a pair of feet, or a horse, or a ship to reach a destination. Communication technology changed that. Human limitations fell away. The promise of the Internet and the rest of the Information Highway is even more replacement of transportation. Shopping by electronic catalog, working and learning at home via computer modem and facsimile, video teleconferencing in place of business travel, acquiring specialized education, and receiving computer-assisted medical care are all reporting success....in If significant parts of one's work, mar- keting, education, entertainment, and well-being can be accomplished without leaving home, will more people choose to live in the countryside instead of in cities or suburbs? Will they choose San and commute electronically to Omaha in- stead of living in Omaha? Such a pattern could lead to a further decline Population transfers resulting from technology are not new. The Industrial Revolution shoveled people out of the countryside into cities. The post-World War II shift of middle-class families from the city to the suburbs, a move encouraged by the technologies of cars and highways, al- tered American life. A new population shift based on the emerging communication technologies promises to shake up life as much as these earlier mass movements did. xxii A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION Difficult Beginnings Many tools of communication began with quite limited ownership. For the centuries when books were hand produced by monks and booksellers, most people lived out their lives not knowing that such a thing as a book existed, let alone ever seeing a book. For a half century after its invention, the still camera was a complicated piece of equipment for the serious hobbyist and the professional. Even though ordinary people aspired to own photographs they did not think of owning a camera. The videotape recorder and the video camera were not initially designed for untrained hands. Sci- entists alone worked with the first comput- ers. In 1943 IBM chairman Thomas Watson said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Some familiar means of personal com- munication began as tools of government and business, but achieved success in per- sonal use. The world's postal systems, a real communication technology, belong to this category. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the typewriter, the telephone, the phonograph, and the radio all saw the first light of day as aids to the world of com- merce. In the twentieth century, audiotape, videotape, and the computer evolved with no idea that millions of ordinary people would take them into their homes. Those familiar business and government tools, the fax machine and the copier, are in the proc- ess of joining them in the home. Not all technologies showed immediate promise. The telegraph and the computer went through periods of government sup- port and little public acceptance. In time, they altered our world. New technologies found acceptance when their superiority over existing tech- nologies for specific uses was recognized but diffusion required an infrastructure extended far beyond an invention, together elements of business, finance, gineering, and government regulation. Businesses and individuals adopted the tele- phone because it offered an attractive alter- native to communication by mail and telegraph. Then structures grew in support us to overlook their individual and collec- tive impact on the society. For example, consider the percentage of our lives devoted to watching a television screen. The set is on in the average Ameri- can home for more than seven hours a day. Our general sense that life is different than it was only a few short years ago—more comfortable or more dangerous, more un- der our control or more beyond it—may fail to lead us thoughtfully to consider that among the reasons that we regard life as different is the time we spend looking at phosphor dots. It is just a step from regard- ing life as different to regarding life as strange. That may raise some concerns and unease that can affect our attitudes about the world around us. Heavy television us- ers, for instance, tend on the whole to be more fearful persons than non-users. As a result of our concerns, we may hesitate go out at night, we may buy a deadbolt or a large dog, and we may vote for a law-and-order candidate for mayor, all without the attendant recognition that our attitudes can be traced to one of the tools of communication in the toolsheds that we call our homes. Political Russian television carried the horrors from Chechnya, of hungry dogs circling the corpses in Grozny. For decades such scenes, neither photographed nor transmit- ted, did not disturb the Kremlin's rigid con- trol. No longer. Russia and the rest of the world are far different places now vision cameras see, videotape records, ellites transmit, and television sets in living rooms show. Even if the Kremlin had the power it once had to block broadcasts on Russian media, CNN would beam the sig- nals from the border of Finland to Vladivos- tok. Jamming a satellite TV signal is considerably more difficult than jamming radio. With 24-hour-a-day financial transac- tions and the penetration by global news agencies, we live in what is becoming a borderless world. xxiv A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION Arresting Gorbachev In 1991, a cabal of old-guard Communist leaders tried to overthrow the more liberal government of Mikhail Gorbachev. The So- viet President, his family, and aides were placed under house arrest in a villa on the Crimean peninsula hundreds of miles south of Moscow. The plotters did their best to shut down telephone, radio, and televi- sion communication. But something went wrong. The plotters were either not aware of the Internet, the globe-girdling of computer networks, or they did not worry about it. They should have. Boris Yeltsen knew about the enormous network and was tapping it to plot counter strategy with experts at NATO. Some of his state- ments, relayed back to the Soviet Union by the Voice of America, rallied public sup- port. At the same time, shut off from what was going on, Gorbachev and his aides rum- maged around in the basement and came up with some old radio sets in working order. They were able to pick up signals from the BBC, the Voice of America, and Radio Liberty. Reports of the coup collapse made it easier for Gorbachev quickly to resume power. The coup failed and, in the days that followed, a stunned world listened as the Soviet empire fell apart. That world of lis- teners included the people of the Soviet Union themselves, who were denied local radio. "They have closed the papers, not so important," said Vladimir Sluzhekov, a reporter, as he stood by a surging crowd of demonstrators. "The radio—that's what hurts. Without the radio, no one knows what's going on except the people who are right here."12 However, through glasnost, the policy of openness, they were getting access to worldwide radio and television sources from the streets of Moscow. I think the histories of these incredible three days will focus heavily on Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America and the BBC, for relaying back to the Russian peo- ple what Boris Yeltsin was saying.'3 sion of the Statue of Liberty, the "goddess of freedom and democracy." The world watched, stunned, as television news sto- ries and pictures were beamed out by sat- ellite day after day. At first, Deng Xiaoping's peared just as shocked. Then it unrolled an intense campaign of disinformation while it tried to put an end to the western cover- age by pulling the plugs on the satellite feeds, but its efforts at censorship were circumvented, mostly by now familiar tools of communication, but partly by a new piece of equipment, the Pixilator, an electronic device that broke an individual video frame into bits for transmission over an ordinary telephone line. The govern- ment's efforts to limit what the camera was able to photograph were also frustrated by small, low-light 8mm cameras which, in the hands of one resourceful photographer, was hidden in a shoebox tied to a bicycle. The flyaway portable satellite uplink found effective employment in Beijing. Brought there by a CNN crew to supple- ment the overworked Chinese uplinks dur- ing the visit by Soviet President Gorbachev, a flyaway uplink was transmitting video pictures accompanying television news re- ports when the student demonstrations be- gan. The Chinese government could not "pull the plug," for in their plug. The CNN signal traveled a com- plex route. Its transmission frequency was converted from Ku-band to C-band as it moved from Beijing to a satellite station in California to another the CNN news center in Atlanta, then was returned to Beijing two seconds later as part of a satellite newscast, a trip of 200,000 miles. The pictures were sharp, dramatic, and so damaging to the Chinese govern- ment that the CNN crew was commanded to stop the transmissions. As the city was under martial law, the journalists had little option but to comply. Yet, they had accom- plished much because the entire world was witness to the protests. When the Chinese government-run tele- vision broadcasts did not reveal the truth about the demonstrations which spread rapidly from city to city, people across China turned to overseas radio broadcasts. xxvi A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION A Wall Street Journal article added this: Can the (Chinese) government keep news reports from making their way back to China? Fax machines in this country have been speeding photographs and newspaper articles across the Pacific ever since the pro- tests began. International phone lines are humming... China's 40,000 students in the U.S. write letters home. Hong Kong televi- sion is picked up in Canton. The Voice of America...is reportedly ready to transmit from a jam-proof site in the Philippines. China's days as an isolated empire are definitively over. The Chinese may call their country the Middle Kingdom, but it's billion-citizen suburb of McLuhan's global village.18 The government at last put an end to the protests by brutal repression at night, at an hour when the camera's eye saw only dimly, then began a public relations cam- paign by all its available means of mass communication to create a different real- ity. Meanwhile, the satellite pictures from the West were examined by government authorities to identify protesters to be ar- rested. Some of those pictures were shown on Chinese television to enlist public help in locating protesters who otherwise might have gone into hiding to form an under- ground movement. From the start, the events of May and June in China were not only reported by the tools of mass communication, they were altered by them. Never had more dramatic evidence been offered of the power of communication technology to al- ter the course of history. The Infection of Mass Communication Tb stop the infection brought by free access to mass communication, governments take whatever steps they can get away with short of engendering revolts in the streets. ABC's Thd Koppel saw at first hand how easily the contagion can spread. When I was in China last year at this time, the Chinese students over there did much of what they did because they had seen on passed to the mass media by terrorist groups, and individual purchases of satellite and cable TV time to show specially pre- pared videos, are a few of the new means of individual political expression made possi- ble by this medium.22 Terrorism and the Media That we live in the midst of an information revolution is not by itself a cause bration. If one component of revolutionary fervor is the demand to be heard, wish can be granted without overthrowing a government. No one knows this better than the modern terrorist who neither knows nor cares to know his fellow air or ship travelers, through whom he can achieve the heady experience of reaching a global audience. The terrorist operating within (a liberal) society knows that his acts of terrorism will be instantly publicized by the television, radio and press and that pictures of a really sensational attack or outrage can be relayed round the world with the aid of lites." Another comment on the same subject: The terrorists and the TV executives cooper- ate in raising terror and ratings. There would still be terrorism without wouldn't have much impact on us. Beirut and Iranian hostage takers sporadi- cally issued photographs and videotapes of their American and European victims that American and European journalists eagerly featured on the front pages of their newspapers and played and replayed on television newscasts. As anticipated, public opinion, pricked by hostage relatives, was aroused by their cries to their governments to do something. Thus, the forceful political tools of media were employed to generate the emotions essential to undergird foreign policy shifts in democracies. What lasting effects they had is arguable, but they cer- tainly augmented the general impression that Jimmy Carter was an ineffectual presi- dent. The disastrous helicopter effort to rescue the hostages in Thhran grew out of a xxviii A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION Middle Eastern Examples of Media's Force In the Middle East, the rapid spread of transistor radios was credited with contributed to the resurgence of Arab na- tionalism.' In Iraq, Saddam Hussein banned typewriters for years, perhaps re- calling his own use of a typewriter and a mimeograph machine as he plotted to seize power. In remote Balochistan, deep in the mountains of Pakistan, radio made ference: everyone seemed to have a radio, and in the most isolated villages tribesmen agile in discussing world affairs. Undevel- oped Balochistan certainly was; backward it certainly was not.28 Meanwhile, Israelis and Jordanians contin- ued to watch each other's television pro- grams. Pakistanis watched Indian movies while their armies sniped at one another. An interesting if perverse example of the power of tools of communication arose in Iran during the 1970s, where ment of Shah Reza Pahlevi, an absolute monarch, used communication exten- sively, but did so counterproductively. regime rapidly acquired a formidable arse- nal of broadcasting equipment and comput- ers for information storage and retrieval.29 Books and films were censored or refused publication. Macbeth and Hamlet were pro- hibited because they showed the murder of a king.3° At the same time, with effects more subtle but no less real, trayal of upper and middle-class standards of living must have augmented the sense of injustice, envy and outrage felt by the poor and the devout.31 Countering the government's control of television and other "large media," a com- munication network of "small media" arose across Iran, centered on 90,000 mosques supplemented by meetings in lecture halls and private homes where audiotapes carry- ing religious messages were either played or read in mimeographed transcripts. The It was further argued that, because of the diffusion of the tools of communication, like inexpensive shortwave portable radios in the huts of peasants, the power of West- ern-based media, with their Western cul- ture and biases, had become too great, poking into the countries being examined and undermining them. The flow of news between First and Third World nations was deeply imbalanced. Direct broadcast satel- lites posed an even greater threat as their signals spilled over into many countries with televised entertainment, carrying in- formation and culture beyond the power of national governments to counter. Censorship and jamming cannot halt the communication flow across porous bor- ders. What Third World countries proposed was a New World Information and Commu- nication Order of international agreements about communication. If Western journal- ists chose to ignore a basic tenet of public journalism—that journalism should serve to improve society—then they should be pressed to do so. Needless to say, proponents of freedom of information bitterly opposed the idea of a New World Information and Communica- tion Order, convinced that much of the opposition stemmed from the fear by these regimes that the media could be a crowbar that pried out their entrenched dictator- ships. Opponents argued, among other things, that the proposal was nothing more than a wish to expand from national to international censorship, the purpose of which was to perpetuate corrupt govern- ments and hide the misery and poverty of the majority of their populations. Oppo- nents of the NWICO argued that the fancy phrases were doubletalk to maintain authority in the hands of dictators who already controlled their nation's presses and microphones. Look, they said, at the record of journalists either murdered or silenced by death threats against their families or simply the threat of being de- prived of the relative prosperity permitted by their livelihood. The argument may never end. At pre- sent, it is less heated than in the past, and the New World Information and Communi- xxx A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION want CNN," said Muhammad Ishgi, a Cham- ber of Commerce official in the Red Sea port of Jidda. "But there is what you might call an American cultural danger to us, be- cause they show us another way things. They tell us we might ferently. You must know that education weapons system. It can go either way."37 Before the Berlin Wall crumbled and the two Germanys were locked together, a sur- vey showed that Dresden area residents were five times as likely to seek permission to leave as other East Germans, grumbling that life under communism was intolerable without the consolation of television from West Germany. The city was too distant from the border of West Germany its television signals over the air. After dis- cussion, local authorities in the East Ger- man city of Dresden brought West German signals in by cable. Likewise, in Canton, China, observing that rooftop antennae were pointed toward Hong Kong, the com- munist authorities allowed dubbed ver- sions of an American police adventure program and a Mexican soap opera. Anec- dotes like this can be found in other places where television is sharply controlled. Economic Freedom with Political Controls A fundamental question facing countries that want economic development along with dictatorial political control is whether they can have both in the Information Age. The dictators and oligarchs who run coun- tries want the latest electronic communica- tions in order to compete in today's global marketplace, but they don't want the thoughts that pour through them. Exiled dissidents from safe havens in western de- mocracies are sending home all the subver- sive material they can by all the media they can, especially these days over the Internet. Dictators who acquired power by sub- versive means complain of western-spon- sored subversion. They also complain of cultural imperialism and fret that their populaces are being ruined by what they are seeing and hearing via television, radio, computers, and telephones, but they can hand, a cable box atop the color set and a satellite dish outside the window. They can flick between lowbrow and high, new American or classic, MTV or the Simpsons. They can tune in CNN or Euro- pean or Polish stations for news discussion. There is the wildly popular sat- ire, "Polish Zoo."... Poland, a country of some 10 million television sets, all dutifully tuned to propa- ganda during the 40-plus years of Commu- nist rule, is being wired for almost anything these days.43 Asked what caused the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, Polish president Lech Walesa pointed to a TV set. "It there," he said.' He also cially radio (which) brought information prohibited in our country. It raised our spirits, strengthened faith and hope. It cre- ated a feeling of togetherness and interna- tional solidarity of free people."' Altering American Politics It is not only outside the borders of the United States that mass communication technology can alter governments. News and commentary have been credited—or blamed—for helping to bring down Senator Joseph McCarthy and President Richard Nixon. In 1995, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee began a campaign for the Republican presi- dential nomination by announcing it on the Internet. "No bunting, no pretzels, no beer," said his media adviser, Mike Mur- phy." Vice President Al Gore and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich were among leaders who carried politics into cyber- space. There they were joined by everyone from highly organized groups to angry lon- ers across the entire spectrum of issues. Each new communications medium in America elevated leaders who could use it. FDR was radio itself. JFK and Reagan thrived on television. But these were unify- ing mediums, at least when there three networks. The nation assembled, liter- ally, in front of them to hear and see real- time theater. But who could possibly lead a nation of cybertribes in a time-shifting world with no center stage?47 xxxii A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION house in Israel to a walk through a ruined neighborhood in Baghdad. With these instant images and on-the- spot reports burning in their minds, yet with virtually no knowledge of events other than those supplied by modern mass com- munication, people in scores of cities around the world took to the streets to support one political course of action or another. Government leaders heard them and, in many instances, after seeing and hearing the same mass mediated reports, added their own voices. The full conse- quences of this public action, informed inspired by mass communication report- ing, may not be known for years, but the likelihood that consequences result from mass media is certain, just as consequences followed news coverage of the Vietnam War a generation before. General Schwarzkopf at a military briefing sardonically thanked reporters who were fooled into believing the fully revealed plans for a seaborne inva- sion of Kuwait, a disinformation strategy that kept Iraqi guns pointed in the wrong direction. A review of what might be called the top 10 technologies of coverage during the Gulf War may be instructive, evidence of the current pace of communications tech- nology: 1. E-mail links connected reporters at newsworthy scenes with producers at dis- tribution centers in spite of the turmoil. 2. Still pictures of high quality destined for newspapers and magazines could be sent in either analog or digital form by radio and ordinary telephone lines. 3. The ability to transmit pictures from the scene of events was matched by frame capture equipment that received them in newsrooms thousands of miles away. 4. Portable facsimile machines could move reporters' stories and other docu- ments quickly from any telephone. 5. Even when bombs demolished the Baghdad telephone exchange, a special sat- ellite uplink permitted by the Iraqi govern- ment only to Cable News Network served shot. Compare this with the instantaneous live switching from Baghdad to Dhahran to Tel Aviv to London to New York, and so forth, sometimes accompanied by vide- otape shot moments earlier or even by those pictures transmitted by a closed in on its target. The black-and-white film of World War II and the Korean War, neither of them so very long ago, appeared only in movie theaters many days after the Notes 1 In his study of the means by A History of Mass Press Oxfordshire OX14 4RN & Francis Group, an informa business this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any or other means, now known or hereafter invented, in- or in any information storage or retrieval system, with- publishers. always rely on their own experience and knowledge in methods, compounds, or experiments described or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only without intent to infringe. Data / Irving Fang. and index. 0-240-80254-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper) Data is available from the British Library. xv xxvi Media's Force xxviii Controls xxx v Literacy 34 CONTENTS vii 61 70 79 I want you." 84 Effects 89 CONTENTS ix Countries 118 145 Ball 151 154 Television 156 CONTENTS xi 161 Base 180 Fibers 206 Structures 208 CONTENTS xiii a Noun 227 235 Revolutions 240 tise and the kindness of others. Among them are Hyman Berman, Ken Doyle, Mark Heistad, Nancy Roberts, Phillip Tichenor, and William Wells, all of the Uni- versity of Minnesota; documentarists R. Smith Schuneman, Niels Jensen, and Peter Hammar; William Cologie, National Cable Television Center; George Potter, Pennsylvania Cable & Telecommunica- tions Association; Martin Collins, National Air and Space Museum; Haney Howell, Winthrop University; Scott Bourne, net.ra- dio; David Glitzer, Blender; Steve Yelv- ington, Minneapolis Star Tribune; Bernard Finn, Kay Youngflesh, and E.N. Sivowitch, Smithsonian Institution; Thomas Volek, University of Kansas; Steve Blum, USSB; and James Bruns, National Postal Museum. Special thanks are due to Cheri Ander- son and Erin Labbie for their research as- sistance, and to Annie Singer for her drawings. xiv present in every generation. Venturesome souls have risked personal freedom, sav- ings, reputation, even life and limb to cre- ate and distribute information. In the present generation, when technology has merged the computer and other connective media like cable and satellite with end-user media like books and television, opportuni- ties have arisen that find their closest com- parison in the fifteenth century, when printing began in Europe and the old limits crumbled. Defining an Information Revolution The wish to remember something by writ- ing it down led over the course of millennia to the start of the first information revolu- tion. It and the revolutions that followed would shape humankind more than any wars or any kings ever did or could. With a few scratches, our inventive ancestors set in motion the never ending story of re- corded information, the communication and storage of knowledge outside the brain. Here broke history's long dawn. xv Social revolutions—those that perma- nently affect the lives of most inhabi- tants—do not emanate from royal edicts. They grow from disturbed soil, an open- ness to change, at least at some societal levels. Media join the turbulence, fastening means to purpose. The tools of communi- cation become weapons in some hands, while in others they serve to extend hu- mankind's knowledge and the richness of intelligent life. The social turbulence that provides the necessary basis for an information revolu- tion leads to independence of thought and the capacity for growth. Graham Greene played a bit fast and loose with history, but made at least a discussable point in The Third Man, when his amoral character Harry Lime said, "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of de- mocracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." One or more new communication tech- nologies arriving in the midst of social change can lead to an information revolu- tion that adds to the turmoil and, more importantly, leaves permanent marks on the society. Indeed, the world is in the midst of an information revolution now, a period identified with capital letters as the Information Age, a product of the informa- tion revolution of the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, the second half of the fifteenth century, following Guten- berg's invention of printing, deserves as much as our own half century to be called the Information Age. A strong claim as the Information Age could also be made for the second half of the nineteenth century, following the inventions of photography and the telegraph, a half century that gave birth to the phonograph, telephone, type- writer, motion pictures, and radio, plus significant changes in printing and early experiments in television and in recording tape technology. Each of these communi- cation technologies was born in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, a time of ten- WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xvii with the convergence of advances in paper production and printing press methods, and the invention of the telegraph, which changed the way information was con- veyed. For the first time, newspapers and magazines reached out to the common man with news about events near and far, and packaged goods for sale. Photography spoke to his heart. Public schools and pub- lic libraries dotted the countryside and the growing cities. For the masses, literacy came within reach. The fourth information revolution, the Entertainment Revolution, started in Europe and America toward the end of the nineteenth century with such technologies as stored sound, affordable cameras, and motion photography. Stories were printed and sold cheaply. Like the pots and pans coming off the assembly lines of the Indus- trial Revolution, entertainment could now be infinitely replicated and canned. In the coming decades, it would be seen in the nickelodeons and heard on the radio. The whole world would come to love the enter- tainment products. At the start of the En- tertainment Revolution, no one could have imagined the number of hours that we would spend entangled with this love. The fifth information revolution, the creation of the Communication Toolshed Home, evolved during the middle of the twentieth century, transforming the home into the central location for receiving infor- mation and entertainment, thanks to the telephone, broadcasting, recording, im- provements in print technologies, and cheap, universal mail services. The cen- tury has, of course, been a period of unre- lieved political, cultural, and psychological turmoil and shifting. That the media of communication have become inseparable from our lives is a matter that has been written about in countless worried articles, books, and research papers. The sixth information revolution, the Information Highway, is now being con- structed out of the convergence of com- puter, broadcasting, satellite, and visual technologies. Communication is shaking off transportation for work, study, and play. Yet, if the information-elite can live more specialization of knowledge than previously existed. They also led to an overloading of information and to an in- crease in misinformation. As each information revolution has run its course, which was based on the widening availability of the tools of com- munication, content broadened. More producers sent a greater amount of infor- mation on a greater variety of subjects over more channels to more and more receivers. The spread of media production, emanat- ing from a multiplicity of independent thought, led to increases in what post- modernism identifies as decentering and fragmentation, with a widening of the expression of points of view, frames of reference, experiences, and histories. Although by definition postmodernism followed modernism, elements of a dis- tinctive pattern have been a charac- teristic of every information revolution.5 Each new communication technology has displaced some other means of com- munication or behavior that had been satisfactory until the new technology be- came available. When something was gained, something of value may have been lost. All tools of communication have had one or more hardware components and at least one software component; that is, physical tools and methods or systems. As the tools reached more hands, both hardware and software became more complex, but they became simpler to manage. Their unit costs dropped and they were also likely to shrink and to transmit data faster. The need for physical transportation to send information has been reduced as communication replaced transportation of messages. The tools of communication have been diffused, or distributed, across most of the societies into which they were intro- duced, or at least that portion of each society that gave—or gives—direction to the whole of that society; in short, the tools were in the hands of each society's movers and shakers. In fully open de- WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xix cation and group activity. In extreme cases, a social dysfunction has resulted. Unlike political revolutions, the dates of social revolutions, including information revolutions, do not lend themselves to pinpointing. All the information revolu- tions had more or less identifiable begin- nings. None has truly ended. The Power of Information Communication media intrude into our lives more than most of us realize. They influence our daily activities. We cannot ignore them or abandon them. When we use them judiciously, we harness their strength. At a national level they have assisted in overthrowing governments. The tools have worked quite efficiently in the hands of those who would sell us every known form of government from democracy to fascism, communism to theocracy. From Tom Paine's Common Sense pamphlets to Mao's little red books and the Ayatollah Khome- ini's audiotapes, media have been used as tools of revolution. Lenin's smuggled writ- ings promoted the Bolshevik revolution and the underground samizdat of writers living under communism promoted its end. Electronic tools have now joined the printed tools to bring added breadth to revolutionary fervor. Our age has also wit- nessed successful media use by those who have no apparent ideology, no political agenda other than to grow rich or influen- tial. Even if control of information does not always include responsibility, it does bring influence by journalists and other writers for the popular media, whom Witold Rybczynski calls the "ragmen of informa- tion." While secondhand experience still depends, to a certain extent, on personal contact— rumor and hearsay—the greatest single source of most people's secondhand experi- ence is neither education nor conversation, but the media: newspapers, magazines, film, radio, and television. Nowhere is the influence of these ragmen of information these individual toolsheds that the Infor- mation Highway will have its offramps. The information will be cheaper, ena- bling larger segments of the population to ride on the Highway and dwell in commu- nication toolsheds. At the turn of the cen- tury, the cost of renting a telephone for a month represented about two weeks wages for an average workman. The first com- mercial television sets sold for half the cost of a new car. Just a few decades ago the thought of self-publishing anything except via mimeograph was almost out of the question for middle-class Americans. To- day, even making a movie is not beyond a middle-class purse. coming from Sorting Media from Content Why do we believe what we believe? What are the sources of our opinions and atti- tudes? Although the answers to such broad questions are complex, it is obvious that almost everything we know about present events beyond our limited horizons comes from media. In this we are different from ancestors who learned most of what they knew through direct experience. If not from such current events media as newspa- pers, radio, and television, our information has come from books, the storehouses of human memory. At times our information is mediated through other people who de- rive their information from communica- tions media and may distort it in the process. It is a highly arguable point, but in rela- tive terms of societal good, what we are watching, the content, may not matter as much as the way we shape our lives around media. The medium, Marshall McLuhan told us, is the message. The effects of con- tent are quite independent of the effects of using the medium carrying it. For example, the effects on a child of watching violent cartoons and junkfood commercials on a Saturday morning are quite distinct from the effects of spending the entire Saturday morning watching television, no matter what is on. It has been argued that the problem with television, a justifiable focus of irritation, is WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxi Shaping and Being Shaped As we spend time with the tools of commu- nication, we spend less time with one an- other. Fewer Americans attend town or school meetings. Voter turnout has de- clined. At the same time, distrust of govern- ment has grown. Memberships in the PTA, the League of Women Voters, and labor unions is down, while social distrust is up. Fewer volunteers turn out for the Boy Scouts, Red Cross, Lions Club, Shriners, and Jaycees.' The nation has drifted from De- lbcqueville's observation in the early nine- teenth century that Americans liked to form civic associations. In organizations whose membership has increased, like the Sierra Club, the National Organization of Women, and the American Association of Retired Persons, people do not normally attend meetings. McLuhan observed that not only the me- dia are shaped. As the technology is shaped for and by its users, the technology shapes the users. It shapes our lives and our views. When enough people adopt a new means of communication so that people change the way they go about their daily activities, the society itself is altered. diagnostic operational and practical fact, the me- dium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each exten- sion of ourselves, or by any new technology. Francisco...the "message" of any medium or tech- nology is the change of scale or pace or pat- tern that it introduces into human affairs.'° in cities. For example, the ways that we use a com- puter changed because the technology changed. Because it is more efficient than it used to be to work on an airplane or even in a taxi weaving through traffic, people now work who once relaxed while traveling by reading a magazine article about some- thing unrelated to their work, or staring out of a window and thinking, or chatting with a seatmate. Now the traveler works. We changed the media and then the media changed us. of the technology to that end. Before the turn of the century, Bell's telephone com- pany, formed soon after the telephone's invention in 1876, had become AT&T. By 1920, a web of telephone wires provided long distance service for much of the coun- try, and conducting business by telephone had become a norm of American business. Some common tools of communication may have begun their public existence as novelties beyond most people's under- standing of how they could possibly have any meaning to daily life, yet as they were diffused into society, the public found that meaning. Public feedback led to further refinement, which in turn led to new uses by yet more people. Photography, for in- stance, had value for almost no one except hobbyists until a steady stream of improve- ments led first to a demand for family pic- tures and later to a rush to own simple cameras that required only the push of a button. Market driven, photography flowed into art and journalism. It spread to printed media and, in motion pictures, photogra- phy spawned a new medium of arguably greater impact than its own. As the quality of communication tools improved and their advantages became known, they spread throughout their po- tential market. Their costs dropped in the pattern of the so-called "calculator syn- drome" that has affected the entire elec- tronics industry. Engineers also improved designs to make the equipment easier to operate. The "buttons" went inside. Video cameras and decks, once limited mostly to television stations and industries, meta- morphosed into camcorders, a hot selling item for the home. As a result, for a growing number of families, spoken words and pic- tures have replaced words written on paper. A letter to a distant loved one is sent in the , form of a video. In high schools, the video that yearbook joins the familiar bound version. bringing en- Life Is Different The success of the means of communica- tion in becoming almost transparent to the user has the unintended effect of leading WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxiii Recent telephone technologies like cel- lular phones and facsimile machines have affected some occupations, such as selling real estate and the lunch trade of some city restaurants. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, cellular and fax were hot items in news stories and full page ads, so they got a lot of attention, but telephone answering machines, based on a simple technology, never were exciting. Yet, when we arrive at home each evening, because of its time- shifting advantage the answering machine maybe our first stop after opening the front door. It liberated us from the need to be physically near the telephone if we awaited an important call. It will remain an impor- tant tool of communication until the tele- phone itself shrinks to a cellphone that is as convenient to carry as a wallet, and we are always "at home." to lock It is the communication tools themselves and their effect upon the societies into which they were introduced that compose these chapters, the communication tools that we all pick up as comfortably as a Saturday sweater. lbols and Weapons The power of the tools of mass commu- nication first to shake and then to shape national policy was evident on the streets of American cities during the Vietnam War. It became clearer in the Soviet Union just a few years ago. that tele- sat-...while it once appeared that the new me- dia would enhance the power of govern- ments (as, for example, Orwell argued in 1984), their effect recently has been the op- posite: breaking state monopolies of infor- mation, permeating national boundaries, allowing peoples to hear and see how oth- ers do things differently. It has also made richer and poorer countries more aware of the gap between them than was possible a half century ago, and stimulated legal and illegal migration:11 On just one 'data network between Moscow and Helsinki, 13,000 messages were counted. Fax machines and cellular phones carried reports to distant corners of the empire, emboldening those who opposed the coup. Self-printed samizdat were aug- mented by the electronic magnitizdat. In the end, the plotters of a return to the tyranny of the past were undone, at least in part, by the tools of the Information Age. Nowhere have the effects of the informa- tion revolution of the twentieth century network been more evident than in nations where information clashed with autocratic rule. "If it hadn't been for television—and radio, too—none of this would be happening." Those were the words of a friend who has long experience of Russia and Russians. We were watching news reports of jubilant crowds in Red Square as tanks retreated. Only a few years ago, she said, all of the dirty business of the coup could have been carried out in secret. But now, 'because of television, nothing can be hidden." Or, as a State Department official told the Washington Post, "The bottom line is, you can't lie to peo- and its ple any more. You're going to get caught."14 to act Tiananmen Square An earlier round of communication wiz- ardry came to widespread public attention in China, a millennium and more ago the wellspring of such communication technol- ogy as paper and printing, but now its re- but that's cipient. The events in Tiananmen Square are further evidence that the tools of com- munication can make life difficult for even the most determined dictatorships by send- ing out text and pictures where the govern- ment preferred silence and darkness. Early in the summer of 1989, taking ad- vantage of an influx of foreign reporters covering the state visit of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a thousand university students in Beijing occupied Tiananmen Square and began a hunger strike as a pro- test against the rigid government of China. An estimated 300,000 protesters supported them in Beijing as demonstrations erupted in cities across China. Some students in Tiananmen Square sculpted their own ver- WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxv Meanwhile, renegade Chinese students abroad mobilized telephones, facsimile machines, audiotape, the mails, and the Bitnet telecommunications network to keep abreast of the latest news. government ap- The fax machines are, in a way, the fuel of the (Chinese) revolution. The faxed materi- als inform, encourage, embolden the young revolutionaries. They have become the wall posters of this generation. Never has there been anything like it.'5 Newsweek reported: The students collected about 1,500 fax num- bers in China from anyone who knew them. They posted the numbefs on their computer bulletin boards and sent their messages without any idea who was at the other end—the electronic equivalent of a note in a bottle. In China, students, hotel waiters or office workers retrieved the mes- sages; then they were reproduced by the hundreds in photocopiers and put on public display.16 They fed back into Chinese cities outside Beijing what was happening in their own capital city. Faxes, multiplied by copier ma- chines, sometimes ended up as wall post- ers, a simple but effective news distribution system. In at least one city, Nanjing, large this case it was not crowds gathered around boom boxes tuned loudly to the Voice of America. Elsewhere the direct-dial telephone and the photocop- ier spread the news. to a relay satellite to Now from China comes the news that the police are guarding the fax machines. What comes next, house arrest for the telephone? Interrogation for the portable computer and its modem? Will we see a cellular phone in manacles? There is something horribly appropriate about the attempt by this government to take back the fax. It is not just the student leaders who are being held responsible for protests this time. Nor is it just reporters who are being expelled for spreading the word. It is the demon of communication technology itself... In China, days of protest and repression have shown the relationship between infor- mation and freedom, technology and de- mocracy. Between fax and facts.17 television what Solidarity had done in Po- land. When I was in Romania, I learned that the revolution over there began in the small city of Timasoara because Timasoara hap- pens to be on the border with Yugoslavia and Hungary, and it was there that they— as distinct from the rest of the Romanians and the rest of the country—saw CNN broad- casts at one o'clock in the morning on Romanian television explaining to them what was happening in Hungary. In other words, the interaction that ex- ists, exists on such a level that it is produc- ing revolution in the world today. It is producing changes, the substance of which is absolutely indisputable.'9 really just a Some version of media-aided uprising could be found from Chile, where banned movies, documentaries, and protest music were circulated on videotapes, to the Baltic countries, where videos of protest demon- strations were shot. In the Philippines, a "living room video" of news reports of the assassination of President Ferdinand Mar- cos' political opponent Benigno Aquino was among the videotapes widely copied and shown to groups of people gathered in liv- ing rooms. Spliced-together newsreels were available as video rentals. Massive mailings of news clippings added fuel to the fires of anger that eventually toppled Marcos and brought Aquino's widow, Corazon Aquino, to power.' Governments have proven virtually powerless to stop determined underground exchanges of media. In many developing countries, television sets and videotape re- corders set up in villages to carry govern- ment-approved material were being diverted to whatever videocassettes the vil- lagers found more interesting. Some gov- ernment agencies supply and advertise entertaining tapes just to attract villagers, hoping they'll stay for their own tapes. Peo- ple tune out state television to view a wide selection of cassettes.21 If VCRs and videocassettes had never done anything but alleviate the oppressions of censorship, they would have earned an im- portant place in history. Their powers have not stopped there, but have extended in in- numerable directions. Videotaped press re- leases, home made videotapes of hostages WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxvii public demand, inflamed by those pictures, to do something. All this the journalists reported, for jour- nalists and terrorists, pursuing parallel paths for what Margaret Thatcher called the "oxygen of publicity,"25 act out of dis- tinctly different motives, but share the goal of seeking maximum drama from the tak- ing of hostages. for cele- Clandestine Radio then the Unapproved, clandestine radio stations have been broadcasting for decades, fre- quently from a transmitter outside the tar- get country's borders, so its government cannot shut them down. Often an opposing government supports the clandestine sta- tions, a fact ignored in the broadcasts, which claim to be "The voice of a free (name of country)." Where conflict exists, either civil war or strife between nations, clandestine radio has become a weapon. During the Cold War, such radio stations were scattered across Europe, Asia, and TV satel- Africa. It should have come as no surprise that the end of the Cold War brought an increase in the number of clandestine stations. Al- though it seemed to be time to sign off the air, many stations that had existed because TV, but it of the hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union did not do so. They kept broadcasting because the new free- doms and halting movements to democ- racy unleashed nationalistic fervor and demands for change. The numbers of pro- ducers of media have increased because there was influence to be had. Opposition television may not be far be- hind. A report from the laboratory prom- ised direct broadcast satellite reception to anyone with a receiver the size of a dinner napkin. Censorship does not block news flow as it once did. Shepherds now receive news as quickly as national leaders do. Goat herd- ers in Siberian villages now watch their republic's news each night and they're talk- ing about it.26 Bedouins on their camels listen to radios as they cross the Sahara. Ayatollah Khomeini sent fiery pronounce- ments from his Paris exile on audiotapes that were transcribed and either Xeroxed or mimeographed. A Ibliran University pro- having fessor commented, "We are struggling against autocracy, for democracy, by means of xerocracy."32 Clandestine radio stations located outside Iran pumped in more messages. When the call to revolution came, the masses responded. The opposi- tion made itself felt in the streets in 1978 the dif- with strikes and demonstrations, aston- ishing observers with well orchestrated...illiteracy here was ninety-five percent but demonstrations of as many as three million people." were Through centuries of war, battle plans were roughly the same: secure the main garrison or palace. When the new flag went up, it was all over. High ground is now the trans- mission tower; the new flag is a different face in the anchor's chair.34 For would-be revolutionaries, the tools of communication have the decided advan- tage of privacy over public rallies as a way to spread the message." Messages of hate the govern- and calls to revolt can be received in the privacy of the home, where no stranger intrudes and where virtually no danger ex- His ists of the policeman's billy club. New World Information Order The U.N. was at the center of a controversy about transmitting information that gov- ernments did not like across their frontiers. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, that were Scientific, and Cultural Organization, was the TV por- the forum of bitter debates about the world- wide flow of information. The argument of many Third World countries was that the principal news agencies, controlled in the industrialized West, distorted what was go- ing on in the developing nations by empha- sizing natural and man-made disasters, dictatorship, government corruption, and backwardness. The spread of such stories around the world, it was argued, accom- plished little more than to humiliate the developing countries and harm their ef- forts at improvement. WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxix cation Order has yet to be established, but the issue has not disappeared. Whatever the out- come, the quarrel has shown the influence of modern tools of mass communication on life in even the most remote of villages. Cultural Imperialism Entertainment supplies another form of in- formation, so it came as no surprise when governments of smaller nations around the globe sounded the alarm at what they defined as the "cultural imperialism" of West- ern, especially American, fictional televi- sion fare. American attitudes, at least those displayed by Hollywood and the television networks, toward the family structure, gov- ernment executives, the police, sex, and religious values are by no means uniformly shared around the world. In addition, what struck American viewers as innocent fun was viewed with alarm by political leaders in some less developed nations because of the potential of situation comedies, soap operas, and adventure shows to make the people of their countries dissatisfied with their own lots when they saw unattainable levels of freedom and opulence. The poten- tial of mass media as an agent of social change has not escaped notice beyond our frontiers. For example, a dispatch from Reuters: China's television minister called Thursday for vigilant control of programming. Minister of Radio, Film and 'Television Ai Zhisheng, writing in the People's Daily, urged broadcast officials to keep a tight grip on the flourishing satellite TV market, which over two years has virtually slipped from government control.... "Keeping a firm grip on the direction of public opinion is an important responsibil- ity of television as the mouthpiece of the party and government," he wrote in a long commentary.36 Media cultural imperialism, sometimes dubbed "Coca-colonization," has been a fa- miliar subject of debate in international forums. 'A lot of us really admire Americans' way of living: better houses, better education. I only slow the process; they cannot stop it. That does not, however, keep the oligarchs from trying, as the Iranian government did in 1994 by restricting use and ownership of to look at an estimated 250,000 satellite dishes as a do things dif- means of keeping Western influence out. is a Some dish owners risked heavy fines, so they disguised the rooftop dishes as air conditioners. As an editorial put it, "Tyranny cannot survive in a nation equipped with fax ma- chines and video cameras, the high tech- nology of free speech."38 Other comments: In the long run, a country can't have a mod- ern economy or society without its mega- bytes and modems, its phones and fax to receive machines. It cannot conduct research or business without the ability of communi- cate easily, directly, personally.39 From The Economist: The telephone, the calculator and the per- sonal computer are gradually outflanking the thought-police. Only places that cannot yet afford those gadgets, plus the North Koreans and Albanians which still manage to control every corner of life, are immune to the effects of this new wave of self knowledge.49 'lb this short list of media-controlled coun- tries can be added the pieces of what once was Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, Croatia, and, especially, Serbia, rigid controls came down on television, radio, and print. Their somewhat isolated populations heard a propaganda storm of hatred and lies di- rected at their neighbors. The mutual vili- fication by what someone called media gangsters, unchecked and untempered by other voices, allowed the mutual slaughter to proceed.' "Always we first protected the typewrit- ers, then the printing presses, and then ourselves," recalled the editor of a Polish underground weekly newspaper.42 Once free, the Polish people continue to use me- dia, but far differently: Consider a Polish family settling into the Fri- day night TV lineup with remote control in WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxxi If mainstream politicians could use the me- dia, so could political extremists. It is not necessary to be a political leader to dissemi- nate opinions. At least one pro-Nazi com- puter bulletin board managed to surface on or political the Prodigy network. A racist talk show, Race and Reason, turned up across the United States on public access cable chan- nels where it could be taped for later group viewing.' Its producer, Ibm Metzger, hardly a household name, could thus ex- tend his unpleasant opinions far and wide, visible testimony not only to the First Amendment, but to the democratic effects of the tools of communication. all came from said it was "espe- The Gulf War The Gulf War was characterized by high- tech weaponry and a public glued to their television sets for what came to be labeled the CNN syndrome. No amateur at manipu- lating media, the general in charge of the coalition forces was moved to remind eve- ryone that real blood was being spilled. War, said General Norman Schwarzkopf, is "not a Nintendo game." Yet, it seemed so. The war may have appeared unreal to some of the hundreds of millions of people around the globe who watched the bridges and buildings blowing up, seeing it through the camera lenses of the very missiles that struck the targets. A science fiction unreality accompanied the Gulf War. It was not only the Stealth air- planes, the missiles that intercepted mis- siles, or the smart bombs, but the cleanliness of a Buck Rogers war. We all knew, of course, that this war like all wars was not clean, but was filled with pain, misery, and death. Yet while we knew it, most of us did not see it or hear it, so we did not feel it, as one should feel wars, in our guts. Instead, we were treated to the glossiest presenta- tion to date of the glossiest war to date, at least from the Western perspective. The wizardry of mass communication technology effortlessly sent the audience were only ping-ponging from videotape of missiles landing to actual live views of incoming missiles in Saudi Arabia, from statements by officials in Washington to interviews in Amman, from a few moments at a ruined as a long-distance intercom to carry re- ports, notably those of foreign correspon- dent Peter Arnett, who concluded, "I was having an impact on what was happening." 6. Remote-sensing technology enabled ABC News to show pictures taken from a satellite of such scenes as the Kuwaiti oil well fires. (A French commercial satellite had alerted the world of the Chernobyl disaster.) 7. Laptop computers carried by report- ers were linked by modem with central news bureaus. That simplified and expe- and dited the news dispatches. 8. Flyaway satellite uplinks, relatively easy to transport, let television correspon- dents send live video from remote loca- tions on short notice. 9. The correspondents did so via inter- national data transmission networks, a com- plex of satellites, uplinks, downlinks, and transmission facilities that could focus the world's attention on a patch of desert sand. Wire service reporters could call in their stories via portable satellite telephones. 10. Computer graphics added a high- tech glitter to the on-air reports of this high-tech war. Watching the televised Gulf War or the more recent tank shelling of the Russian parliament building, we were now living in the world of "Imagine that!" Thanks to com- munication technology it may have seemed that we had awakened inside an arcade game. Small wonder that, by an overwhelming percentage, Americans at home supported and applauded the Gulf War, whereas the Vietnam War two decades earlier brought riots into our city streets. Journalists in Vietnam were enviably free to roam about. Less enviable were the logistics of television reports. The black- and-white 16 millimeter film traveled by truck, car, and then airplane to the United States for processing in a West Coast film lab, after which an edited segment was transmitted to New York at considerable cost over leased wideband telephone com- pany lines for showing to the American public two or three days after the film was WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxxiii events shown. The tools of communication are themselves smart bombs, but they have an even greater range. bomb as it Let us now turn to the beginning of the story of humankind's development of the means of communication. The first infor- mation revolution was writing. 12 Report on the coup attempt in the Soviet Union, New York Times, 20 August 1991. which socie

A History of Mass Communication: Six Information Revolutions PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue