Mass Communication Technology Research Paper

Even by its own lights, technicism omits a number of figures whose influence has been profound, for example: Applegarth and Hoe who perfected the rotary press in 1850s, the Abbe Caselli whose telegraph system produced facsimile images in 1862; Pfleumer who created audio tape in the late 1920s; Carlson the patentee of the xerox machine (1938); Kilby who designed the integrated circuit in 1958; Maiman creator of the laser in 1960; Hoff who built the first central processing unit in 1969, etc. Technicism also fails to explain why so many of its roll-call of famous ‘inventors’ have Dopplegangers who dispute their status—Gutenberg’s claim on the press is contested by Waldvogle and Coster; Daguerre’s by Fox-Talbot; Morse’s by Cooke and Wheatstone; Bell’s by Gray; Edison’s and the Lumieres’ by (at least) Friese-Greene and the Skladanowsky brothers; Marconi by Lodge and Popov; Zworykin by Schoenberg, and so on. Not only are there more ‘great men’ but, mysteriously, they tend to have the same idea at about the same time. Most dramatically, Bell and his rival Gray arrived at the US Patent Office in Washington with designs for telephones on the very same day, February 14, 1876. More than that, the ‘inventors’ all have precursors who thought up the same sort of technological application earlier but are forgotten. Francis Ronalds had his elegant static electric telegraph rejected by the British Admiralty in 1816, nearly three decades before telegraphy was diffused. David Hughes, the ‘inventor’ of the microphone, was told his demonstration of radio was no such thing in 1879 when it was, 16 years before Marconi’s ‘invention.’ A. H. Reeves inaugurated the digital age with a sampling device built in the Paris Laboratory of ITT in 1938 but talk of a ‘digital revolution’ did not start for another half-century. A succession of small computers, beginning with the very first computer to work on a real problem, the Manchester UK Baby Mark I of 1948, were discarded in favor of large devices until the coming of the Apple II in 1976.

Most grievous of all the problems raised by tech- nicist explanations of the development of communication systems is the central concept that technology engenders social change. The Reformation, for example, is credited to the printing press. As Marshall McLuhan, a major technicist thinker, put it: ‘Socially, the typographic extension of man [which is how he described printing from moveable type] brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy’ (McLuhan 1964, emphasis added). But, if the press did ‘bring in’ these things, it took some centuries to accomplish this, making a mock of the norms of causality. The lesser technicist claim is that the press ‘caused’ the Reformation; but, as Gutenberg biographer, Albert Kapr, noted, ‘the stimulus for [Gutenberg’s] invention was rooted in the religious controversies of his time and other closely related needs of his age’ (Kapr 1996 emphasis added). The same pre-existing pressures, including church reform, drove printing forward. The historical record in fact suggests that it is always factors in the social realm which push communications technologists into assembling their ‘inventions.’

2. Social Needs

There are alternative approaches to this history which offer a ‘thicker’ (in Geertzian terms) account and better answer fundamental questions about the origins of media technologies and the nature of their diffusion.

A great deal of knowledge is accumulated by society (indeed, by different cultures), some formal and much informal. The common insight that leaving washing out in the sun bleaches it, a crucial perception underlying the development of photography, is an example of informal knowledge. Dr. Thomas Young’s experiments of 1801 are a good example of formal scientific understanding. He was able to calculate the wavelengths of different colors using light sources shone through narrow slits to interfere with each other. One hundred and fifty years later, the utilization of such light interference patterns informed the creation of holographic imaging systems. Physicist James Maxwell’s wave theory, the nineteenth century’s best formal explanation of the nature of electromagnetic phenomena, is the foundation of telephony, radio, and television. Alan Turing’s 1936 paper solving a cutting edge problem in pure mathematics directly determined computer design a decade later (Turing 1936).

Given the widespread understanding of this ‘science,’ broadly defined, many can be expected to have ideas about the technical application of such knowhow in any given circumstance. For example, 115 years before Turing, Charles Babbage was discovered by the astronomer William Herschel, according to legend, dozing over logarithmic tables in the rooms of the Cambridge (UK) Analytical Society. When asked what he was thinking of, he reportedly said: ‘I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.’

‘It is quite possible,’ replied Herschel (Goldstine 1972). Babbage’s mechanically driven computer was never built but his ideas for the architecture of a symbol manipulating machine which would alter its operations in the light of its own computations, with a ‘mill’ (central processing unit) and a ‘store’ (memory), underpin computing design.

Babbage managed to build only part of his machine which, anyway, required power and tolerances beyond the range of Victorian engineers (Hyman 1984). In other fields, many built prototypes, not all of which failed to work. For example, the coherer was a machine designed to demonstrate the wavelike nature of electricity. A number of physicists constructed variant devices and no physics lab in the late nineteenth century would have been without one. That the coherer could be used for signaling—that it was, in fact, a radio—required the identification of a communications need; and it was the identification of this need which enabled the radio to be, in effect, discovered rather than ‘invented.’

Identification occurred because of the parallel development of iron-clad warships. These vessels steamed into battle so far apart that visual contact could not be maintained through the fleet. The first demonstrations of radio by Marconi and Popov took place at sea during the summer maneuvers of the British and Russian Imperial fleets in 1895. In the same way, the railways focused experiments using electricity for signaling, which had been thought of in the mid-eighteenth century and had been producing ignored prototypes since 1816 (Ronalds) at the latest, into the ‘invention’ of the telegraph in the 1840s. The first telegraph wires ran down the railway tracks between Baltimore and Washington, Windsor and London, St. Germaine and Paris.

In the twentieth century, the need to build nuclear weapons served to transform the development of advanced, massive electrical calculators into an agenda which would produce electronic computers— symbol manipulators which altered their operations in the light of their own calculations—from 1948 on. The threat posed by those same weapons in the 1970s created the need for an impregnable distributed communications system to control essential military computing during nuclear attack. A quarter of a century later, the technology which did this was released to the pubic and diffused globally as the Internet.

The social need which transforms prototypes into ‘inventions’ need not, however, always be itself a new technology. For example, the legal invention of the modern corporation in the 1860s produced novel office needs. Use was finally found for languishing prototypes such as the typewriter which had been patented in 1714 or the adding machine which now acquired an elegant printing capacity but which had existed in basic form since 1632. The elevator, made safe by Otis in 1857, was perfected and the skyscraper office block was designed to house all these devices and the corporation which used them. It is in this social context that Bell, Grey, and others built telephones. Changes in the structure of post-French Revolution society bring together a range of well-understood chemical and physical phenomena to produce, in photography, a system of image making for use by the dominant middle-class of the nineteenth century. The camera obscura portabilis (1550, at the latest) and photokinesic chemistry (explored from the 1720s onwards at the latest) come together to meet this social need. By 1840, photography was ‘invented’ and the centuriesold Western tradition of painted aristocratic portraits, still-lives, or landscapes was democratized (Eder 1978, Freund 1982).

The general pervasive requirement that the everexpanding urban mass be housed and entertained governs many developments. The Gutenberg flat-bed press had increased its speed from 8–16 impressions per hour (iph) to 1,200 iph between 1450 and 1800. Driven by the rising literacy required by an industrialized society, between 1800 and 1870 the press, powered by the same steam that had powered the industrial revolution over the previous century and more, reached speeds of up to 40,000 iph.

The seventeenth century lantern slide show, with its cuts, fades, dissolves, and animations, became a major urban diversion. The audience learned to sit in rows in the dark watching images (for example, La Fantas- magorie, a hit slide show in Paris during the French Revolution). The use of photography for slides and then, arising from scientific investigations using photography to stop motion, the idea of a photographic strip to create the illusion of motion dates from 1861. Theater was slowly organized as actor-managers gave way to owners (often with chains of theatres), producers, stars, agents. By the 1890s, ‘shows’ had become ‘show business.’ In the US, the owners formed a cartel in 1895 and the artistes, a union. All this, as much as any insight of the Lumiere Brothers, ‘invented’ the cinema (Chanan 1995, Allen 1980).

3. Social Brakes

But, as the historian Fernand Braudel has noted, with these ‘accelerators’ come ‘brakes’ (Braudel 1979). The ‘invented’ technology faces social forces suppressing its potential to cause radical disturbance. First when it finally emerges from the shadows it has taken longer to develop than is usually understood. Then, often, complex patent arguments or government regulatory interventions slow its diffusion. Corporations especially tend to be protected by this ‘braking’ process. The telegraph company Western Union was the world’s biggest firm when the telephone was being diffused and although it is now far from being any such thing nevertheless it still exists. New media are meshed with old. The Internet (AOL), the moving image (Warners), and print (Time) join together and all survive. But it takes time for these arrangements and accommodations to be effected.

Thus television was a fully developed system by 1936. The basic idea for the transmission of moving images using mechanical scanning, spinning disks to scan the image had been patented in 1884 and the term ‘television’ coined in 1906. Electronic scanning was described in 1908. The first signals were displayed on a cathode ray tube at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology in 1911 by Boris Rozing whose pupils Zworykin and Schoenberg led the research teams at RCA and EMI (UK), respectively. Mechanically scanned and electronic experimental systems were much touted from the 1920s on.

Using what was essentially the RCA solution, the Germans and the British began regular television services in 1936–7. Yet, with the very same technology, the Americans continued to call their transmissions during this period ‘experimental.’ What was at issue was RCA’s dominance. (The Federal government had been struggling with the ATT telephone monopoly for half a century and did not wish to create another monster corporation.) Behind the facade of technical issues a commercial agreement was hammered out to ensure the diffusion of the technology. In 1941, the National Television Standards Committee promulgated signal standards almost the same as those which had been proposed in 1936, but now RCA’s radio rival CBS and other manufacturers were able to share the technologies. The next seven years of World War II and its aftermath halted development, although the Germans continued to broadcast throughout the conflict using the system the Americans had put on hold. Then the same suppressive pattern emerged again after the war as the government stopped the award of TV licenses ostensibly to sort out overlapping signals but actually to allow radio and film interests to reach a modus i endi. At the start of this ‘freeze’ in 1948, television was live from radio headquarters in New York. By 1952, when it was withdrawn, the schedule was dominated by filmed shows made in Hollywood—but radio interests continued to own the television networks and major stations.

The same sort of delays, allowing society fully to absorb the new system, affects all technologies. The growth in patents is often suggested as an indicator of the increased range of contemporary innovation and implies speedier take-up of new developments. However, improvements and modifications can be patented in exactly the same way as breakthroughs and fundamental innovations and the former account for much patent activity. There is no evidence in communications of a greater number of basic innovations. Nor is there evidence of a speed-up in diffusion.

It took up 16 years and an act of the US government (the All Channel Law, 1964) to force manufactures to give up tubes in TVs and use solid-state circuits instead. The audio-CD, based on a computer data storage system, was marketed by Sony and Philips in 1983 to stem the flow of home LP disk recording. Digital sound quality could not be maintained on analogue audiotape. But at the same time digital audiotape (DAT), which could ‘clone’ CDs, was available. In fact, the first DAT studio recorder had been sold in 1971. Philips, having just built two massive CD manufacturing plants, in 1984 directly frustrated industry discussions about the introduction of DAT which remained a marginal medium for the rest of the century (Gow 1989, Morton 2000).

4. Transformative Technologies

The result of the push of social need being constrained by the brake stifling radical disruptive potential is that new communications technologies, however influential on society, do not transform it. Given that communication systems are created, introduced, and diffused in response to pre-existing social needs, it follows that their capacity for radical disruption, pace technicist hyperbole, will be limited.

Of course, a new technology can have unintended consequences—fax machines can facilitate junk mail; the Internet can transform the distribution and profitability of pornography. But technicist rhetoric suggests that transformative end effects cannot be known and yet, outside of comparatively marginal surprises, this is not the case. The end effect is that transformative radical potential will be contained.

The needs of flexible manufacturing have internationalized the corporation which in turn required the internationalization of communication. To everevolving trans-oceanic cable capacity has been added the satellite communications system to facilitate a worldwide market. But a worldwide market is still a market, more efficient and all-embracing but essentially the same. This did not change when Internet communication facilitated data transmission, personal messaging, and commerce.

This is not to say, however, that outside of the West, these technologies cannot have more transformative effects. For example, from 1977–9, the messages of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini were transmitted from France to Iran by telephone and distributed by audiocassette. The Westernizing Shah was removed (Mohammadi 1995). This illustrates both transformative communications power and, on the other hand, the limits of media effects. As much as Western technology aided the Iranian Islamicist revolution, at the same time it failed the Shah’s Westernizing mission.

Centralized governments can also ‘resist,’ as when China, for example, ordered Rupert Murdoch in 1994 to remove politically offensive channels (BBC World) from AsiaSat 2 and he did so. The technology itself can have limited reach. In 2000, the Internet required literacy, expensive equipment, and easy access to telephones. The International Telecommunications Union estimated that more than two-thirds of humanity lacked even the last. The Internet clearly was not transformative for them.

In the West, although the technologies are pervasive, their revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary, potential can be disputed as well. This argument depends on the viewpoint. Technicists, whether technophile or technophobe, are amnesiac about technological history and privilege technology as a monocausal social driving force. They erroneously believe that the pace of innovation has quickened over the last two centuries when historical understanding reveals that it has not. They also think, in ignorance of the record, that the processes of innovation have become more structured when, again, human intuition remains as strong a factor as ever. They assume, finally, that more information is in fact significant of itself and ignore its quality and the limited human capacity to absorb it. Henry Thoreau wrote in 1854: ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate’ (Czitrom 1982). Any Internet search suggests that Thoreau’s hesitancy is still merited.

For technicists, each and every change in communications, and in society generally, looms large. A nontechnicist viewpoint, on the other hand, focuses on social continuities. On this basis, the nontechnicist tends to resist even the rhetoric of cumulative technologies converging to effect transformative change. Convergence of signal processing is of significance for communications organizations since it blurs any technological basis for distinguishing their activities. But many already existed across media technologies as conglomerates. Their power and growth has far more to do with national regulation (or its lack) and economic globalization than it does with machines, including digital ones. Communications technology will remain what it has always been, one factor among many, in determining the structures of world communication systems (see Winston 1998).

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