Reading The Media- The Sociology Of Mass Communications:
The Political, Economic and Historical Context.
At the beginning of these notes I asserted that the output of the mass communications industries are as much a product of industrial society as the machinery that delivers content to consumer. As such a brief history of the industries is probably called for- you may wish individually to seek out a more detailed chronology of the various media, corporations and institutions which comprise at least part of the subject matter of this module.
Contrary to popular belief printed books to not first appear in Europe in the 15th century but in China about 600AD. Indeed the earliest newspaper appears in Peking in 748AD. The European innovation that made "mass production" possible is in the use by Guttenburg of metal plates. This technology was first used in 1453 to print a 42 line version on the Bible at Mainz. Regular newspapers have been produced in Europe since the early 17th century, though as I suggested the early British Newspapers were little more than information sheets for the maritime and mercantile speculators of the coffee houses of Britain's Imperial past.
There are of course two obvious prerequisites for the development of genuine "mass" communications based on the written word. The first is technological- the printing presses themselves but in addition to be truly a medium of popular communication the written word must also have an audience: a substantial proportion of the population must be at least semi-literate. The advance of mass literacy in Western Europe, North America and the rest of the now "Advanced Industrial Societies" is at best a late eighteenth and nineteenth century phenomena and newspapers as the first media of mass communications develop rapidly during this period. There is, in the UK, good evidence that some "organic" growth in literacy or semi literacy from the early part of the nineteenth century. Indeed seditious (or radical) new sheets and pamphlets became so common that a stamp tax was introduced. The long term effect of this taxation was to shift the balance away from readership as the primary source of revenue and make all newspapers reliant on advertising for survival.
Church and State projects for mass basic education began in, at least in the UK in the late part of the nineteenth century. Mass compulsory basic education is enshrined in legislation in 1880, not much over a century ago and certainly within the lifetimes of my own grandparents.
Most of the fundamental discoveries in physics that lead to the possibility of radio and television are made during the mid to late nineteenth century and photography becomes a popular recreation during the same period. The early cinema again begins at the end of the last century with experiments in both France and the UK (both countries now claim credit for having invented photography and cinema separately). Commercial exploitation of the cinema as a channel of mass entertainment can be said to have originated in France in 1895 when the Lumiere brothers charged an audience in Paris to watch a moving film of the arrival of an oncoming train. Such was the novelty and realism of this that some of the audience fled in panic believing that the train was real. In the early part of this century films were shown commercially in the form of a novelty extension to the fairground sideshows at Coney Island and Atlantic City.
Because of its isolation from most of the trauma of the first world war film development in the USA continued, indeed in 1917 David Selznik was confident enough to offer the deposed Czar of Russia a job in pictures "since you are now out of work". By the end of the first World War American made silent films had begun to establish a world wide audience, indeed, despite the privations of famine and civil war even the nascent Soviet Union became involved in film production. By the early nineteen twenties the best recognised faces on the planet were not politicians or religious leaders but Hollywood movie stars. In 1920 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks toured extensively and were mobbed by adoring crowds everywhere from Africa to South Asia and Europe. If anything the advent of sound films (the "Talkies") in the late twenties was to bring about some retrenchment in the global audience for American made fare and lead to an expansion in local film production (and in the local language) in many areas of the world notably in Italy, in France and in the Third World. In the English speaking world however American made films have remained dominant until today.
The first medium of mass communications to be directly received in the home is of course radio. The Italian scientist and entrepreneur Guillermo Marconi conducted the first successful experiments in wireless telegraphy in 1894 and by 1901 had transmitted radio signals across the Atlantic. The Marconi Company itself rapidly dominated the early experiments with radio. It should be noted that the first uses of the new medium were military- primarily by the navy in the US & UK. RCA in the US in was formed as an attempt (an entirely successful one) to Americanise the then burgeoning radio industry and take over the Marconi company's assets in the US. The mushrooming radio industry and its subsequent regulation through legislation in the US has been well documented - suffice it to say that the intended monopoly of broadcasting RCA had been presented with very quickly fell apart and the US then as now has a plethora of commercial radio stations even within relatively compact geographical areas.
In the UK the early history of broadcasting is the history of one institution- the BBC. Like RCA in the US the original British Broadcasting Company was set up at the demand of a consortia of radio receiver manufacturers (including Marconi) to stimulate sales and to control the chaos that might have resulted from unregulated broadcasting stations.
The original financing plan was to have a licence fee collected from each receiver owner and a royalty paid to each of the member companies for each of the BBC approved receivers sold. The attempt at establishing a monopoly of sales - approved sets only - failed completely partly because the technology for self construction of sets was simple and widely available and partly because many European stations could also be received in the UK - weakening the monopoly position of the BBC. None the less the BBC became dominant in broadcasting in the UK and was initially run more or less at the personal fiat of Lord Reith.
The establishment of the Corporation (rather than Company) did nothing to alter the overall management structure of the BBC and the Reithian mission to "inform educate and entertain" was to remain at the centre of the policy and image of the BBC, arguably to today.
Television although operating on a trial basis to small numbers of viewers before the Second World War grows in reach exponentially in the US during, and in the UK after the war. In the UK in 1939 The nascent BBC Television service broadcast to a tiny proportion of the population of the London area, in the USA a handful of stations were transmitting to no more than a few thousand viewers. The original system as developed by Baird was abandoned for broadcasting because of its poor quality and cumbersome operation.
Although its development was to be arrested during the war itself "radio with pictures" had shown its potential as a medium. The spectacular growth of television in the immediate decade following the end of the war was first experienced in the USA. Given that the US was the only industrialised nation to end the war richer that it had been at it's point of entry into hostilities this is of course unsurprising.
The growth of television in audience reach has been again well documented but suffice it to say that even by the early sixties it had regular programme audiences of 12-14 million viewers. Recently the advent of video recording DBS and cable have begun to impact on the volume of terrestrially broadcast television that is watched in Britain. This trend is likely to accelerate in particular as the technology of cable allows for inter-active services to be supplied to domestic receivers.
Current technical developments include LEP and LCD screens as well as continuing research into digital broadcasts and mircomirror devices.
All of the advanced industrial economies (and many others) have network broadcasting of television the content of which is more of less distinctive to that culture. The dominance of Anglo-american media output is a matter of continuing concern to many national governments ( notably in France) and the structure of ownership and control of media content will be addressed later.
Brian Mulrine Bradford College. 2003
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