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RADIO, CINEMA AND
TELEVISION
From steam to electricity
• 1760-1790: many inventions concerned with communication
• Industrial rev + comm rev as part of the same process
• Steam power: the replacement of human and animal strenght by inanimate power:
• Rethoric: “conquering nature”
• Ships: 1776-1940 more than 30 milions to the US
• Railways: 1868-1900 the great age of railroad-building
• Mail
• 1731: Gentleman’s Magazine: info (including details of inventions)+entertainment
Electric telegraphs
• Begins the process of reshaping what came to be called the “media”:
• Crimean War (1853-6): the first war to be reported by correspondents, artists and photographers.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE INTRODUCTION OF TELEGRAPH
• Powerful instrument for politicians+mil for
• T linked national and international market, including stock exchanges and commodity markets (ex: cotton, corn and fish)
• T speeded up the transmission of info (most imp): distance was conquered
• Agencies to carry out news accross the frontiers: Reuters; later Ass. Press (AP), 1892
• 1895 wireless telegraph
Telephones (1876)
• Beginning tel - associated not only with one-to-one comm, but with entertainment for a scattered audience (ancestor of broadcasting)
• New organization of society
Marconi: Wireless (end of 19th c)
• The culmination of 19th century comm
• Guglielmo Marconi
• Radio entered the home first: US,HOL,UK
• Before programmes were offered by new istitutions, there was an amateur network of enthusiasts – “hams”.
• Potentially the largest audience in the world
• 1899 Marconi covered the America’s Cup yacht races
• 1901 M – sent a wireless message accross the Atlantic
• 1904: wireless hit the headlines when it was used to report on the arrest of Dr Crippen
• 1st WW - military purposes
• 1912: M’s station in Long Island picked up the SOS from the Titanic and sent the news to the White House
• 1919: RCA, Radio Corporation of America was founded and took over all M’s patents
• 1920: the M’s company – opposition from the Wireless Telegraphy Board: M’s concert’s were intefering with defence messages; this –
• Ham’s protest: there was still no sense of a great audience
Forest
• Concentrated on trasmitting music (opera)
• 1910: he broadcasted live from NY Metropolitan Opera
• HE UNDERSTOOD THAT BROADCASTING WAS A MEDIUM THAT COULD BECOME BIG BUSINESS
Burrows (UK) and Sarnoff (US)
• 1916 UK wireless experts still unconvinced of a future of the kind predicted by Forest
• B + S understood that radio had to become a household utility
UK (BBC)
• BBC derived its initial income not from Ad but from royalties from the sale of wireless sets and licence fees.
• BBC was made a monopoly because of the gov’s decision that since there were competing claims for access to the scarce spectrum there should be only one broadcasting org
Reith
• Change of structure in 1927 set out in a royal carter: BBC had to provide:
• INFORMATION
• ENTERTAINMENT
• EDUCATION
• The management of broadcasting had to be in the hands of broadcasters, independent both of gov and business:
• PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
• A strong sense of mission, not just as a medium of entertainment
• High moral tone
• A monopoly was the natural instrument to achieve his mission
US
• no monopoly
• 1922 radio boom, a large number of stations of all kind emerged (at the end of 1922 the number of licenses 572; some associated with newspapers, other with retail org, other with cities, school or uni)
• At first they all used the same wavelenght, 360 metres – “chaos in the ether”
• Emerged powerful networks: NBC, CBS
• Disappointment of those local owners who tried to concentrate not on the far but on the near
• Network power expressed itself in increased programming by formula
• AD became the financial dynamic. Attacked by Hoover secretary forcommerce
• Radio was the latch key to nearly every home of the US
Main differences
UK
• BBC – monopoly
• Financial methods: royalties from the sale of wireless sets and licence fees
• Moral mission, not just entertainment
• A wider range of programming
US
• No monopoly
• Financial methods: ad: from the start broadcasting integrated into the business system
• Mainly a means of entertainment with news coming second
• Local stations
The age of broadcasting
• BBC, NBC, CBS istitutions more than org
• II WW- reports of war (ED Murrow) a war of words
• 1940: most European broadcasting stations – Nazis
• BBC: voice of freedom (host many eu broadcasters) +
• Morale (ent pgr – Tommy’s Handley ITMA)
• Goebbels: radio – propaganda
• US, Roosevelt, “fireside chats”
Common features to all the countries
• The offer of programmes to a large unseen audience
• A marked division between those people directly involved in programme making and those involved with finance
What programmes?
• Music
• News
• Sport
• Weather forecast
• Variety
Changes in the 60’s: Pirate stations
UK
• Pirates (Radio Caroline)
• BBC created a new radio 1 in 1967
• Local radio was introduced in the Uk
US
After 1945:
transistor radio
Automobile radio
Pop+news remained staple fare
70’s (Us)
• Creation of a national public radio
• FM listeners exceed the number of Am listeners
Radio developed more towards entertainment.
CINEMA
• The development of both cinema and Tv depended on the camera
• 19th c. camera: France, Britain, and Us
• Ph. won special royal and political favour (Victoria, Metternich)
• Kodak camera (1876): usable by everyone and everywhere, the art went out photography
1906: instead than taking the place of the illustrated paper, it was taking the place of theatre
• 1914: Hollywood
• Stars system: Chaplin, Valentino
• Film- international form, like the novel
Trinity
• Information
• Education
• Entertainment
The fourth estate- the press
• The Times, the dominant organ of the press in London was seen as the 4th est.
• Maculay (hist.), referring to the press gallery in Parliament rather than to the Times or the press as a whole
• Hunt (journ.) used this expression as the title of his book on the press in 1850
• The times and the penny press (NY), quality newspapers and tabloids
Press in the Us
• New York Sun (1st penny press newspaper)
• New York Herald, 1835: more innovative and complete Bennet:
“my ambition is to make the newspaper press the great organ and pivot of government, society, commerce, finance, religion and all human civilization”
Religion (Bennet)
“a newspaper can send more souls to heaven and save more from hell than all the clubs and chapels in NY”
New York Tribune
• Greeley
• Article from Europe (Marx)
• Deliberate exclusion of domestic news, refusing to print details of crimes, reports of trials, and theatre plays.
New York Times (1851)
• Raymond (founder)
• Separating “news” and “views”
• American Press never centralized – continued to rest on a local base.
• After the 50’s of the 19th century, not important links with political parties
• English provincial press lost its influence when information and entertainment came to centre on London
By 1900 the press had established itself as a force in society, and was to remain a basic medium long after electronic media had appeared
The age of television
• 30’s – depression, experiments
• 1939: NY world Fair
• 1941: Us entered the war: NBC and CBS began tv broadcast in NY
• 1945: still a cold climate around TV
• 1952: Us, more than 1/3 of the pop:
A real mass audience was beginning to grow; Cinema attendance fell
What programmes?
• At first drama: some thought of TV as “cultural theatre”
• Film material
• Stereotyped programmes towards entertainment (Game shows (beat the clock), Quizzes, Soap operas)
BBC (Barnes)
• 1953: Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation: 20 m
• Public halls, public houses
• 1955: the Parliament took away BBC’s monopoly
• ITA (Independent Television Authority, later IBA) set up in 1954, would control ad: commercial breaks had to be controlled
• BBC retained a competitive advantge in sport and comedy + introduced satire
British Broadcasting system
• Unified, including television and radio
• BBC and the other channels different in the financing methods: BBC depended on a license fee, the other companies were driven by profit and depended on adveritising
First critics to TV
• Daily Mirror, 1950: “if you let Tv set through your door, life can never be the same again”
• Ernie Kovacs (US scholar): “Tv is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done”
• The “cultural desert” (Minow, president of FCC)
• “a chewing gum for the eyes” (Uk)
• The strongest criticism in the Us was on stereotyped entertainment
• Decency, sex, violence
• Hilde Hemmelweit: “Television and the child”, also considered the influence of Tv on social and political behaviour, including violent protest, opened the debate on the influence of TV on children.
• Sesame street (entertainment+educational)
• Daniel Boorstin “The Image”:
media manufacture pseudo-events and celebrities, known, unlike heroes, by their images rather than their achivements (the mediatic event)
Adorno
• Strong critic to the cultural industry
• Strong critic of the mass media: cinema, radio, ad, Tv, ecc.
• Mass media operate in a way that each individual unconsciously absorbes the (negative) values of the existing world and society.
• mass media are not something neutral, contaniners that can be filled up with different contents
• mass media are ideologies themselves, deliver an image of the world that has to be acceptable by anyone
• Mass media develop uniform and standardized languages that lead to general conformism
Debord
• Society of the Spectacle (1970):
“in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles: everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”.
Baudrillard
• Tv is the medium of electronic simulation
• The dissolution of Tv into life and the dissolution of life into Tv
Key events in the history of Tv (and good topics for your paper…)
• Vietnam
• The assassination of Martin Luther king +
• Kennedy
• The Apollo XI landing
• Dallas (entertainment)
Internet
• 1969: landing on the moon, birth of internet, that is strictly related to the conquest of the space
• 1957: URSS – space project called Sputnik
• 1958: Eisenhower adm financed a project of military research in the field of communication: ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency)
• 1961: Yuri Gagarin first man brought in the space
• Answer of the Us was NASA: in charge of space programs (later Apollo)
• ARPA began to study the science of information and communication and to work to a project able to allow computers to communicate and transfer data
• This project was called ARPAnet and had the function to guarantee the safety of data in case of a nuclear war
• UCLA, UCSB (Un of Santa Barbara) uni of UTAH and SRI (Stanford Research Institute): Arpanet at the beginning was a network of 4 computers linked to each other to exchange information
• So Internet at the beginning was used by the Department of the Defense and 4 Universities
• It was in the 90’s that Internet became a mass media
• 1989 (Fall of the Berlin Wall): Arpanet was replaced in all the universites by NSFnet, quicker.
• 1991-1995: European collaboration to the internet: Tim Berners Lee from CERN, a European Physics Research Institute created HTML (Hyper Text Marking Language), a system through which since then were composed the data (surfing)
• 90’s: a network dedicated to academic research became a network of networks open to everybody
March 4th 1996: Net Day
• California: Clinton, FFC President and many other authorities: ceremony installing tel wires linking all the California schoolrooms with the Internet. Clinton: promised that all the Us schoolrooms would have been linked soon. So the Internet at the beginning was just a media for education and information: When it became a mass media +entertainment.
Compare to the other media internet would grow from below undirected by governments.
Internet and Media Convergence
The Internet can be considered a fusion between all the kinds of communication: written, oral and visual.
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