3 A Brief History of “The Media”

Depending on who you talk to, media has existed since we first started translating our ideas and thoughts to noises and images.  Those noises and images started to take form through repetitive use and development over time.  Eventually, those noises started to develop into phonemes (specific sounds that connect to an idea), which become collections of sounds in a particular order, moving into a syntax and, eventually/finally, the spoken word as we understand it now.  We mediate our thoughts into a form that could be understood by others.  Through this mediation, we start to exchange ideas, concepts, information, and … well, you get the idea.  We have been communicating for a long time through one type of media or another.  Always adapting and changing to new ways, new technologies, but still using some form of media.  Always.

When I teach an Introduction to Media course (“Media,” “Mass Media,” “Mass Communication,” “Journalism and Media,” etc. – the name often changes from campus to campus, but the ideas are essentially the same), and I start with the spoken word, there is the occasional push-back or the “light bulb” moment, but usually the blank stare.  The inevitable question – “I thought we were learning about the media, not speaking” – will come up.  Good.  This is what I want my students and you to be thinking about.

The Essentials

• We need to remember that EVERYTHING we try to say, write, draw, or otherwise create, is mediated, meaning that it is never a pure idea.  There is always some sort of translation going on when I am trying to get an idea to you.  If we keep in mind that everything is interpreted and never 100% exactly what we intended to put out into the universe, then perhaps we can allow for some forgiveness when someone misinterprets what we mean to say … or post … or text.  Just something to think about.

• We have been mediating our ideas for as long as there have been two people trying to get an idea across.  We have changed the ways we mediate over the last twenty thousand years or so, but it’s been happening for a while now.  As it becomes more complicated, we need to work at it more to ensure that the message really is what we intended it to be.  Remember – literacy is not just about interpreting.  It is also about creating and trying to make meaning where none existed before.  No pressure.

Where it all starts

An element that we often forget is that, without mediation, there is no way for the ideas in our heads to get out.  Until we can directly connect our brains to one or more people (no thank you, BTW!), we have to mediate our ideas somehow.  Whether it is through audible utterances (words, grunts, mimicry), alpha-numeric writing, or even pictures on a cave wall (or, let’s say, hieroglyphs in the northern African continent, throughout Asia, and current Central America), the ideas need to be transformed through an agreed-upon format.  All of our rules of grammar, spelling, turn-taking when speaking, debate, even how to make noises with our own facial and glottal anatomy – all of them get back to the idea that we want to get our internal stuff out.  We have to mediate it.  In other words – “the mediated world” is everywhere.

When we start to discuss the history of media, we have to understand that we are always mediating our thoughts. There is no direct connection between what we are thinking and what we are presenting to the world (at least, not yet, though The Matrix got pretty close to what it would take – no thanks). We need some way to mediate the raw thoughts so others are able to understand and make sense of what is happening in our heads. If you think about it, we have to use sounds and images to even talk to ourselves. If we need to mediate ourselves internally, we definitely need to do it externally.

From the spoken word, we move to the written form. This does not start with alphabets … those come much later. Rather, the first written languages are iconography and pictographs: symbols and pictures that represent ideas, stories, events, or emotions. As the stories of gods, monsters, great hunts, and rulers are drawn on everything from cave walls to temples to papyrus, the pictures begin to represent individual words. This action moves to individual sounds. Those individual representations are slowly merged into sequences. Ultimately, the first mediated ideas that are not verbal and are not strictly pictographic come into being^[1].

Moving from drawing things to reading things

Any movie that talks about dinosaurs or cave people will have some sort of scene where the archaeologist (think Indiana Jones) comes across some drawings on a wall that are significant and meaningful.  Something profound is said about them … and the world is saved.  In reality, many of those drawings are just the day-to-day record of what happened to whoever created them back then.  For our purposes – it’s the daily news.  What was hunted.  What was gathered.  How the weather was.  They helped remember herd migrations, agriculture growth records, you name it.  As now, those important items were key to success – if not survival – even then.  Also for our purposes here, those same drawings become the first relevant evidence for us regarding the written … well … “word.”

What is important for us at this moment is that ideas were taken from the world around those individuals, internalized, then recorded in a mediated form – in this case, as cave drawings (pictographs) and carvings (petroglyphs).  These mediated messages helped audiences understand what had happened and what might happen again given the same circumstances (season, sunshine or moonlight, large predators, etc.).  These messages helped communities, well, communicate.  Though these types of recordings are not news in today’s understanding, they ARE the record of the day.

Eventually, the pictures started to become more abstract, representing sounds rather than things.  From there, the idea of alphabets started to develop.  Take multiple single symbols (we’ll call them “letters”) and use them to represent those vocal sounds we talked about earlier and – what do you know – we have a written language^[2].  The cost of the written word moving from cave walls and stone tablets to something a bit more portable (a clay tablet or a papyrus scroll) was incredibly expensive.  This resulted in only the richest and most powerful in societies to have access to this information.  Literacy rates were incredibly low.  If you could not read, you had to rely on those who could (the ruling class, the clergy, etc.) to tell you what things said.  Laws.  Religion.  Edicts.  Contracts.  Everything.  If it was important, it was recorded in written form.  This resulted in a control of information and, by extension, control of one group of people over another.  We see the results of this even today, though it has gotten much better.

Maybe we would have been better off having our information recorded as pictures on a cave wall.

The Book – now it’s not just for the fancy people

For the longest time, the written word was replicated by hand.  I love showing a scene from The Name of the Rose to my students where our heroes (Sean Connery and Christian Slater) enter the Scriptorium in the church they are investigating for murder … under the influence of “impure” writings (the works of Aristotle, for example).  Here we see how the lesser clergy (often illiterate themselves) – including one Ron Pehrlman (one of my favorite actors, by the way) – are copying text (bibles) into illuminated manuscripts.   These beautiful books are meant to tell the stories of the bible in two ways – through the word and through the pictures.  They were also expensive and rare, with gold leaf and embedded jewels throughout.  It was said that you could tell the worth and power of a person based on their collection of books, manuscripts, scrolls, etc.  Imagine seeing one of these open on display in someone’s study?  We still see this perspective performed today – just walk into a house with a library or den or, dare I say, a college professor’s office (yeah … I’m guilty of that).

Fast forward a couple of hundred years (at least in Western Europe – they already had a version of this in China) and we have the first printing press with movable type (the Gutenberg Press – a true game changer).  Why is this a big deal?  Because now replicating the written word could be done more quickly.  Publishers could push more of the product out in the market, this brought the costs down.  More print in the hands of the public means more people begin learning to read, which results in higher literacy rates and a more informed public.  All of this results in at least some control of information (because we still cannot say all) in the hands of masses.  Such a cultural shift – moving information out of the hands of those in power (the church, aristocracy, royalty) and into the hands of everyday people causes strife and discord … but also informed conversations and decisions.  Change begins to happen.  What we start to see is the power of media and “the media.”

Consider how you are probably accessing this text right now.  Chances are you are not reading a hard copy of this very text.  You are reading it on a device via an open-source agreement with, amongst others, Amazon Kindle^[3] or Google Books.  Information in the hands of the public in the twenty-first century has moved from hardcopy to digital.  The former still exists, but convenience (for some – remember that the digital divide is still alive and well across the United States and globally) and the ubiquity of devices in our lives has moved us into a digital literacy space. The implications are endless.

Newspapers – still alive and kicking … for now.

The idea of the newspaper, in one form or another, has been around as long as the printed word has.  From handbills, town and village postings, and the news of the day at the local pub, all the way to newspaper culture (that, unfortunately, is dying off in the US) and online publishing, the printed news is still a format that is recognizable and easily accessible by the vast majority of people.  Though newspapers are closing left and right (the history of the death of the newspaper – as with other smaller media entities – can be directly connected to the consolidation that occurred after the passage of the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 – more on that in chapter four), they still exist and should be recognized for what they provide – a source of information and commerce.

Newspapers have always struck a balance between local coverage, national reporting, and advertising.  Remember that US media is (for the most part) commercial media, meaning that the reporting and the comics and the op-eds only exist, first, because of the ad space that is sold within the newspaper and, a distant second, subscriptions to the newspaper.  As subscriptions have gone down across the country, newspapers have closed and the amount of advertising within the pages of the newspaper has increased proportionally (perhaps even more than that).  This inevitable change in newspapers is demonstrative of what is happening across our media (particularly our legacy media – Newspaper, Radio, and Television).  More ads, less information.  It is no wonder that the public trust in our news and media has gone down so much … unless, of course, the news reflects our own personal and ideological beliefs.

As of this writing, there are currently seven companies that own the vast majority of newspapers in the U.S.  Seven.  That’s it.  When we talk about ownership across all media platforms and spaces, you will see how big – or how small – the media world really is.  Where I grew up (the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area), there were two competing regional newspapers – the Minneapolis Star-Tribune^[4] and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.  Depending on where you lived and how you prefer your news written, you subscribed to one or both (here is a story on the two big papers in the Twin Cities).  Where the Star-Tribune (aka “Strib”) is still locally owned (by Glen Taylor, the owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves [NBA] and the Minnesota Lynx [WNBA]), the Pioneer-Press (now TwinCities.Com) is owned by Alden Golden Capital, a New-York based hedge fund that is notorious for purchasing then dismantling newspapers (there is an amazing and depressing documentary on the Rocky Mountain News that lays out how this is done).  If you hold the two side by side, you will quickly see what happens when a newspaper is owned by a local owner versus owned by a hedge fund.  Yeah … I might be just a little bitter about this.

The above presents what happens when the value of news reporting goes down in both popular perceptions and as a commercial product.  As more and more news consumers are receiving their information from pundits, forwards, and influencers for “free” (remember: we are data and, therefore, our clicks and eyes are worth money), subscriptions go down.  Fewer subscriptions translates to ads having to be sold for cheaper because newspapers cannot justify the price of ad space to buyers.  This in turn leads to less money coming in resulting in fewer reporters being hired.  Ultimately, what happened to the Rocky Mountain News happens to your local newspaper – it is carved up, sold for space, and ultimately dies.

With all of that said, newspapers are important and, I would say, essential to a properly informed public.  They are cheap (or should be), they are relatively up to date, and we need that right now.  Unlike cable television, internet access, and streaming services, newspapers are “old school” – no electricity or internet needed … unless (like me) you receive your subscription via your newspaper’s app or the web version.  In many places, the paper is still delivered to your doorstep.  Now THAT is pretty convenient.

Audio, Video, and the ability to record and reproduce mediated messages of all kinds – game changer

Many of us, right now, are walking around with a media production “suite” (what the studios were sometimes referred to as) in our pockets.  The latest iterations of smartphones have cameras and microphones that might rival television studios and photographers just a couple of years ago. The idea of developing film has moved from being the only way to see the finished product and reproducing it to hobbyists and purists willing to donate the time and resources to what has become an art form.  Pro-quality video can be shot and shared within minutes.  Capturing audio that sounds like it is “right here – right now” can be accomplished with our phones and a wired or wireless microphone that is carried around in our pockets.  Historically, these skills and technologies were relegated to those who learned the craft through schooling or working in a studio and those who funded the projects (not always technicians but definitely consumers) confined to studios and sound stages.  That is no longer the case.  As much as the printed word and the photograph in the 19th and early 20th century were king, “digital” is the media form of the 20th and, even more so, the 21st century^[5].

Historically, the ability to record any sort of signal starts with capturing sound – from tin plates to clay cylinders to LPs, then from magnetic tape to zeroes and ones on a CD and, ultimately, on a hard drive and flash drive.  And … now … streaming.  In every case, the ability to capture sound, moving it from sheet music to performance to reproduction, has predicated what our media world looks like now.  We need to keep this in mind – audio was and is (maybe) still “the one that rules” all of the rest (sorry – little Tolkien geek moment there).  So let’s talk about the history of audio recording and playback – briefly, of course.

Consider the old game of tying two cans together with a string, pulling that string tight, and being able to communicate across a distance: the words spoken into the can are concentrated by the can, causing the string to vibrate, which vibrates the other can … and you can hear what is being said into the can.  Old school technology – reconceptualized and replicated by the first recording process.  Audio recording started with tar and a horsehair … or boar hair, depending on what you read.  Regardless, it was figured out that if sound was funneled down and concentrated (specifically, it was constricted) through a smaller and smaller cone, it would cause a bristle (the precursor to a needle) to vibrate.  When combined with a cylinder of tar, the vibrating bristle would record noise by moving back and forth on the cylinder.  Once the tar hardened, the process was reversed.  The cylinder was spun the other direction, the needle was placed on the groove it created, it began to move and send the captured sound waves back up the funnel.  The sound was amplified as the funnel increased in size (like a brass instrument) and what was recorded was played back for audiences.

Obviously, tar cylinders are not what we would call ideal for storage, playing on a Friday evening to entertain guests, etc.  As the phonograph technology advanced, we moved from tar to sheets of tin (smaller and cheaper).  From there we moved to the long play album (LP) that we are all familiar with … if you shop at a record store still or have a vinyl collection laying around somewhere.  Magnetic recording became a mainstay for the audio recording industry with the invention of the reel-to-reel and 8-track cassette followed by the “mini” reel-style cassettes that were a mainstay until the invention of digital audio recording, first moving from converting analog sound to digital storage, finally leading to end-to-end digital audio production.  If you would like a much more detailed discussion of the origins of audio recording, I highly suggest you check this link out.

Video follows a similar path that starts with recording video as photographs on plates (using, amongst other deadly chemicals, mercury), then on film that would need to be processed.  At the same time, motion is being captured through reproducing flip books as flip photographs (check out the idea of the nickelodeon and the Nickelodeons as store fronts here).  From there, we move to film and processing, to digital, and then to streaming.  When we see audio and video merged (The Jazz Singer in 1927), the first movie with color (A Visit to the Seaside in 1908, NOT The Wizard of Oz in 1939 – the first movie in Technicolor, which was quite the advancement), and the first movie houses, we start to recognize and understand just how massive the movie industry was about to become.

The history of the television and movie industry is massive, full of twists and turns and deals and scandals.  Honestly, more than we need here.  For our purposes, we focus on the tech and how the tech led to the inevitable commercial viability of the media forms.  Like audio, replication started with using a permanent medium and exposing it to a signal.  Whether a plate or exposed film, the image is captured.  As the technology and the talent improves, ways to manipulate the captured image are developed.  Product production, reproduction, distribution, and performance all expand.  Genres and markets develop.  Commercialization occurs.  Between televion stations, cable networks, and movie houses … one has to wonder how we got anything done?  Distribution then moves everything to our couches.  Companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are creating theater-level content that competes with the established production companies and conglomerates.  All of them are vying for your eyeballs and your wallets.

With the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, the movie industry – as massive as it is – had to tack quickly to survive.  With no access to theater audiences, content was moved online to take advantage of the streaming tech that has become as ubiquitous as smart devices.  Audiences began enjoying the ability to watch movies meant for the big screen in the comfort of their own pajamas and couches.  Even with the cost of a “ticket” (paying to watch at home) being a little higher than the theater, the overall investment per movie was much less.  The industry has been changed, perhaps permanently.  The ways that the industry celebrates itself has to be re-conceptualized.  The audience has changed the medium … to an extent.  As of 2022, the struggle is still real.

Where we are now (social media, mobile, video games, and VR)

With everything above, it’s time to talk about the 21st century and our current media spaces … by starting in the 1960s (sorry – history chapter).  We often forget that the first computers (think large capacity calculating machines) were invented in the early 19th century (click here for information on the Difference Machine by Charles Babbage).  The computers during World War 2 (yep, they had them there as well) were as big as gymnasiums.  The idea of a network system was created by the US and UK governments as redundancies in the event of nuclear war (Remember Wargames?  You should probably check that one out :-)).  However, for our purposes, it is really all about 1994, Tim Berners-Lee, and HTML.  Once this computer language was created in order to quickly reference information across multiple networks (think “the cloud” as we understand it now), our way of accessing information and consuming our media was changed forever.

Quickly … incredibly quickly … the technology around us evolved.  Our devices became smaller every year (and then, for some unknown reason, phones just had to get bigger), more powerful, and faster.  Our phones left the cables in the wall behind and moved into our pockets.  Phones became so much more – cameras, media players, multi-modal communications devices, production studios, classrooms, additional video monitors … and, yet, we still can receive and make phone calls on them (though that seems to no longer be the way to communicate).  The idea of the virtual reality helmet moved from Lawnmower Man and Hackers to Facebook (sorry … Meta).  Augmented reality is more and more part of our lives, influencing everything from gaming (Pokemon Go!, anyone?) to how we shop in a store or even watch a television show.  It is only in the last 10 years that we have truly begun to understand the ubiquity of our media in our everyday lives, and that our media is so much more than the passive experience of consuming it – though, yes, that is definitely still a large part of it.  We immerse ourselves, we create our content, and we distribute it to each other just to prove that it actually happened.

So – why is the history of media (for us, U.S. media) important for us to talk about?  Complex question.  Literacy is developed and refined as we work to understand what we are consuming and creating.  The best way to do that is to develop a knowledge infrastructure or foundation – media history … what we just spent this chapter quickly talking about … helps to do that.  To be fair, this chapter works to quickly cover what could be and is whole books and classes.  However, if we have a sense of where things are coming from and how we interact with those things, our ability to exist within those spaces as they exhaust now is expanded and improved upon.  After all, we don’t start reading in a foreign language by being handed a book and told to “just do it.”  We start small.  We need to learn the rules then expand past them.  In this case, a brief start on the history is the establishment of the rules.

Now that we have some history under the belts, the rest of this text explores a variety of areas.  We need to start to understand who owns the media we consume.  We will then talk about how that media is paid for and sold.  We obviously need to look at Social Media (since chances are you may have learned about this book through a post, tweet, or feed).  The idea of how it all works together and syncs up is important.  Then, of course, what can we do about all of this media!  Let’s get to work.

Resources

You may not be too interested in media history resources, but if you are, here are a few that have some fantastic information and are easily accessible:

• Smithsonian Institute Freedom of the Press Collection – https://www.si.edu/spotlight/news – Fantastic collections to look at online without even heading to DC … though you should definitely go to DC.

• NewSeum Center for First Amendment Media Literacy – https://www.newseumed.org/ – In 2019, the Newseum was closed in Washington, DC.  It was a loss.  However, the founding organization is still active and has created this space for parents, teachers, and students to look at and use.  Highly recommended.
• The Essential Guide to Mass Communication: History, Methods, Ethics, and the Future – https://www.mastersincommunications.org/guide-mass-communication/ – A great, easy to access discussion that might help fill some blanks in as you make sense of how all of this has come together.