The long view of media effects reminds us that we are never left untouched by new communication forms.
Few ideas are as evocative in communication analysis as those that argue that big social changes are driven as much by particular media forms as by the ideas carried in those forms. The conventional view of communication is that we have ideas, information or thoughts, and then we choose the medium to deliver them, concluding that a given choice is not that consequential.
A media determinist sees things differently. Most clearly laid out by Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan in the 1970s, media theory argues that the vessel turns out to be as important as what it is carrying. McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “The medium is the message” doesn’t quite get it right. But a panoramic “big picture” view of communication effects certainly justifies the conclusion that dominant media forms usually create unanticipated and sometimes huge social changes.
Madonna and Child,1284 wikipedia.org
For example, academician Neil Postman and others have argued that television has transformed the idea of childhood, mostly by ending it.1 There’s a little hyperbole here, but also a valid point embedded in the observation. In the Middle Ages, for example, children were thought of as incipient workers: more or less adults in training. Even in their first decade the young were expected to take up the burdens of the working world; there was often no particular interest in isolating them from the secrets and challenges of adulthood. We see hints of this in paintings of children from this period, which often portray the young as just smaller versions of everyone else.
Mary Cassatt, A Kiss for Baby Anne Wikiart.org
Many generations later the idea of childhood was especially nurtured by the Victorians, helped by more affluence and the spread of age-graded literacy. They saw the young as a vulnerable and innocent group to be sequestered from the perils and problems of adulthood. Look at the children portrayed by painter Mary Cassatt or other artists in the last few centuries and you get the idea. The goal of creating a protected world for children was also supported by the growth of children’s literature, which used age-appropriate language to support adventurous but “safe” narratives.
Yet television imposes no literacy requirements. Electronic media are nearly as accessible to children as to adults. Think of a news report that includes an interview with a mother who has just lost her son in a shooting. There are obviously limits to what children viewing such a news item can understand. But the raw emotion of the mother is apparent even to a five-year-old. They will experience the cues of distress directly. Obviously, that would not be the case if the account existed only as a written news story.
Using the logic of media determinism can make our social histories look very different.
Most parents sense the difference. The pervasiveness of visual/presentational media means there are very few safe refuges from the dark corners of the culture. As media determinists sometimes put it, there is really no such thing as children’s television.
Using the logic of media determinism can make our social histories look very different. A few more examples:
The Enlightenment and an emerging belief in human rights was abetted by the development of printed texts. Printing decentralizes the control of information and ideas, ultimately weakening the informational monopoly of the church after the 16th Century.
The invention of the telegraph hastened the development of news wire services and the journalistic principle of objectivity. Objectivity was needed if the services were going to sell stories to different parts of the country.
The photocopier contributed to the downfall of the old Soviet Union. Cheap copies of political tracts made in private countered the power of government-sanctioned printers.
Civil stability in one-party states like China and North Korea is continually threatened by the internet and social media. The online content crosses these political borders with difficulty. But even with government-imposed electronic firewalls isolation from digital content is no longer possible.
Our growing obsessions with all kinds of screens is undermining our social intelligence. Heavy personal media use in the young seems connected to their rising social anxieties about engaging in face to face interaction.
Of course attributing large social changes to just one dimension of a complex culture can be risky. Even so, a macro-view of media effects can be a timely reminder that new ways to connect to the world always change us. They continue to redefine new forms of daily behavior that start with early adopters before they are acquired by the broad center. The cycle completes itself when a new norm is accepted without much notice. So walking alone and apparently talking to no one no longer suggests schizophrenia. We now assume a phone is their link to another.
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1Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, Revised (Vintage, 1994).
David Sarnoff, Marconi telegrapher and future President of RCA, in 1908. The Sarnoff Collection, TCNJ.
Give those early innovators their due. It all started with a single wire carrying words coded in simple on-off pulses, hardly more than a long-distance doorbell.
When did we pass over the threshold into what has become the consequential change in the human condition known as the “Information Age?” Many would perhaps place this monumental transition around the 1920s, with the popularity of radio and the early attempts to make “smart machines.” But the real beginnings of our obsession with electronic media began much earlier, with a simpler but demonically influential breakthrough.
The telegraph began as a system of wires and keys that could send text-coded electric pulses over extended distances. Wires on poles spread rapidly throughout the eastern United States in the 1850s. And with this growing network, information began to move at the speed of light rather than the pace of a horse or locomotive. By the civil war era Boston could “talk” to New York or Washington D.C. in real time.
We had entered the age of harnessing electrons for communication, making distance insignificant. The process of shrinking the world had begun. Gradually news came as easily from 300 miles away as from down the street.
Sterling Colorado Railroad Station, 1880s
The change is easy to visualize with two iconic forms of communication usually built side by side. Old images of railroads stretching across mountains and prairies usually include telegraph poles marching along the line. The single wire literally ran through each station along the route, and through the dispatcher’s desk key before exiting the other side of the building. Telegraphy not only made train travel safer, but the thin metal wire also began to carry news from one location to the next at far greater speed. These included accounts of local happenings that were reported in the 19th Century equivalent of a “breaking” story.
We had entered the age of harnessing electrons to make distance immaterial; the process of shrinking the world had begun.
President Lincoln became addicted to telegraphy. Throughout the civil war he spent ours across the street from the White House at the War Office, waiting to hear from his generals in various battle locations which had been wired by the military.
News of Lincoln’s assassination in Ford’s Theater spread in the east within hours. But it would take up to ten days for word of the tragedy to reach portions of the country west of the Pony Express origination point in St. Joseph Missouri.
New telegraph lines passing through New England led transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau to note that “we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The same could be said about phone obsessives today. But that’s another story. The race was on to build news networks to be known as “wire services” that terminated in most city news rooms, providing local papers with much more coverage of events that had occurred in distant cities. To this day The Associated Press still depends on local reporters to feed local stories of potential national interest to their far-flung subscribers.
Fittingly, the most important thoroughfares in some cities carried the name of the new network that was beginning to knit the country together. Telegraph Road is arguably Detroit’s best-known Street, and somehow fitting in a city known for technology and innovation. San Francisco and Berkeley California have their own versions, and do many other towns.
So when you wonder when we became addicts to the effects of charged electrons traveling at the speed of light, give those early 19th Century innovators their due. It all started with a single wire carrying simple on-off pulses, technically little more than a long distance doorbell, but one that would eventually summon us all.
