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.
______________
1Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, Revised (Vintage, 1994).
Too much attention to where we have been can mean that we are perhaps missing beguiling possibilities just around the corner.
It’s a natural impulse to look to the immediate past to make judgments about the future. In a sense it is all we have. And yet for all the changing norms affecting how we connect with each other, it’s still too easy to become wedded to selective memories and romanticized histories.
I seem to recall ever-widening eyes while older members of my family rhapsodized about their own childhoods on horseback, or camped out for the summer near the family’s not very successful silver mine. The stories seem to come from a Technicolor world filled with older family members that were larger than life. One could imagine that they were not that different from those all-American stoics who patiently guided the Smith family through the giddy summer of 1904 in MGM’s Meet Me in Saint Louis.
By contrast, my adolescence seemed to unspool around a far less exciting existence seemingly shot in grainy black and white. To be sure, I have sense colorized it, especially the bits that took our family back to the wonderful mountains not too far from that old mine. But I still marvel at the elders I’ve constructed who lived unpredictable lives in fabulous times.
There’s a point to all of this. We tend to create memories that are equal parts history and fantasy. After all, we are not digital devices. Accuracy of recall is a strength of hard drives, not humans. We often select what are perceived simplicities of the past, especially forms of family intimacy that probably overstate the closeness we desire and the tensions we’d like to forget.
It’s worth remembering that too much attention to the receding landscape in the rear view mirror can mean that we are perhaps missing beguiling possibilities just around the corner.
It’s inevitable that new forms will rise and challenge the dominance of previously invincible media.
Nowhere is this more true than in our preferred ways of connecting with others. We know how and when connecting works for us. We understand our strengths, even as we puzzle over new digital platforms and their peculiar rules of engagement. But as the great media theorist Marshall McLuhan cautioned, media types and forms of address evolve ceaselessly and irrevocably, as relentless in changing the landscape as the flow of volcanic magma from Hawaii’s Mount Kilauea.
There’s no going back. Old forms of media don’t necessarily die out. They co-exist or become transformed. Think of radio today, sixty-five years after television captured its place as the nation’s preferred medium. Radio is still with us and doing reasonably well. But it’s inevitable that new forms will rise and challenge previously dominant media. In his day Plato decried the growing interest in written texts. Similarly, John Philip Sousa was none too happy to have his music imperfectly captured on noisy shellac recordings. And yet the work of both is alive because of the “new” media they reluctantly anticipated.
The challenge is to get the mix right for an individual life. We need to be more conscious of the expansion of social media and cell technology have cost us and what they’ve allowed. Choices must be made because our lives can easily be trashed and overwhelmed by media distractions.
One example: It’s easy to poke fun at online dating services. They are sold to us mostly by peddling notions of romantic love that haven’t been in vogue since the 50s. And yet just when we think we couldn’t push ourselves any further from authentic personal relationships, a friend beams with pride over the new person who has entered their life through a digital porthole. Cole Porter didn’t write love songs about online romance. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen.
