broadcast

This page looks at the broadcasting revolution - radio and television - as background to considering the internet. The media page in the separate economy guide considers the industry. The Ketupa.net site provides detailed profiles on around 140 individual media groups.

In contrast to print, there are few outstanding studies of how broadcasting has affected western culture, society and economies overall. We've therefore pointed to some of the more provocative or entertaining writing, particularly from the US, with a restricted scope.

     the shape of the revolution 

For Mitchell Stephens, author of The rise of the image the fall of the word (New York: Oxford Uni Press 98) "video remains the communications revolution of our time", one that was seized by consumers and business at a quicker rate than the web. 

Neil Harris' Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites & Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 90) notes that 1% of US homes had colour television in 1961 when NBC first broadcast all its programs in colour. By 1963, 60 million homes had tv; only 1.2 million had colour sets, rising to 33% in 1969. Thirty years later 98% of US households (94% of Australian) have colour televisions, more than have phones.

Raymond Williams' Television: Technology & Cultural Form (New York: Schocken 75), Lynn Spigel's Make Room for TV: Television & the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 92) and Michael Sproule's Propaganda & Democracy: The American Experience of Media & Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 9) offer an alternative view.

For a view of the broadcasting industry we recommend a grab-bag of books. Susan Douglas's Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 87) is an insightful study of early days.  Erik Barnouw's three volume A History of Broadcasting in the United States (New York: Oxford Uni Press 66-70), is a lively journalistic account, complementing Asa Briggs' staid four volume The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 61-79). 

Barnouw's Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford Uni Press 75) focuses on the development of television; we recommend David Fisher's Tube: The Invention of Television (Washington: Counterpoint 96) instead. Anthony Smith edited the crisp Television: An International History (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 95). 

     impacts

Christopher Burton's The Radio Revolution (PDF) is a thoughtful introduction from the US Center for Information Strategy & Policy, publisher of the Magazine of Information Impacts.

James Baughman's The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking & Broadcasting in America since 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 92) is a thoughtful study of broadcasting's relationship with film and print media.

Television quickly proved the most popular of the public arts. Americans who had once spent their evenings using a variety of mass media - films, newspapers, periodicals, and radio - were likely by the mid and late 1950s to watch television. People still went to the movie house, read a daily paper or a magazine, and listened to a radio program, but the amount of time they devoted to each activity declined, in some cases dramatically.

Baughman's  Television's Guardians: The FCC & the Politics of Programming, 1958-1967 (Knoxville: Uni of Tennessee Press 85) is a perceptive study of US content regulation. For television as a model for perceptions of the web as a sewer that destroys culture, commerce and community consult William Boddy's Fifties Television: The Industry & Its Critics (Urbana: Uni of Illinois Press 99), Karal Marling's As seen on TV - The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 94), Gerard Jones' Honey I'm Home! Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream (New York: Grove 92) and Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television & Popular Culture (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 92) by Andrew Goodwin.

Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke Uni Press 00) explores the box as a device onto which we project our darkest fears. Michael Schiffer's thin The Portable Radio in American Life (Tucson: Uni of Arizona Press 91) argues that 'portability' is as American as apple pie and predates the Japanese transistor.

For politics, local and national consult Satellite Broadcasting: The Politics & Implications of the New Media (London: Routledge 88) edited by Ralph Negrine and Fireside Politics: Radio & Political Culture in the United States 1920-40 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 00) by Douglas Craig. Monroe Price edited The V-Chip Debate: Content Filtering from Television to the Internet (Mahwah: Erlbaum 98), valuable in understanding wars over internet content filtering systems.

Among landmark studies of the 'tube of plenty' as a mechanism for social good and model for the web consider the report of the Sloan Commission on Cable Communications in On the Cable: The Television of Abundance (New York: McGraw-Hill 71). 

Cable technology, in concert with other allied technologies, seems to promise a communications revolution.... Citizens may still take a hand in shaping cable television's growth and institutions in a fashion that will bend it to society's will and society's best intentions.... If cable technology proves indeed to be the heart of a communications revolution, its impact upon society's most immediate needs might be enormous.

Ralph Smith's The Wired Nation: Cable TV: The Electronic Communications Highway (New York: Harper 72) was more realistic: 500 channels (many of them on what's now AOL) but most showing what critics characterised as the SOS.

     the death of television

For popular accounts of the fall of electronic 'old media' view Fred MacDonald's One Nation Under Television: The Rise & Decline of Network TV (New York: Pantheon 90), Kevin Maney's Megamedia Shakeout: The Inside Story on the Leaders & Losers in the Exploding Communications Industry (New York: Wiley 95) and Ken Auletta's Three Blind Mice: How The Television Networks Lost Their Way (New York: Random House 91)

For home recording, of interest as a precursor to companies such as Napster, see Gladys & Oswald Ganley's Global Political Fallout: The First Decade of the VCR 1976-1985 (Cambridge: Center for Information Policy Research 87). 

Joel Brinkley's Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television (New York: Harcourt Brace 97) explored the High Definition TV revolution, one that never occurred. Expect more of the same with Australia's digital tv regime in the next three years.

Ellen Seiter's Television & New Media Audiences (New York: Oxford Uni Press 99) is suggestive.



   next page  (infrastructure)