Week 9: Mass Media
Briggs & Burke, Information Education Entertainment
This piece summarizes the history of broadcast technology from the radio to the TV. Most significantly, it touches on some of the regulatory issues that accompany (and, really, precede) the development of any new technology. Who owns the technology? Who owns the airwaves? I find myself frustrated reading B & B sometimes, because I think some things aren't covered enough and others are covered in too much detail, and I sometimes can't find the rhyme or reason to their decisions. For example, I'm told that, in 1982, Japanese children watched a whole lot more TV than their American counterparts. But there's no elaboration as to why that is significant. So, frankly, I could do without that information thankyouverymuch if there'll be no elaboration or connection to a larger argument. Also, I find it odd that B&B primarily rely on older authors to discuss technology but don't mention any of the recent and great cultural studies work that's been done on broadcast technology. Finally, their book is called A Social History of the Media, but I find very little that invokes the social. What is it that's social about this particular history of the media? Where's the social in what we read for today?
I'm really curious about Reith's (of the BBC) opinion that broadcasting should remain within the purview of broadcasters, rather than government or business. I fail to see how broadcasters can be neither government nor business, unless they're some sort of non-profit organization. Clearly, I don't know enough about the BBCs organizational structure to forward this line of questioning, but it does make me wonder.
B&B note of broadcast media, that while the content may differ and the business model may differ, the constant is the division of labor required to make broadcast function efficiently. Parks argues in Cultures in Orbit that the allure of satellite TV is partly derived from this division of labor. I don't have time to get into her extensive argument here, but the general idea is that satellite TV is thrilling because the spatial division of labour is emphasized, and the viewer is left amazed at the functional division of labor that brings spatially dispersed content into one neat little package.
McLuhan, Two Selections
You know, I sometimes wonder about McLuhan. Sometimes I'm not sure if he's serious or not, because I want to give him the credit of being tongue-in-cheek, even though he's not. I just find it really hard to get by his technological determinism, especially when he makes claims such as: the free market can't come to Russia or Hungary until those countries have undergone a longer period of Gutenberg-influenced ?psychic modification.?
I do like one thing he says, which for me borders on ideological critique--something McLuhan notoriously refrained from. McLuhan writes ?this somnambulist conforming of the beholder to the new form or structure renders those most deeply immersed in a revolution the least aware of its dynamic.? So, this is reminiscent of, (I think) Stuart Hall's adage that the most commonsensical things are also the most ideological. If you accept it w/o questioning it, then it's probably ideological. Even here, though, McLuhan is still positing a one-way technology-to-user path, privileging the effects of the technology.
McLuhan also writes, ?This [new market for art] revealed to human attention new dimensions of the function of art.? This suggests that art had some hidden, perhaps fetishized properties that weren't revealed until art became commodified. I disagree and would argue that the commercialization of art in fact imbued art with different properties or elements. In this same section, I also disagree with the assertion that commercialization has somehow made previously opaque art transclucent. If we took Marxist perspective, we could argue that the commercialization of art masks its production processes, thereby making art more opaque.
Horkheimer & Adorno, The Culture Industry
?Culture today is infecting everything with sameness.? At first, I thought this was a really great statement, because some cultural artifacts, such as TV, really do lend themselves to sameness (something that B&B ignore for the most part). For example, it's a lot cheaper for third world or developing countries to buy TV content from the US (or other ?developed? nations), rather than producing it themselves. So, this reinforces the notion of US or Eurocentric cultural hegemony.
I can clearly see H&A's influence on cultural studies, and especially the concept of ?assemblage,? when they write things like, ?The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of film on the banks, characterizes the whole sphere, the individual sectors of which are themselves economically intertwined. Everything is so tightly clustered that the concentration of intellect reaches a level where it overflows the demarcations between company names and technical sectors. The relentless unity of the culture industry bears witness to the emergent unity of politics.?
The consumer here is redefined as the ideology of the amusement industry, similar to McLuhan's apolitical observation that production strategies with new media would start with effects (in this case, consumers) and move backwards from there. In this same breath, H&A also write about the replacement of ?use value? of cultural assets with ?exchange value,? which is somewhat close to Benjamin's notion that in an age of mechanical reproduction, we come to identify ourselves with our collections of symbols.
Benjamin, Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction
So, I just finished reading a book (Sterne's Audible Past) that is incredibly relevant to a discussion of Benjamin. Sterne's book is a brief history of sound, and he covers the notion of sound reproduction and sound fidelity in this book. He writes that, before we had the notion of a copy (i.e., that you could have a copy of a piece of music), we didn't have a concept of ?original.? What is the original without a copy? The original comes about as a result of the creation of the copy. So, for our reading of Benjamin, we could argue that ?aura? was not something preexistent in art that was uncovered once we began mechanical reproduction (see my earlier critique of McLuhan). Rather, ?aura? is created with mechanical reproduction, not revealed through it. Aura was never something we fetishized until it was made transparent through mechanical reproduction. It simply wasn't there.