A Brief History of Mass Media and Culture Until Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the

movable type printing press, books were painstakingly handwritten and no two copies were exactly the
same. The printing press made the mass production of print media possible. Not only was it much
cheaper to produce written material, but new transportation technologies also made it easier for texts
to reach a wide audience. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Gutenberg’s invention, which helped
usher in massive cultural movements like the European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. In
1810, another German printer, Friedrich Koenig, pushed media production even further when he
essentially hooked the steam engine up to a printing press, enabling the industrialization of printed
media. In 1800, a handoperated printing press could produce about 480 pages per hour; Koenig’s
machine more than doubled this rate. (By the 1930s, many printing presses could publish 3,000 pages an
hour.) This increased efficiency went hand in hand with the rise of the daily newspaper. The newspaper
was the perfect medium for the increasingly urbanized Americans of the 19th century, who could no
longer get their local news merely through gossip and word of mouth. These Americans were living in
unfamiliar territory, and newspapers and other media helped them negotiate the rapidly changing
world. The Industrial Revolution meant that some people had more leisure time and more money, and
media helped them figure out how to spend both. Media theorist Benedict Anderson has argued that
newspapers also helped forge a sense of national identity by treating readers across the country as part
of one unified community (Anderson, 1991). In the 1830s, the major daily newspapers faced a new
threat from the rise of penny papers, which were lowpriced broadsheets that served as a cheaper, more
sensational daily news source. They favored news of murder and adventure over the dry political news
of the day. While newspapers catered to a wealthier, more educated audience, the penny press
attempted to reach a wide swath of readers through cheap prices and entertaining (often scandalous)
stories. The penny press can be seen as the forerunner to today’s gossip-hungry tabloids. Figure 1.3 11 •
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA AND CULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO MASS COMMUNICATION The penny
press appealed to readers’ desires for lurid tales of murder and scandal. Wikimedia Commons – public
domain. In the early decades of the 20th century, the first major nonprint form of mass media—radio—
exploded in popularity. Radios, which were less expensive than telephones and widely available by the
1920s, had the unprecedented ability of allowing huge numbers of people to listen to the same event at
the same time. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge’s preelection speech reached more than 20 million people.
Radio was a boon for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive audience. An early
advertising consultant claimed that the early days of radio were “a glorious opportunity for the
advertising man to spread his sales propaganda” because of “a countless audience, sympathetic,
pleasure seeking, enthusiastic, curious, interested, approachable in the privacy of their homes (Briggs &
Burke, 2005).” The reach of radio also meant that the medium was able to downplay regional
differences and encourage a unified sense of the American lifestyle—a lifestyle that was increasingly
driven and defined by consumer purchases. “Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made,
exact-size clothing…to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to
commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round (Mintz, 2007).” This boom in
consumerism put its stamp on the 1920s and also helped contribute to the Great Depression of the
1930s (Library of Congress). The consumerist impulse drove production to unprecedented levels, but
when the Depression began and consumer demand dropped dramatically, the surplus of production
helped further deepen the economic crisis, as more goods were being produced than could be sold. The
post–World War II era in the United States was marked by prosperity, and by the introduction of a
seductive new form of mass communication: television. In 1946, about 17,000 televisions existed in the
United States; within 7 years, two-thirds of American households owned at least one set. As the United
States’ gross national 1.3 THE EVOLUTION OF MEDIA • 12 product (GNP) doubled in the 1950s, and
again in the 1960s, the American home became firmly ensconced as a consumer unit; along with a
television, the typical U.S. household owned a car and a house in the suburbs, all of which contributed
to the nation’s thriving consumer-based economy (Briggs & Burke, 2005). Broadcast television was the
dominant form of mass media, and the three major networks controlled more than 90 percent of the
news programs, live events, and sitcoms viewed by Americans. Some social critics argued that television
was fostering a homogenous, conformist culture by reinforcing ideas about what “normal” American life
looked like. But television also contributed to the counterculture of the 1960s. The Vietnam War was the
nation’s first televised military conflict, and nightly images of war footage and war protesters helped
intensify the nation’s internal conflicts. Broadcast technology, including radio and television, had such a
hold on the American imagination that newspapers and other print media found themselves having to
adapt to the new media landscape. Print media was more durable and easily archived, and it allowed
users more flexibility in terms of time—once a person had purchased a magazine, he or she could read it
whenever and wherever. Broadcast media, in contrast, usually aired programs on a fixed schedule,
which allowed it to both provide a sense of immediacy and fleetingness. Until the advent of digital video
recorders in the late 1990s, it was impossible to pause and rewind a live television broadcast. The media
world faced drastic changes once again in the 1980s and 1990s with the spread of cable television.
During the early decades of television, viewers had a limited number of channels to choose from—one
reason for the charges of homogeneity. In 1975, the three major networks accounted for 93 percent of
all television viewing. By 2004, however, this share had dropped to 28.4 percent of total viewing, thanks
to the spread of cable television. Cable providers allowed viewers a wide menu of choices, including
channels specifically tailored to people who wanted to watch only golf, classic films, sermons, or videos
of sharks. Still, until the mid-1990s, television was dominated by the three large networks. The
Telecommunications Act of 1996, an attempt to foster competition by deregulating the industry,
actually resulted in many mergers and buyouts that left most of the control of the broadcast spectrum
in the hands of a few large corporations. In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
loosened regulation even further, allowing a single company to own 45 percent of a single market (up
from 25 percent in 1982). Technological Transitions Shape Media Industries New media technologies
both spring from and cause social changes. For this reason, it can be difficult to neatly sort the evolution
of media into clear causes and effects. Did radio fuel the consumerist boom of the 1920s, or did the
radio become wildly popular because it appealed to a society that was already exploring consumerist
tendencies? Probably a little bit of both. Technological innovations such as the steam engine, electricity,
wireless communication, and the Internet have all had lasting and significant effects on American
culture. As media historians Asa Briggs and Peter Burke note, every crucial invention came with “a
change in historical perspectives.” Electricity altered the way people thought about time because work
and play were no longer dependent on the daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset; wireless communication
collapsed distance; the Internet revolutionized the way we store and retrieve information. Figure 1.4 13
• UNDERSTANDING MEDIA AND CULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO MASS COMMUNICATION The
transatlantic telegraph cable made nearly instantaneous communication between the United States and
Europe possible for the first time in 1858. Amber Case – 1858 trans-Atlantic telegraph cable route – CC
BY-NC 2.0. The contemporary media age can trace its origins back to the electrical telegraph, patented in
the United States by Samuel Morse in 1837. Thanks to the telegraph, communication was no longer
linked to the physical transportation of messages; it didn’t matter whether a message needed to travel 5
or 500 miles. Suddenly, information from distant places was nearly as accessible as local news, as
telegraph lines began to stretch across the globe, making their own kind of World Wide Web. In this
way, the telegraph acted as the precursor to much of the technology that followed, including the
telephone, radio, television, and Internet. When the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, allowing
nearly instantaneous communication from the United States to Europe, the London Times described it
as “the greatest discovery since that of Columbus, a vast enlargement…given to the sphere of human
activity.” Not long afterward, wireless communication (which eventually led to the development of
radio, television, and other broadcast media) emerged as an extension of telegraph technology.
Although many 19th-century inventors, including Nikola Tesla, were involved in early wireless
experiments, it was Italian-born Guglielmo Marconi who is recognized as the developer of the first
practical wireless radio system. Many people were fascinated by this new invention. Early radio was
used for military communication, but soon the technology entered the home. The burgeoning interest in
radio inspired hundreds of applications for broadcasting licenses from newspapers and other news
outlets, retail stores, schools, and even cities. In the 1920s, large media networks—including the
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)—were launched,
and they soon began to dominate the airwaves. In 1926, they owned 6.4 percent of U.S. broadcasting
stations; by 1931, that number had risen to 30 percent. 1.3 THE EVOLUTION OF MEDIA • 14 Figure 1.5
Gone With the Wind defeated The Wizard of Oz to become the first color film ever to win the Academy
Award for Best Picture in 1939. Wikimedia Commons – public domain; Wikimedia Commons – public
domain. In addition to the breakthroughs in audio broadcasting, inventors in the 1800s made significant
advances in visual media. The 19th-century development of photographic technologies would lead to
the later innovations of cinema and television. As with wireless technology, several inventors
independently created a form of photography at the same time, among them the French inventors
Joseph Niépce and Louis Daguerre and the British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. In the United
States, George Eastman developed the Kodak camera in 1888, anticipating that Americans would
welcome an inexpensive, easy-to-use camera into their homes as they had with the radio and
telephone. Moving pictures were first seen around the turn of the century, with the first U.S. projection-
hall opening in Pittsburgh in 1905. By the 1920s, Hollywood had already created its first stars, most
notably Charlie Chaplin; by the end of the 1930s, Americans were watching color films with full sound,
including Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Television—which consists of an image being
converted to electrical impulses, transmitted through wires or radio waves, and then reconverted into
images—existed before World War II, but gained mainstream popularity in the 1950s. In 1947, there
were 178,000 television sets made in the United States; 5 years later, 15 million were made. Radio,
cinema, and live theater declined because the new medium allowed viewers to be entertained with
sound and moving pictures in their homes. In the United States, competing commercial stations
(including the radio powerhouses of CBS and NBC) meant that commercial-driven programming
dominated. In Great Britain, the government managed broadcasting through the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC). Funding was driven by licensing fees instead of advertisements. In contrast to the
U.S. system, the BBC strictly regulated the length and character of commercials that could be aired.
However, U.S. television (and its increasingly powerful networks) still dominated. By the beginning of
1955, there were around 36 million television sets in the United States, but only 4.8 million in all of
Europe. Important national events, broadcast live for the first time, were an impetus for consumers to
buy sets so they could witness the spectacle; both England and Japan saw a boom in sales before
important royal weddings in the 1950s. 15 • UNDERSTANDING MEDIA AND CULTURE: AN
INTRODUCTION TO MASS COMMUNICATION Figure 1.6 In the 1960s, the concept of a useful portable
computer was still a dream; huge mainframes were required to run a basic operating system. Wikimedia
Commons – public domain. In 1969, management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that the next
major technological innovation would be an electronic appliance that would revolutionize the way
people lived just as thoroughly as Thomas Edison’s light bulb had. This appliance would sell for less than
a television set and be “capable of being plugged in wherever there is electricity and giving immediate
access to all the information needed for school work from first grade through college.” Although
Drucker may have underestimated the cost of this hypothetical machine, he was prescient about the
effect these machines—personal computers—and the Internet would have on education, social
relationships, and the culture at large. The inventions of random access memory (RAM) chips and
microprocessors in the 1970s were important steps to the Internet age. As Briggs and Burke note, these
advances meant that “hundreds of thousands of components could be carried on a microprocessor.”
The reduction of many different kinds of content to digitally stored information meant that “print, film,
recording, radio and television and all forms of telecommunications [were] now being thought of
increasingly as part of one complex.” This process, also known as convergence, is a force that’s affecting
media today. 1.3 THE EVOLUTION OF MEDIA • 16 Key Takeaways • Media fulfills several roles in society,
including the following: ◦ entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination, ◦ educating and
informing, ◦ serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues, and ◦ acting as a watchdog
for government, business, and other institutions. • Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press
enabled the mass production of media, which was then industrialized by Friedrich Koenig in the early
1800s. These innovations led to the daily newspaper, which united the urbanized, industrialized
populations of the 19th century. • In the 20th century, radio allowed advertisers to reach a mass
audience and helped spur the consumerism of the 1920s—and the Great Depression of the 1930s. After
World War II, television boomed in the United States and abroad, though its concentration in the hands
of three major networks led to accusations of homogenization. The spread of cable and subsequent
deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s led to more channels, but not necessarily to more diverse
ownership. • Transitions from one technology to another have greatly affected the media industry,
although it is difficult to say whether technology caused a cultural shift or resulted from it. The ability to
make technology small and affordable enough to fit into the home is an important aspect of the
popularization of new technologies. Exercises Choose two different types of mass communication—
radio shows, television broadcasts, Internet sites, newspaper advertisements, and so on—from two
different kinds of media. Make a list of what role(s) each one fills, keeping in mind that much of what we
see, hear, or read in the mass media has more than one aspect. Then, answer the following questions.
Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph. 1. To which of the four roles media plays in
society do your selections correspond? Why did the creators of these particular messages present them
in these particular ways and in these particular mediums? 2. What events have shaped the adoption of
the two kinds of media you selected? 3. How have technological transitions shaped the industries
involved in the two kinds of media you have selected