The international encyclopedia of media studies : media history and the foundations of media studies

4400 Pages·2013·62.305 MB·English

by  Angharad N Valdivia, Wiley InterScience (Online service)

Introduction
Mapping the Field of Media History
John Nerone
ABSTRACT
Media history is an emerging field. Ambiguities about its object of study and
modes of explanation make it difficult to define the boundaries of media
history. It is possible to sketch out some existing formations of scholarly work
in the area. This introduction offers some suggestions for mapping the field
while it introduces the structure and contents of the handbook. It also addresses
the received history of the field of media studies. It challenges the likelihood
of the emergence of accepted grand narratives about either media history or
the foundations of media studies, but proposes that the resulting anarchy is a
sign of intellectual robustness.
Media history is an emerging field. Scholars across the full range of the social sciences
and humanities now encounter the media as a phenomenon. As they work to com-
prehend the media, they often turn to historical work as a mode of explanation.
There they are discovering a large and overlapping set of theories, problems, and
texts. Working sometimes in dialogue with but as often mostly unaware of or uncon-
cerned with each other, they are nevertheless beginning to generate the intellectual
and institutional apparatus of an interdisciplinary field. No one knows whether the
field will cohere or enjoy only a moment of dynamism before disappearing.
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, First Edition.
General Editor Angharad N. Valdivia.
Volume I: Media History and the Foundations of Media Studies. Edited by John Nerone.
© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
2 JohN NeroNe
Ten years ago I addressed this emerging field in an essay in Blackwell’s Companion
to Media Studies (Nerone, 2003). Remarking on the various disciplinary sources of
media history, I argued that there was a fundamental incoherence springing from a lack
of recognition of what exactly was meant by the term “media,” and that in fact there
were two different notions of media in play in the field: one notion referring to
technologies, and another referring to institutions. For many scholars, media are the
tools of communication, like the telegraph, while for others, media are the organiza-
tions that produce and distribute news and entertainment, like the BBC. I did not at
the time suggest a definitive resolution of this division, though I did point to areas in
which scholarly formations seemed to be bringing together work across the divide.
Revisiting this question a few years later (Nerone, 2006), I outlined three formations
that seemed to promise coherence, or at least meaningful dialogue, among the many
genres of media history: the history of technology, reconceived under the general
principle of the social construction of technologies; the “history of the book,” as a
well-institutionalized meeting ground of disparate scholars with modest theoretical
investments; and the history of the public sphere, migrating from Habermas’s formula-
tion into a more catholic notion of public spaces and practices. I did not predict success
for any of these. Rather, I offered my own preference for continued anarchy.
James Curran offered another take on the fundamental diversity of media history
in his book Media and Power (2002; see also Curran, 2009). Curran identifies a number
of competing narratives of British media history: the dominant “liberal” narrative,
and challenging “feminist,” “populist,” “libertarian,” “anthropological,” “radical,” and
“technological determinist” narratives. Each narrative in Curran’s scheme brings
certain moments and actors into visibility while obscuring others in a way that might
seem incommensurable. Curran holds out hope for a coherent integrated narrative
of media history, at least in Britain, emerging from a dialogue among metanarratives.
It is a modest hope, but one that I do not share.
There are good reasons why there are so many narratives of media history. In
addition to the disagreement over who is the protagonist (technologies or institu-
tions), there are also disagreements over what supporting characters are most
involved (markets, governments, individuals, gendered power structures), where the
story is set (homes, communities, nations, virtual spaces, the globe), and what
the story means. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? One might hope for settling these ques-
tions through a scholarly conversation. The most likely result of that is a shifting set
of groups of like-minded scholars: sphericules. Or one might hope that the welter
of specific narratives might harmonize on a deeper level, where a larger narrative
fits them together by making them part of the same big story. But as you appeal
continually to larger and larger narratives, you find that each one of them has com-
petitors framed around different selections of character, setting, plot, and theme.
Alas, it’s turtles all the way down.1 If order is to emerge from this chaos, it won’t be
brought by tellers of a grand narrative.
That’s too bad for me, because I would have preferred to have composed a book
that moved in a steady narrative line. And of course I have such a book in mind, as
INtroductIoN: MAPPING the FIeLd oF MedIA hIStorY 3
I think every media historian does. But the task of this book is to represent the field,
not to present an author’s master narrative. This handbook offers a map of this still
anarchic field. Each essay presents a relatively coherent assessment of a particular
approach or problem or moment. A critic might contend that the essays add up to
less than the sum of their parts. There are, by design, dissonant voices in this collec-
tion, and the intent is to have them work together to indicate the shape of the field.
In this introduction, I will try to spell out the contribution of the collection as a
whole, and argue for the usefulness of thinking of media history as a field, in spite
of the fact that it is hardly a coherent field.
Approaches
Media history is an interdiscipline that brings historical research into dialogue with
the unruly tribe of communication theories. Historical research in this formulation
can be of two sorts. One is the historical work of historians with degrees in history
working in departments of history, and I’ll refer to this in shorthand as history from
now on. The other is historical work done by scholars in many other disciplines,
and I’ll refer to this as historical studies. History remains relatively non-theoretical.
A sophisticated engagement with theory (or any substitute term, like interpretation
or methodology) is not a requirement for a piece of work being determined good or
valuable by historians. Good historical work is defined not so much by theoretical
or methodological correctness but by two more pragmatic standards: whether the
author has made a good-faith effort to look at everything relevant to the subject
matter and whether the author has sufficiently addressed one’s work to the ongoing
conversations of other historians. Historians have paid attention over the past few
decades to the theoretical underpinnings of historical narrative (White, 1973) and
have also thought some about the stuff they draw on, the archive, and how it’s been
shaped and selected and preserved (Burton, 2003; Robertson, 2011; Smith, 1998).
But attention to these discussions is a hood ornament of a history, not part of the
engine or drive train.
Historical studies tend to be more engaged with theory and methodology.
Historical sociology or anthropology or economics, for instance, often sets out to
test a theory, or tries to clear the same methodological threshold as other research
in the same discipline. Media historians often look like historical sociologists in this
regard.
Media histories differ from other historical studies, though, in that they tend not
to have a body of theory that they call their own. Media theory is an ad hoc assem-
blage of theories drawn from other fields and disciplines and then (sometimes)
modified by being addressed to processes of mediation. At this moment, there is no
standard version of media theory. Nor is there a standard list of communication
theories. Communication scholars have been playing with schemata of media
4 JohN NeroNe
approaches and theories for quite some time (Berelson, 1959; Craig, 1999), and may
have moved closer to a standard taxonomy, but there are damned few theories that
every media scholar is expected to know, and those don’t seem to add up to either a
worldview or a toolkit. Even if media studies is moving in the direction of coherence
(an arguable proposition), other social sciences and humanities seem to be moving
in the opposite direction, decreasing the likelihood that media studies will ever arrive
at a moment of stabilization.
So when I say that media history mediates between historical work and commu-
nication theories, I’m not talking about a dialectic between two stable entities.
Instead, both partners in this negotiation contain multitudes. As a result, the bounda-
ries of media history are very difficult to describe. Those boundaries change not just
in the present but in the past. Work that was written in previous decades gets hailed
into media history in a process of irredentism2 (Peters, 1986). Just as dead people
may find themselves baptized into Mormonism, Elizabeth Eisenstein awoke one day
to discover that she was a media historian.
Because of the ad hoc way in which media history has grown, this book takes a
multidimensional approach to mapping it as a field. The first dimension, Part 1 of
the book, consists of approaches, and represents the theoretical domain of media
history. A critical reader will notice a hard core of dead white men at the top of this
section – Marx, Innis, McLuhan, Foucault. Essays centered around figures like these
are coupled with essays about approaches like race/ethnicity and gender. Those
essays may seem to a critical reader to be compensatory, but they are not add-ons.
Scholars of gender insist that every history has an element of gender to it, even if
unacknowledged, in the same way that Marx says every history has an element
of political economy to it. Each of these chapters is meant to take on a body of
notions that can and should play in every work of media history. Any monograph in
media history ought to acknowledge questions of class and economics, technology
and culture, identity and discourse. These questions are not unique to media
history or media studies, but they are fundamentally constitutive of any account of
the media.
These chapters also begin to nominate entries to a canon. Media historians do
tend to have read the same basic books. Some of these really belong to media schol-
arship. Harold Adams Innis, for instance, is read a little bit by economists and geog-
raphers, but is primarily taken seriously by media scholars. McLuhan has readers
across the humanities, but is an exotic there, often invoked only as a straw man. Most
of the authors of the foundational approaches had no investment in media scholar-
ship so called. Marx, Foucault, and Habermas speak to the full range of the social
sciences and humanities. Each of them inspired a next generation, also frequently
cited here: McLuhan and Innis begat Walter Ong, James Carey, and Neil Postman
(Marvin in this volume); Marx’s work (Mosco in this volume) oriented Raymond
Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Herb Schiller; numerous scholars of the history of
sexuality, the history of science, and the study of governmentality continue the
legacy of Foucault (Packer in this volume); Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner offered
INtroductIoN: MAPPING the FIeLd oF MedIA hIStorY 5
contrapuntal voices to Habermas’s. This second generation, too, did not have an
investment in media studies as a field.
Also canonical is a range of historical work that sometimes tracks the theoretical
work. The other Marx, Leo (Mosco in this volume), is an example, as is Eisenstein
and a series of other scholars – Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Natalie Zemon
Davis, Adrian Johns – who are identified with the formation that calls itself “the
history of the book” (Zboray & Zboray in this volume). Benedict Anderson has had
a tremendous impact among media historians, although often through a superficial
appropriation of his concept of imagined communities. Scholars who study identity
in media history (Soderlund and Squires in this volume) usually have read W. E. B.
DuBois, Omi and Winant, and Joan Scott, who do not define themselves as media
scholars, as well as Stuart Hall, who does. A pair of social histories from the last
decade are more directly aimed at media history: Asa Briggs and Peter Burke’s Social
History of the Media (2005) and Paul Starr’s Creation of the Media (2004). Briggs and
Burke are historians by training, and Starr is a sociologist; their books were written
with an awareness of their impact on media history but without an investment in an
identity as media studies scholarship.
This canon-in-the-making outlines a common set of problems around which
media histories orbit. These problems are not specific to media history, however, and
are broadly shared across the social sciences and humanities. The problem of empire
is the gravitational center of studies of writing and communication in the ancient
world. The problem of the circuit of meaning is the central motif in histories of
print culture, which tend to dwell on how ideas were disseminated through the pro-
duction, distribution, and consumption of texts. The problem of the public gives
urgency to journalism history and the history of freedom of expression and com-
munication policy. The problem of the local and the global informs the study of the
movement of messages through space and across borders, expressed in frames
ranging from cultural imperialism to hybridity to modernization. The problem of
representation is one of the more powerful drivers of the analysis of media content.
The problem of capitalism appears in accounts of media commercialization, media
ownership, consumerism, and advertising support. The problem of the modern and
postmodern invites studies of how media forms hail people into configurations as
readers or as audience members or as hybrid producer/consumers, and how media
institutions and media professionals won and then lost the ability to stabilize mean-
ings. Astride all of them is the problem of democracy.
Moments
The heart of this book is a set of chapters devoted to specific moments. The list
of moments is non-exclusive and sometimes overlapping; some specific texts and
authors appear in more than one of these chapters. One could easily imagine other
6 JohN NeroNe
chapters and other organizations. Much of this particular list orients around com-
munication technologies, like writing or the telegraph. Others deal with grand
historical moments like the Enlightenment. The logic behind this selection is to
follow the scholarship: to focus on objects around which work from various fields
coalesces. There is an emphasis on English-language scholarship in this selection, but
at least it’s an ethnocentrism with a guilty conscience.
A number of topics appear recurrently in these chapters. These topics may come
to be the ground on which broader media histories emerge. Among these topics are
journalism, the public sphere, technology, markets, and policy; lurking as yet unrec-
ognized is work. These topics are thoroughly entangled with each other, with the
public sphere coming up repeatedly in conjunction with several others, and markets
and policy continually making cameo appearances.
Journalism is a particularly well-represented topic. Journalism history is one of
the oldest and most firmly institutionalized modes of media history, claiming its own
scholarly organizations and journals. For all that, it is not a deeply thought-through
field. Even now, as journalism as a normative practice, as a viable occupation, and as
a social institution is experiencing disruptions that commentators label a crisis, jour-
nalism historians are slow to recognize the stakes (Nerone, 2011; for two remarkable
exceptions, see McChesney & Nichols, 2011; Zelizer, 2010). But the emergence of a
recognition of the transnational dimension of journalism’s history is one of the more
promising developments.
Four essays in Part 2 specifically address journalism, and they are broken down
geographically. In addition, a fifth deals with the international wire services, the
infrastructure of a global news system that has had powerful influence on national
developments. The geographical chapters deal with Europe (primarily Germany,
France, and Britain), North America (primarily the United States), South Korea, and
China. These are mostly narrative in structure.
Differences in the style and tone of these pieces reflect regional differences in both
scholarship and news systems. The European history (Wilke in this volume) takes
primacy in time; the Europeans invented the term, and inaugurated what became a
global practice. The European invention of journalism is characterized by fragmenta-
tion along national lines and by strong interaction with states, which entailed an
emphasis on centers of power and especially capital cities.
Modern journalism grew from both the struggle to free the press from state
control and the rise of new, more market-oriented business models. The first was
framed in the West by a notion of the public sphere; it is a matter of debate whether
its development resembled the Habermasian model. In North America, and particu-
larly in the United States (Kaplan in this volume), a set of normative ideas about how
the press was supposed to facilitate the public deliberation of citizens exerted a
gravitational force on public policy, especially the construction of a postal system as
an infrastructure for the press (John, 1995; see also Chapter 13, this volume). Coupled
with artisanal production by printer-editors, the North American system took on a
fundamentally different cast than the European one that had seeded it. It also pro-
vided a resource for an emerging system of mass popular politics.
INtroductIoN: MAPPING the FIeLd oF MedIA hIStorY 7
In the mid-nineteenth century, a combination of a market revolution (Sellers,
1994) and the emergence of a telegraph–railroad infrastructure transformed the
news system (see John in this volume). A more commercialized press began to
produce a news culture distinguished by event-oriented and eventually neutral or
objective items that acquired commodity value through the labor of reporters and
through distribution as saleable items through the wires (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001;
Chalaby, 2000). When news organizations industrialized – became big businesses
among other big businesses – they repurposed elements of the norms of the public
sphere into an ideology of professionalism and social responsibility that could explain
and justify the power they were recognized to hold. They encouraged the growth of
journalism degree programs in colleges and universities. They began to export this
ideology to the rest of the world. The Western wire services created a global news
system in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Rantanen in this volume),
forming a material base for the transmission of Western journalism as a news style.
The Asian chapters are again quite different, reflecting both the remarkable trans-
formations of the countries they cover and the challenges of present-day journalism
and journalism education in those countries (Kim and Chen & Wang in this volume).
The histories they tell share a series of themes: a prehistory of “indigenous” journalism
in the court papers of Confucian monarchs, an encounter with Western colonialism,
an initial encounter with Western forms of journalism, the interaction of journalism
with a struggle for national liberation, the transformative impact of World War II
and its aftermath the continuing negotiation with state power, and the extraordinary
recent experience with digital technology.
The journalism history chapters are more concretely institutional than the rest of
the book. They can tell the story of a recognized formation of practices and ideas
embodied in organizations that have left archives and that interact with other agen-
cies like states, universities, and advertisers who also generate archives. They can
work from a significant body of previous scholarship on specific news organizations,
journalists, legal controversies, and national press systems. There is a global history
of Western hegemonic journalism. At the same time, the boundaries of this history
are not settled. This is most clear in the Asian case studies, in which hegemonic
Western journalism has only somewhat colonized the news system, while other
journalisms, ranging from Confucian admonition and Maoist self-criticism to citizen
journalism, offer counter-histories. The act of writing journalism history, in such a
fluid situation, can contribute to a redefinition of journalism’s identity.
The chapters on technologies are more abstract. Most trace the assembling of
elements into familiar forms – instruments or assemblages – that have some built-in
affordances that in turn provide some agency in historical processes. Historical work
on communication technologies has settled in to a middle ground between the sort
of muscular technological determinism argued by Innis and McLuhan and a contrary
argument from social determinism that can be found everywhere from Milton’s
Areopagitica to the limited effects model of media influence. In this middle ground,
there is a soft determinism that comes from the way technologies are socially
constructed.
8 JohN NeroNe
The history of the printing revolution provides a convenient parable of the interplay
of these positions. From the Renaissance to the scholarship of Innis and McLuhan, the
printing press was celebrated as the tool that enabled Western civilization. A large body
of scholarship based partly on careful research into the invention and dissemination of
print technology in fifteenth-century Europe (mostly ignoring its invention in other
places) and a formalist analysis of the abstract technology saw powerful effects gener-
ated more or less automatically. The most hyperbolic version of this position is
McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, which attributes to printing not just Western rationality
but also the discovery of depth in perspective, a side effect of a reorganization of the
sensorium. An initial rejoinder to this hard technological determinism came from
Elizabeth Eisenstein’s epic work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980). As its
title suggests, Eisenstein’s book also sees powerful effects, but they come about because
printing reorganized the environment of European intellectuals through the mass
reproduction of standardized texts. Still, Eisenstein settled on a feature of the technol-
ogy as the prime mover of this agency and called it “typographical fixity.” A generation
later, Adrian Johns (1998) introduced another dimension of social construction, arguing
that fixity itself was a characteristic that had to be built into printing, and that initially
printing had introduced heightened uncertainty into intellectual life by spawning
uncontrollable flows of forgeries and piracies.
The chapters on technology in this volume deal with a broad range of objects:
writing (Peters), printing (Kittler), the telegraph and telephone (Rantanen, John),
sound technologies (Rothenbuhler), photography (Robertson), motion pictures
(Wasson, Wasser), broadcasting and television (Ouellette), computing (Grier), and
mobile telephony and other digital technologies (Andrejevic). These chapters too are
quite diverse. John Durham Peters explores a vast history and a large spectrum of
scholarship on various writing systems, while David Alan Grier offers a minute
examination of a string of applications of computing technology to newspaper pro-
duction. In spite of this diversity, several common themes emerge.
Each of these technologies is presented as socially constructed at some level.
Usually the construction involves the interplay of different types of actors. In the
industrial era and after, the interplay generally assumes similar forms across culture
industries (see Wasser in this volume), which constitute a kind of braiding of four
histories: of science, of entrepreneurs, of regulators, and of publics or audiences.
The history of theatrical film is a good case in point. There is a scientific history
stretching from the camera obscura through the development of photography and
the magic lantern to different apparatuses for film exhibition; this trajectory can be
captured in shorthand form by narrating innovators in a sequence: Daguerre, then
Muybridge, then Edison, more or less. Then there are the various attempts to mon-
etize these innovations through first a “cinema of attractions” (Gunning, 1990), then
through a variety of projection venues, culminating by the 1920s in the classic studio
system in the United States, with parallel histories in some other countries. As entre-
preneurs competed for market control, they engaged with the state on several levels:
as regulators of exhibition spaces, as censors of film content, as enforcers of antitrust
INtroductIoN: MAPPING the FIeLd oF MedIA hIStorY 9
law, and perhaps most importantly as enforcers of patent and copyright law, which
became the key tools by which some measure of industrial control was maintained.
Throughout this history, ordinary people inflected developments continually: as con-
sumers, as fans, as crowds, as voters, and arguably as cultural citizens in a cinematic
public sphere (Hansen, 1991). So the social construction of theatrical film involved
a complex negotiation among many different actors, with the decisive role being
played sometimes by entrepreneurs, sometimes by policymakers, sometimes by audi-
ences, and sometimes by technicians. Similar stories are told about many technolo-
gies in this volume.
One narrative arc that reappears often in these pages is mobile privatization. Initially
coined by Raymond Williams (1971) to describe the vector behind the social construc-
tion of television, mobile privatization denotes the deep drive in modern capitalist
societies to reconfigure practices so that people can engage in them as private individu-
als or nuclear families moving freely through social and geographical space. Mobile
privatization offers a shared trajectory uniting disparate objects and systems that
moved activities from public to private ownership and control in the course of the
rise of mass consumer societies: the automobile, moving transportation from trams
and railways to the suburban garage; the refrigerator, moving food storage from the
public market to the family kitchen (Hartley, 1999); the telephone, moving social
interaction from the public street corner to the private parlor; and, of course, radio
and television, moving entertainment from the public theater to the living room (Hay,
2006). Media technologies help people move more quickly and smoothly through
shared spaces too, providing a kind of capsule (de Cauter, 2004): think of the way a
newspaper can be held up as a kind of shield, preventing unwanted interaction on
a bus or subway; or the way people submerge their gaze into a smartphone, effacing
their surroundings and immersing themselves in an extralocal environment. Common
sense tells us that mobile privatization sums up much of the work of the developing
digital media system, intensifying the capsule of privacy by detaching it from the
defined space of the home and the car. But even within this very convincing narrative
there are contrary positions to hold, one in which the tools of mobile privatization
are “technologies of freedom” (Pool, 1984), and another in which they are “technolo-
gies of oppression” (Howard, 2010, pp. 13–14).
The “technology of oppression” version of mobile privatization runs along two
tracks, which we might call Foucault and Marx. The Foucault track sees the mobile
private individual as the ideal subject of neoliberal governmentality, deploying the tools
of digital communication to render oneself visible to surveillance and at the same time
better self-disciplined. In the Marx track, mobile privatization accelerates the expropria-
tion and accumulation of wealth, in large part by capturing unpaid labor that people
misrecognize as play or leisure. The latter is Smythe’s (1994) argument in his famous
“Blindspot” essay. It is also the argument of numerous critics of Facebook.
Late capitalism is another overarching topic in the essays on technologies.
Repeatedly we see firms and corporations competing for monopoly control of indus-
tries. In turn, we see industries that are prone to concentration because of either
10 JohN NeroNe
economies of scale associated with production technologies (see, for instance, the
essays by Kaplan and Stole) or apparent instances of “natural monopoly” (see John
and Rantanen). Media technologies tend to produce bottlenecks in distribution, either
because of aspects of the technologies involved or because of the collusion of poli-
cymakers in reinforcing the market control of specific interests, for instance in
spectrum allocation (McChesney, 1993) or in intellectual property law (Lessig, 1999).
Yet monopoly is consistently seen as a problem. The media system is supposedly one
of the infrastructures of democracy, so it follows that, if there are pools of monopoly
in the media system, the media power generated will distort the conduct of public
deliberation. A liberal could argue that the public sphere itself must be a monopoly.
Even counterpublics cannot operate effectively in the absence of a hegemonic main-
stream public sphere. How else can a coherent public opinion emerge? And if the
public sphere must somehow exercise a monopoly, wouldn’t the media that serve it
eventually, if only for efficiency’s sake, have to share some monopoly characteristics?
Still, even conceding that, wouldn’t we want that monopoly power to be publicly held?
Work is a topic that is the direct subject of only one essay (Barnhurst) but that
figures in a few others as well (Wasser, and also the essays on journalism). Media
work usually has been thought of as white collar work, and the most familiar media
occupations have either sought to professionalize or to control the labor market
through unionization. These workers’ movements have had varying success, depend-
ing on where and when you look; for the most part, “technical” occupations have
organized more successfully than “creative” ones (including journalism as a creative
occupation). Where media workers have won some measure of autonomy, there has
often been a gender component; autonomous work is gendered male, historically.
Women have often had to fight a war on two fronts in media workplaces – one against
simple exclusion, and the other against a masculine workplace culture.
Implicit in the scholarship on these moments, as in much communication scholar-
ship generally, is the unspoken presence of democracy as the master problem.
Democracy appears in its political guise in the essays on journalism and in invoca-
tions of the public sphere; it appears in its cultural guise in the essays on media
technologies. In either arena, democracy is supposed to involve dispersed and shared
power, freedom from coercion, and an ability to engage in meaningful action in part
through communication. For most of the scholars represented in this collection, and
in this section in particular, the history of the media has not been a story of steady
progress toward democracy. At the same time, it is hard for these and other media
scholars to imagine democracy without the media.
The Foundations of Media Studies
The question of democracy also runs through the history of media studies. Part 3
features a series of essays on key moments in the history of media studies. A critic