Media And Culture: Media Culture In Transformation
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
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Media And Culture: Media Culture In Transformation
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Creation of networks + new consciousness time & space
Two waves of industrialization
1. First wave (1800-1860)
a. Expansion of existing infrastructure: canals, postal networks, railroads,
telegraph (optical and electric)
2. Second wave (1850-1900)
a. Gas and electricity supplies, urban transit systems, telephone, later: wireless
telegraphy/radio.
Before trains
● Traveling was a full sensory experience of the surrounding landscape. Traveler
doesn’t just see the landscape, but also hears, feels, and smells the surroundings.
● “intensity” of travel, travelers constantly struggling with terrain and weather
conditions.
Modern consciousness of Space
● Railway tracks had to be cut into the landscape to make straight and even lines – to
overcome the natural landscape and cut through natural barriers.
● Higher travel speeds are experienced as being “shot through” space.
The modern concept of space
● Stands in contrast to a more natural “landscape’
● Relies on straight, flat lines between points.
● People could reach more distant places more quickly. They could transport goods
more efficiently at the cost of a sense of the immediate environment.
○ This is both an expansion and a shrinking of our experience of space. World
feels smaller now places could be reached a lot faster.
Panoramic travel
● Sitting on a train, and things in your immediate surroundings get blurry, because you
move so fast. So you have to look into the distance. Depth is blurred, there is no
longer a foreground.
● Speed of the train travel disrupts that synesthesia:
○ The immediate environment cannot be fully grasped
○ Vision gets overstimulated, disconnected from other senses
○ Result: reorganization of sensory experience (looking into the distance to
get the ‘bigger picture’).
Modern Consciousness of Time
● Comparative time-table (cities US)
● Different local times pose a problem: new infrastructures (railway, telegraph) require
coordination
○ Solution: synchronization of time across countries and later time zones
(see International Meridian Conference)
● Growing societies now also share the same clock time
● New importance of punctuality / ‘time management’
● Modern time is linear, divisible, synchronized, coordinated, fast.
Modern media Communications
Premodern ways of communicating across distance
● Techniques were slow, dependent on the weather or expensive smoke signals, carrier
pigeons.
, ● Telecommunications have three distinctive elements from other communications
over distance:
○ Message transmission point-to-point
○ Sending messages without physical transportation
○ Interactive: people/institutions can reply to received messages.
Optical telegraph (1790s)
● Invented by Claude Chappe
● Semaphore stations that ‘carry’ the sign to another station. Secret codes.
● Telegraph disconnects communication from transport.
● “Napoleon’s telegraph” way of dominating Europe, a useful tool to communicate
with distant regions that he wanted to control.
● Weaknesses:
○ weather dependent and unreliable
○ requires many towers spread throughout the landscape which is expensive
○ and you could only send one message at a time.
Electrical Telegraph (1830s)
● Electric telegraphy networks are established in the US, UK, and Germany.
● Sends messages across lines: these no longer have stations but electrical lines,
where one receiving station could receive a message from thousands of kilometers
without needing other stations.
● Morse Code: consisting of dashes and dots – human operators.
Europe vs US
Europe
● Telegraph system regulated by the state – so that technology could be made cheap
and affordable, state subsidies.
● Includes private individuals as customers
● Investors are generally more cautious, slower developments (not a great business
opportunity)
● Establishes international communications network – important especially in UK,
so government could communicate with its colonies.
US
● Telegraphy networks were licensed to private businesses
● Concentrates on business clients – not mainly focused on private individuals
● Generally stronger investment in research & innovation
● Focuses on national communication
Cultural importance of telegraphy
● Military purposes – get an advantage when it comes to communicating with troops,
sending them to places, etc.
● Allowed for integration of international stock market – in order to be able to trade
fast, you need to get information fast too. – allowed for faster exchange.
● Allowed for integration of railway networks – e.g. train schedules could be made
more easily because communication was smoother.
● It changes private communication across distances.
● Changes in professional communication, eg. in journalism
○ better and quicker access to news (esp. for local papers)
○ acceleration of news (“news in a flash”)
, ○ establishment in press or news agencies (collect news and sell it to
subscribers/newspapers) for reliable reporting and systematic distribution of
information.
Telephony
Important differences from telegraph
1. first domestic telecommunication medium
2. Three main business models
a. Public monopolies (state regulation) – state took ownership of the media
infrastructure and run the entire telephone business – popular in Europe until
late 1800.
b. US & CA, focus on private businesses that run the network.
c. Mixed system – becomes dominant in Europe beginning 20th century, in
which private companies are in charge of local networks and the state in
charge of long distance lines (more expensive to maintain + people don’t
make as many calls at long-distance).
3. As a result of different business models: different uses (commercial vs private).
Still: Photography
● Camera obscura, lat. = dark room
○ Also called pinhole camera. Natural phenomenon in which an inverted image
of an object is projected onto a screen through a small hole in a wall.
● Magic Lantern: Early projection device (most likely) invented by Christaan Huygens
in the early 17th century. The mechanism is based on the optic principles of the
camera obscura and used a strong light source and a lense to project a magnified
image.
● Both devices: projected impermanent images. → wish to fix images.
Photography → based on the reaction of chemicals (silver nitrates) to light.
● ‘indexicality’ of photography
○ index: smoke as an index (direct sign) for fire. There is a direct relation to the
object.
○ index in photography: the light that is reflected by the object.
○ icon in photography: the shape resembles the real object.
○ “Pencil of Nature” → there is no human interference/manipulation, nature is
creating it. → most objective form to record things.
Daguerrotype, invented in 1838 named after Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
(1787-1851). Daguerre discovered the possibility of taking a ‘latent’ (negative) image that
can be revealed (developed by means of mercury vapor) into a positive and fixed image by
means of heated salt water. This reduced exposure time to a few minutes. → people
couldn’t move in the meantime as images would get blurry.
1. Photograph as a document → photographs used as a way to objectively capture
reality.
2. Photography as a fixing of time ➝ allows us to fix moments of history and to relive
them.
3. Photograph as improved access to the world → Scientific tool for detailed,
objective observation but also spirit photography.
4. Photograph as a commodity: bourgeois portraiture.
Scientific use of photography
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