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Media History Lecture/Videos Summary
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Lecture notes of 66 pages for the course Media History at RuG (-)
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Media HistoryBy Frank Harbers
Week 1, video 1
Why the need to study media history?
Because to get a good grasp of the present. To understand how or why we have arranged
our present society the way we have, why certain developments (be it political or social)
took place, and of course developments within the media: why they happen the way they
do? To understand that we need to understand our history. Because what has happened in
history. Has determined who we are and why we are the way we are. And whether that is
you as an individual or us as group or as a country or as a society. This also goes for the
media, to understand why the media have developed in a particular way, why newspapers
or television or movies are produced or organized the way they are, it is crucial to know their
history.
We can often see this quite easily if we look at media technology for instance. Think of the
similarities between a typewriter and a computer for instance. So, new media are not
entirely new inventions or innovations without any historical contexts. They are always built
on what was already there in previous periods. This process that has been termed
remediation does not only relate to technology, but also to how we organize media outlets
and what professional practices are seen as the best way to produce media concepts, and
which form and genres we are offered.
To take another example, looking at the newspapers from the 1990’s and now. They show
quite some similarities in the way that content is organized on the initial online news sites.
So, earlier ideas on how to structure and present the news have an important influence on
how this happens on new media.
There are more examples. Think of the characteristics of e-readers. When computers and
laptops became widely accessible, they started to experiment with e-readers. But what was
striking is that this did not change the reading practice that much. If you look at e-readers
nowadays you see that they shout out many of the digital possibilities to stay as close as
possible to the original reading experience of a printed book. You can for instance even
digitally fold a page in an e-book, like you can in a printed book. This shows that to better
understand current media, from the technology to the practices and forms that are
associated with media, it is important to know how media have developed historically.
But this comes with challenges, this because it can be very hard to compare media history
and the present. As you can see when new media come around, some always argue that it is
revolutionary, and others will always say that it is nothing new. When you link this back to
the general perspective of our handbook, who also argues that we too often focus on the
revolutionary elements, but we should much rather see media developments as an evolution
in which new media draw on older forms of media.
Pierre (?), has formulated this challenge nicely he says: ‘one of the great problems faced by
historians is how to avoid falling into one or the other of two symmetrical illusions. On the
,one hand there is the sense of something that has never been seen before (revolution).
There are people who loves this business, and it is very much the thing, especially on
television (this is an older quote), to announce the appearance of incredible phenomena or
revolutions. And on the other hand, there is the opposite they way it has always been, there
is nothing new under the son, there will always be people on top and people on the bottom,
the poorer are always with us and the rich too. The already great risk of falling into such
traps is all the greater because historical comparison is extremely difficult.’ So he points
out how hard it is to make nuanced comparisons between the past, pas media forms and
practices, and newly developed media like technologies. It is basically our task to make sure
that we do compare but compare in a nuanced way.
Then there is a second challenge and that is taking a mental picture of periods that
happened a very long time ago is very hard. To understand what developments meant for
people living at that time or to understand how certain media actually functioned and how
you operated them can be very hard to do as time goes by.
Week 1, video 2
Media history as a field of study within media studies
Media history as a research field has reemerged from the field of general history as well as
from communication science, journalism and media studies. It is a relatively young research
field with specific journals devoted to this topic emerging from the 1990’s onwards.
Because media history is a relatively young field of research there are a couple of issues.
Firstly, media (plural) history is in reality often medium (single) history, as it often focusses
solely on the development of one medium in particular. It is a general feature. It is far more
rare that different media are discussed together. You might understand why this is, because
doing research into one medium is already a lot of work. That is the reason why media
history as well often focusses on a particular country or a particular region because of the
vastness of historical research material that is around. Another issue with a lot of media
histories is that they are medium-centric, which means that they focus mostly on the
developments of the medium rather than representing the historical development of the
medium within broader society. In other words, these histories focus on the content and
organization of the medium outlets, but they often fail to connect this to the broader
societal context and thereby not emphasizing that what is going on society was an important
influence on the way the media developed. Finally, another big issue that media history
often displays is technological determinism. Technological determinism refers to the
overemphasis some people put on the influence of new technologies; they see these new
technologies as the main drivers of historical developments. For instance the idea that the
invention of the telegraph or the invention of the printing press is more explanation for the
historical development of the newspaper, is a typical example of such a form of
technological determinism. Which does not take into account that it is a much more
multifaceted process in which society also play a very important part.
,This perspective of technological determinism views communication technology as a
autonomous cause of change, it overlooks the way in which the development and
application of this technology is influenced by the wider context of society. It exaggerates
the impact of new communications by downplaying non-media influences. So, political,
economic, or social influences for instance.
Different narratives of media history
The historical development of media is vase and wide and broad and that you can take many
different focus points. These focus points strongly influence the way you interpret events
and developments of the media. There are 6 different narratives.
1. The liberal model: interprets the development of the media as a continuous struggle
for freedom independence and the right to publish whatever the media professionals
want.
2. Feminist perspective: focusses more narrowly on what role media have played in the
emancipation of women. Focusing on media outlets that might have pushed the
position of women in society forward, but also on media that have reinforced the
unpressed and inferior position that women have had for a long time in history.
3. Populist narrative: frames media history as a struggle between the elite and the
masses. It is about what media should and what it should not focus on, what is
considered quality news for instance and what is considered to be quality news for
instance and also what is considered to be unimportant and superficial
entertainment.
4. Libertarian narrative
5. Anthropological narrative
6. Radical narrative
It is important to realize that what you focus on as an historian function as a lens for how
you do historical research and how you interpret the historical developments. It is also
important to realize that this list of 6 narratives is not exhaustive. There are many other
possible focus points and interpretation
Week 2, video 1
Print society is a period in modern history that has a lot of meaning for our understanding of
contemporary media and culture. As you can see in the picture below, the boos of Facebook
Mark Zukerberg is compared to his predecessor in the 15th century Johannes Gutenberg, the
creator of the printing press. Not because Zukerberg was an invenventor, because he was
not, but because of the consequence of his innovation. He made smart use of inventions
that other people did and in that respect he is comparable with Gutenberg, who also saw
new applications of existing technologies in his age. Both inventors had what we can call
social effects and that changed the world of human communication.
, What was print society and how did it change the world
Let’s start in our contemporary culture with media. in 2007 apple company introduced the
new Iphone, a device that we nowadays all use. The big boss of apple, Steve Jobs, himself
introduced this new device. Jobs was more of a brilliant marketeer and an entrepreneur
than an inventor. Actually he was no inventor at all. His presentation was all about his
statement that apple had made a revolutionary device that: ‘changes or disrupts the entire
computer and music industry’. And so, he did. More than that, because it also changed social
and political live as such. But even Jobs could not know that in 2007, because making a new
device is something different than changing the social and political lives, nobody can really
predict that. If you can predict that, then you would be able to make yourself rich instantly.
Steve jobs restricted to the real and concrete innovation his company developed, this was a
combination of several existing and strong functions. The new Iphone was an Ipod with
touch-control, a very smart mobile phone and an internet connection device. It all worked
on the already existing software of IOS 10, but this was of course hidden from the user
because the philosophy of apple always was (and still is) ‘make a device that everybody can
use’. In this respect of the iphone: use with your own fingers, using picture driven
applications. And the rest is history.
The smartphone changed something, not only in America but in the whole world. In
retrospect it was a device with the biggest effect on the world. It made change possible in a
lot of respects. Looking at it from a historical perspective you could say that the smartphone
was an agent of change, because it combined several technologies in one new easy to use
device. Technologies like the mobile telephone, that was already invented in the 1980’s, and
modern computer operating systems were all combined with a touch-control and software
sharing systems. But the use of it created the biggest change in social life in society. It made
photography and video a structural part of everyday life, because every user of the phone
could make his/her own content and distribute them infinitely to all corners of the world. It
also created new working practices, disrupted by the old ones. Practices like uber, booking
and takeaway were built upon on-demand functions instead of supply functions. Because of
all these functions the Iphones changed our time-consumption. this is visible below. Notice,
however, that it did not wash away old forms of media time-consumption.
What does this contemporary story of media innovation tells us in historical perspective?
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