A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media

Jesse Drew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135117559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

The last few decades have helped dispel the myth that media should remain driven by high-end professionals and market share. This book puts forward the concept of "communications from below" in contrast to the "globalization from above" that characterizes many new developments in international organization and media practices. By examining the social and technological roots that influence current media evolution, Drew allows readers to understand not only the Youtubes and Facebooks of today, but to anticipate the trajectory of the technologies to come.

Beginning with a look at the inherent weaknesses of the U.S. broadcasting model of mass media, Drew outlines the early 1960s and 1970s experiments in grassroots media, where artists and activists began to re-engineer electronic technologies to target local communities and underserved audiences. From these local projects emerged national and international communications projects, creating production models, social networks and citizen expectations that would challenge traditional means of electronic media and cultural production. Drew's perspective puts the social and cultural use of the user at the center, not the particular media form. Thus the structure of the book focuses on the local, the national, and the global desire for communications, regardless of the means.

1 The Rise and Fall of the Broadcasting Model

Many economists like to point out that every era has been linked with what is described as a “motor force,” a central propellant that drives the social, economic, and cultural development of a society.¹ In the past, such “motors” have included the production of bronze, the introduction of the steam engine, the growth of railroads, and the popularization of the automobile. It is widely accepted that we are currently in an age of “information,” a somewhat technical term that implies detached and objective data without specific social context.² Perhaps it is time to recognize that it is specifically the social production and processing of this information, the communication of messages between human beings, that is at the heart of the stimulus and the engine of the Information Age.

Emphasizing the central role of communications is not to deny that technological advancements in areas such as medicine, biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other spheres of knowledge are also expanding dramatically. It is merely to point out that these advances owe a great debt to the rapid development of accessible communication technologies that accelerate the capacity to share findings, research, and data among engineers, humanities scholars, scientists, and medical professionals, both globally and between disciplines. Such scientific exchange was the primary reason for the construction of the World Wide Web in the first place, “as a place to allow high energy physicists to share data.”³ The rapid growth of international business, of global assembly lines and global markets, is also predicated upon these communications advances. It is the instantaneous transmission of manufacturing specifications, marketing orders, engineering documents, and financial transactions that has created the phenomenon we now call “globalization,” a term that was not in use in the early days of the Web, but is now universally recognized. Global communications have fueled many new transportation initiatives that facilitate the routing of raw materials and goods and accelerate the transference of people, cultural practices, beliefs, and knowledge.

Containerization of freight, standardization of packaging, doubling of truck trailers, and other efficiencies are all examples of squeezing greater capacity out of traditional means of hauling goods. Under these circumstances, the wheel, the wagon, the ship, and the jet plane can be understood as communication devices. The explosion of a new global culture is certainly based upon the adaptation of communications devices, in particular by the youth of many nations. The Web and its use of social networks make it easy to share and discover global tastes in music, in humor, in imagery, in literature, and in cultural expression with few boundaries. The importance of communications to the exponential growth of the computer industry and its associated peripherals cannot be underestimated, as its growth did not take off until it was understood that the computer was a communications tool, not just a number cruncher. Indeed, the many computer business leaders who failed to recognize that fact are now immortalized in Web sites devoted to quotes that will live in infamy, such as IBM chairman Thomas Watson, who stated in 1943 that “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”⁴

MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

Thus, although communications lies at the center of the primary facets of what we refer to as the Age of Information, it is often taken for granted and unrecognized, and it remains invisible to many observers, who oftentimes tend to zoom in on more spectacular technologies and sectors and ignore the communicative glue that binds many sectors together. Though the ability to communicate is taken as a given in most cultures, it would be hard to find a practice more fraught with conflict, repression, reaction, distrust, and intrigue. Communications technology has always been a thorn in the side of the powerful, from the ancient world to modern times. The construction of the written language was a skill closely held to the cloaks of the monks and monastic orders through the centuries of the European medieval period. The printing press, rather than being celebrated as a liberating technology, was feared and monopolized by royalty and clergy who understood the subversive potential it posed. For centuries, the written word was off limits to the masses throughout Europe. As Starr points out, “Control and centralization have a long historical connection. From ancient empires that kept scribes close at hand to the absolutist states of early modern Europe that centralized printing in their capitals, regimes seeking to censor communications have often tried to confine it geographically.”⁵

The opinion that keeping written communication out of the hands of the masses was of strategic importance traveled across the Atlantic to the early American colonies, where writing, reading, and publishing were solely the province of the upper classes and political elite. Knowing how to read and write was a serious offense for slaves, and literacy was outlawed throughout many of the slave-holding states, where white people who taught slaves were criminalized. South Carolina, for example, issued the following legislative initiative: “Be it therefore Enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That all and every Person and Persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach or cause any Slave to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a Scribe in any Manner of Writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write; every such offense forfeit the Sum of One Hundred Pounds current Money.”⁶ The justification for such laws was often based upon the precedent that “even the Catholic Church denied the scriptures to the ignorant and impressionable.”⁷ In response, African Americans improvised a broad range of communicatory practices in order to subvert old modes or create new modes of communications, ranging from weaving quilts embedded with maps and escape routes to the north, to incorporating expressions of freedom into tap dancing (one of the few allowable cultural expressions permitted for slaves), and to interpreting the stories and lessons of the Bible in order to show divine support for the struggle of the emancipation of the African American people.⁸ Despite countless repressive obstacles to communication, in every nation on Earth, people have always found ways to develop their ability to communicate and to give voice to those who share grievances and desire social change. It is often observed that oppression breeds resistance, and no resistance could have any chance of surviving without communication. Throughout history, all movements for profound social change have in their beginning stages an organ of communication that served as a platform for unity and action. The creation of a media voice is recognized as one of the first tasks for any movement for social change. The early American colonies were rife with printed journals that agitated, inspired, and ultimately led to the War of Independence. Frederick Douglass recognized the importance of an independent media voice when he began publishing the pro-abolitionist North Star in 1847. Russian revolutionary V. I. Lenin laid out a central task of media in his polemic “What Is to Be Done,” linking the work of the revolutionary newspaper Iskra with an overall strategy of building a nationwide revolutionary movement that would eventually result in the Bolshevik Revolution.⁹ The Polish insurgent union group Solidarnosc used their newspaper Robotnik and other journals to build their revolutionary movement in the 1980s. In the Philippines, Radio Veritas is credited with mobilizing millions of people during the People Power Revolution against the Marcos dictatorship. Many other examples of the crucial role played by independent media spring to mind, such as the Serbian Radio station B92 during the war in Serbia, the audio tape distributors of Iranian opposition to the Shah, and the insurgent communiqués of the Zapatistas; all provided organizational structure and a voice for social change and political action. Arrayed against these grassroots media projects were the established media and communications groups, particularly in the global south, where the connection between the ruling classes and mass media is far more transparent than in the West. In many Latin American countries, for example, the mantle of reaction is often held by the ruling families through their ownership of major newspapers and broadcasting stations.

The United States is rich with many grassroots media projects that seek to amplify dissidents’ voices and opinions over the hegemonic media din and seek to speak back to power and privilege, but these communicatory projects rarely show up in history texts, nor are they often given serious consideration in academia. Dispersed and decentralized movements of writers, publishers, artists, designers, photocopiers, silkscreeners, and leafletters conflict with the firmly established and less complex pronouncements that movements are led by charismatic and powerful individuals, not an amoebic and rhizomatic collection of souls. The widely held, one-dimensional “great man” theory of history fails to take account of how new ideas take root, spread like wildflowers, and bloom in the sidewalk cracks, fields, factories, and landscapes of nations, and move great mountains of repression and injustice.

Histories of communications, in the limited texts that exist, typically marginalize alternative and subversive attempts at participatory communication. Everett M. Rogers, author of perhaps the most definitive study of the field of communications in academia, comments that communications research is “mainly empirical, quantitative, and focused on determining the effects of communication.”¹⁰ He points out that communication studies are largely funded by media conglomerates, with a particular interest in addressing these research areas. Thus, communications practices that lie outside the commercial arena do not attract the financial incentives for more than cursory investigations. There are few scholars that challenge the established mythologies of heroic inventors and entrepreneurs such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Samuel Morse, and Guglielmo Marconi, men whose inventions sprang from the work of many other inventors and helped pave the way toward today's communications infrastructure. The framing of these individual success stories helps establish the normative view of media technologies as the fruits of free enterprise that contribute to social progress. James Carey notes that “Edison, Bell, and other wizards were exploited as symbols of the new civilization, used to curry public favor and demonstrate the beneficence of the new technology, while new empires in communications and transportation were created behind the mask of an electrical mystique.”¹¹

The emergence of large capital involvement in communications began in the mid-1800s as the steel wires of the telegraph crept across the American continent, becoming the primary conduits of regional and international news, and establishing the means for a national stock and commodity market. Despite their often acclaimed role in promoting civilization, democracy, and development of the West, telegraph companies like Western Union were fiercely monopolistic and undemocratic. The early telegraphic enterprises were part and parcel of the holdings of railroad and oil “robber barons,” who provoked public outrage among the American people in the late 1800s. Telegraph lines were built alongside railroad lines, where they were used for speeding messages to other towns as well as for electrically switching tracks. The confluence of rail and telegraphy highlights the basis of communications in systems of transportation to electrical messaging, as the mail trains and pony express were replaced by telegraph keys. Though often touted as a symbol of the march of progress, telegraphy is recognized as one of the preconditions for establishing colonialism throughout the underdeveloped world, as it proved essential for governing from afar and alerting the colonial powers to impending insurrection or unrest.

Wireless radio telegraphy, the forerunner of modern radio, was promoted and popularized by groups of amateur tinkers and hobbyists, mostly comprised of young boys who thrilled with the ability to build cheap radio kits and send and receive messages from great distances. Until US business interests came to realize the profit potential of radio, the airwaves in the early 1900s were dominated by these citizen broadcasters. The Radio Act of 1912 claimed the airwaves for US business interests and ensured that the electromagnetic spectrum would be the domain of business and commerce, not citizen communications. As Susan Douglas explains, the radio amateurs were stripped of their rights to broadcast not because of any disruption but because “a very influential business, the press, found their activities a disruptive encroachment on its turf.”¹² Early adopters of radio technology included the primary creator of Central American banana republics, the United Fruit Company, which found radio useful in managing its far-flung shipping operations. As wireless telegraphy gave way to voice and music on the airwaves in the 1920s, most of the avid broadcasters were not business interests but community organizations, labor unions, churches, and educational institutions. Subsequent legislative acts pertaining to radio communications further ensured commercial exploitation and eroded public access to the airwaves. As Robert McChesney points out, it was not at all self-evident that the US system of broadcasting would become solely based upon the commercialization of airtime, pointing out that by 1926 only 4.3 percent of US stations were characterized as being “commercial broadcasters.”¹³ By 1927, the Radio Act of 1927 began to secure the airwaves for large corporations that were beginning to understand the economic potential of radio. The Act established a Federal Radio Commission, which proceeded to allocate the airwaves to large business interests. For example, of the twenty-five frequencies set aside for powerful clear channel stations, twenty-three of them went to the newly formed NBC affiliates. The Communications Act of 1934 and the establishment of the Federal Communications Commission essentially sealed corporate dominance of the airwaves for many years to come and restricted access, experimentation, and development to commercial exploitation, leading the director of Catholic radio station WLWL to note that “the existent set-up of the United States is dominated by two monopolistic networks. They decide the type of educational programs that shall go on the air; what social, political, ethical questions shall be discussed; what point of view will be presented.”¹⁴ The commercialization of radio had many detractors, including Lee de Forest, the man credited with the invention of the vacuum tube that helped launch radio broadcasting. He wrote to the National Association of Broadcasters to complain about what the industry has done to his “child.” “You have made him a laughing stock to intelligence. . . . [Y]ou have cut time into tiny segments called spots (more rightly stains) herewith the occasional fine program is periodically smeared with impudent insistence to buy and try.”¹⁵

Many communications inventions have faced similar monopolization or thwarted development due to the collusion of manufacturing and entertainment trusts with allies in government. Regulatory agencies such as the FCC, the FDA, and the FTC have become notoriously known as “revolving doors,” as they are typically staffed not by “watchdogs” but by a rotating crew of industry representatives. Fax machines, UHF television, FM radio, photocopy technology, Digital Audio Tape (DAT) machines, and video duplicators have all been monopolized, restricted, or delayed by commercial interests or by threatened governments. The extensive repression of communication technologies spans the ages and runs the gamut of activities, ranging from the banning of literacy among slaves to the outlawing of photocopy and mimeograph machines in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations. Such communications control is also evident in the imposition of dominant languages upon colonized peoples to ensure central control and weaken cultural resistance. Ireland, noted by some as the first colonized nation in modernity, had its native tongue, the Irish language, suppressed almost to the point of extinction. In Japan, the indigenous Ainu inhabitants also had their language banned in order to weaken resistance to Japanese rule and to retard cultural and national unity.¹⁶ The Japanese strategy for suppressing the Ainu was imported from the US frontier in the 1800s, a strategy based on the removal and concentration of indigenous on reservations and the destruction of indigenous culture and language.

The desire to control speech and cultural communication is not ancient history—it can still be perceived today in attempts by corporations and industry lobbying groups to monopolize common cultural works and ban use of words, phrases, music, literature, and images through predatory and restrictive legal action. Many contemporary trademark fights in the courts would be considered laughable, if not for the fact that they can present serious financial harm to citizens who challenge such absurd control of language. A notorious account of one such battle was Al Franken's fight over the phrase “fair and balanced,” which Franken had used in a title of a book he had written. The Murdoch empire of News Corporation/Fox News claimed to own the phrase and insisted that others were prohibited from using it.¹⁷ Franken won that case, but most people would not have had the financial resources to battle such a large corporation. The term “radical media,” used for decades by many of the subjects mentioned in this book, was recently acquired by a corporate consortium that now claims to own those words. Soon after this acquisition, a conference in London was threatened by the consortium and subsequently prevented from using the term “radical media” in the name of the very conference where the theme was “radical media.”¹⁸ The organizers subsequently changed the name to “rebellious” media.

This ownership of words and phrases extends to all aspects of cultural production. At a certain point, Bart Simpson, Charlie Brown, Wonder Woman, and other cultural icons became integral parts of our social landscape. In a culture where images and sounds are often more important than words and phrases, the ability to refer to or quote a picture of Mickey Mouse or send someone the “Happy Birthday” song without provoking a legal fight is essential to an open and meaningful civic conversation about our current society. Legal precedent for control of intellectual property was instigated by a desire to encourage creativity, not to block speech and ensure corporate profit indefinitely. The Copyright Term Extension Act pushed forth by Congressman Sonny Bono, humorously called by some “the Disney Preservation Act,” extends copyright an unprecedented number of years into the future, an act that writer Kembrew McLeod says “means we are allowing much of our cultural history to be locked up and decay only t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Talbe of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Rise and Fall of the Broadcasting Model
• 2 The DIY Aesthetic and Local Media
• 3 Networking the Global Community
• 4 Labor Communications in the New Global Economy
• 5 The Fight Over Content
• 6 The Shape of Things to Come
• Notes
• Index