[Music] communication mass communication from the centralized creation and control of the message to its consumption by large audiences at every turn from the printing press to the present we have found ways to accelerate the duplication and distribution of information and entertainment in every era new Communications technologies have had profound and lasting effects on individuals and society that new Communications tech technologies will change society as predictable but to even begin to understand how we must first understand media history as we have moved grown from nomadic tribes to Farms to Urban dwellers our means of communication have advanced along with us over the years how we communicate has been an important measure of our development into a complex society knowledge TV retro brought to you by Jones International University the first fully online accredited University change your life for the better on your schedule 8we classes begin next month visit j.edu to find out more if you go back through the history of communication you can trace some of these revolutions for example the discovery of an alphabet the discovery of writing the discovery of the printing press the discovery of electronic media before writing we have a rich Heritage of oral culture we have storytellers creators and we have traveling minstrels the kind of mass communication that you had before uh writing became WID spread and uh uh uh that really doesn't occur until after printing um took the form of somebody standing up and speaking as loudly as possible so the art of oratory that was so very important in the medieval period or In classical times begins to diminish in importance after printing what the printing press did um was make the possibility of the amplification of the message larger and by amplification I mean the capacity for one speaker to reach many listeners or receivers because it makes what it did was make possible the reproduction of exact copies of a message for distribution to many people what was difficult before the printing press was the the production of many copies of that message um certainly they did copy messages you know the scribes um monks who who produced copies of manuscripts but it was very laborious very timec consuming um it was very difficult to make very many copies and it was practically impossible to make exact duplicates because in the process of transcribing we know now from looking at that history the message changed there was always a process of interpretation that went on there so that over time a text would not remain identical the printing press makes identical copies multiple identical copies possible something else was going on however as well that is tied almost from day one back at the the rise of the Gutenberg newspapers or the corantos of the 16th and 17th century that carries on into the industrial period which was there was a very strong Commercial Drive associated with with the printing press as well some of the first um one sheet uh newspapers really weren't about politics or even religion at all they were about business news they were the uh shippers in antp wanting to know when the boats were coming in from London and and what what the Manifest the cargo manifests held what the prices were for particular Goods in in different ports around around Europe so it's very very interesting that the mass communication the origins of mass communication are very much tied to a fundamental kind of commercial process as well and people would actually pay for this information because it was very valuable to their to their Enterprises through the mass production of print materials to reach broad audiences the concept of mass communication arose and took on definition first through printing presses then steam then high-speed presses we increased our ability to rapidly create identical copies of information in the United States the mass communication concept was built on the 19th century industrial factory model centralized mass production for large General audiences the notion that this new industrialized form of communication whether it was print or whether it was film or ultimately radio and television could be thought of as a product to be bought and sold and that was very much I think a major change in the Notions of communication that the industrialized period made possible again not not a new idea entirely it was there from the early days back in the the 15th and 16th century at least but it became more saling it became a bigger portion of it so it's a broad sweep of changes that takes place both in the technology and in the social and cultural interactions with them and those changes emerge over a period of time they aren't overnight [Applause] with the Industrial Age as manufacturing brought mass production and distribution technology added more mass to the concept of mass communication starting with a simple device that did no more than convey electrical impulses over a copper wire the telegraph is is the beginning of what we think of as sort of the electronic electrification of communication and what it did was separate transportation from communication because before the telegraph while we had the capacity to mass reproduce a message with the printing press the movement of that information was restricted to whatever Technologies existed to move people and goods across the land across geography so that the pace the uh the speed at which messages could travel were dependent on what were the existing states of the Technologies of Transportation the importance of telegraphy was enormous and we think of ourselves as living in a society that changes very rapidly but consider what it was like to live in a society that before telegraphy the upper ceiling on the speed of the movement of any message or any person was the horse uh telegraphy changed this totally and made it possible to move messages in ways that were previously unheard of which seemed utterly magic so telegraphy represented a real important shift in people's um sense of the size of the world and and uh who could be talked to and who they could talk to and so on when the telegraph was first invented it was looked upon as a device to improve public morality and public education and to uplift the entire American continent all of a sudden the greatest Minds in the country could talk to each other instantaneously over a wire think of the benefits of that if you brought together the the best scholars in the nation and hook them up to the telegraph imagine the tremendous things they could invent and discuss and come up with well that's phase one phase two is when the medium doesn't exactly live up to its tremendous potential with regard to the telegraph it eventually became a means of Commerce uh keeping the trains running on time sending stock quotations back and forth the telegraph also made it possible for newspapers to pull resources and begin to exchange information enhance the development of the wire Services um so that you didn't have to have reporters stationed all over the place you could rely on newspapers in another city to give you information about what's going on there via the telegraph in exchange for your doing the same thing that effort uh made it much more possible for people simultaneously to be getting more or less uh the same uh the same information uh in in in quite dispersed uh places and that may have been one of the most important developments uh that in that occurred in in creating this kind of notion of a mass uh communication capacity once information traveled around the globe almost instantaneously it was only a matter of time before human speech would follow in the United States Alexander Graham Bell's telephone ushered in point-to-point communication but also helped pave the way for one to many voice communication with the development of the technical capacity to transmit voice and that comes out of the development of the telephone we begin to think okay we've got the telephone we've got the telegraph now these two things together why not put those together and send voice across Airways so that radio is conceived as a wireless Telegraph with this point to-point use and the um and get getting rid of the problem of the wires that have to be maintained that you have to put underneath the ocean and so on um radio begins that way and it only later develops into what we think of as radio being used as mass communication a message produced in you know centrally produced someplace and then transmitted to many people at once we're of it straws in the wind I shall leave you two to talk this off I'm sorry Mrs black there's no use talking you must give him up you dare to talk to me like that you love Thief one of the the large corporations involved with the development of radio um AT&T American Telephone and Telegraph was also thinking about this new medium and because of the prior uses of the telephone and the telegraph conceived as these point to point forms of communication is it's called toll the toll notion t o which is we provide only the means of communication we don't care what the message is we will sell you access to the means of communication and you decide what you want to send hence the idea of people wishing to sell something a service a product buying the means of access to and an audience ask for McTavish in the giant economy tin at your favorite Grocers tonight or tomorrow sure remember the name McTavish and now friends for our [Music] next long before radio became so pervasive most people left their homes several times per week to go to the movies for entertainment and they 2 in the 1950s however a new source of visual entertainment invaded American Homes this is NBC The National Broadcasting Company within a decade television was the dominant medium of mass communication television then becomes more widely available to the populace on what we would call almost a demand basis very very quickly I mean you the television is not widely available in the mid1 1940s by 1960 in the United States it's an 80 to 85% of the households maybe pushing 90% uh by the mid 1960s so it it takes us over very very quickly the the difference between it and the movies at that point uh as a uh as a as a uh basic technology of course is that you and I can have it in the household relatively we don't have to go anywhere uh to participate in it in the early days of television and actually for the first um two or three decades of television it was definitely what we would think of as a mass medium it is an oligopoly of three networks with no Challengers I mean we have educational television which is this distant distant marginalized alternative those three networks basically are all looking for the same thing which is this notion of the homogenized Mass audience the bigger the better ABC didn't sound a lot different than CBS or NBC just on the news value alone similarly on the entertainment and the storytelling uh you know um action adventure cop shows westerns whatever the uh the entertainment that were they were really quite common across the networks as well that it created a kind of a national cultural experience but within a fairly limited range of possibilities from a solid infrastructure in the early years television networks saw their revenues and market share erode as new Communications Technologies successfully competed for the time and attention of diminishing Mass audiences keep in mind back in the 1970s the the VCR the video cassette record quarter um actually spread to households about as fast as television set spread back during the 1950s it was a tremendous success and with that came of course your own handheld mini cam that you could go out and shoot the family on the weekends you could watch those tapes in there that took away from Network viewing you could go down to the local video store r a movie or something that took away from Network viewing uh Nintendo came out with video games and the kids of course played the video games over the television set that took away from Network viewing you also had your independent stations putting some stuff on the air that uh was popular once on the networks and still had some popularity so the networks were in effect competing against themselves as some of their reruns on the independent stations took away some of their own audience so there were a number of factors that uh chewed away at the network audience size perhaps by more than anything Network tele was undermined not by some other communication media but by more television arriving first by copper wies strung over mountaintops then to the suburbs and later by satellite to everyone everywhere cable raises the issue of a broader Spectrum capacity it starts to do that in the late 60s and the early 70s when it begins to Dawn on people that if you had something like a coaxial cable or ultimately a fiber optic distribution system you wouldn't be limited to as few frequencies as we are in what we call erroneously over theair uh broadcasting so the notion that you could have more television or radio stations I mean vastly uh more of them uh becomes a new idea with the launching of uh satellites in the mid 70s and the use of them by HBO and Ted Turner with with wtbs uh we have a very cheap and efficient way of Distributing information nationally and thus it's at that point when that technology is in place that we have the explosion of the mtvs ESPN CNN all all of these basically launching in the late '70s early 80s this radically Alters the communication environment because people are no longer tied to broadc television which is designed to appeal to as many people as possible and we develop Niche services such as MTV which appeal to only a narrow demographic audience and now we're on into things like the Golf Channel The History Channel Etc which are not broadcast in the sense of reaching a broad audience they are narrowcast they're intended for narrow audiences and this really Alters the way in which we think about cable and the way in which we think about broadcast television so there's a lot of competition and increasingly that you see this kind of organization around around carving out pieces of that mass audience well we will you know this network will say well we're interested in Fox for example develops organized around carving out a piece of the mass audience young people who seem to be underserved by The Big Three networks we will produce programming to attract them siphon off from these other two then the other two start trying to other three try to start differentiating themselves in terms of um well um how do we carve out around a particular gender or particular racial or ethnic group um you know so you get one network on Monday night has got you know ABC has football all right we're we're going for the men the other network says okay let's counter program let's go for the women let's have Murphy Brown let's have the series of the the women Orient sitcoms so there's this kind of um fragmentation of the Mass audience everybody's looking to carve out a piece the thing I think we need to remember is that even when you carve out a chunk we're still talking about audiences in enormous numbers enormous numbers despite the fact that more and more media are reaching narrower and narrower audiences they may be serving the same basic functions that they always have I'm not sure that the rapid growth in the number of television channels particularly in cable television um is having any substantive effect on what we watch it is clearly fragmenting audiences uh you can now watch news 24 hours a day if you want but if you actually look at the news it's not much different than the news you see on CBS for half an hour you just see it all day long so the content of television has not changed much more has changed much it's just that you can get any one piece of it a lot more so there's more of it but it's not sub substantially changed Bruce Springstein said 54 channels and nothing on there's something to that cable television in the 1980s and direct a home satellites in the 1990s opened up a multi-channel world of information and entertainment on desktops the worldwide web connected the world and put a new kind of communication power in the hands of groups and individuals now traditional media are converging with New Media to create an ever expanding Universe of communication if you think of the television screen as something that is married now to the computer as well and has the same sources of information available to it that we can now get on the internet combine those two things and you begin to see a world of information the likes of which nobody has ever had access to before and we're just begin beginning to play with that potential so that um I think what you need to do is get your head around the notion that where we had discrete forms of the transmission of entertainment information movies what have you we are now slowly but surely coming into a system where it's all going to come through one channel and those of us sitting wherever we're sitting in the workplace at home probably walking along with the earphones on and watching something that kind of thing we can have have any piece of information any piece of entertainment we want anywhere in the world anytime we want to get it that's a that's a wild notion but it's a real notion in terms of the kind of Technology we have available to deliver that to us now and what that means is you will be able to log onto the internet or whatever we call it and access video programs television programs as well as textual sources of information at that point you will begin putting together your own television program programs own sequences if you want to see what a filmmaker in Sweden has to say about something you simply dial his web page you're not dependent on saying at 7:00 what's on you can find anything you want at any time but beyond that uh people will be able to communicate with video back to you almost like a video telephone system for filmmakers and television producers if and when we get to that stage um what I watch will be completely different than what you may watch because I'm making different choices the profusion of media alternatives are changing not just the lives of individuals but of traditional mass media corporations we're in a enormous period of transition uh in the mass media uh system um for in in a number of different ways first I would say that we're going through a period of fractionalization which is since the late 1970s uh uh over the last decade and a half and more we've going through a period of fractionalization in which more and more media channels are being offered to people in the United States and also around the world so fractionalization is a big thing the second big change is globalization the media are increasingly a global phenomenon and media conglomerates are increasingly Global entities and not just American entities um and so today anyone who works in an upper level position within the media has to understand that companies make their revenues not just within the United States but particularly in the audiovisual media like television and movies foreign markets are incredibly important so we have fractionalization we have globalization and we also have conglomeration conglomeration is a a phenomenon that has been building steam over the last several decades but media conglomerates uh more and more in the last 1520 years uh have become very interested in moving their material across media boundaries it used to be that each part of what is now the giant Communications or telecommunications industry was a discrete industry so that you had the movie industry the television industry the computer industry the telephone industry all of them were separate they tended to be dealt with by Regulators who dealt with them each on their own what's happened now is that the boundaries between sectors have eroded Executives in the media particularly at the higher levels know that the boundaries between media Industries are blurring for a person who's not interested in going into media it's still terribly important to understand Med Industries because these are the organizations that create an environment of symbols that surround us most of what we talk about every day most of what we see about the world every day is filtered through media it's filtered through companies that that basically construct worlds for us it's not like these worlds are not true but the worlds are constructed because of um constraints because of rewards that companies get because of cons concerns that they have that are out there and that we have to know we have to understand in order to be able to say hey we're we're not going to totally be Pawns of a of a world we don't we know nothing about um being an educated individual means being aware of how your environment gets created and the media are such an important part of that environment I can't imagine someone not wanting to know how the media world gets created in the near future it appears that media will continue to merge and grow and profoundly impact culture just as each new Communications medium has in the past by knowing the history of mass media we are better able to understand how media impacts our lives and transforms Society a [Music] knowledge TV retro brought to you by Jones International University the first fully online accredited University change your life for the better on your schedule 8we classes begin next month visit jiu e to you to find out more