Chapter 18: Media Part I – How to Think About Communication Technology
18.1 A Tale of Two Generations
What role does media play in your life? Let’s explore that question by looking at the lives of two hypothetical characters three generations apart.
J.B.’s Life
The year is 1965. John Bartholomew — “J.B.” — Martin is 39 years old, married, with three children in their teens. They live in a three-bedroom house in Berwyn, Illinois, and J.B. works as a porter and sometimes conductor for a passenger railroad company that would later become Amtrak. Every morning, before heading off to work, J.B. reads the newspaper and discusses some of the stories with his wife, Katherine. In the evenings, sometimes the family argues about what to watch on television, which they all have to agree on since there’s only one TV set in the house. Occasionally, something in a show upsets him, and J.B. reacts by yelling at the television set.
The Sunday paper includes a TV Guide (a listing of every show that will be on the five broadcast channels in his area), and J.B. circles the movies he or his family might want to watch throughout the week. Once, a James Bond movie aired at midnight on a Friday, and he got his oldest son out of bed to watch it with him. The previous year, J.B.’s cousin Ronnie in Ohio had been contacted by the Nielsen ratings people, and Ronnie’s family spent a week writing down everything they watched in a small notebook, which was how television stations gathered data about viewership. Nobody has ever collected any data about what J.B.’s family watches.
His family has the TV on for about four hours a day, which is close to the national average. When he gets home from his job, J.B. often wants to listen to music instead, and he puts jazz records on the turntable and sings along. He is a pretty good jazz singer, but there are no recordings to prove it. No one in the house owns headphones, and sometimes the children complain about the music he listens to. He doesn’t want to be too domineering about his musical tastes, so he lets the children listen to their own records, but he has mixed feelings about the styles they choose.
J.B. also has a hobby of growing exotic plants, and when a cactus finally blooms after 17 years, he takes photos with his analog camera. He has to wait until the 36-exposure film roll is finished, and then brings it to a drug store to get developed and waits a week to find out how the pictures turned out. Three of the photos turned out well, and he carries those three around in an envelope in case anyone wants to see them.
A landline telephone hangs on the wall in J.B.’s kitchen, and two other phones are connected to the same number. Next to the kitchen phone is a messy handwritten list of phone numbers, with many crossed off or inserted between others. J.B. rarely looks at that list, since he has memorized the numbers of most of his family and friends. When Ronnie calls, J.B. likes to talk to him for a long time, but the kids get anxious because there’s no way to know if their friends are trying to get through on the same phone line.
While cleaning one day, J.B. comes across the box of letters he and Katherine wrote to each other during their courtship. He considers throwing them out, but asks his children if anyone want to hang onto the letters, and his middle child shows interest.
Katherine passes away 20 years later, and J.B. lives a few more years after that. He does not make it to 2024, the year his great-granddaughter, Jarice, gets a job with his old employer, Amtrak.
Jarice’s Life
Jarice is 23 years old, a recent college graduate with a degree in Communication Studies, and her new job with Amtrak is working remotely as a “social media specialist.” Jarice’s mother has only a vague conception of what that is, even though she can overhear Jarice on Zoom meetings several times a day. Her mother also has trouble being able to tell when Jarice is working or not working, since Jarice rapidly shifts between managing Amtrak’s social media posts and checking her own personal social media sites.
When Jarice applied for the job, one of the things Amtrak asked about was how many followers she had on her personal accounts, and they were impressed that the answer was in the thousands. Although she is not aware of her great-grandfather’s singing skills, she inherited the gift; using just her phone, she records videos of herself singing, edits them, and posts them online. The most popular of these singing videos has 82,726 views, although Jarice is as puzzled as anyone as to why that one did so well but similar follow-up videos were only seen by a fraction of that number. In addition to the music videos, she has 5,329 pictures stored on her phone, and roughly three times that number stored on the cloud. She posts about a dozen of those photos on social media every week.
Jarice’s cell phone is in her hand for a significant portion of the day, but she rarely uses it to make actual phone calls, instead preferring to send text messages, often with photos or video clips attached. Other than her own number, she doesn’t remember anyone else’s phone numbers, which created a big problem when she lost her phone on a trip to Houston and had to figure out how to recreate her contact list from scratch. When driving anywhere outside her neighborhood, she uses the GPS app in her phone to give her directions. At night, before going to sleep, she plugs in the charger on her night stand and closes out of the apps that are open — sometimes surprised at how many have been running all day long.
There are four television sets in her home, but Jarice prefers watching shows on a tablet. She has paid subscriptions to four streaming video services, but often watches pirated shows and movies. She recommends shows and movies to her friends, but has trouble remembering what platform they were on. The platforms, on the other hand, remember everything she has watched, and use sophisticated algorithms to recommend new shows for her. They even know when she pauses scenes and backs up to rewatch them. After the shows end, she is usually asked to let the platform know how much she liked them.
In addition to the television and movie streaming services, she watches YouTube frequently, and subscribes to 23 channels, some by her friends. She tries to remember to like all of her friends’ videos, even the ones she doesn’t particularly care for, just out of loyalty and politeness. She can’t help noticing that some of the videos posted by her friends receive only a few dozen views, and she thinks she ought to do more to advise them on how to increase those numbers. Most of the videos she watches, especially the mainstream ones, start with popup ads, but she intently watches the countdown clock next to the small “SKIP” button in the corner of the screen, and takes satisfaction in hitting that little “x” a split second after it appears. She has never bought anything as a result of those popups, and is sometimes puzzled by why certain types of ads keep cropping up.
She also subscribes to a music service which provides her with access to over 100,000 songs, but still enjoys the “retro” feeling of going to record stores and buying vinyl LPs. She particularly likes having friends over to her house and listening to records together — a communal feeling she just doesn’t get from listening to digital music through earbuds. Once, when her friend Morgan was over, they put on “old school” jazz records and Morgan asked about a cardboard box in the corner of the room. The box contained her great-grandfather’s letters, and Jarice and Morgan spent hours reading correspondence between J.B. and Katharine. While it was fun hearing about their courtship, what the young women enjoyed most was catching glimpses into what life was like 59 years earlier. Jarice wonders if anyone will be reading her 2024 social media posts in the year 2083.
