18.2 A Brief History of Media

The Intersection of the Corporate and the Personal

Both J.B. in 1965 and Jarice in 2024 are frequent consumers of media, although in starkly different ways. In this discussion, I will be using the term “media” (the plural of “medium”) to refer to any channels used to convey information from a source to a receiver, whether they rely on electronics or not: handwritten letters, photographs, Post-It notes on refrigerators, telephones, television, vinyl records, cell phones, text messaging, tablet computers, video conferencing, etc.

Of course, both J.B. and Jarice also spent parts of their day communicating without the use of media: speaking face to face, singing, hugging. I’ll use the term “communication technology” to distinguish machinery or objects used to convey information to others (telephones, computers, cell phones) from technology used for other purposes (ovens, cars, lawnmowers).

A fundamental point about communication technology is that it costs money, unlike, for instance, people talking face to face. This means that even though this technology can be used to facilitate conversations between ordinary people, somewhere in that communication process you will find a business. When it comes to mass communication and entertainment, the business aspects are more obvious: when you watch a Disney movie, you know it took a lot of people and equipment to make that movie and that it must be paid for somehow. When you send a text message to a friend, you might not think about who is funding that — but someone is.

Tracing the history of communication technology, you see the same pattern over and over: a new form of technology was invented (printing press, telegraph, telephone, still camera, film camera, microphone, vinyl record, compact disc, cell phone, etc.), and initially that equipment was so expensive that only a few people or companies could afford it. That gave rise to book publishing houses, newspaper and magazine publishers, movie studios, record labels, radio and television networks, phone companies, and more, all making their money by reaching the public.

The public enjoyed these new forms of entertainment and connection, and in many cases the cost to the consumer was not direct — such as television shows being paid for by advertisements — so the public didn’t have to think much about the business side. Even decades ago, when you were on the phone to your Aunt Louisa in Rio de Janeiro, you might be aware of your phone bill, but during the call itself you could just enjoy the fact that you were able to talk to someone thousands of miles away. If you went to a movie theater, once you were in your seat you could forget about how much you just paid for the ticket and instead focus on being in love with Morgan Freeman.

In other words, media always involves a blend of the personal and the corporate. As a television viewer, you might get excited about watching “your” show, with all the connotations of personal connection and meaning, while the executives who produced that show are thinking about advertising revenue and syndication profits. In the words of media scholar Robert Kolker:

All media are owned, often by enormous corporations. We need to understand this, but not let it obscure the fact that, no matter how big the corporate structure of ownership has become, we still respond to the media as individuals. We have “our shows.”^[1]

Orality vs. Literacy

To examine the role of media in your life, try stepping back and imagining life without any form of communication technology — which was life for several hundred millennia before humans started writing on stone tablets roughly 6,000 years ago. When humans first developed writing, what changed?

One person who spent a lot of time thinking about this question was a Jesuit priest named Walter Ong, a man with a curiosity so intense that it led him to become a historian, philosopher, and professor of English literature in addition to the priesthood. As a historian, he noted that, out of all the civilizations that have existed on planet earth, only a small minority ever had a system of writing. And as soon as writing arrived, it created a divide between the people who could use this new system and the people who couldn’t: the literate vs. the non-literate (or “illiterate,” but that word has negative connotations). The divide existed on a societal level as well as on an individual one  — some early cultures had writing systems and others didn’t, but even within a literate society, only some people knew how to read and write.

What difference did that make? In Ong’s book Orality and Literacy,^[2] he showed that the creation of a writing system leads to fundamental shifts in many facets of society: who has power, what is valued, and even how people think. Ong argued that in oral societies, for instance, people view history as a series of cycles instead of as a linear evolution.

You are obviously in the literate category or you wouldn’t be reading this book, so it may be hard to grasp what life would be like without books, websites, photographs, written contracts, or reference resources where you can look something up. How does a society retain knowledge? How would young people learn?

For one thing, you’d have to rely very heavily on people’s memory: in an oral culture, if knowledge isn’t in people’s heads, it doesn’t exist anywhere. Non-literate societies have to have a good system for remembering things, such as repeating simple sayings, and designating a few community members as memory-keepers. The griots in western Africa,  for example, are the “living archive of the people’s traditions,”^[3] musicians (since songs are a good way to remember things), and advisors to the royal family: very powerful people!^[4]

Once humans developed writing, the world was introduced to something new: the document, a permanent version of words that can be referred to at any later time. In an oral culture, words only exist in the immediate present, and once a sentence has been spoken, it disappears. Documents lighten the burden of having to remember what was said, and give people a way to resolve differences in memory. Rather than bickering over what was said (often called a “he said, she said” argument), they can go back and look at what was written down. Naturally, the documented version is going to resolve that battle quickly, and if the battle involves a mixture of recorded words and spoken words, documents will have more influence than memories of conversations.

Take a situation where you are living in an apartment, paying monthly rent to a landlord. One month you run into some unanticipated expenses and can’t pay the rent on time, which you explain to the landlord and they verbally agree to let you pay late. But later something goes wrong and it ends up in small claims court: what’s going to have more sway, a description of a remembered conversation in a hallway, or the lease that spells out “tenant must pay their rent by the first of the month”? This is why, when people do reach informal agreements like that, they are advised to “get it in writing.” It’s a way of saying that communication that uses permanent media is more powerful than oral communication that can’t be documented.

This is an example of why literacy is power, and why history is full of cultural clashes in which a literate society subdues an oral one — such as white European settlers in America taking the land from the native tribes, who struggled to figure out how to respond to the argument “We have a deed that proves we own this land.”

Another clue that literacy is power comes from the fear among slave owners in pre-Civil War America that their slaves might learn to read and write. At one point, the state of Virginia had laws on the books stating that “any slave or free person of color found at any school for teaching, reading or writing by day or night” could be whipped 20 lashes, and a white person caught teaching “free coloured persons or slaves” to read could be fined between $10 and $100 and serve up to two months in jail (Davis, 1845, p. 3***). (A depiction of the fear of slaves becoming literate can be seen in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave). If slaves gain the power to read, the slave owners seem to be saying, we’re in deep trouble.^[5]

Over time, of course, literacy rates steadily rose, although they are still low in some demographic categories and areas of the world: in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, literacy among women is still sitting at 52%. But assigning numbers to literacy means having to pin down exactly what “literacy” means, and just because you can read basic words doesn’t mean you can interpret “legalese” in a contract, or that you fully understand your rights when you post a video on YouTube. Even people who have been to college can be exploited by lawyers who write contracts or terms of use in language they can’t follow.

The problem with our discussion so far is that it presumes writing is the only way to record communication, a presumption which became inaccurate when electronics entered the picture. In the late 1800s, inventors like Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner were figuring out how to capture sound on cylinders and discs, and the Lumiere brothers created film (or “moving pictures,” shortened to “movies”). In the ensuing decades we got vinyl records, tape recordings, and analog videotape, and then digital media took over. As for that discussion with the landlord about paying the rent late, you no longer have to get it in writing as long as you record the conversation on your phone. In other words, there are now more forms of permanence than there ever were before, and the word “document” can refer to a video or audio recording as well as to printed material.

The switch to electronic media also brought with it a shift in what “literacy is power” means: now it can mean knowing how to effectively use electronic media, how to become a successful vlogger, and how to gain large followings (which is theoretically possible even if you can’t read and write). The success of presidential candidates or scientists might hinge on how well they grasp the potential of social media, or how good they look on television.

Take the example of Bill Nye the Science Guy, who is well known to millions and is called on as a science expert in many situations — not because his science background is so impressive (he only has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering), but because he uses media so well; he should be given an honorary PhD in being a talk show guest.

Imagine being a teenager with so much power that the White House calls on you as a political consultant , which happened to some TikTok stars in March of 2022, garnering this Washington Post headline:

Of course, by the time you read this you may be asking “What is TikTok?” or “Why aren’t you talking about _______ [fill in the latest media platform that didn’t exist in 2024]?” What will the future of media look like? I would be a fool to try to guess, but at least I can propose ways to classify and think about media — some dimensions and variables that will remain relevant no matter what new invention comes down the pike.

The dimensions I will explore are:

• 1) Reach & ratio: how many receivers can that communication technology reach? What ratio of senders to receivers is feasible?
• 2) Gatekeepers: are there people in the way of a sender being able to broadcast a message to the audience, or is the sender free to send messages without barriers?
• 3) Permanence: is the communication permanent, and if so, in what ways? Is there a difference between theoretical permanence and practical permanence?
• 4) Richness: how much information can the channel convey, and in what combinations?
• 5) Personalization: is the communication personalized to a particular target, or generalized for a broad audience?

The contrast between J.B. and Jarice’s lives is a framework for examining each of these questions, and you can now see why I emphasized certain details in the stories.