19,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: New Directions in Media History - Polity
- Sprache: Englisch
In this expansive historical synthesis, Richard Butsch integrates social, economic, and political history to offer a comprehensive and cohesive examination of screen media and screen culture globally - from film and television to computers and smart phones - as they have evolved through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on an enormous trove of research on the USA, Britain, France, Egypt, West Africa, India, China, and other nations, Butsch tells the stories of how media have developed in these nations and what global forces linked them. He assesses the global ebb and flow of media hegemony and the cultural differences in audiences' use of media. Comparisons across time and space reveal two linked developments: the rise and fall of American cultural hegemony, and the consistency among audiences from different countries in the way they incorporate screen entertainments into their own cultures. Screen Culture offers a masterful, integrated global history that invites media scholars to see this landscape in a new light. Deeply engaging, the book is also suitable for students and interested general readers.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 645
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: A Screen Culture History
What is Screen Culture?
Context: Place and Situation
Life with and without Screen Media
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Global Media
Organization of the Book
Notes
1
:
American Cinema to World War I
Historical Context
Early Moving Picture Exhibition
Urban Nickelodeons and Neighborhood Audiences
Film Text and Culture
Screen Culture and Culture
Notes
2
:
Global Cinema, 1900–1920
Early European Film Culture
Colonial Contexts
Notes
3
:
The Hollywood Studio Era, 1910s–1940s
What was Hollywood?
‘The Product’: A Normative Message
Movie Palaces and Neighborhood Houses
Notes
4
:
Global Hollywood, 1920s–1950s
American Film Hegemony
European Movie-Goers
Colonial and Post-Colonial Markets: Africa, Asia, Latin America
Indigenous Film: India, China, and Egypt
Patterns and Trends
Notes
5
:
Western Television in the Broadcast Era, 1945–1990
Living in Fifties America
British Television
European Television and Nationalism
Comparisons
Notes
6
:
Post-Colonial Television, 1960s–1990s
Protecting National Sovereignty
Latin America: Brazil and Telenovela
Indian Telenovelas
Muslim Television: Middle East, North, and West Africa
China: Late Development
Global Patterns
Notes
7
:
Digital Media in the New Millennium
Digitization
Technical Convergence
Industry Convergence
Surveillance
Notes
8
:
Using Digital Media
Mobile Mediated Interaction
Mediating Collective Action
Notes
9
:
Globalized Media in the New Millennium
Access and Affordability
Hollywood Hegemony
Multi-Centered Globalization
Local Audiences: Nollywood
Glocal: Same but Different
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of tables
Chapter 5
Table 5.1. World Television Count 1972
List of figures
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1. The growth of world trade, 1948–1990 Source: Bernhofen, Daniel M., …
Figure 9.2. Global saturation of mobile phone and internet use Source: United N…
Figure 9.3. Global saturation rates for internet access by region, 2013 Source…
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
viii
ix
x
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
227
228
229
230
231
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
232
233
234
235
236
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
246
247
248
249
250
251
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
279
280
281
282
283
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
New Directions in Media History
Richard Butsch, Screen Culture: A Global History
John Nerone, The Media and Public Life: A History
Screen Culture
A Global History
Richard Butsch
polity
Copyright © Richard Butsch 2019
The right of Richard Butsch to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5324-2 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5325-9 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Butsch, Richard, 1943- author.
Title: Screen culture : a global history / Richard Butsch.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Series: New directions in media history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035712 (print) | LCCN 2018049986 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535866 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745653242 | ISBN 9780745653242 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745653259 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Mass media–History–20th century. | Mass media–History–21st century.
Classification: LCC P90 (ebook) | LCC P90 .B89 2019 (print) | DDC 302.23009/04–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035712
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:
politybooks.com
In memory of my sisters, Ruth and Peggy,
and in appreciation of Ava and Noah as living inspirations.
Acknowledgments
In researching and writing this book I have striven to see the forest, but also to see the trees well enough to see how they make a forest. To do this, I have had to rely on sources produced by thousands of scholars, many not directly cited, from whom I have accumulated knowledge and insights over decades that allowed me to see the trees and the forest. I wish to thank those scholars.
I also wish to thank a few by name whose work and reflections have helped me through this project and to whom I am grateful: Richard Abel, Katherine Fuller, Sonia Livingstone, Richard Maltby, Virginia Nightingale, Janet Staiger, Silvio Waisbord, and anonymous reviewers for Polity Press. Further, I could not have done the research for this book without the help of Rose Hilgar, who tracked down and obtained for me, often beyond the call of duty, innumerable books and articles, primary and secondary sources through inter-library loans. Finally, as always, I thank Ava Baron, whose unstinting support and insightful guidance from beginning to end enabled me to find my way through the forest to a book manuscript.
Abbreviations
NYT
New York Times
MPW
Moving Picture World
HJFRT
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
Annals
Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science
ILWCH
International Labor and Working Class History
Introduction: A Screen Culture History
When the leading American broadcast television network of the time, NBC, introduced color television in the 1950s they promoted it as ‘living color.’ The great divide between print and screen is this ‘living’ quality of moving images. Moving images long pre-dated film. There were a variety of mechanical devices that did this. But these never went beyond the novelty phase, mostly occasional toys for a very few, very rich. On the other hand, in the early twentieth century, film quickly became a mass medium and moved beyond novelty to narrative story-telling. Over the century, television and recently the internet and smartphones were added. Now screen media, as they are collectively called, are as pervasive a part of our lives as breathing and present stories as ubiquitous and enveloping as reality. Now internet and smartphones are ‘living’ in a second sense too, not only moving or active, but also interactive. As pervasive as they have become, screens could not but have an influence on culture. This book explores the history of that culture.
Media are purveyors of culture, distributing images and ideas to millions of individuals, providing a common experience across numerous and dispersed groups. Even while people differ in their interpretations of the same video representations, they begin at the same starting point, a ‘preferred’ reading. Such widely disseminated representations provide a glue for modern societies.
Over a long history, critics have assumed powerful effects of screens upon their viewers, shaping their ideas and behavior. But research over the past four decades has made it clear that we cannot presume that media messages are consumed whole and uncritically by audiences. Yet, neither can we assume that mass-consumed texts (their visual, oral, and symbolic content), when pervasive and persistent, have no impact at all. So the book includes examination of screen industries and screen texts. At the same time, screens and screen messages are of no consequence unless people integrate them into their lives. Thus we must examine meaning-taking and meaning-making by audiences and other actors situated in everyday life, where cultures are made, expressed, and experienced.
This book provides a global history. It examines screen media and their audiences in multiple nations across five continents in order to reveal how screen culture developed under diverse circumstances, and how it flows across nations. Underlying the idea of globalization is the assumption that everything is connected, that people, actions, events, conditions in one part of the world are connected to those in other parts of the world. Screen media very clearly have been global since the early days of moving pictures. To better understand the growth and pervasiveness of screen media we need to understand their global reach. The global is a larger version of more local processes of cultural intrusion and resistance, such as a small town's resistance to big city ideas expressed in a movie. Thus the cultural geography of place, local, national, and global, which weaves through the history in multiple and varying ways.
What is Screen Culture?
The term ‘screen’ includes screens for film, television, video games, computers, and smartphones, what Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay describe as first, second, and third waves of screen technology.1 Screens are about images more than language, a modern form of visual culture. Excluded by the term are media that rely primarily on senses other than the visual, in particular the sound media of audio recording, radio, and voice telephone. Also excluded are live performances that are not mediated by a screen. Second, screen implies moving images, or what often is termed ‘video,’ excluding or at least limiting photos and other static visual arts. Third, I have excluded screens used almost entirely for text as did early PCs, email and the internet – the internet term ‘web-page’ is a remnant of that era. The internet entered screen culture when it evolved beyond email and text to predominantly video websites. Mobile phones entered screen culture when smartphones added video and internet capabilities. While earlier mobile phones had screens, these were for display of text, like early PCs. Smartphones advanced the convergence of film, television, computers, and phones and made video content mobile.
‘Screen culture’ as a term, first appeared in trade and academic books during the mid 1980s, and had a boost in the mid 1990s, according to a Google Books Ngram search. The term has been used loosely and imprecisely to describe something arising from screen media, most often the video images on film or tv. Popular press writers use the term as if screen images shape culture, rather than culture serving as a context for screen use. I will look less at the screen and more at its context, the shared ideas and practices of people in front of the screen, and what explains those. I will examine the interaction between the organizations and people who have produced the consumer technology – e.g. the movie theater, the tv set, the smartphone – and the images on the one hand, and those who are using the technology and viewing the images, on the other. This interaction is more abstracted and impersonal, but nevertheless real and consequential.
Consequently, I will use a literal interpretation of the term. Screen culture is the shared ideas expressed by producer and audience practices using these media and texts. What makes it culture, above all, is that it is the lived culture that arises when people interact with and through screen media. As everyday life fills with screen activity – averaging nine hours per day for American adults in 2017 – screen becomes an increasingly important aspect of the broader culture, infiltrating and influencing all other elements.2
Screens: Image and Language
Through the twentieth century, media have become predominantly images rather than worded representations. Advances in print technologies and changes in advertising strategy substantially turned newspapers and magazines to visual imagery; television supplanted radio; and most recently, imagery has challenged text on computer and smartphone screens.
The value of word versus image was controversial long before the twentieth century. W. J. T. Mitchell stated that the history of Western discourse on images is “about the fear [sic] of images … the political psychology of icons, the study of iconophobia, iconophilia, and the struggle between iconoclasm and idolatry.” Leading English literati as well as religious moralists opposed ‘spectacles’ as inferior to textual representation. Shakespeare's contemporary Robert Greene was known for his spectacles popular with audiences, such as a whale's mouth from which the character of Jonah arrived on stage. But the famous actor Richard Tarelton was admired for his quick wit in response to shouts from the audience. Ben Jonson and John Locke too favored word over image.3 Also in the seventeenth century, Protestant Non-Conformists objected to the visual performance on stage as deceptive lies, although they considered the written text of plays to be morally acceptable. One of the first acts of the Commonwealth government in 1642 banned theatrical performances, even as it allowed printing and reading playscripts.4 In the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb and Romantics such as Samuel Coleridge continued the tradition of preferring playscript over stage performance. When modern mass media arrived in twentieth-century America, reactions to radio were uniformly positive, while film and television were often treated with moral and aesthetic hostility. Reviving this criticism recently, media theorist Neil Postman regretted that America had changed from a print culture to a screen culture.5
At the same time, reactions varied with types of visual culture. Visual art has held a preserved space where a select canon of images has been granted special status.6 Stage has been divided between ‘legitimate’ drama that relies primarily on the word, and comedy and musical theater that has relied more on spectacle. The long form of feature film, requiring a more complex story and characters, was considered superior to short-form television programming – television was described as a vast wasteland in the same era that auteur theory was recasting film as an art form. Nevertheless, it is the screen that has appealed to the masses, has colonized our everyday environment, and has become increasingly integral to our everyday culture. This should not be entirely surprising since the visual is nonlinear, amorphous, and contextual – much like everyday lived culture – while text is more linear and formalized. Images are more holistic, while words are more precise. Visual representation is more akin to the subtlety of everyday practice of culture, which depends on implicit visual cues far more than on explicit oral or written instruction.
Culture
All this brings us to the term ‘culture,’ famously described by Raymond Williams as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language … mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines,” including anthropology, sociology, history, cultural and media studies. It is important to understand culture because it is the fabric of everyday life upon which societies are built and histories unfold. That is to say, culture, as it is experienced and expressed in everyday life, is most influential. So-called high culture, art, and literature, intellectual culture, or any sort of culture is important only so far as it is incorporated into everyday interactions. To understand the significance of screen culture, we must concentrate on lived culture or culture as practice, where ideas are expressed, shared, and activated.7
Put simply, culture is shared ideas; and objects and actions symbolize these ideas.8 Functionally, shared ideas, a shared understanding of the meaning of things, enable a group of people to coordinate their actions with each other. Culture exists only through interactions among people. Interactions both depend upon and express the shared ideas. In interacting, people interpret the meaning of others’ actions and in turn convey meaning in their own actions. Through this dance of meaning, people confirm their shared ideas. Thus, cultures are not fixed and finished things, but fluid and continually negotiated.
Nor is culture singular. Any group interacting with each other on a regular basis develops a culture among themselves. Couples, families, circles of friends, and other associates typically develop unspoken assumptions about what is appropriate appearance and behavior, how each is to be treated, who is a leader and who followers. In small groups, members regularly re-negotiate such assumptions, through arguments, resistance, and feelings talk. So too, nations of millions are bound together by a common culture, mediated by large organizations, communication systems, and goods distributed and consumed nationally, all of which circulate and confirm shared meanings. Millions internationally may share aspects of a common culture across national boundaries through the flow of communication and goods that represent cultural values norms and beliefs.9 Between these micro and macro extremes are numerous other cultures, in layers, levels, and interstices, such as cultures of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.10
The plurality of cultures is especially pertinent to the discussion of global-local distinctions. The term global culture is an imagined singular culture that homogenizes and threatens to dissolve the distinctiveness of other cultures. At the same time this dichotomy presumes that local cultures are numerous, particularly focusing on geographic cultures. The term ‘local,’ however, is used vaguely, creating confusion about which local cultures are meant – national, ethnic, neighborhood or family.
None of these cultures is total in the sense that all the members of a group live solely within one culture. We each and all participate in a variety of cultures each day as we move from group to group and situation to situation. Multiple cultures are woven together by individuals participating in diverse cultures. Even in isolated groups such as hunter-gatherer bands, peasant villages, or nomadic herdsmen, anthropologists often find distinct subcultures for men and women. In cosmopolitan cultures of urban areas people encounter many cultures in a typical day. As anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod observes: “because [television's] cultural texts are produced elsewhere and inserted into local households, communities, nations – confirms for us the need to rethink the notion of culture in the singular.”11
Lastly, culture is not an individual creation, but is the product of collective, coordinated action of many people enacting and enforcing the same expectations, values, and beliefs. Those collective, coordinated actions constitute social structure. Therefore we cannot examine and explain culture without also discussing social structure, in this case the economic, political, and global structures that shape the production and reception of screen media and their images.12
Context: Place and Situation
Culture happens when people gather in places and engage in situations where they interact, create, and express that culture. While the two terms, place and situation, are close relatives, it is useful to distinguish them. A geographer's term, place is a space populated with things – interiors with walls, floors, and furnishings; streetscapes of buildings, pavement, signs, a forest or farm – that identify it as a particular place. A place becomes the setting for a situation when peopled with actors, their dress, props, and statuses, who build a shared understanding of it in order to align their interactions with each other. Place is grounded in location; situation in interaction. The meanings of places and situations and the things within them are fabricated by the actors in the process of interacting.13
The complex of meanings thus constructed is culture. The meanings are not created sui generis, but are based on the culture(s) people bring with them to this place/situation and use – as raw material we might say – to guide their interpretation of it and of the actions of others, and to choose their own purposes and actions in constructing a culture for that situation and those participants. Where and when a place is influences which people and what cultures arrive there. The more cosmopolitan the place the more diverse – and the more work is involved in aligning actions and constructing a shared definition of the situation.
Places are fixed to a particular location. Situations are portable to the degree to which a particular place is inessential to the interaction. Cultures are even more portable, since people carry cultures into a situation. The physicality of place gives culture fixity. Without some fixity, culture would be useless, since its purpose is to give us some predictability in our daily life and interactions, a frame within which actors can assess how to act. At the same time culture needs to be fluid to fit the situation and interactions. Being mindful of place as well as situation, we are then sensitized to the dual nature of culture as both fixed and fluid.
Places are more durable, residues of past actions; situations more ephemeral, people in the midst of acting. Actors enter places and create situations. Situations arise as actors engage and evaporate when they depart. In one place, many situations may occur. In a plaza, several may emerge simultaneously. In a school building, days are full of some situations, nights with others. Places are the artefactual fabric of culture at large, its distinctive character that enables us to identify what and where it is. If we are familiar with the culture, the artifacts tell us what they are for, what we are expected to do with them. Situations are the momentary processes of culture writ small in our everyday lives.
Two important contrasts of places keep appearing throughout this history, that between urban and rural, and between Western and post-colonial societies. Both also involve contrasts between industrial and agricultural economies, as well as contrasting representations as modern or traditional cultures. At the same time, these contrasted places are linked to each other by capitalism and imperialism.14
Cities tend to be centers of greater specialization, while rural country dwellers, notably small farmers, of necessity tend to depend upon doing most things themselves. Cities have long been characterized as places of hurry, anonymity, and loneliness, while small town and rural setting have been depicted as stagnant and claustrophobic, due to little privacy and peer pressure to conform, although having more sense of community.15 Cities initially arose as government centers, but have grown into markets that stimulated consumption. During the last two centuries, much, mostly Western-inspired discourse has characterized Western societies as being similar to cities in such respects, and colonial peoples similarly to rural communities.
Characterizations that contrast modern and traditional values, and link them to differences between city and country, recur across many societies and are central to modernization and national-building efforts of post-colonial nations. As will be seen, screen media often have been recruited to serve these efforts. Tradition and modernity have been ideal types used to capture dimensions along which societies vary. Tradition was often conceived as an idealized community contrasted to the alienation and anonymity created by urbanization and industrialization. Of course, while tendencies may differ between cultures, differences are not dichotomous, and individuals within a culture may exhibit a broad range on the same dimensions, sometimes such that variation within a culture may rival variation between cultures.16
Places and Screens
Screens are things; they occupy and are contextualized by places in which they sit, such as a tv in a home or a waiting room. We talk about screens in terms of place, such as going to a movie, going on the internet. Where we watch is therefore important: at home, on a bus, in this or that country or continent. Mobile screens such as smartphones can be carried from place to place, as the bus moves.
What we witness on the screen is itself a place, metaphorically, fictively, realistically. Screens are like windows in a place that enable us to see into another place. Immersive media places, like movie theaters, help us imaginatively to leave the viewing place and be transported into the place in the screen. Watching in the home, on the other hand, we are immersed in domestic life. Interactive screens conjoin the two places. With the internet and smartphones, we can pass through those windows and engage in real time with people and events in that other place, while continuing to be and act in the first place. The relation between these spaces can create a variety of problematic social and cultural situations as well as opportunities. Thus, the complaint since television began, “Stop watching that screen and look at me …” Numerous cartoons since the 1950s have caricatured this situation.17 Decades ago, phones made a limited, aural tear in the space, but the smartphone screen has greatly increased availability of distracting attractions and bi-spatial interactions.
Screen presence and use changes the definition of the situation. Conversation arises in a waiting room, but is stultified by a television turned on. At the same time, social interaction may incorporate and shape their meaning. Turning off the tv can ‘put it in its place’ and restore conversation. All this will be discussed in Chapter 8.
As an example of a place, a situation and a medium, take an empty storefront in 1908 New York City on a local neighborhood shopping street where one might encounter neighbors and friends. For a nickel one can enter. The interior is filled with about a hundred motley chairs. It is dark, a moving light image of people doing something is projected on a sheet or improvised screen. It flickers. The people are dressed casually and come and go. They chat and eat, talk at the images on the screen. This is a place and a socially defined situation. The people share a definition of it as a nickelodeon and act accordingly. The situation includes props such as the informal decoration and furnishings, projector and screen, darkness. The entry price communicates its casual nature. The images tell them it is light entertainment, a novelty, not serious work.
Compare this to a large, lavish theater downtown where the people on the street are more likely strangers and more formally dressed, whether for work or a night out. The entry fee in 1920 is a dollar, a sufficient expense to mark this as a special event. The lobby is luxuriously decorated with marble, mirrors and chandeliers. The auditorium is filled with chairs upholstered in velvet and bolted to the floor in rows. It is dark and a projector lights up a screen. All this communicates very different expectations of behavior.
Compare this again to a television in a home in the 1950s, a domestic situation with yet other props, cues and behavior, or to people almost anywhere today using mobile media, such as a smartphone. Each of these examples involves a medium in a situation, and people attending to that medium or sometimes ignoring it. The situation defines the medium and what to do with it; at the same time the medium redefines the situation. To understand media and their audiences, their cultures, we need to understand the processes through which the media and their contexts are socially constructed by place and in situation.
Life with and without Screen Media
To understand the development and turns of screen cultures over time, we must begin with an historical baseline of life before the arrival of screen media. Today, for surprisingly many in the world, daily life is filled with screen media, their sights and sounds. They are ubiquitous and have become the context of our lives. Just a century ago, however, the only screen media were silent films, available only in a movie theater and leaving ‘life’ outside. Screen media history involves three dimensions of change in everyday life, changes in people's use of time, changes in what may be called leisure skills, and changes in isolation from the larger world. Time spent using media meant less time used elsewise. Such displacement also meant collective loss of skills in activities no longer passed down to younger generations. Third, media brought the outside world into even remote communities, where traditionally information had been passed on largely by word of mouth. These changes in everyday life were part and parcel of larger historical changes, from domestic production and a culture of subsistence to industrial production and a culture of consumption. The changes occurred unevenly depending upon people's different social and geographical locations, as capitalist industrialization spread across the global landscape over the past three centuries.
From Domestic to Industrial Production
Concomitant with the spread of screen media in capitalist economies, subsistence production by families for their household use was steadily displaced by industrial mass production to sell to consumers, turning useful things into commodities for sale, and replacing utility with profit as the purpose and drive. The specific directions of development depended upon timing and circumstances particular to each society. Scholars have debated the differences in capitalist development in early modern Europe, colonial and post-colonial societies, and post-Soviet Eastern Europe.18 But once under way, the structure of industrial capitalism pushed toward some common changes. Industrial capitalism separated production from consumption, work for pay from leisure to consume. Before industrial capitalist mass production became dominant, most families produced most of their own sustenance and pleasures.
In the nineteenth-century US, many people built their own homes, made their own clothes and processed their own food. As there was little separation between work and home or between personal relations and market relations, there was also little separation of work and leisure. Capitalist production grew piecemeal by colonizing ever more aspects of life and replacing ‘home-made’ with factory-made goods produced and sold for a profit. The process pushed and pulled people from subsistence living to working for a wage and buying what they needed.19
The process transformed cultural production as well. In the past, people made toys, music and entertainment for their own enjoyment As recently as the early twentieth century, in isolated valleys of the Appalachian mountains of the eastern US, there was a rich folk music culture in which most of the population were musically skilled in singing and playing instruments as part of everyday activity, and many made their own instruments. It was such music cultures that American record companies mined to create the commercial forms of country music and ‘race’ music.20
As with national markets, globalization proceeded, industry by industry; for example, from textiles to oil in the nineteenth century, autos to television in the twentieth. The unique economic properties of cultural products like movies sometimes aided their export.21 In much of the world the transition from pre-capitalist villages to industrial production has often been rapid, compared to that in the West. In some cases, screen media seemed to arrive all at once. But that growth logic can be retarded or diverted by other forces, most notably by the state. In particular, post-colonial governments often developed and operated screen media as an alternative to capitalist development. This will be discussed in Chapters 2, 4, 6, and 9.
Cultures of Consumption
To continue expansion, industrial capitalism needed to commodify new areas of life and stimulate consumer demand. This meant promoting a culture of consumption for homes, families and individuals. In tandem with the commodification of production, Western cultures began to shift their emphasis from a parsimonious work ethic to increasing approval of consumption as a way of life. Consumption in this sense however did not mean literally to consume or to use; it referred to a narrower, market sense of purchase.
Western European and US businesses began in earnest to promote consumption and reshape upper-middle and upper-class culture in the mid to late nineteenth century, when they turned shopping and purchasing into pleasurable leisure. Pioneering retail entrepreneurs created feminine urban shopping districts in New York, London and Paris, including department stores, theaters and other amusements, and supplanted the previously masculine markets near docks and factories. This signaled a new culture of everyday experience for urban middle- and upper-class women centered on spectacle, sensation and indulgence.22 From this it grew into mail-order businesses that reached even small villages and farmhouses with enticing catalogs of images of things to buy, from shovels to ladies’ wear. By the end of the nineteenth century, commodification and consumption were well established in Western cultures.23
Screen media arrived in the US just when this culture of consumption was broadening. Motion pictures were not only consumption in themselves, but also ideally suited to display and promote consumption. Early movie theaters greatly increased the market for purchasing entertainment, making it available at low cost and at convenient locations, so that vast sections of the working class, who previously could not regularly afford commercial entertainment, could now do so. In addition, ‘moving pictures’ could depict people engaging in the pleasures of consumption, to a greater degree than static department store displays and print advertising. By the 1920s films had changed to longer feature-length and had shifted from working-class to upper-class characters and settings. This allowed displays of lavish lifestyles based on consumption. Producers began contracting with manufacturers to prominently feature their products within the sets of the film. At the same time, movie ‘palaces’ combined both witnessing the spectacle of consumption in the movies and temporarily enjoying an hour or two in luxurious surroundings, a sort of fantasy consumption.24 Consumption was intensifying.
Intensification is indicated by increased time spent to acquire and use commodities. How people use their time reflects cultural priorities and values. American time-use research has revealed that screen media strikingly increased the amount of time spent consuming commercial entertainment, due mostly to its wide availability and affordability.25 Through the twentieth century, screen media accounted for a steadily increasing portion of the waking day in the US, even for working-class people. Movie-going consumed an hour or two per week until the 1950s, when television multiplied that to four hours a day. Recently, smartphones with internet connection have made screen media use almost a continuous activity. That meant other activities, such as socializing, community activities, recreation and sleep increasingly had to compete for time and attention. In general, leisure became less participative and less communal; social interaction became less face-to-face and more mediated. What does this reveal or reflect about cultural changes? At minimum, time use patterns reveal that Americans have chosen consumption of screen media over non-commercial social interactions or solitude.
Globalization contributed another element to consumption. It gave rise to intersticial higher classes or class fractions situated between their native culture and a hegemonic or global culture arriving with global commerce, as will be discussed. For these groups, culture was becoming less insular and more cosmopolitan, and presumed familiarity with multiple cultures. As sociologist Zigmunt Bauman writes, “The sign of belonging to a cultural elite today is maximum tolerance and minimal choosiness. The principal of cultural elitism is omnivorousness – feeling at home in every cultural milieu, without considering any as a home, let alone the only home.”26 Globalized media enabled and enhanced such cosmopolitan consumption.
At the same time, the values of a culture of consumption were not universally accepted. As was noted, the pleasures of consumption at first were directed toward upper-middle and upper-class women, and were criticized for distracting these women from their domestic responsibilities. But those same classes more vociferiously condemned expenditures for pleasures by working classes that they feared encouraged rebelliousness.
British sociologist Stanley Cohen identified recurring patterns of reaction to incipient social and cultural changes of all sorts, which he labeled ‘moral panics.’27 Such reactions accompanied the spread of each new visual medium. Regardless of the era, continent or culture, these triggered public debates and moralistic outcries, especially by higher-status groups, against their popularity among women, children, lower classes and castes, subordinated races and tribes and other lower-status groups. In the earliest phase, optimists focused on utopian possibilities of the new technology. But shortly, others expressed alarm, predicted and publicized bad consequences, stirred a moral panic and called for some civic regulation. However, panics faded away as people became accustomed to the medium. This is not to say that there was no basis for either optimism or pessimism, but both tended to be overstated.28
Media panics are seldom about large structural changes, since these are not immediately evident in people's everyday lives. Structural issues more often are addressed in political debates concerning the society and the state. But reactions by a broad swathe of people tend to be about things they can see – or think they see – affecting their own family or community. Even when calling for a national solution, these are local issues. Both euphoria and hysteria are invariably in relation to visible impacts on people's everyday lives and immediate circumstances, while long-term and broader social economic and political effects tend to be less noticed and reacted to.
In some cases reactions have been framed as nationalist causes. American film companies stirred fears that French films in the 1900s and 1910s were endangering the nation (Chapter 2). Post-colonial variants focused on cultural imperialism weakening native cultures and nation-building agendas (Chapters 4 and 6). Again, the fears were often a response to the real popularity of screen media among lower-status populations.
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Global Media
Globalization is place and situation writ large. So far, we have focused on screen media at the ground level of everyday life. The issues discussed above, as already noted, applied as well to the development and reception of screen media across the globe, but under differing circumstances and in different eras. Larger structural forces, such as capitalism, imperialism and nationalism, have driven media developments, economic and cultural hegemony, and reactions to them at the national and international level.
Global media distribution grew upon a broader global trade system with deep historical roots. To understand this context, we need to briefly review the linked histories of the formation of nation states, nationalism, colonial empires, and post-colonial nations. Media have played a part in these as a means of persuasion or, seen from another perspective, as fostering a national culture. These developments were uneven, in some places advancing a century or more ahead of others. But the general pattern still applies.
Global media hegemony began with the dominance of Western European companies and countries exporting films to their colonies and to the US before World War I. The war disrupted their dominance, allowing US companies, then settling in Hollywood, to consolidate control of the American domestic market. After the war, Hollywood quickly extended its reach to European markets and much of the rest of the world, a hegemony which was compounded by export of American television programming after World War II. Only recently has this hegemony begun to be challenged, as several nations vie for regional dominance and even begin incursions into Europe and the US.
Post-colonial media institutionalization arose in the context of this history. Film, radio and television were perceived by many governments as powerful tools for reshaping culture, forging national identity, fostering nationalist allegiance, and binding the nation to the state. For these purposes, governments controlled and often owned and operated such media within their territories. However, as Western imperialism receded and transnational corporations ascended, global media arose less as instruments of nationalism than of trade. This includes trade in media content as commodities in themselves, and media as advertising platforms for all commodities and for a culture of consumption. Most recently, multiple centers of media production, export and exchange have arisen, contesting Western hegemony and establishing regional dominance. The book will follow this history as it has moved from film to television to digital screen media (see Chapters 2, 4, 6, 9).
Globalization has always been about trade. When traders came with military escorts it became conquest. Global trade is as ancient as civilizations.29 Ancient empires, such as Persia or Rome, grew by absorbing adjoining territories, transferring goods from periphery to center and then re-distributing them. As modern European nation-states emerged, they were able to acquire and hold colonial empires of non-contiguous territories, often separated by oceans, at far greater distances from the homeland than the adjacent territories of ancient empires. By the sixteenth century a handful of Western European nations had created modern colonial empires and organized the world into parallel, hierarchical systems of trade between European ruling nations and their respective colonies. By 1900, few peoples and little territory lay outside this system.30
Colonial rule required occupiers on the ground. Posted throughout the colonial world they constituted an early global bourgeoisie. They and their governments did much to sustain their home cultures in foreign places – exclusive enclaves, children sent home for their education and enculturation, and rulers imposing their home culture and language on colonial government. Appended to this colonial class were the native populations who served and conducted trade with colonials, their governments and businesses. Such in-between population necessarily were familiar with both the colonial's culture and language as well as their own native culture and language. This in-betweenness produced some blended cultures among this class, as well as tension and conflict.
By the mid twentieth century, colonial systems were being challenged by powerful independence movements and by the rise of multi-national corporations.31 After World War II, Western powers began to re-order the world system with international pacts such as the Bretton Woods monetary agreements, and organizations such as the World Bank. Unlike the competing imperial networks before, this new system allegedly gathered all nations into one open-market trade system, but one of dramatic economic imbalance, with the US at the top, the former European imperial states as its allies, and the rest of the globe gradually slipping from their control. In the same era, the largest corporations in the most multi-national industries, such as oil,32 changed from multi-nationals that were based in one nation while doing business in many, to become transnational companies without financial interests and allegiance tied to any one nation. The transition to transnational corporations, including media corporations, has been a victory of private over public, since public was by definition circumscribed by national boundaries, while private companies were free to range across the globe wherever they could find profit. At the same time, this did not leave nations powerless. Certainly, strong central governments of large, rich nations have continued to wield great power militarily, politically and economically.
European Nationalism
Coinciding with their formation out of feudal landholdings and fealty relationships, early modern European states engaged in processes to forge unified nations at home.33 Max Weber recognized that states cannot effectively operate using force alone when he defined the state as an institution with a monopoly of legitimate power within a territory. Territorial control by the nation-state demanded discourses to justify its authority. Nation-building is not a once-and-done effort, but requires an apparatus of on-going legitimation to counter disintegrating forces. The creation of a nation required the creation of a unified culture through new narratives, new traditions, new histories and new myths. As one Italian unification leader phrased it, “We've made Italy; now we must make Italians.” Modern European states constructed imagined nationalities coterminous with their territorial boundaries to replace feudalistic pyramids of social relations as the glue of society.34 This entailed defining all subjects as one people and securing their allegiance to the national state.
Defining ‘who we are’ was buttressed with the creation of traditions (‘what we share’) and history (‘what we did together’). This was accomplished through laws and schools, public celebrations for citizen participation, public monuments as ever present reminders, and through the preservation of ‘heritage,’ the physical detritus of the past, including buildings, battlefields, and artifacts in museums, given special new meaning.35
Strategic use of media propagated these ideas to the masses. Before the twentieth century the medium was print. But its capacity to reach the masses was fore shorn by illiteracy and language differences. The twentieth century visual and aural media promised to overcome some of these limitations. European nations quickly adopted these new media as valuable tools of nationalism. They introduced state policies to tailor film, radio, and television to these purposes through subsidies for domestic producers and trade barriers against imports, and the establishment of broadcasting as a government controlled public service.36
Post-Colonial National Unity
Among its many injuries, colonialism created problems of identity for colonial peoples. European rulers created artificial boundaries for their colonies, disregarding traditional tribal territories.37 The consequences of this persisted after independence. Substantial ethnic minority populations within nations and tribal allegiances across boundaries made constructing a unified national culture more difficult.
In such circumstances, independence movements had to choose between fighting one or two wars: a war of independence against the colonial ruler to establish an independent nation within existing colonial boundaries, and another to redraw boundaries with multiple adjacent nations to create an entirely new map based upon tribal unification. The latter has almost always been sacrificed to the former, due to a necessity to become functionally a nation, in order to negotiate with their colonial ruler and to deal with a world divided into nations.
The principal experience upon which national identity could be built was to define the nation, its population and culture, as opposite to their colonial rulers, different but not inferior. Such a strategy was inherently reactive, in contrast to pro-active and aggressive early modern European nationalism. At the same time, these new nations continued to be economically linked to Western technologies and markets.
These contradictory pulls toward and away from the West contributed to an “inherent contradictoriness in nationalist thinking” for both independence movements and post-colonial governments. Thus, post-colonial historian Partha Chatterjee argues that nationalism developed in these nations, even before independence, through a bifurcation of the ‘material,’ that is, the economic, the state, science, and technology; and the ‘spiritual,’ the national culture constructed from tradition, religion, and so on. Control of the former was relinquished to colonial rulers. The latter was insulated from colonial control. Yet over generations of colonialism, Western ideas nevertheless had changed the ‘spiritual,’ as well – to such a degree that even ancient classics were neglected. Western concepts of nation, individualism, and scientific rationality had become, in historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's words, “both indispensable and inadequate”.38 Western ideas had to be identified, but could not simply be excised or the whole cloth would be damaged. They had to be de-constructed, their universality disclosed as provincialism, making room for non-Western ideas, while not discarding the West entirely.
In an effort to address these contradictions, post-war programs of nationalism constructed new histories of the nation and its peoples, and folklore revivals enshrined fragments of people's cultures while discarding other aspects seen as impediments to modernization. At the same time, nationalist movements adopted Western technology and modernist values (sometimes capitalist, other times socialist), justifying this as necessary to the strength of the nation and a patriotic duty of every citizen.39 While modernization took priority in earlier post-colonial development, by the late twentieth century, populist ideological programs took precedent, in some cases resulting in a wholesale discard of all things Western, rather than the complexity and subtlety proposed by post-colonial studies and other de-Westernization intellectuals.40
Given its perceived importance for nationalist agendas, governments often subsidized the costs of media infrastructure and production of content, in contrast to the American commercial model. Nevertheless recently, just as some nations have heightened their anti-Western stance on culture, they have opted to retreat from government-supported media and shift to a neo-liberal for-profit model, as discussed in Chapter 6.41
From White Man's Burden to Modernization Theories
Western colonialism had defined colonial peoples, cultures and societies as backward and colonization as improvement and uplift, that Europeans were the drivers of history and their subjects were the objects of history. As Edward Said explained, Western discourses orientalized the East in order to occidentalize the West and hid the complexity of the relationship.42
Western post-war modernization theory and policies continued these social Darwinian presumptions. Arising with de-colonization and post-colonial nation-building, and in the midst of the cold war, it was an instrument with two edges, continuing to define these new nations as culturally backward peoples, while promising economic progress for them at the same time. After World War II, development planning was promoted by American and Soviet technocrats alike, and conflated Western with ‘modern’ science and technology. Post-colonial societies were conceived as earlier universal stages of economic and political development, with the expectation that technological industrialization was the way forward, whether as capitalist or socialist states.43
Consequently, governments launched massive efforts to persuade native populations to shed their traditional culture and adopt modern values, motives and goals. Modern values privileged quantifiable material gains over traditional satisfactions, social relations and spiritual beliefs. While Western development plans promoted progress through individualism and achievement motivation, post-colonial nation-building emphasized individual sacrifice for the good of the nation.44 As anthropologist William Mazzarella succinctly phrased it:
… postcolonial elites within those new nations tended to legitimate their own custodianship of the development ideal – the urgent need for development – on the grounds that the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots had so far failed to manifest the [necessary] forms of modern consciousness that had purportedly been achieved in the developed West.45
One notable example of modernization theory was psychologist David McClelland's claim that the lack of achievement motivation – in effect, aspiration for upward social and economic mobility – kept poorer nations poor. Judging other cultures using the values of Western capitalist societies, he concluded that these cultures were preventing Western modernization. As late as 1997, another influential theorist, Alex Inkeles, still denied the ethnocentricity of these theories.46
Recently, cosmopolitanism, a cultural outgrowth of globalization, has become another challenge to nationalism. It echoes the suggestions of modernization theory that nations need to shed their traditional cultures and open up to Western ideas. It advocates cultural relativism in which peoples of differing identities and cultures live and let live in the same geographic, social, and political spaces. However, given the continuing wealth and power differential between the West and most post-colonial nations, operationally cosmopolitanism buttresses Westernization more than Western acceptance of post-colonial cultures. It does this in part by turning social relations into market relations and conceiving people as consumers in global markets.47
Organization of the Book
This book entails a double structure, one of time, another of space. It is a history of the arrival, rise to dominance and transformation of the principal screen media, from film to television to digital screens. Second, it is a history of spatial differences in media development across nations and the global ebb and flow of media hegemony, and of cultural differences in audiences’ use of media and interpretations of their texts. Comparisons across time and space reveal some surprising similarities as well as differences. At the same time, the book will trace two linked developments: on the one hand, the rise and fall of American cultural hegemony; on the other, the consistency among nations of audiences constructing their own cultures out of materials of screen entertainments and, beyond the West, engaged in this process with an ambivalence toward the West and its modernism. Given the uniqueness of historical moments, chapters vary in the attention to production and the texts it produces on the one hand, and audiences and the cultures they produce on the other, depending on which forces are more pertinent to the times and places and the issues discussed. The book examines both the global and the local, that is, at ground level how audiences and others create screen culture through their everyday social interactions in using screen media or reacting to it, and at the national and international levels how screen industries, from the beginning, pursued international markets and established cultural hegemony, and how governments promoted and reacted to those markets and that hegemony.
To make all this manageable, as well as to create a continuing thread through the chapters, I have focused on a few notable national examples to encompass a global history. The primary criteria for these selections are cultural power and market size or population. Population is concentrated in a few nations that constitute half the world's population, which therefore have a great global impact. China has 1.4 billion people; India has 1.25 billion; the EU member nation population is 500 million; the US is 300 million; Brazil 200 million; Nigeria 175 million.48 This list includes the nations that historically have exercised international cultural power through media, and nations that seem poised to exercise a comparable power as well. Consequently, woven through the chapters are the histories of media developments in the US, Europe, China, India, Brazil, and West Africa, and their relationships to each other.
Film was the first screen medium. Cinema overturned the pre-screen world of live entertainment. Film shared the media spotlight of this era with the aural medium of radio. But it stood above all as the popular visual medium. The story of film in the first half of the century is also primarily about Western cultural hegemony. This history is explained in Chapters 1 through 4. By the mid 1950s the second screen medium, television, was established. Television became the quintessential mass medium, with nightly audiences far larger than film. Hollywood became the supplier of much prime-time programming, so television and film had a close but complicated relationship in shaping screen text. Again, the story begins with the US and Europe and moves outward, as post-colonial governments subsidized development in their own nations. Chapters 5 and 6 tell this story.
Toward the end of the century, a complex of new communication devices and infrastructure overturned the film and television worlds. Digitization tied all screen media together, so that the same texts and images were available on multiple platforms and users could shift from one to the other seamlessly. This media interconnectedness also merged industries from film and television to computers and telephone, and provided the groundwork for huge multi-media, global corporations to form. At the same time, these new media were mobile and interactive, and peoples of many nations, previously on the margins of screen media, were now active participants. Chapters 7 through 9 tell these stories.
Notes
1
Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, eds.,
Television Studies After TV
(Routledge 2009).
2
Also see Lila Abu-Lughod,
Dramas of Nationhood
(University of Chicago Press 2005), p. 35; Vivian Sobchack, “The scene of the screen: Envisioning cinematic and electronic ‘presence,’” in
Materialities of Communication,
eds., Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford UniversityPress), pp. 83–106. Anna Kaun and Karin Fast, “Mediatization of culture and everyday life,”
Karlstad University Studies
, 13 (2014).
3
Roger Chartier
Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer
(University of Pennsylvania Press 1995); W. J. T. Mitchell,
Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology
(University of Chicago Press 1986), pp. 119–121, quote p. 3. Re film see J. R. Taylor,
Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-Makers of the Sixties
(Hill and Wang 1964). Gabriel Egan, “Hearing or seeing a play: Evidence of early modern theatrical terminology,”
Ben Jonson Journal
, 8 (2001): 327–347, p. 332; Jenny Sager,
The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema
(Palgrave 2013), ch. 1; Herbert Blau, “The audition of dream and events,”
The Drama Review
, 31(3) (1987): 59–73 on Johnson; Mitchell,
Iconology
, 121–123 on Locke.
4
Jonas Barish,
The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice
(University of California Press 1981); H. Diehl,
Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England
(Cornell University Press 1997); Fiona Price, “‘Myself creating what I saw’: The morality of the spectator in eighteenth-century Gothic,”
Gothic Studies
, 8(2) (2006): 1–17.
5
Charles Lamb, “On the tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation,” in
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
(1811); Sager,
Aesthetics of Spectacle
, p. 25 n. 14 on Coleridge, n. 16 on other critics. Neil Postman,
Amusing Ourselves to Death
(Methuen 1987).
6
Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds.,
Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations
(Wesleyan University Press 1994); Theo van Leeuwne and Carey Jewitt, eds.,
Handbook of Visual Analysis
(Sage 2001).
7
Raymond Williams,
Keywords
(Oxford University Press 1976), p. 76; Stuart Hall, ed.,
Representations
(Open University Press 1997), p. 3. For useful reflections on culture, symbol, and media see Michael Schudson, “How culture works,”
Theory and Society
, 18 (1989): 153–180.
8
My conception of culture is based upon concepts of symbolic interaction and social constructivism. See, e.g. Herbert Blumer,
Symbolic Interaction: Perspective and Method
(Prentice Hall 1969); Erving Goffman,
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(Doubleday 1959); and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann,
The Social Construction of Reality
(Anchor 1967).
9
On culture, nations, and diaspora see John Sinclair and Cunningham, “Go with the flow: diasporas and media,”
Television and New Media
, 1(1) (2000): 11–31, esp. pp. 16–18.
10
Zygmunt Bauman,
Culture in a Liquid Modern World
(Polity 2011), p. 1; Tak Wing Chan and John H. Goldthorpe, “The social stratification of cultural consumption: Some policy implications of a research project,”
Cultural Trends
, 16(4) (2007): 373–384. Through the book, we will discuss class, gender, nationality, and race in terms of cultural differences.
11
Abu-Lughod,
Dramas of Nationhood
, p. 44.
12
On the links of culture with social structure, see e.g. Raymond Williams,
Marxism and Literature
(Oxford University Press 1977), and
Sociology of Culture
(Schocken 1982); Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction
, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press 1984); Arjun Appadurai,
Modernity At Large
(University of Minnesota Press 1996), p. 5.
13
