Difference between revisions of "Broadcasting"

Revision as of 15:37, 25 April 2010

In NBC: America's Network, Michele Hilmes illustrates how the naming of NBC, the National Broadcasting Company, contains the core characteristics that broadcasting would take on in America. "First, national: when RCA announced the formation of its new radio "chain" in 1926, it introduced the first medium that could, through its local stations, connect the scattered and disparate communities of a vast nation simultaneously and address the nation as a whole...Second, broadcasting: this word was coined to denote a new form of communication that emerged in the early 1920s, one that emanated invisibly from a central source and passed with ease though not only physical but social and cultural barriers to reach listeners as private individuals in their homes. More accessible, more exotic (where did that distant station come from?), yet more intimate than any former medium, it created new forms of community and now modes of creative expression. Third, company: In the United States, unlike most of the rest of the world, broadcasting would develop as a primarily private owned enterprise, a business responding to market conditions rather than an organ of the state or a public service institution."¹ "The first practical applications of radio was ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications," originally known as wireless. The word broadcast, in the electronic sense of the term, stems from early United States naval reference to the "broadcast" of orders to the fleet.^*

Her analysis concentrates on the American broadcast system: this dossier focuses on those central reception characteristics of the distribution model: reception over distance, simultaneous consumption by a mass audience, and identical content. This "obvious" modus operandi emerged during a worldwide paradigm shift toward nation stabilization as a result of the horror of World War I and entering World War II on all sides of the ideological spectrum. Mussolini was quoted as saying that without radio he would not have been able to achieve the solidification of and power over the Italian people that he did, and the Fireside Chat over radio is frequently thought of as having vastly strengthened President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s popularity and influence with the American people.²

Broadcasting is a living industry and technical model, but substantial moves away from these key characteristics have effectively rendered the broadcasting mentality dead.

Development and Remediation

The shape the industry and technology adopted--with a chain of local stations affiliated to central content-producing networks sending transitions to customer-owned receivers, was not inevitable. Early experimentation in broadcasting involved both amateurs and professionals, who both sent and received. Many early radio operators formed a community in which feedback was an integral part of the experience. However, the frequency spectrum for broadcast transmissions is limited, and many early transmissions interfered with the clear reception of each other. "Ships' wireless operations lacked standardization. Hams' message traffic clogged the spectrum. Bogus distress calls, faked weather data, and other precursors of Internet mischief proliferated" (balk 25). In order for both the broadcast mindset and the broadcast industry to succeed, transmissions needed to reach receivers clearly. As a result of federal regulations--the 1910 Wireless Ship Act, Radio Act of 1912, Radio Act of 1927, Communications Act of 1934--and an imbalance between individuals and industry to influence those regulations did the industry assume the shape it did. With federal licenses dedicating specific frequencies to specific broadcast stations, the technical format could now function.

The defining characteristics of broadcasting--remote reception of identical content simultaneously and in multiple locations--existed in a variety of mediums long before the first commercial broadcasting experiments, but distinctly, they did not exist altogether in a single medium.

• The woodcuts and the printing press produce identical content that could be received a distance from its production, but this technology did not address simultaneous reception.
• Live theater produces changing content that was only available at its production site and only available to the audience who could fit in the theater.
• The cinema produces (largely) identical content that could be received a distance from its production, but the unity of time was limited to the audience who could fit in the theater.
• The telegraph produces content a distance from its production, but with a single receiver did not produce a simultaneous reception by a group.
• Traditional fine arts (painting and sculpture) produce content rooted in a single location that could be viewed by a grouped audience, depending on size of content.

Institutionalization and Formal Prohibitions/Affordances

With increased regulation and standardization, the formal prohibitions about what each side of the broadcasting model could do fell into place. Participation on the part of the audience was eliminated as radio become conceptualized no longer as a boy's sport, but as "a genteel domestic amusement to be consumed passively by the entire family." "By 1926, there were substantial alterations in receiver design. Technical controls had been simplified down to two knobs (tuning and volume) so that practical know-how was no longer needed." (Speigel 29) Broadcast distributors determined the

Heterogeneous Audiences and Pops and Hisses

In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary tracks a shift in the observer from representation by the camera obscura—“the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world”—to representation by the stereoscope—“the decentered observer” who when coupled with an apparatus sees visual representation not “subordinated to an exterior image of the true or the right.” Broadcasting, both audio and televisual, altered the observer (listener) yet again.

This new observer remediated the quasi-domestic space of the earlier as well as the subjective representation of the later. But rather than mono-optic or bi-optic, this new mass audience was now Argus Panoptes, the many-eyed monster guard of Hero. Visual representation in the 20th century was no lingered rooted proximity as was that of the 19th. A 1923 commentary on radio broadcasts marks this change. “Station WGY has reversed Shakespeare's portrayal that "all the world's a stage." Broadcasting of drama through the ether is making all the world the audience and the radio studio the stage." The individual observer becomes part of a reception crowd.

But the heterogeneous nature of taste creates cracks in the broadcasting model, and the privatized competition implicit in the American industry resulted in choice for the audience. The broadcast model depends on a single central figure, the station, sending out content to multiple receivers, the audience. This model is immediately problemitized once choice enters the system, empowering the audience.

Narrowcasting and Transition

"If, as some have argued, the emergence of modern mass media spelled the doom for the vital folk traditions that thrived in nineteenth-century America, the current moment of media change is reaffirming the right of everyday people to actively contribute to their culture. (jenkins 136)

Distinction between interactivity and participation

References

1 Hilmes. Michele and Henry, Michael Lowell. NBC: America's Network. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007. Italics original.

• Hillard 3

2 Hillard, p1