Broadcasting

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

These defining characteristics of broadcasting 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

The shape the industry and technology adopted--with local stations affiliated to central content-producing networks sending transitions to receivers, was not inevitable. Early experimentation in broadcasting involved both amateurs and professionals, who could both send and receive. Only as a result of federal regulations--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.

Heterogeneous Audiences and Pops and Hisses

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. Under the industry's platonic ideal, the extent of audience choice would be on/off, volume up/down. But American broadcasting adopted a private model from the beginning, which initiates competition between networks and stations.

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