Brian Winston

Media,Technology and Society : A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet

Introduction: The Storm from Paradise: Technological Innovation, Diffusion and Suppression:Part One: Propogating Sound at Considerable Distance 1. The Telegraph: The First Electrical Medium 2. Before the Speaking Telephone 3. The Capture of Sound Part Two: The Vital Spark & Fugitive Pictures 4. Wireless and Radio 5. Mechanically Scanned Television 6. Electronically Scanned Television 7. Television Spin-Offs and RedundanciesPart Three: Device for Casting Up Sums Very Pretty 8. Mechanising Calculation 9. The First Computers 10. Suppressing the Mainframes 11. The Integrated Circuit 12. The Coming of the MicrocomputerPart Four: The Intricate Web of Trails 13. The Beginnings of Networks 14. Networks & Recording Technologies 15. Communications Satellites 16. The Satellite Era 17. Cable Television 18. The Internet Conclusion: The Pile of Debris From the Boulevard des Capucins to the Leningradsky Prospect

The subject and the indexicality of the photograph

Abstract Taking as a case study the documentary Unknown White Male (UK, 2005) — a film whose theme and reception problematizes stable notions of what constitutes subjectivity — a corrective is offered to the dominant mode applying Peircean semiotics to the moving image. Cinema and media studies have tended to apply Peirces triadic division of the sign in a limited, formalist way following the explications of his method offered by Wollen and others. However Wollen ignores Peirces placement of photograph as indexical within the context of the iconic as well as the distinction Peirce draws between ‘instantaneous’ and ‘composite’ photographs. Moreover, Peirces more general understanding of the importance of semiotic analysis to the overall mental well-being of the human subject, hitherto largely ignored by media scholars, is also addressed.

Emancipation, the media and modernity: some reflections on Garnham’s Kantian turn:

In Emancipation, the Media and Modernity, Nicholas Garnham argues for the continued viability of the Enlightenment project, suggesting that, despite attacks from the right and various postmodernists, ‘coercive inequality and avoidable ignorance’ still require an enlightened response. Discarding history is an especially fraught outcome of the turn away from Enlightenment values. Where history might inform, say, public debate and policy-making on and for the media, it is instead largely ignored. In consequence, the Enlightenment concept of free expression is now by no means seen as a crucial public good, the key human right. The history of the struggle for press freedom is forgotten. The basic principle of free speech is abridged and adjusted for non-print media as with current British communications regulatory structures. However, it can be argued that all of the received legitimations for media-specific content controls above the general law - from supposed spectrum scarcity through to the public right to know - are poorly grounded. Their undebated general acceptance dangerously undermines the concept of free expression. Yet, as Garnham reminds us, for Kant and his successors emancipation depended on enlightenment which in turn depended on publicity - the free exchange of ideas about the world and about social relations with fellow citizens in order to arrive at truth and a freely chosen and shared moral community.

Book Review: Big and beautiful: DNCJ: Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (Academia & The British Library, pp1014, £65)

This is a work of no small ambition, weighing in at more than 1,000 pages and boldly and baldly announcing itself in caps: DNCJ – claiming the acronymic high ground of the OED and the ODNB. But this implicit hubris is more justified than not. The Dictionary of Nineteen-Century Journalism in Britain and Ireland is described by its editors as a “snapshot” and its 1,600-plus entries are indeed not comprehensive. Nevertheless, it gives as rich a picture as one could wish of a world where print was the media king. When I found my own personal model of an unjustly forgotten 19th century journalist – Jessie Boucherett, an early feminist who published the Englishwoman’s Review in the 1860s – duly celebrated, I realise that looking for omissions was a pretty footling enterprise. The DNCJ does not simply correct our tendency to leave the 19th century press as a footnote to history; it presents the entire Victorian landscape as being awash with journalism. The entry on Charles Dickens, for example, begins with the facts that he “served a full newspaper apprenticeship” and (this will bring much pleasure to the NCTJ) “taught himself shorthand”. Dickens’s enduring achievement as a master of English literature is transformed into, merely, the “eight serial novels” (unnamed) that he produced between the onerous business of editing Household Words and All the Year Round – “hugely successful enterprises in weekly magazine journalism”. Or consider Marian Evans: in the early 1850s she became the first woman to edit a prestigious British periodical, The Westminster Review. She “was a pragmatic and capable journalist”; but that word, “journalist”, does not, for example, appear in her entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There she is, of course, “George Eliot”, novelist: “A great delineator... and eloquent observer of humanity” – but no hack. Around 20 per cent of the entries on individual “journalists/editors” are on women, a welcome strength. As the Boucherett biography indicates, their work was by no means confined to the world of fashion and household magazines or indeed merely to writing and editing. Many who published, though, like George Eliot, assumed male persona. Margaret Oliphant, for example, was very much a precursor of today’s featured columnist. Henry James, in his obituary of her, thought Big and beautiful

Is ‘British Cinema’ a Zebra?

It is in political science as much as in any subset of cultural studies that the justification for treating British cinema as a specific entity lies. As a reflection of British national identity, or of the lack of coherence in national identity, few areas of cultural production offer such rich pickings. Examining the chasm between Britain and its cinema is likely to be more fruitful than any analysis of the latter in isolation.

Say Goodnight, Nurse

Since the arrival of multi-channel television, there has been considerable debate about whether broadcasting still needs to be under the restraint of so much content regulation. Why should broadcast programmes be treated any differently from other forms of media content? Much of the debate has centred round the impartiality regulations, which some also consider will impede broadcastings ability to deal effectively with changed political realities, while others argue that these are all that prevent broadcasting from becoming as opinion-driven as much of the press. Here two distinguished academics find themselves on opposite sides of the fen...

The conscience of cinema: the works of Joris Ivens 1912–1989: by Thomas Waugh

The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens 1912-1989 by Thomas Waugh. Amsterdam University Press. 2016.

The Martian Invasion and the Sociological Imagination

124 hardcover. Also available as an open access E-Book. 779 pages.

Book Review: News travels fastThe News from Waterloo: the Race to Tell Britain of Wellington's Victory, by CathcartBrian (Faber & Faber, pp335, £16.99)

I am not here concerned with the fact that this event at Grover’s Mill did not happen; that it was, in fact, a fiction — that week’s Mercury Theater of the Air presentation on CBS directed by, and starring, Orson Welles. Fiction in the guise of news is unremarkable, after all: it is even to be found buried in the news itself. ‘Truth’, it should not be forgotten, is for the press as much a branding device as it is an earnest of quality. We can see this in its archive from, say, the French canard — news-book — with its true (veritable) report of a dragon seen in the skies above Paris in 1567 through the astronomer Sir John Herschel’s observation via a giant telescope of creatures on the moon reported by Benjamin Day’s New York Daily Sun in 1835 to all the fabrications, embellishments and entrapments of yesterday’s papers (Fellow 2013:88; Jankovic 2000:195). The Herschel story appeared in the New York Sun on 6 May 1835 as a sensational spoiler to disrupt the launch of its first one cent rival, the New York Herald; but that paper’s publisher, James Gordon Bennett Sr, would become — and more successfully so than Day — a purveyor of such stunts. He was, after all, the man who (reportedly) said: ‘Many a good newspaper story has been ruined by over verification.’ Of few major news stories is this truer than of the received myth of the impact of the Welles broadcast.

‘The Greatest Documentaries of All Time’: The Sight and Sound 2014 poll

67 keep up with events. Lamb has demonstrated the virtues and rewards of encouraging journalists to stay faithful to one place or region and a story they care deeply about. In my case it was Vietnam. In Lamb’s it is Afghanistan. She never allowed herself to be completely sidetracked by any other assignment. Afghanistan became a part of her. She made it her own war. It is an oldfashioned approach to foreign reporting. Well worth preserving and encouraging, nonetheless, for out of it come books like this. I am sure her book will be studied at staff colleges and read, with discomfort perhaps, in the corridors of power. While often in awe of soldiers in the field she has little praise for the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence. Lamb has provided a great lesson in journalism too. For in this increasingly fast-paced world many editors have a notoriously short attention span as they send their journalists scurrying from assignment to assignment, chasing deadlines and datelines in a breathless attempt to