Megan Gwynne Mullen

Space Bias/Time Bias: Harold Innis, Empire and Communications

Harold Adams Innis introduced his major contributions to communication scholarship gradually, perhaps not even realizing until near the end of his life that he even had ideas to contribute to this nascent field. Reviewing Innis’s work, as well as what has been written about him since his death in 1952, I am aware of how much my thinking has been influenced by him. But unlike many influential theorists, Innis’s most powerful ideas are stated subtly, often embedded in lengthy histories full of arcane detail. So I don’t always remember to credit him directly when spouting off notions about connections between the printing press and modern-day forms of slavery, or between local historians and the rise of internet genealogy sites. Yet I should cite various essays and I certainly should cite Empire and Communications. I am confronted constantly by evidence that the conditions Innis identified as key to the success and longevity of empires define twenty-firstcentury life. Empire and Communications is a seminal book.1 Its meticulous examination of civilizations from ancient history to the early twentieth century consumed years of Innis’s life, as he looked to support his thesis that media technologies are the critical influences in the rise and fall of empires. He explains that “the concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. . . . Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space

ROUNDTABLE: Brian Winston, Messages: Free Expression, Media and the West from Gutenberg to Google

Easy to read, and highly topical, Messages writes a history of mass communication in Europe and its outreaches, as a search for the origins of media forms from print and stage, to photography, film and broadcasting. Arguing that the development of the mass media has been an essential engine driving the western concept of an individual, Brian Winston examines how the right of free expression is under attack, and how the roots of media expression need to be recalled to make a case for the medias importance for the protection of individual liberty. Relating to the US constitution, and key laws in the UK which form the foundation of our society, this is a highly useful book for students of media, communication, history, and journalism.

Residual Media (review)

506 Electric Sounds is probably not that book. It will not readily serve those outside Wurtzler’s own specialty, because he employs a vocabulary that detracts incalculably from the book’s readability. There are also significant problems with his arguments, evidence, and conclusions. The book focuses exclusively on mass media, to its detriment. It might seem reasonable to forego a discussion of the telephone in this study, because it was not a “mass” media in the usual sense. Yet Wurtzler repeatedly mentions, in isolation, the contributions of AT&T and its subsidiaries. He fails to make anything of the overwhelming presence of the U.S. telephone conglomerate in inventing, manufacturing, providing services for, or promoting the technological artifacts that are at the center of his argument. In a work focusing on “hardware” and seeking links across media and corporations, this is an inexplicable omission. Also troubling is Wurtzler’s failure to make more than passing reference to governmental regulation and economic intervention. Other historians have established that government-led investigations, legal proceedings, and eventual regulation of the mass media are central explanatory factors in their technological histories. Here, again, is another cross-media linkage ignored. The major omissions and artificial constraints placed on this work are perhaps the reasons why Wurtzler fails to reach novel conclusions. In a chapter titled “Conclusions/Reverberations” he explains, weakly, that he “stubbornly resists imposing closure” (p. 280) on his subject. Instead, after briefly summarizing his chapters he diverges into a narrative that includes miscellaneous personal recollections, opinion, and a discussion of loosely related recent events. Readers looking for a cross-cutting study of the use of sound in several different media would be better served returning to works like Andre Millard’s America on Record (1995), Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New (1988), or the unpublished dissertations of Michael J. Biel, William Lafferty, and Mark Clark, among others.

The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941 (review)

228 The other three essays are comparatively weak with regard to the theme of the collection and seem removed from its organizing principle. Michael Brown recounts the transformation of the popular image of Guglielmo Marconi during the rise of broadcast radio in the early 1920s, attributable to his claims of having received radio messages from Mars. George Plasketes looks at Steven Bochco’s failed attempt to meld the genres of Broadway musical and television police drama in Cop Rock and notes its implications for the development of later hybrid-programming genres and the adoption of singular “special episodes” in more conventional vehicles. And Heather Hundley does a content analysis of programs during the last season of the comedy series Cheers and draws inferences about their reflecting sexual double standards in society. The use of content analysis and genre theory sets these essays apart from the rest of the anthology and blurs its focus. One also wonders why the editors need to posit a strict dichotomy between “objective” and “subjective” historiographical approaches, asserting that “[t]he essays contained in the first section of the book predominantly represent traditional objective history, while those in the second half exemplify cultural studies research” (pp. 5–6). The claim that there was ever a positivist method of historiography, as laid out in the introduction, is dubious and seems arbitrary in establishing the ground for Carey’s approach to communication as culture, influenced by those of Robert Park, John Dewey, and Harold Adams Innis. Carey’s argument was against positivism in communication “effects” research, not historiography. Furthermore, it is difficult to distinguish some of the essays that are purportedly “objective” from those that supposedly take the cultural-studies approach—aside from those that substitute pop consciousness or ideology for insight into historical and cultural change.

Coming to Terms with the Future He Foresaw

When first published in 1964, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media created—at least for a time—a bridge between the ivory tower and mainstream popular culture.1 When the book became available in paperback it sold a hundred thousand copies, making it a bestseller. It turned its English professor author into a pop culture icon, as people from many walks of life marveled at the book’s insights on how media technologies affect human behavior. McLuhan reveled in the attention as perhaps no academic had done before. He published articles not only in respected scholarly journals but also in Family Circle, McCall’s, Saturday Evening Post, Playboy (an interview), and a variety of newspapers. He had his ideas featured in art exhibits. And he made a now-classic cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie Annie Hall. McLuhan never shed the academic mantle, though, and until his death in 1980 continued to teach at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. It was there that he started the Centre for Culture and Technology— which, though it is now struggling financially, has set groundbreaking precedents in the humanistic study of technology. For those of us who look at electronic media in the ways literary scholars look at books, it is hard to think about the field of academic endeavor known as media studies without a nod to McLuhan. Even those who cannot accept his notion that “the medium is the message” have had to ponder his reasons for making this oftquoted statement. Of course, not everyone was equally wowed by McLuhan’s splashy debut. C L A S S I C S R E V I S I T E D

Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (review)

Cold War, Cool Medium is an engaging and complex account of U.S. commercial television during the 1950s—specifically, the period and concept that have been labeled “McCarthyism.” Thomas Doherty has read and reread a wealth of original source documents (including publications ranging from the Washington Post to Variety to TV Guide, as well as archived television programs) to make sense of a larger cultural picture. He argues persuasively against the “conventional wisdom” in which “television is cast as coconspirator in the conformities and repressions of Cold War America” (p. 2). Instead, he claims, television by its very nature allowed the namecallers to expose their own ridiculousness to the nation. Television’s characteristic openness and participatory nature (its “coolness”) proved antithetical to their unfounded accusations. Cold War, Cool Medium includes several very strong chapters that elaborate this. Chapter 5, “Forums of the Air,” for example, traces the parallels between President Eisenhower’s progressive self-distancing from McCarthy’s accusatory politics and his own development of an increasingly telegenic personality. Eisenhower became increasingly chatty in his televised appearances and willing to be telecast while relaxing at home. It would seem that such a cool demeanor would be out of sync with the hotheaded senator. Of course, as Doherty’s writing makes apparent, Eisenhower’s televisual appeal owed at least as much to the medium’s multicausal evolution as to his own efforts to cultivate it for political benefit. The president was hardly the only politician helped by the intrusive live cameras. Chapter 6, “Roman Circuses and Spanish Inquisitions,” begins with a look at the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce hearings of 1951, headed by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. These hearings turned out to be a natural for the television screen, as a T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E