Introduction

Mapping the Field of Media History

John Nerone

Media history is an emerging field. Scholars across the full range of the social sciences and humanities now encounter the media as a phenomenon. As they work to comprehend the media, they often turn to historical work as a mode of explanation. There they are discovering a large and overlapping set of theories, problems, and texts. Working sometimes in dialogue with but as often mostly unaware of or unconcerned with each other, they are nevertheless beginning to generate the intellectual and institutional apparatus of an interdisciplinary field. No one knows whether the field will cohere or enjoy only a moment of dynamism before disappearing.

Ten years ago I addressed this emerging field in an essay in Blackwell's Companion to Media Studies (Nerone, 2003). Remarking on the various disciplinary sources of media history, I argued that there was a fundamental incoherence springing from a lack of recognition of what exactly was meant by the term “media,” and that in fact there were two different notions of media in play in the field: one notion referring to technologies, and another referring to institutions. For many scholars, media are the tools of communication, like the telegraph, while for others, media are the organizations that produce and distribute news and entertainment, like the BBC. I did not at the time suggest a definitive resolution of this division, though I did point to areas in which scholarly formations seemed to be bringing together work across the divide. Revisiting this question a few years later (Nerone, 2006), I outlined three formations that seemed to promise coherence, or at least meaningful dialogue, among the many genres of media history: the history of technology, reconceived under the general principle of the social construction of technologies; the “history of the book,” as a well-institutionalized meeting ground of disparate scholars with modest theoretical investments; and the history of the public sphere, migrating from Habermas's formulation into a more catholic notion of public spaces and practices. I did not predict success for any of these. Rather, I offered my own preference for continued anarchy.

James Curran offered another take on the fundamental diversity of media history in his book Media and Power (2002; see also Curran, 2009). Curran identifies a number of competing narratives of British media history: the dominant “liberal” narrative, and challenging “feminist,” “populist,” “libertarian,” “anthropological,” “radical,” and “technological determinist” narratives. Each narrative in Curran's scheme brings certain moments and actors into visibility while obscuring others in a way that might seem incommensurable. Curran holds out hope for a coherent integrated narrative of media history, at least in Britain, emerging from a dialogue among metanarratives. It is a modest hope, but one that I do not share.

There are good reasons why there are so many narratives of media history. In addition to the disagreement over who is the protagonist (technologies or institutions), there are also disagreements over what supporting characters are most involved (markets, governments, individuals, gendered power structures), where the story is set (homes, communities, nations, virtual spaces, the globe), and what the story means. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? One might hope for settling these questions through a scholarly conversation. The most likely result of that is a shifting set of groups of like-minded scholars: sphericules. Or one might hope that the welter of specific narratives might harmonize on a deeper level, where a larger narrative fits them together by making them part of the same big story. But as you appeal continually to larger and larger narratives, you find that each one of them has competitors framed around different selections of character, setting, plot, and theme. Alas, it's turtles all the way down.¹ If order is to emerge from this chaos, it won't be brought by tellers of a grand narrative.

That's too bad for me, because I would have preferred to have composed a book that moved in a steady narrative line. And of course I have such a book in mind, as I think every media historian does. But the task of this book is to represent the field, not to present an author's master narrative. This handbook offers a map of this still anarchic field. Each essay presents a relatively coherent assessment of a particular approach or problem or moment. A critic might contend that the essays add up to less than the sum of their parts. There are, by design, dissonant voices in this collection, and the intent is to have them work together to indicate the shape of the field.

In this introduction, I will try to spell out the contribution of the collection as a whole, and argue for the usefulness of thinking of media history as a field, in spite of the fact that it is hardly a coherent field.

Approaches

Media history is an interdiscipline that brings historical research into dialogue with the unruly tribe of communication theories. Historical research in this formulation can be of two sorts. One is the historical work of historians with degrees in history working in departments of history, and I'll refer to this in shorthand as history from now on. The other is historical work done by scholars in many other disciplines, and I'll refer to this as historical studies. History remains relatively non-theoretical. A sophisticated engagement with theory (or any substitute term, like interpretation or methodology) is not a requirement for a piece of work being determined good or valuable by historians. Good historical work is defined not so much by theoretical or methodological correctness but by two more pragmatic standards: whether the author has made a good-faith effort to look at everything relevant to the subject matter and whether the author has sufficiently addressed one's work to the ongoing conversations of other historians. Historians have paid attention over the past few decades to the theoretical underpinnings of historical narrative (White, 1973) and have also thought some about the stuff they draw on, the archive, and how it's been shaped and selected and preserved (Burton, 2003; Robertson, 2011; Smith, 1998). But attention to these discussions is a hood ornament of a history, not part of the engine or drive train.

Historical studies tend to be more engaged with theory and methodology. Historical sociology or anthropology or economics, for instance, often sets out to test a theory, or tries to clear the same methodological threshold as other research in the same discipline. Media historians often look like historical sociologists in this regard.

Media histories differ from other historical studies, though, in that they tend not to have a body of theory that they call their own. Media theory is an ad hoc assemblage of theories drawn from other fields and disciplines and then (sometimes) modified by being addressed to processes of mediation. At this moment, there is no standard version of media theory. Nor is there a standard list of communication theories. Communication scholars have been playing with schemata of media approaches and theories for quite some time (Berelson, 1959; Craig, 1999), and may have moved closer to a standard taxonomy, but there are damned few theories that every media scholar is expected to know, and those don't seem to add up to either a worldview or a toolkit. Even if media studies is moving in the direction of coherence (an arguable proposition), other social sciences and humanities seem to be moving in the opposite direction, decreasing the likelihood that media studies will ever arrive at a moment of stabilization.

So when I say that media history mediates between historical work and communication theories, I'm not talking about a dialectic between two stable entities. Instead, both partners in this negotiation contain multitudes. As a result, the boundaries of media history are very difficult to describe. Those boundaries change not just in the present but in the past. Work that was written in previous decades gets hailed into media history in a process of irredentism² (Peters, 1986). Just as dead people may find themselves baptized into Mormonism, Elizabeth Eisenstein awoke one day to discover that she was a media historian.

Because of the ad hoc way in which media history has grown, this book takes a multidimensional approach to mapping it as a field. The first dimension, Part 1 of the book, consists of approaches, and represents the theoretical domain of media history. A critical reader will notice a hard core of dead white men at the top of this section – Marx, Innis, McLuhan, Foucault. Essays centered around figures like these are coupled with essays about approaches like race/ethnicity and gender. Those essays may seem to a critical reader to be compensatory, but they are not add-ons. Scholars of gender insist that every history has an element of gender to it, even if unacknowledged, in the same way that Marx says every history has an element of political economy to it. Each of these chapters is meant to take on a body of notions that can and should play in every work of media history. Any monograph in media history ought to acknowledge questions of class and economics, technology and culture, identity and discourse. These questions are not unique to media history or media studies, but they are fundamentally constitutive of any account of the media.

These chapters also begin to nominate entries to a canon. Media historians do tend to have read the same basic books. Some of these really belong to media scholarship. Harold Adams Innis, for instance, is read a little bit by economists and geographers, but is primarily taken seriously by media scholars. McLuhan has readers across the humanities, but is an exotic there, often invoked only as a straw man. Most of the authors of the foundational approaches had no investment in media scholarship so called. Marx, Foucault, and Habermas speak to the full range of the social sciences and humanities. Each of them inspired a next generation, also frequently cited here: McLuhan and Innis begat Walter Ong, James Carey, and Neil Postman (Marvin in this volume); Marx's work (Mosco in this volume) oriented Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Herb Schiller; numerous scholars of the history of sexuality, the history of science, and the study of governmentality continue the legacy of Foucault (Packer in this volume); Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner offered contrapuntal voices to Habermas's. This second generation, too, did not have an investment in media studies as a field.

Also canonical is a range of historical work that sometimes tracks the theoretical work. The other Marx, Leo (Mosco in this volume), is an example, as is Eisenstein and a series of other scholars – Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Natalie Zemon Davis, Adrian Johns – who are identified with the formation that calls itself “the history of the book” (Zboray & Zboray in this volume). Benedict Anderson has had a tremendous impact among media historians, although often through a superficial appropriation of his concept of imagined communities. Scholars who study identity in media history (Soderlund and Squires in this volume) usually have read W. E. B. DuBois, Omi and Winant, and Joan Scott, who do not define themselves as media scholars, as well as Stuart Hall, who does. A pair of social histories from the last decade are more directly aimed at media history: Asa Briggs and Peter Burke's Social History of the Media (2005) and Paul Starr's Creation of the Media (2004). Briggs and Burke are historians by training, and Starr is a sociologist; their books were written with an awareness of their impact on media history but without an investment in an identity as media studies scholarship.

This canon-in-the-making outlines a common set of problems around which media histories orbit. These problems are not specific to media history, however, and are broadly shared across the social sciences and humanities. The problem of empire is the gravitational center of studies of writing and communication in the ancient world. The problem of the circuit of meaning is the central motif in histories of print culture, which tend to dwell on how ideas were disseminated through the production, distribution, and consumption of texts. The problem of the public gives urgency to journalism history and the history of freedom of expression and communication policy. The problem of the local and the global informs the study of the movement of messages through space and across borders, expressed in frames ranging from cultural imperialism to hybridity to modernization. The problem of representation is one of the more powerful drivers of the analysis of media content. The problem of capitalism appears in accounts of media commercialization, media ownership, consumerism, and advertising support. The problem of the modern and postmodern invites studies of how media forms hail people into configurations as readers or as audience members or as hybrid producer/consumers, and how media institutions and media professionals won and then lost the ability to stabilize meanings. Astride all of them is the problem of democracy.

Moments

The heart of this book is a set of chapters devoted to specific moments. The list of moments is non-exclusive and sometimes overlapping; some specific texts and authors appear in more than one of these chapters. One could easily imagine other chapters and other organizations. Much of this particular list orients around communication technologies, like writing or the telegraph. Others deal with grand historical moments like the Enlightenment. The logic behind this selection is to follow the scholarship: to focus on objects around which work from various fields coalesces. There is an emphasis on English-language scholarship in this selection, but at least it's an ethnocentrism with a guilty conscience.

A number of topics appear recurrently in these chapters. These topics may come to be the ground on which broader media histories emerge. Among these topics are journalism, the public sphere, technology, markets, and policy; lurking as yet unrecognized is work. These topics are thoroughly entangled with each other, with the public sphere coming up repeatedly in conjunction with several others, and markets and policy continually making cameo appearances.

Journalism is a particularly well-represented topic. Journalism history is one of the oldest and most firmly institutionalized modes of media history, claiming its own scholarly organizations and journals. For all that, it is not a deeply thought-through field. Even now, as journalism as a normative practice, as a viable occupation, and as a social institution is experiencing disruptions that commentators label a crisis, journalism historians are slow to recognize the stakes (Nerone, 2011; for two remarkable exceptions, see McChesney & Nichols, 2011; Zelizer, 2010). But the emergence of a recognition of the transnational dimension of journalism's history is one of the more promising developments.

Four essays in Part 2 specifically address journalism, and they are broken down geographically. In addition, a fifth deals with the international wire services, the infrastructure of a global news system that has had powerful influence on national developments. The geographical chapters deal with Europe (primarily Germany, France, and Britain), North America (primarily the United States), South Korea, and China. These are mostly narrative in structure.

Differences in the style and tone of these pieces reflect regional differences in both scholarship and news systems. The European history (Wilke in this volume) takes primacy in time; the Europeans invented the term, and inaugurated what became a global practice. The European invention of journalism is characterized by fragmentation along national lines and by strong interaction with states, which entailed an emphasis on centers of power and especially capital cities.

Modern journalism grew from both the struggle to free the press from state control and the rise of new, more market-oriented business models. The first was framed in the West by a notion of the public sphere; it is a matter of debate whether its development resembled the Habermasian model. In North America, and particularly in the United States (Kaplan in this volume), a set of normative ideas about how the press was supposed to facilitate the public deliberation of citizens exerted a gravitational force on public policy, especially the construction of a postal system as an infrastructure for the press (John, 1995; see also Chapter 13, this volume). Coupled with artisanal production by printer-editors, the North American system took on a fundamentally different cast than the European one that had seeded it. It also provided a resource for an emerging system of mass popular politics.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a combination of a market revolution (Sellers, 1994) and the emergence of a telegraph–railroad infrastructure transformed the news system (see John in this volume). A more commercialized press began to produce a news culture distinguished by event-oriented and eventually neutral or objective items that acquired commodity value through the labor of reporters and through distribution as saleable items through the wires (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001; Chalaby, 2000). When news organizations industrialized – became big businesses among other big businesses – they repurposed elements of the norms of the public sphere into an ideology of professionalism and social responsibility that could explain and justify the power they were recognized to hold. They encouraged the growth of journalism degree programs in colleges and universities. They began to export this ideology to the rest of the world. The Western wire services created a global news system in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Rantanen in this volume), forming a material base for the transmission of Western journalism as a news style.

The Asian chapters are again quite different, reflecting both the remarkable transformations of the countries they cover and the challenges of present-day journalism and journalism education in those countries (Kim and Chen & Wang in this volume). The histories they tell share a series of themes: a prehistory of “indigenous” journalism in the court papers of Confucian monarchs, an encounter with Western colonialism, an initial encounter with Western forms of journalism, the interaction of journalism with a struggle for national liberation, the transformative impact of World War II and its aftermath the continuing negotiation with state power, and the extraordinary recent experience with digital technology.

The journalism history chapters are more concretely institutional than the rest of the book. They can tell the story of a recognized formation of practices and ideas embodied in organizations that have left archives and that interact with other agencies like states, universities, and advertisers who also generate archives. They can work from a significant body of previous scholarship on specific news organizations, journalists, legal controversies, and national press systems. There is a global history of Western hegemonic journalism. At the same time, the boundaries of this history are not settled. This is most clear in the Asian case studies, in which hegemonic Western journalism has only somewhat colonized the news system, while other journalisms, ranging from Confucian admonition and Maoist self-criticism to citizen journalism, offer counter-histories. The act of writing journalism history, in such a fluid situation, can contribute to a redefinition of journalism's identity.

The chapters on technologies are more abstract. Most trace the assembling of elements into familiar forms – instruments or assemblages – that have some built-in affordances that in turn provide some agency in historical processes. Historical work on communication technologies has settled in to a middle ground between the sort of muscular technological determinism argued by Innis and McLuhan and a contrary argument from social determinism that can be found everywhere from Milton's Areopagitica to the limited effects model of media influence. In this middle ground, there is a soft determinism that comes from the way technologies are socially constructed.

The history of the printing revolution provides a convenient parable of the interplay of these positions. From the Renaissance to the scholarship of Innis and McLuhan, the printing press was celebrated as the tool that enabled Western civilization. A large body of scholarship based partly on careful research into the invention and dissemination of print technology in fifteenth-century Europe (mostly ignoring its invention in other places) and a formalist analysis of the abstract technology saw powerful effects generated more or less automatically. The most hyperbolic version of this position is McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, which attributes to printing not just Western rationality but also the discovery of depth in perspective, a side effect of a reorganization of the sensorium. An initial rejoinder to this hard technological determinism came from Elizabeth Eisenstein's epic work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980). As its title suggests, Eisenstein's book also sees powerful effects, but they come about because printing reorganized the environment of European intellectuals through the mass reproduction of standardized texts. Still, Eisenstein settled on a feature of the technology as the prime mover of this agency and called it “typographical fixity” A generation later, Adrian Johns (1998) introduced another dimension of social construction, arguing that fixity itself was a characteristic that had to be built into printing, and that initially printing had introduced heightened uncertainty into intellectual life by spawning uncontrollable flows of forgeries and piracies.

The chapters on technology in this volume deal with a broad range of objects: writing (Peters), printing (Kittler), the telegraph and telephone (Rantanen, John), sound technologies (Rothenbuhler), photography (Robertson), motion pictures (Wasson, Wasser), broadcasting and television (Ouellette), computing (Grier), and mobile telephony and other digital technologies (Andrejevic). These chapters too are quite diverse. John Durham Peters explores a vast history and a large spectrum of scholarship on various writing systems, while David Alan Grier offers a minute examination of a string of applications of computing technology to newspaper production. In spite of this diversity, several common themes emerge.

Each of these technologies is presented as socially constructed at some level. Usually the construction involves the interplay of different types of actors. In the industrial era and after, the interplay generally assumes similar forms across culture industries (see Wasser in this volume), which constitute a kind of braiding of four histories: of science, of entrepreneurs, of regulators, and of publics or audiences. The history of theatrical film is a good case in point. There is a scientific history stretching from the camera obscura through the development of photography and the magic lantern to different apparatuses for film exhibition; this trajectory can be captured in shorthand form by narrating innovators in a sequence: Daguerre, then Muybridge, then Edison, more or less. Then there are the various attempts to monetize these innovations through first a “cinema of attractions” (Gunning, 1990), then through a variety of projection venues, culminating by the 1920s in the classic studio system in the United States, with parallel histories in some other countries. As entrepreneurs competed for market control, they engaged with the state on several levels: as regulators of exhibition spaces, as censors of film content, as enforcers of antitrust law, and perhaps most importantly as enforcers of patent and copyright law, which became the key tools by which some measure of industrial control was maintained. Throughout this history, ordinary people inflected developments continually: as consumers, as fans, as crowds, as voters, and arguably as cultural citizens in a cinematic public sphere (Hansen, 1991). So the social construction of theatrical film involved a complex negotiation among many different actors, with the decisive role being played sometimes by entrepreneurs, sometimes by policymakers, sometimes by audiences, and sometimes by technicians. Similar stories are told about many technologies in this volume.

One narrative arc that reappears often in these pages is mobile privatization. Initially coined by Raymond Williams (1971) to describe the vector behind the social construction of television, mobile privatization denotes the deep drive in modern capitalist societies to reconfigure practices so that people can engage in them as private individuals or nuclear families moving freely through social and geographical space. Mobile privatization offers a shared trajectory uniting disparate objects and systems that moved activities from public to private ownership and control in the course of the rise of mass consumer societies: the automobile, moving transportation from trams and railways to the suburban garage; the refrigerator, moving food storage from the public market to the family kitchen (Hartley, 1999); the telephone, moving social interaction from the public street corner to the private parlor; and, of course, radio and television, moving entertainment from the public theater to the living room (Hay, 2006). Media technologies help people move more quickly and smoothly through shared spaces too, providing a kind of capsule (de Cauter, 2004): think of the way a newspaper can be held up as a kind of shield, preventing unwanted interaction on a bus or subway; or the way people submerge their gaze into a smartphone, effacing their surroundings and immersing themselves in an extralocal environment. Common sense tells us that mobile privatization sums up much of the work of the developing digital media system, intensifying the capsule of privacy by detaching it from the defined space of the home and the car. But even within this very convincing narrative there are contrary positions to hold, one in which the tools of mobile privatization are “technologies of freedom” (Pool, 1984), and another in which they are “technologies of oppression” (Howard, 2010, pp. 13–14).

The “technology of oppression” version of mobile privatization runs along two tracks, which we might call Foucault and Marx. The Foucault track sees the mobile private individual as the ideal subject of neoliberal governmentality, deploying the tools of digital communication to render oneself visible to surveillance and at the same time better self-disciplined. In the Marx track, mobile privatization accelerates the expropriation and accumulation of wealth, in large part by capturing unpaid labor that people misrecognize as play or leisure. The latter is Smythe's (1994) argument in his famous “Blindspot” essay. It is also the argument of numerous critics of Facebook.

Late capitalism is another overarching topic in the essays on technologies. Repeatedly we see firms and corporations competing for monopoly control of industries. In turn, we see industries that are prone to concentration because of either economies of scale associated with production technologies (see, for instance, the essays by Kaplan and Stole) or apparent instances of “natural monopoly” (see John and Rantanen). Media technologies tend to produce bottlenecks in distribution, either because of aspects of the technologies involved or because of the collusion of policymakers in reinforcing the market control of specific interests, for instance in spectrum allocation (McChesney, 1993) or in intellectual property law (Lessig, 1999). Yet monopoly is consistently seen as a problem. The media system is supposedly one of the infrastructures of democracy, so it follows that, if there are pools of monopoly in the media system, the media power generated will distort the conduct of public deliberation. A liberal could argue that the public sphere itself must be a monopoly. Even counterpublics cannot operate effectively in the absence of a hegemonic mainstream public sphere. How else can a coherent public opinion emerge? And if the public sphere must somehow exercise a monopoly, wouldn't the media that serve it eventually, if only for efficiency's sake, have to share some monopoly characteristics? Still, even conceding that, wouldn't we want that monopoly power to be publicly held?

Work is a topic that is the direct subject of only one essay (Barnhurst) but that figures in a few others as well (Wasser, and also the essays on journalism). Media work usually has been thought of as white collar work, and the most familiar media occupations have either sought to professionalize or to control the labor market through unionization. These workers' movements have had varying success, depending on where and when you look; for the most part, “technical” occupations have organized more successfully than “creative” ones (including journalism as a creative occupation). Where media workers have won some measure of autonomy, there has often been a gender component; autonomous work is gendered male, historically. Women have often had to fight a war on two fronts in media workplaces – one against simple exclusion, and the other against a masculine workplace culture.

Implicit in the scholarship on these moments, as in much communication scholarship generally, is the unspoken presence of democracy as the master problem. Democracy appears in its political guise in the essays on journalism and in invocations of the public sphere; it appears in its cultural guise in the essays on media technologies. In either arena, democracy is supposed to involve dispersed and shared power, freedom from coercion, and an ability to engage in meaningful action in part through communication. For most of the scholars represented in this collection, and in this section in particular, the history of the media has not been a story of steady progress toward democracy. At the same time, it is hard for these and other media scholars to imagine democracy without the media.

The Foundations of Media Studies

The question of democracy also runs through the history of media studies. Part 3 features a series of essays on key moments in the history of media studies. A critic might say that this part of the book is linked to the first two only by the accidental appearance of the word “history.” On the contrary, the history of the study of the media is in fact a modeling of the history of the media themselves. The rhythm of the life course of the field reflects a negotiation between the history of the media system and the history of the academic organizations and institutions that have housed its study and their own negotiations with the political forces that shape them.

There are three major moments in this history. The first extends from nineteenth-century arguments about the breakup of traditional communities in the process of industrialization and modernization, to World War I-era anxieties about the power of propaganda. The second moment overlaps with the first, examining the influence of media messages and media forms on public opinion in modern democracies, with the conflagration of World War II and the settlement achieved in Western countries afterward as pivotal. The third moment stretches from the critique of liberal versions of the influence of the media in democracies to the collapse of mass communication as a business model and the rise of networked digital communication in the past few years. Each moment engages with a specific dominant version of the media. The first moment engages mostly with “the press,” the second with “mass communications,” and the third with “media.”

The first moment (the subject of essays by Hardt, Collins, and Wahl-Jorgensen in this volume) began with the question of the impact of democracy and free markets on culture and politics. Key nineteenth-century statements of the question were de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Mill's On Liberty, and Le Bon's The Crowd. In Germany, whose universities produced the founders of graduate programs in US universities, sociologists took on the study of the press as an institution, framing its social importance in terms of the shift from community to society. One product of German university education was Robert Ezra Park, who became a key figure in the Chicago School of sociology.

Park's career offers a neat container for many of the influences of this early period of media studies. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he studied with John Dewey (who later moved to Chicago and then to Columbia University, both key locations for the gestation of media studies). Upon graduation, Park went to work as a journalist. Then he took an MA in philosophy at Harvard, where he studied with William James. He then did postgraduate work in Germany, studying with Georg Simmel at Berlin and then Wilhelm Windelband in Heidelberg, where he took his PhD in philosophy. He returned to the United States and taught briefly at Harvard before going to work with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee. In 1914, he joined the sociology department at the University of Chicago.

Park's combination of US pragmatist philosophy and German sociology was characteristic of media studies in the early decades of the twentieth century. Media had been called forth to fill a vacuum in meaning making for populations uprooted by industrialization and urbanization. Chicago was a particularly interesting laboratory for studying such media. The population of Chicago included large pools of recent immigrants, divided by language, nationality, religion, and political persuasion, segregated by neighborhood and exploited by employers and purveyors of goods and entertainment. Assuming the posture of progressive reformers, sociologists surveyed this population to find out how media took over the role of cultural authority left vacant by immigration and social transformation, processes which had eclipsed the authority of parents, community, churches, and schools. Chicago sociologists and their fellow travelers, like George Herbert Mead and John Dewey, hoped that the media system would replace the meaningful culture produced by interaction with local communities by allowing people to form an equally meaningful culture rooted in a “Great Community” (Dewey, 1927), and that this culture would allow democracy to flourish in what Wallas had called the Great Society.

The press assumed great responsibility for constructing the great community. For Dewey and many others, the press had underperformed. Early media scholarship drew on a generation of populist criticism of the press as a big business, seeing it as in thrall to the “money power,” as muckrakers called concentrated wealth at the beginning of the twentieth century. The climax of this moment of press criticism, and of this moment of media studies, came in the response to World War I. The Great War had given scholars a chance to see the power of propaganda when directed by central governments and deployed through the press. The disillusionment expressed in Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) is understandable, considering Lippmann's participation in the Wilson Administration's efforts to make the war make the world safe for democracy. Lippmann linked his critique of press performance to an indictment of market forces, on the one hand, and of the flawed cognitive machinery of ordinary people on the other. Both parts of that critique yielded research agendas for communication scholars.

The second moment, the moment of mass communications, overlapped with the first. For scholars of Park, Dewey, and Lippmann's generation, the question of the media also involved a fear of cultural anarchy springing from the strangeness of new urban populations. Eastern and Southern Europeans mixing with older immigrant populations from Germany and Ireland and occupying neighborhoods next to growing African American ghettos seemed defenseless against the material that appeared in their newspapers and, beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, on their movie screens. The influence of the movies became a major topic of concern. An audience that included many young people as well as many immigrants seemed especially vulnerable to the obvious emotional and sensual power of the motion picture. And this power was wielded by shady entrepreneurs employing stars of questionable morality. It was this set of anxieties that produced the first massive funded study of media effects, the Payne Fund studies of motion picture influences. It also informed the early studies supported by Rockefeller Foundation funding, like Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown. In a more radical vein, an anxiety about the way the media system might mimic fascism marked the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, and others of the Frankfurt School (see Kellner in this volume).

Meanwhile, other researchers undertook studies funded by sources more interested in applications for profitable media operation. Advertising agencies wanted to be able to tell their clients scientifically what worked to convince consumers; broadcasters wanted to be able to tell their advertisers scientifically what sorts of people watched which programs; political groups wanted to know scientifically how public opinion stood on matters of relevance to elections. This sort of “administrative” research did not fear the power of the media but wished to harness it.

All of these strains came together at a few key institutions. Chief among them was Columbia University, where Paul Lazarsfeld headed the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Lazarsfeld unsuccessfully courted scholars like Adorno and C. Wright Mills, while forming more harmonious partnerships with Frank Stanton, the head of CBS, and Robert K. Merton. Yale University was another key center, housing social psychologists studying media influence like Carl Hovland and political scientists like Harold Lasswell, who wrote formative volumes on propaganda.

As World War II approached, many of these scholars were recruited by the Rockefeller Foundation into a communication seminar that met regularly to try to formulate some covering procedures and terminology for what looked to be an emerging social science discipline. Wilbur Schramm, a product of Harvard and the University of Iowa who would later found PhD programs at Illinois and Stanford, was also a member of this group. When the United States entered the war, most of this group played a role in the war effort, working with the Office of War Information.

World War II produced a settlement among the competing schools of studying media effects. The compromise consisted of an identification of the problem with the so-called “5w” model of communication processes – who says what to whom through which channel with what effect. Media effects would thus take the form of changes in individuals' attitudes, and would be measurable through survey research and experimental study. And a rough set of parameters for findings also appeared at that point in what later came to be called the “limited effects” model (Simonson in this volume). In the limited effects model, media content changes attitudes only under specific circumstances and only with the help of opinion leaders or support from a primary group. The major function of the media in this model was reinforcement. Institutionalized by Lazarsfeld and his students, especially Bernard Berelson and Elihu Katz, this model remains very influential.

Left out of the postwar settlement in media studies were radicals of the left and cultural critics of the right. These continued to voice criticism of “mass culture” and “mass society,” seeing the “mass media” as a central element. On the left, the strongest statement of this position came in the book The Power Elite, by Lazarsfeld's estranged protégé C. Wright Mills (1956).

Through the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, academic work tended to confirm the limited effects model. In the 1970s, a number of approaches appeared, proposing stronger media effects but remaining within the limited effects paradigm and applying the same methods. Among the more vital are agenda-setting, spiral of silence, and uses and gratifications. It is notable that the first two deal primarily with news media. In the 1980s and 1990s, studies of news media influence would also embrace priming effects, framing effects, and indexing, all indicating that the news system could function as an extension of power.

Intimations of media power really blossomed in the Western academy after 1980. By that time, numerous forces outside the academy had already argued the case for media power. In the United States, the civil rights and antiwar movements found a media voice only after a long struggle. On the global scene, a movement for a New World Information and Communication Order had appeared, sponsored in UNESCO by members of the Non-Aligned Movement (see Nordenstreng in this volume).

The rise of critical approaches to media studies can be looked upon as a shift in object of study from “mass communications” to “the media.” To some, the media meant the media system, and was understood as a subsystem of industrial capitalism (see McChesney in this volume, on the political economy of communication). To others, it meant the multiform cultural environment of industrial societies (see McCarthy and Logue in this volume, on cultural studies). Both of these strands drew inspiration from the Marxist tradition, with the political economists crediting Smythe, Schiller, and Garnham and cultural studies scholars crediting Williams, Thompson, and Hall. A broad area of agreement was often obscured in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States and United Kingdom – mostly in the United States – by eruptions of pointed disagreement.

Conclusion

The history of the field in this volume trails off in the 1990s, before the advent of digital media. It is likely that the field will reconfigure itself as the impact of the digital environment becomes clear. The rise of network media will oblige some of us to rethink what we have meant by media, and when we do that we may also have to rethink media history.

The useful lessons of history usually begin with a negative. “Never forget” is the prime example. In media history and in the history of media studies, the obvious lesson might be stated this way: “Don't assume that the term ‘media’ has a stable meaning.” The word itself is relatively recent in coinage, at least as a term applied to communication. In the nineteenth century it was applied to people who communicated with the spirits of the dead. But before that it referred in art, physics, and chemistry to the material that a work or a process used. Air was a medium for sound. Canvas was a medium for painting. Gelatin was a medium for growing bacteria. In the 1920s in the United States it came to be used in advertising agencies to refer to anything that could carry an ad, replacing the term “space,” which had been made archaic by the advent of commercial radio. Only in the second half of the 1930s did that usage become more commonly seen in scholarly and popular writing. In fact, the word was novel enough in the 1960s that many thought McLuhan had invented it. In the 1930s, media referred to radio, magazines, newspapers, and motion pictures; in the 1960s, television was the dominant referent. Now “new” media, or network media or social media, are displacing television and the press in both popular and scholarly conversations. So the meaning of the word “media” has changed several times in the lifespan of the older living media historians.

Therefore, to return to the theme I struck at the beginning of this introduction, we can expect continuing anarchy, both in media studies and more specifically in media history. There are neither the intellectual nor the institutional resources to stabilize either of them as a discipline. But again I think this is a good thing. There is a persisting illusion that knowledge, and especially historical knowledge, works best when it is authoritatively known. Granted, we want to be able to work with a vast array of solid facts or information; nothing is more useless than a debate in which everyone gets to make up their own facts. But historical knowledge is not per se factual; rather, it is interpretive. And if everyone agrees on the interpretive level, then the production of new histories becomes a tedious antiquarian enterprise. It is the interplay of master narratives that makes media history so appealing as a field. One could say that there is too much anarchy; exercises like this book are meant to offer some kind of order. They can try to bring researchers in the field into conversation with each other, and to make them more aware of their compatibilities and dissonances. They cannot, however, make this field into a discipline.

NOTES

1 One version of this saying comes from Geertz (1973, p. 27): “There is an Indian story – at least I heard it as an Indian story – about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.’”

2 Irredentism refers to attempts to “redeem” lands ruled by another country on the basis of claims about ethnic solidarity or historical possession.

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