“The daily newspaper was a European-American invention that soon spread beyond the North Atlantic area. Where the colonial system offered the opportunities, indigenous educated classes soon took advantage of them to make their voices heard in both local languages and those of the colonial rulers. British India was again an especially clear case in point. Here the press developed in fairly close synchrony with Europe’s, one difference being that the printing press appeared in India at the same time as the newspaper: a double communications revolution. The first English-language paper came out in 1780 in Calcutta; the first in an Indian language (Bengali) in 1818. The Gujarati-language Bombay Samachar, founded in 1822, is still published today (as Mumbai Samachar). Soon there appeared English-language papers produced by Indians. Lithographic technology, which soon spread to smaller cities, was common to all. Another reason why the new medium was taken up so quickly, eagerly, and successfully in India was that the country could build upon a rich culture of written reporting. The years from 1835 to 1857 were a time of vibrant progress, in liberal conditions that people in the German Confederation could only dream of at that time. After the Great Rebellion of 1857–58, the colonial government reacted more heavy-handedly to Indian criticisms and tightened its control of the press, but this never escalated into a muzzling of public opinion. The viceroys valued the press both as a means of communicating with the population and as a source that relayed information and attitudes from Indian society. Together with the English legal tradition that generally tied the hands of the state, these pragmatic considerations explain nineteenth-century India’s significance as a country with a highly developed press system.”
Category: Media
Linda McQuaig on the Canadian National Railway’s pioneering use of radio
“Starting in 1924, the CNR launched a dramatic innovation: radio on trains. At the time, radio was a relatively new technology. There were only a few stations, mostly located in the United States, whose signals could be heard in Canada, and only in the evening hours. Still, radio was an enormously exciting new form of entertainment that brought music -often live performances in studio- into homes hundreds of miles away.
Sir Henry was determined to make this exciting new technology part of the pleasure of train travel. There had been some earlier dabbling with radio technology by several U.S. rail lines, but no follow-up on those limited experiments. The CNR therefore became the first to overcome the considerable technological challenges and actually outfit railway cars so they could receive radio signals while in motion. On Janurary 5, 1924, the first radio-equipped transcontinental train, operated by CNR, left Montreal bound for Vancouver.
The concept proved popular. Passengers were delighted to be able to stroll to the train’s lounge car, put on a headset, and suddenly, almost magically, hear live music broadcast by a radio station somewhere out there in the dark. The addition of radio service quickly became known as an attractive aspect of travelling on CNR, and there was a noticeable shift of passengers from CPR to CNR on the well-traveled Montreal-Toronto run, which had long been dominated by CPR.
The enormous appeal of radio to the ear of a railway passenger in the 1920s is captured in an anonymous account from the CNR archives. The writer describes a scene in the observation car of a CNR train passing through the Prairies. The passengers are bored and waiting for lunch. Suddenly, the sound of organ music fills the car, grabbing their attention. The organ strains are followed by a sermon, Bible readings, and hymns broadcast live from a service in a Saskatoon church many miles away. When there is a pause in the church service to take up a collection, a passenger on the train rises, puts a five-dollar bill into a hat, and then passes the hat to the other passengers, who all contribute something. When the train pulls into Saskatoon later that day, thirty dollars are delivered to the church from the enthralled passengers.“
Pankaj Mishra on the 90’s “revolution of aspiration” and the “common present”
“Beginning in the 1990s, a democratic revolution of aspiration -of the kind Tocqueville witnessed with many forebodings in early nineteenth-century America- swept across the world, sparking longings for wealth, status and power, in addition to ordinary desires for stability and contentment, in the most unpromising circumstances. Egalitarian ambition broke free of old social hierarchies, caste in India as well as class in Britain. The culture of individualism went universal, in ways barely anticipated by Tocqueville, or Adam Smith, who first theorized about a ‘commercial society’ of self-seeking individuals.
The emphasis on individual rights has heightened awareness of social discrimination and gender inequality; in many countries today, there is a remarkably greater acceptance of different sexual orientations. The larger political implications of this revolutionary individualism, however, are much more ambiguous. The crises of recent years have uncovered an extensive failure to realize the ideals of endless economic expansion and private wealth creation. Most newly created ‘individuals’ toil within poorly imagined social and political communities and/or states with weakening sovereignty. They not only suffer from the fact that old certitudes about their place in the world -including their sense of identity and self-worth- have been lost along with their links to traditional communities and other systems of support and comfort and sources of meaning. Their isolation has also been intensified by the decline or loss of postcolonial nation-building ideologies, and the junking of social democracy by globalized technocratic elites.
Thus, individuals with very different pasts find themselves herded by capitalism and technology into a common present, where grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power have created humiliating new hierarchies. This proximity, or what Hannah Arendt called ‘negative solidarity’, is rendered more claustrophobic by digital communications, the improved capacity for envious and resentful comparison, and the commonplace, and therefore compromised, quest for individual distinction and singularity.”
Bonus: Zygmunt Bauman
“We remain of course as modern as we were before; but these ‘we’ who are modern have considerably grown in numbers in recent years. We may well say that by now all or almost all of us, in every or almost every part of the planet, have become modern. And that means that today, unlike a decade or two ago, every land on the planet, with only a few exceptions, is subject to the obsessive, compulsive, unstoppable change that is nowadays called modernization, and to everything that goes with it, including the continuous production of human redundancy, and the social tensions it is bound to cause.”
Umberto Eco on mass media, “discordant interpretations” and TV advertising
“The mass communication universe is full of these discordant interpretations; I would say that variability of interpretation is the constant law of mass communications. The messages set out from the Source and arrive in distinct sociological situations, where different codes operate. For a Milanese bank clerk a TV ad for a refrigerator represents a stimulus to buy, but for an unemployed peasant in Calabria the same image means the confirmation of a world of prosperity that doesn’t belong to him and that he must conquer. This is why I believe TV advertising in depressed countries functions as a revolutionary message.”
Bonus: Sukarno shores up the point
“The motion picture industry has provided a window on the world, and the colonized nations have looked through that window and have seen the things of which they have been deprived. It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigerator can be a revolutionary symbol—to a people who have no refrigerators. A motor car owned by a worker in one country can be a symbol of revolt to a people deprived of even the necessities of life . . . [Hollywood] helped to build up the sense of deprivation of man’s birthright, and that sense of deprivation has played a large part in the national revolutions of postwar Asia.”
media notes #10: electricity and radio in Toronto history
The following quotes from Too Good to be True by Randall White imply that radio and domestic metered electricity were taken up simultaneously during the 1920’s, at least in Toronto.
Metered electricity:
“Electricity was a crucial prerequisite for the Standard Electric Home. In 1930 Might’s Directory would review the progress of the “Toronto Hydro-Electric System.” In 1916 the system had served some 40,000 meters in the city. This had increased to more than 93,000 meters by 1922, and to more than 141,000 meters by 1924. More than 175,000 meters would be served by the end of the decade.”
Early radio in Canada:
“Canada’s first experimental radio station began broadcasting in Montreal in 1919. For a while in the 1920s Toronto newspapers carried program listings for Canadian stations as far away as Vancouver. By 1924 the recently established Canadian National Railways had begun a primitive programming service in both English and French. (Its Toronto outlet was known as CNRT.) By the late 1920s there would be five local radio stations in Toronto itself.”
The mass perception of radio at its debut:
“The June 1922 ads reflected the novelty of the new machines. A radio was not yet just something you put in your living room, to receive programs from stations on the dial; it was also a mysterious link to assorted strange noises from the cosmos.”
London’s super-rich: geography, mobility and visual exposure
Quoted from Alpha City by Rowland Atkinson
“The mobility of the alpha city’s rich is facilitated by a Möbius-like remaking of city space. The lifeworld of the city becomes a kind of a continuous strip over which rapid movement can be made, stepping from one zone to another, or from one mode of travel to another. These characteristics are important because being on the move also entails a kind of vulnerability in terms of feelings of exposure, unwanted attention or the security risks that may be experienced, although the latter may be influenced by national background. For the super-rich, visibility is often seen as a problem. This is particularly so in an increasingly synoptic age in which the many watch the few through social media, and where cameras, drones and mobile phones enable reports on the activities of the wealthy to be relayed far and wide.
The photographer Dougie Wallace highlights this unease in his series of portraits of the wealthy as they cross the last few feet of pavement -the vulnerable somatic world of the street- from a private car or taxi to the environs of Harrodsburg (London, not Kentucky). Many of them appear startled or on the cusp of furious indignation as they stare into the lens.”
“Electronic Ceremonies: Television Performs a Royal Wedding”
By Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan
“By orchestrating the passage from a qualitative, selective participation in the ceremony to a quantitative, global one, television has created a remarkable historical or cultural artefact: the notion that one can attend the “whole of an event”. The experience of anybody who tries to attend a public event or ceremony constantly proves that “attending” means attending part of the event. One cannot view a procession from all vantage points unless one moves along with the procession (and therefore one loses one’s place), or unless one is part of the procession (and therefore totally unable to focus on it as a spectacle). You see an event from a given place, from a given distance and this place and distance tell you (and tell the others) who you are. In the case of the royal wedding, either you are in the church (that is, a guest of the royal family), or you are outside the church, and the conquest of a place with good visibility has to be paid for, in terms of waking up before dawn or sleeping on the pavement. As in the theatre, your distance from stage, your placement in regard to the centre of the event, is a very clear reminder of your place in society. (To use Benjamin’s notion, your distance from the event constitutes its “aura”.)
What happens with the introduction of television is that, in accordance with narrative structures and the exigency of continuity they introduce, everybody attends the whole of the event. Everybody attends, at least, something which is called “the whole of the event”. What seems new to us is this very notion of a totality of the event, a notion which seems inherited from the domain of a spectacle.
An event such as the royal wedding indeed presents itself as a string of smaller ceremonial units, featuring the same actors (the royal family, the newlyweds) but different audiences, and the dramaturgy of each of these units is an answer to the nature of the audience. What happens with television is that the distinctive self-presentations of the royalty to the different constituents of the British public are no longer conceptualized on the mode of “either/or”, but become available on the mode of “and/and”. The different groups now form one audience. The different sub-events now form one narrative (and one of the tasks of the broadcasters is to organize the rhythmic continuity, the unity of the performance). By turning the event into one spectacle, TV acts as a class equalizer: only the attendant audiences maintain the privilege of seeing only part of the event, thus experiencing their deprivation as its aura. However, the equi-distance introduced between the various segments of the public is compensated by a television-performed reintroduction of distance.”
Bonus: LinkedIn Post About A TikTok-Era Electronic Ceremony (Sophie Miller)
“Sofia Richie said ‘I want the wedding of the year’ and her PR team said, ‘YES M’AAM’ 💸💸
Any celebrity wedding is going to get a sprinkle of coverage…
A few pap pics and Vogue articles are pretty much a given when your dad is legend Lionel Richie, your sister is a 00’s icon, and your guestlist is a selection of Hollywood’s most established.
But *THIS* celebration had buzz the A-lister scene hasn’t seen for a HOT minute.
👉 +800k followers on Sofia’s new TikTok account in less than 6 days
👉 178M views on the #sofiarichiewedding hashtag
👉 Sofia Richie and related searches dominating Google top 10 search ranking worldwide for just over a week
👉 searches for Chanel, the wedding’s official designer partner, up over 300%Hotter than the Peltz-Beckham wedding.
Hotter Paris Hilton’s wedding.
And SO much hotter than any recent Kardashian celebration, despite dedicated episodes on their hit show on Disney+ and their combined social following of 500M+.
Sofia and the team did something others didn’t.
🌎 Invited the outside in.
It was more than just an extravagant ‘I do’ followed by a quick snap on Instagram.
It was…
💬 Guest encouraged to post in real-time.
🎬 A perfectly curated dress reveal in partnership with Vogue BEFORE the big day to give fans a treat, not a blurry pap pic.
💍 Super casual and scrappy, iPhone filmed get ready with me’s from the bride herself.
🌎 Released clips from bridal breakfasts and rehearsals showing Sofia and the bridal party just being giddy girls on their wedding weekend.
📱 Every product and outfit broken down in videos and captions for the ultimate ‘insider’ appeal.A groundbreaking approach? No.
A refreshing one? Yes.
Exclusivity’s out.
And so’s perfectly curated extravagance.
The rise of the normie continues 👋👀
(And so does my screenshot collection of dream wedding-scapes and 5 star venues I’ll never be able to afford)
Anyone else been *obsessed* keeping up with the wedding snaps this week?”
Charles Taylor on globalization, media and “diasporic consciousness”
Queen’s Quarterly, Fall 1998
“Globalization also involves the development of world media spaces. The media now reach into all but the most remote societies. They thoroughly permeate these communities, and many media organizations are constantly casting about the globe, collecting their select audiences, those groups of people who are fixed on certain images and programs. Along with this, and not entirely separate from it, there is a world public sphere and the development even of world civil society in term of public opinion. Think of the tremendous importance in our world today of organizations like Amnesty International.
But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of globalization is the tremendous increase in international migration and the consequent diversification of the populations in many countries. A few decades ago a country like Canada had a population -speaking just of religion- that was Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish. Today, every major religion is represented in substantial numbers within the Canadian population. And with this comes the development of another striking phenomenon, something we might call a diasporic consciousness. People now live in imagined spaces, spaces where they see themselves situated within a certain society, and more and more of these space straddle borders and other boundaries. You now have people who are in many ways fully integrated as citizens of their new countries, but at the same time retain active interest and contact with people in their country of origin. Their interest in the politics of one country feeds into their interest in the politics of the other, and they are linked also to their country-of-origin compatriots settled in different nations all over the world.”
Blair Neatby on “Bible Bill” Aberhart’s talent for radio and Alberta exceptionalism
“The most significant step, however, came when Aberhart was persuaded to broadcast his Sunday afternoon sermons over a pioneer radio station in Calgary. Aberhart proved to be a phenomenally successful broadcaster. He had a clear, sonorous voice, a pleasant voice which he used almost instrumentally, with a wide range of volume and mood to convey his message.
The message was biblical prophecy. Aberhart was a fundamentalist, preaching the revealed word of God. Like other religious sects, Aberhart and his adherents used the Bible to protest against the evils of the modern, materialists world: the evils of sophisticated academics and their biblical criticism, the cold formality of middle-class congregations, the vices of dancing and movies and drink. The old-fashioned, traditional Christian rejected these evils, rejected the material world with its pride and its temptations, and gave himself completely and enthusiastically to God. Basically it was a simple and appealing message: the world is sinful but Jesus saves.
In the 1920s Aberhart was only one of many fundamentalist preachers in Alberta. Indeed, one sociologist describes the province as being unique in Canada for its bewildering mixture of non-conformist religions. Alberta has its pockets of old-world sects, such as Mennonites and Hutterites. Immigrants from the United States brought with them or later imported an astonishing variety of Apostolic and Pentecostal sects. Aberhart with his Prophetic Bible Institute was only one of thirty or forty sects, with each congregation upholding variations of the same fundamentalist faith, and each prospering or declining according to the effectiveness or popularity of its leader.
Radio was a new and significant instrument in enlarging the congregation of an evangelist. By the end of the 1920s the isolation of most farm homes had been pierced by crystal radio sets. There were no networks but in Alberta local stations could reach most of the province and were spared competition from British Columbia stations because of the Rockies and from eastern Canadian stations because of distance. Aberhart was a talented preacher and Alberta was fertile soil for his message. Radio provided the ideal medium to cultivate a provincial congregation.”
media notes #9: Marshall McLuhan on “entertainment” and control/regulation of media
“The restrictive pressure by the press on radio and TV is still a hot issue in Britain and Canada. But, typically, misunderstanding of the nature of the medium rendered the restraining policies quite futile. Such has always been the case, most notoriously in government censorship of the press and of the movies. Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movies is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming. To those who have never studied media, this fact is quite as baffling as literacy is to natives, who say, “Why do you write? Can’t you remember?”
Thus, the commercial interests who think to render media universally acceptable, invariably settle for “entertainment” as a strategy of neutrality. A more spectacular mode of the ostrich-head-in-sand could not be devised, for it ensures maximal pervasiveness for any medium whatever. The literate community will always argue for a controversial or point-of-view use of press, radio, and movie that would in effect diminish the operation, not only of press, radio and movie, but of the book as well. The commercial entertainment strategy automatically ensures maximum speed and force of impact for any medium, on psychic and social life equally. It thus becomes a comic strategy of unwitting self-liquidation, conducted by those who are dedicated to permanence, rather than to change. In the future, the only effective media controls must take the thermostatic form of quantitative rationing. Just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout. Education will become recognized as civil defense against media fallout.”
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