“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.“
Czeslaw Milosz on historical ignorance (1980)
“…for those who come from the “other Europe,” wherever they find themselves, notice to what extent their experiences isolate them from their new milieu -and this may become the source of a new obsession. Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember. Certainly, the illiterates of past centuries, then an enormous majority of mankind, knew little of the history of their respective countries and of their civilization. In the minds of modern illiterates, however, who know how to read and write and even teach in schools and at universities, history is present but blurred, in a state of strange confusion. Molière becomes a contemporary of Napoleon, Voltaire a contemporary of Lenin.
Moreover, events of the last decades, of such primary importance that knowledge or ignorance of them will be decisive for the future of mankind, move away, grow pale, lose all consistency, as if Friedrich Nietzsche’s prediction of European nihilism found a literal fulfillment. “The eye of a nihilist,” he wrote in 1887, “is unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to drop, to lose their leaves. . . . And what he does not do for himself, he also does not do for the whole past of mankind: he lets it drop.”
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.”
C. B. Macpherson on democracy, liberalism and the market society
“So democracy came as a late addition to the competitive market society and the liberal state. The point of recalling this is, of course, to emphasize that democracy came as an adjunct to the competitive liberal society and state. It is not simply that democracy came later. It is also that democracy in these societies was demanded, and was admitted, on competitive liberal grounds. Democracy was demanded, and admitted, on the ground that it was unfair not to have it in a competitive society. It was something the competitive society logically needed. This is not to say that all the popular movements whose pressures resulted in the democratic franchise, and all the writers whose advocacy helped their cause, were devotees of the market society. But the bulk of them were. The main demand was for the franchise as the logical completion of the competitive market society.
In short, by the time democracy came, in the present liberal-democratic countries, it was no longer opposed to the liberal society and the liberal state. It was, by then, not an attempt by the lower class to overthrow the liberal state of the competitive market economy; it was an attempt by the lower class to take their fully and fairly competitive place within those institutions and that system of society. Democracy had been transformed. From a threat to the liberal state it had become a fulfilment of the liberal state.”
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.”
David Broder on Italy’s decline
“In Gallino’s terms, the loss of collective hope -the belief that common actions can have a real bearing on political and economic decisions- has given rise to individual and atomised responses, characterised by disillusionment and despair. These have been the sentiments mobilised by both the Five Star Movement and the Lega, in turn planting their flags in former heartlands of the Left. The socialists used to speak of the ‘sun of the future’, the promise of tomorrow -a vision hard to imagine in the current climate. Deprived of a party of their own, the atomised masses have broken up into disempowered fragments, capable of sporadic signs of discontent but not to carry forth an alternative set of values, a vision of regeneration, a community built on collective pride. Italy does, indeed, have social conflict, but it is a war being fought from above, dismantling and disaggregating the historic conquests of the labour movement and driving an ever-harsher climate of resentment, division and disdain for the public sphere.”
Jane Jacobs on the death of “community”
“Two parents, to say nothing of one, cannot possibly satisfy all the needs of a family-household. A community is needed as well, for raising children, and also to keep adults reasonably sane and cheerful. A community is a complex organism with complicated resources that grow gradually and organically. Its resources fall into three main categories.
First, there are resources that all families need and that virtually none can provide for themselves, nor can any but the largest, richest, and most institutional households provide them. These resources are mostly tangible. They include affordable housing for all the community’s members; publicly funded transportation (even privately owned cars need roads, parking lots, and police forces); water and sewage systems; fire protection; public health and safety inspections and enforcement; schools; public libraries; large-scale public recreation facilities; parks; ambulances and other emergency services.
Items in the second category are provided more informally by a community but are also mostly tangible. They consist of convenient and responsive commercial establishments, plus noncommercial (nonprofit) services initiated and maintained by volunteer citizens’ groups. These last may, or may not, overlap with publicly provided resources, depending upon differences in government programs and local cultures: for instance, old people’s homes and activities; churches or other community gathering centers; concerts, festivals, sports tournaments; language classes; and job training centers.
The third and final category of community resources is thoroughly informal, thoroughly intangible, and probably the most important: speaking relationships among neighbors and acquaintances in addition to friends.
Everyone needs entrées into networks of acquaintances for practical as well as social purposes. Think what the adults in a nuclear family -just the two of them- are expected by society to provide:
Knowledge and experience sufficient to use simple home remedies in cases of trivial illnesses or wounds, and -more important- the ability to judge correctly and quickly when ills or wounds are too serious for home remedies, maybe even life-threatening. Ability to tutor children needing help with homework. Ability to be a soccer mom and a hockey dad. Skill and tact at training children to shun drugs and to be cautious of strangers but not to mistrust everybody. Ability to purchase responsibly, make bill and tax payments, and in general handle money realistically in spite of blandishments to gamble or become profligate. Make ordinary home and equipment repairs and keep abreast of maintenance chores. Deal knowledgeably with banks and bureaucracies. Pull a fair share of family weight in community betterment efforts and neighborhood protection. Deal civilly with people whose upbringing, cultures, and personalities are at odds with the traditions and customs of one’s own nuclear family, and teach children to be both cosmopolitan and tolerant. Without this last ability, nuclear families can be irreparably torn asunder when relationships develop between their children and lovers from other ethnic or religious backgrounds or, if the family is very stodgy, simply from other educational or income groups.
Who are the paragons that, unaided and unadvised, can earn a living and also provide all this and more? Few of them exist. Only membership in a functioning community makes handling these responsibilities feasible. Another thing: the neuroses of only two adults (or one) focusing relentlessly on offspring can be unbearable. The diverse viewpoints and strengths of many adults can be educational and liberating. Two adults who have too little adult companionship besides themselves can easily drift into isolation from society and become lonely, paranoid, resentful, stressed, depressed, and at their wits’ ends. Sitcom families and “reality” TV can and do fill isolated hours, but cannot offer the support of live friends and the practical information of varied acquaintances.
One can drive today for miles through American suburbs and never glimpse a human being on foot in a public space, a human being outside a car or truck. I have experienced this in suburban Virginia, California, and Massachusetts, as well as suburban Toronto. This is a visible sign that much of North America has become bereft of communities. For communities to exist, people must encounter one another in person. These encounters must include more than best friends or colleagues at work. They must include diverse people who share the neighborhood, and often enough share its needs.
Here is something sad: sometimes an unusually energetic and public-spirited individual in an American or Canadian social desert will start a campaign to improve the place: clean up a trash-filled creek and pond, for instance, or revive a defunct local market and community center. The neighborhood may even receive an award for the achievement. Then what happens? Sometimes the noble idiosyncratic effort lacks staying power; when the originator is lost to aging, death, or relocation, the project fades away, too, because no functioning community exists to carry it on. One of the great strengths of New York City is that its neighborhood community efforts typically have staying power; once under way, they tend to persist not only for decades but for generations. This cultural characteristic, moreover, is perhaps most marked in the densest part of the city, Manhattan.
Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities. Highways and roads obliterate the places they are supposed to serve, as, for example, highways feeding the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge wiped out most of the formerly large Bay Ridge community in Brooklyn. Robert Moses, the nearest thing to a dictator with which New York and New Jersey have ever been afflicted (so far), thought of himself as a master builder, and his much diminished corps of admirers still nostalgically recall him as that; but he was a master obliterator. If he had had his way, which he did not because of successful community opposition, one of Manhattan’s most vibrant, diverse, and economically productive neighborhoods, Soho, would have been sacrificed to an expressway. Other forces, acting in concert with automobile culture, have also been pervasive. Along came sterile housing tracts set in isolating culs-de-sac, and shopping centers whose only ties to localities were the dollars of local consumers. These, often enough, erased community hearts and landmarks, as if to make sure that marooned vestiges of what had been lost were also lost.
Of course, many people have opposed what was happening to former communities: thousands upon thousands have poured ingenuity and energy into opposition. Some who are fortunate enough to have communities still do fight to keep them, but they have seldom prevailed. While people possess a community, they usually understand that they can’t afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost. In miniature, this is the malady of Dark Ages.“
“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?”
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