Focus on Marshall McLuhan

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Focus on Marshall McLuhan McLuhan is probably
the most famous media critic to have ever lived.
Although he has been dead for 20 years, his work
is still influential and discussed frequently in
both academic and media circles. He was
influenced by the work of Harold Innis, recall we
mentioned Innis and McLuhan were both part of
what was called the Toronto School of
communication theory. In particular, McLuhan
borrowed from Inniss idea of the monopoly of
knowledge and the bias concept, as we will see
in a few minutes. Like Innis, McLuhan is a
medium theorist, in an even more determined sense
than Innis was. Many of McLuhans main ideas are
included in the reading Under- standing Radio
you were required to read, so lets take some
time to review them here.
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Basic Concepts The medium is the message As a
true medium theorist, McLuhan believed that one
needed to examine the form of the medium itself,
not its content, to see where meaning lies i.e.
you look at the radio set and the impact
communicating in this way has on society, not the
content of any particular program. The dominant
medium at a given moment in history creates a
particular media environment that supports
certain forms of consciousness, identity, and
culture, and not others. This media environment
provides a context for everything else we do in
our culture silently assimilating or
massaging everything it touches. The media
environment created through the dominant medium
takes its particular shape from the sense organ
either the eye or the ear that the medium
favours.
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Thus, McLuhan breaks down media according to the
acoustic or visual values attached to oral
and print-based cultures respectively. Oral
media environment Print Media Environment Electr
onic Media Environment Retribalization and the
Global Village Hot and Cool Media
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McLuhan on radio In the excerpt you read from
the textbook, McLuhan uses many of the terms we
just discussed the medium is the message, the
global village, hot and cool media. McLuhan
believed that radio was a hot medium and that
it contributed to the retribalization of the
global village by recreating the conditions
of oral culture. Radio merges voice and
electricity in a matter similar to the way the
human voice works in a real body, he argued. It
therefore provided for electronic implosion as
opposed to the explosive nature of writing and
the alphabet. Print sends us outward through
space and time, radio sends us inward, toward
greater self-consciousness and group identity.
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Radio, according to McLuhan, makes a world of
simultaneity, immersion and universal
participation (radio requires no special
literacy) and privacy (due to its implosive
nature.) If print is a hot media, radio is even
hotter. In sum, McLuhan argues that we need to
focus less on the content of a particular form of
media and more on the form what does a medium
allow or disallow, by shaping a media environment
around itself. Now that we have an idea of
McLuhans views on radio, lets look more
directly at the history of radio and its social
and economic impact.
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time-line 1864- radio highlights 1864 James
Clerk Maxwell argues that electro-magnetic waves
exist and should be able to travel through
space 1887 Hertz produces electro-magnetic waves
in a lab. 1894 Marconi invents wireless
telegraph or radiotelegraphy, using
electro-magnetic waves as his channel. late
1890s Marconis Wireless and Signal Telegraph
company grows prosperous offering limited
radiotelegraph messages for businesses in the
US 1901 Marconi sends first transatlantic
wireless message from Signal Hill, Newfoundland
to Cornwall, England 1901 Reginald Fessenden, a
Canadian, sends first experimental voice message
by wireless 1906 Fessenden invents the
broadcast program, sending Christmas messages
and playing music for United Fruit boats in the
Caribbean 1909 Marconi wins the Nobel Prize for
physics 1910s ham operators flourish, using
radio as a point-to-point medium early
experiments with broadcast form time-line
(1920-39)- radio as a mass medium 1920s 1920
The first radio broadcasting stations are opened.
1920 Sound recording is done electrically.
1920 KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasts first
scheduled radio programs.
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1921 The word "robot" enters the language.
1922 The first radio commercial is
broadcast, 100 for ten minutes. 1922
First 3-D movie, requires spectacles with one red
and one green lens. 1923 A picture,
broken into dots, is sent by wire.
1923 16 mm nonflammable film makes its debut.
1924 The Eveready Hour is the first
sponsored radio program. 1924 Two and
a half million radio sets in the U.S.
1926 Permanent radio network, NBC, is formed.
1926 Bell Telephone Labs transmit film
by television. 1927 NBC begins two
radio networks CBS formed. 1927 U.S.
Radio Act declares public ownership of the
airwaves. 1927 Technicolor.
1927 Negative feedback makes hi-fi possible.
1928 In Schenectady, N.Y., the first
scheduled television broadcasts. 1929
In Germany, magnetic sound recording on plastic
tape. 1930s 1930 "Golden Age" of
radio begins in U.S. 1933 Armstrong
invents FM, but its real future is 20 years off.
1934 First drive-in movie theater
opens in New Jersey. 1934 Half of the
homes in the U.S. have radios. 1936
Berlin Olympics are televised closed circuit.

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1937 Carlson invents the photocopier.
1938 CBS "World News Roundup" ushers in modern
newscasting. 1938 Radio drama, War of
the Worlds," causes national panic.
1939 Regular TV broadcasts begin. History of
Radio Radio is interesting because unlike film,
it is a form of mass media that we bring into our
homes. The only other media that fits this
description is print media, which is
fundamentally different in nature. Radio thus
completes the process begun by Hollywood film by
which the mass audience is made. Radio creates
many of the program genres that are still in use
today. For example, soap operas, quiz shows, or
sit-coms. Many of these genres are produced
specifically to advertise, and so
they established a strong commercial basis to
media that continues today.
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With no wires necessary and the ownership of
radio the only pre-condition for receiving radio
messages, true broadcast communication can
begin. Radio is the first media instrument to
require state regulation. Because radio
frequencies are a public resource, but most radio
operators are privately owned, regulation was
initially needed to ensure enough broadcasting
space for the military. This is partially why
the BBC first started regulating radio broadcasts
in 1932. States also regulated radio
broadcasters because of a fear of the impact of
radio programming on listeners. Critics charged
radio programs were often amoral or insipid. To
improve the content of radio programming, and to
avoid American domination of the airwaves, many
governments launched their own radio networks,
like the BBC and CBC. The wireless telegraph
was first invented by Guglielmo Marconi in
1894. Radiotelegraphy is point-to-point
transmission of Morse code without wires.
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Although wireless is invented in 1894, broadcast
radio doesnt emerge until the 1920s. Yet as
early as 1916, David Sarnoff, general manager of
RCA and a protégé of Marconis saw the future of
the wireless. He sent a memo at that time to his
bosses at RCA, forecasting that just as every
house held a piano or a phonograph at the time,
it would eventually have a wireless. From
Wireless telegraph to radio In 1920, a company
named Westinghouse grew frustrated with
the control of wireless by three big companies
GE, RCA and ATT. It began the first regular
broadcasts of music and voice from KDKA
in Pittsburgh, the first licensed radio station
in the U.S. The appeal was instant 50,000
receivers were sold by March 1921 750,000 by
mid-1922 5 million by 1925 and 50 million by
1940.
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In the early days, radio was unregulated, you
only had to be an American citizen to own a
station. So department stores, universities and
even some individuals owned their own radio
stations. (Although the big four remained GE,
RCA, ATT and Westinghouse) Radio commercials
were first aired by ATT in 1925. What were the
cultural consequences of radio?
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