Media Technologies::Thoughts#1

Originally, I thought of this blog as a place where I could report on the progress of my work and share some thoughts with you, the lucky visitor. However, for several reasons, one being that it is actually harder to write about one’s thinking on a blog, I haven’t been able to really achieve this aim so far. Another reason was that I have been feeling completely lost in my Ph.D. subjects for months and just didn’t know where to start when I was trying to post about my work. It’s only very recently that the pieces of this huge puzzle have started to fit together and that the outline of my project have truly emerged from the sea of information, knowledge and pondering in which I was kind of sinking. So, the situation of this blog is about to change and I truly hope that I will henceforth be able to share more of my researches!

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With this said, let’s turn to my first set of “Thoughts”. It concerns the evolution of media technologies against the historical background of the changes that have affected the home and the individual since the begining of the 20th century. In the last 4 months, I have been reading a few books and articles on socio-anthropological studies about the evolution of media uses and audiences. One sociological aspect that emerges more or less clearly from these accounts is a progressive shift towards a very individualized use of these technologies. Of course, media for individual solitary uses have been existing for centuries, the book for example, although historical analysis by researchers like Roger Chartier (1) have shown that reading has often been a collective activity. The first audiovisual experiences in the early years of the 20th century were essentially collective and often public. Films were viewed in movie theaters visited by crowds of people, while the first radio and TV sets were at the center of social gathering, whether restricted to the family or extended to the neighbors. Moreover, Shaun Moores in his book on media consumption (2), shows that these media technologies are located at the crossroad between the technical logic of use and stakes of power relations between members of a group. Thus, for decades, it was the prerogative of the “pater familias” who decided on the use of these household facilities.

To make it (over-) simple, the 1960’s witnessed a set of socio-political and economic upheavals that impacted deeply the outlook of societies, especially their conceptions of authority, freedom, spirituality, and the position of their various institutions, such as religion, family, school, State, etc. These changes materialized in the technical evolution of media technologies and their use in both the private realm and the public domain. If public collective viewing of films has continued until today, the idea of “to each their own equipment” was progressively adopted by the emerging mass “consumers”, as the living standards were being significantly raised by the economic boost experienced during the 30 years that followed WWII. Encouraged to consume not just for the sake of surviving, but for individual fun and happiness, people began to switch from a purely facilities renewing logics to that of the multiple facilities at home and outside. Until the 1950’s, household would usually own one unit of each equipment and use it until it is completely worn out, and then, replace it with, if possible, the same or a better quality model. In the 1960’s-1970’s, as individuals began to extrict themselves from the social hierarchies that had dominated societies for decades and to reclaim the right to think about themselves first as a prerequisite to be able to fullfill their social duty, it became normal that they should be individually equiped with those technologies deemed essential for their well-being as active citizen. This social trend converged with a technical logic of miniaturization and mass-production, which helped decrease the price of these objects (3). Progessively, the owning of at least one telephon, two or more radio sets, of at least one TV-set if not two or three starting in the 1980’s, of several disc-players, tape-recorders, become a sort of symbol of social status and living standard. In 1979, Sony nailed more deeply than ever this trend by offering the world the “Walkman“, which has been both acclaimed as the ultimate symbol of individual freedom and denigrated as the ultimate producer of selfish zombies, inoccuous to the rest of the world and its sufferings. Not so much later, the Japanese engineering industry (again) brought out the first individual game consoles, which allows you to take your games anywhere you want, play alone in your corner or share with others.

The computer followed somewhat similar path to that of radio or television, with a difference in its very origin. First a science-fiction luxury only affordable by giant corporations, then an invasive facility at work, soon to become a sort of high-tech symbol of manhood in the home, as at first most families could afford only one of these machines at a time and it would usually be monopolized by the “pater familias”. But with the mid-1990’s and the sudden massive adoption of the Web, championed by high-tech and very influencial gurus as the information age panacea, it became soon a watchword to equip every human being with a computer, everywhere. In the trail of digitalization and convergence between various media and communication technologies, came the cellphone or mobile phone, which, as its names imply, are the walkman equivalent in telecommunication.

With this sort of social and technical convergence, first between the collective public and the privacy of household, now joining around the individual itself, it seems that a trend spotten by Raymond Williams (4) in the 1970’s has intensified: that of the “human snail”, which like its animal counterpart, carries with him his digital “home” and becomes a sort of node of interactions and communication, in the same way that the household has been for decades

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References:

(1) Roger CHARTIER (dir.), Pratiques de la lecture, Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2003 (3è éd., 2è éd. 1993, 1ère éd. 1985).

(2) Shaun MOORES, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption, London, Thousand Oaks, New Dehli: Sage Publications, 1993.

(3) Philippe BRETON & Serge PROULX, L’explosion de la communication: Introduction aux théories et aux pratiques de la communication, Paris: Ed. La Découverte, 2006 (2nd éd., 1ère éd. 2002).

(4) Raymond WILLIAMS, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London:Fontana, 1974.