Technological determinism was not the answer, as the third section of this chapter, on the 'Age of Television' will show, but more attempts were to be made to provide answers about the social consequences of television than had ever been asked about radio.
Information became a major concern anywhere during the late 1960 and 1970s where there was simultaneous talk both of 'lack of information' and 'information saturation'.
information as a commodity / information economy
functions of media -- information, education, entertainment
p 244 medium
Ernie Kovack's judgement that
television is a medium 'because it is neither rare nor well done'
is memorable
the new term 'information society' gave form to a cluster of hitherto more loosely related aspects of communication -- knowledge, news, literature, entertainment, all exchanged through different media and different media materials -- paper, ink, canvas, paint, celluloid, cinema, radio, television and computers.
From the 1960s onwards, all messages, public and private, verbal and visual, began to be considered as 'data', information that could be transmitted, collected, recorded, whatever their point of origin, most effective through electronic technology.
Vivian Sobchack, 1996, The persistence of history
described the metaphor of cyberspace, itself a construct
in terms of an electronic system:
Television, video cassettes, video tape-recorder/players,
video games, and personal computers all form an encompassing electronic system
whose various forms interface to constitute an alternative
and absolute world that uniquely incorporates the spectator/user
in a spatially decentered, weakly temporalized and
quasi-disembodied state.
AE: stoned / fried by magnetic radiation
Virtual reality was when and where the computer disappears and you become the 'ghost in the machine'
AE: what are the limits of the digital experience, or more importantly, what should be the norm: 3D virtual environments, plain text, or some form of XP?
some phenomena in the media are older than is generally recognized
Anon, The Vision of St. Bernard, Book of Hours c. 1470
Harold Lasswell (1902-78):
who says what to whom in what channel with what effect
each medium of communication tended to create a dangerous monopoly of knowledge
p.8: for Christians, images where both a means of conveying information and a means of persuasion
AE: part of the rethorics of institutionalized religion
ecclesiastical rethoric: pulpit is a mass medium
mediated literacy, literacy as an obstacle to public amnesia
Another development of this period was the narrative strip or picture story.
The ancestor of the 20th century comic strip.
The visual narrative in which the viewer 'reads' the episodes,
visually from left to right and from top to bottom,
was already known in the middle ages but its importance increased
with the rise of woodcuts in the Renaissance.
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