Media Technology and Society
A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet
By Brian Winston
Routledge, London: 1998
Reviewed by
The history books tell us that Samuel Morse "invented" the
electronic telegraph in 1844. That was, Brian Winston
explains, four years after a message announcing that Queen
Victoria had given birth traveled on a telegraph wire from
Windsor into London. It was nineteen years after a Russian
diplomat in Germany, Baron Pawel Schilling, had designed an
electric means for sending messages over wires. And Morse's
"What hath God wrought" was sent twenty-eight years after
Francis Ronalds succeeded in transmitting information
electronically along the eight miles of wire he had wound
around his London garden.
One of Winston's goals in his information-rich new book,
[ital]Media Technology and Society,[ital] is to place the
word "invented" within quotation marks -- at considerable
cost to the reputation of gentlemen like Marconi, Bell and
Morse. Another is to demonstrate that societies shape their
technologies more than technologies shape societies. He
argues that societal (particularly economic) forces
determine the effects, uses, acceptance and even the
arrival of new forms of communication. Ronalds' prototype
of the telegraph, for instance, was rejected by the British
Admiralty as "wholly unnecessary" and therefore went
nowhere. The "supervening necessity" -- the societal force
-- that would eventually allow the telegraph to be
"invented" was the need, Winston maintains, to safely
coordinate railroad trains on single tracks.
All this leads to a larger and more controversial point. If
society is the horse, technology merely the cart, then
communications technologies can hardly be pulling us in
radical new directions. Winston, who is head of the School
of Communication, Design and Media at the University of
Westminster, not only has a go at that old [ital]bete
noir[ital] technological determinism; he dismisses the
whole notion that we are undergoing an information or
communications revolution.
"There is nothing in the histories of electrical and
electronic communication systems," he writes, "to indicate
that significant major changes have not been accommodated
by preexisting social formations." In other words, forget
those fears about television or those hopes for the
Internet. "Western civilization over the past three
centuries," Winston contends, "has displayed, despite
enormous changes in detail, fundamental continuity --
and...it continues to do so."
For those of us who have read Winston's stimulating 1986
book, Misunderstanding Media, these are mostly familiar
arguments. In this substantial new work he clarifies and
expands them. A detailed model of historical change in
technology is presented, beginning with scientific
developments and working its way through prototypes,
ideation, "invention" and diffusion -- with society
intervening to stimulate or, more frequently, repress at a
couple of crucial stages.
Such repression of dangerous new inventions was the major
theme of [ital]Misunderstanding Media[ital]. Here Winston's
"law of the suppression of radical potential," his most
memorable contribution in that book, stands guard over the
transition between "invention" and diffusion. Winston
argues, for example, that the spread of television was
delayed -- "suppressed" -- in part because it threatened
the film and radio industries.
His arguments are buttressed in this new book by a more
thorough recounting of the history of electronic
communications. Indeed, this is the most comprehensive
history of these events -- the development of the
telegraph, telephone, radio, television, the computer and
the Internet -- that I have seen in one book.
Occasionally an error pops up among the information on
scientists, inventors and media companies Winston has
collected from Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia
and other countries: David Sarnoff, for example, for all
his importance in the history of RCA, was not "the founder
of the Radio Corporation of America." Still, Winston
manages to present a solid and extremely useful history of
many of the most significant technological developments of
the past two centuries -- a history well grounded in an
understanding of science and of the workings of those
technologies.
Winston's arguments can be useful too, but sometimes they
are less solid. Certainly, the notion of the lone inventor,
inspired only by inexplicable flashes of insight, deserves
the sustained assault he levels against it. And certainly
societal factors can spur and retard both the process of
invention and the process of realizing the potential of an
invention. Those of us who isolate the development of new
technologies in an attempt to ponder the impact of new
technologies need to be reminded of this. Winston forces us
to note the connections, to face the complications.
But this extended effort to demonstrate that technological
development is almost entirely beholden to concrete
societal forces too often requires some stretches. Are we
really to believe that without single-track railroads the
telegraph would not have been "invented"? (Yes, Morse's
first line was strung alongside a railroad, but its first
messages had nothing to do with train traffic.) And would
television really have failed to overcome "the brake" of
established entertainment industries, as Winston asserts,
if it had not been for the need to find uses for electronic
manufacturing capacity after the end of World War II?
The wonder, the power, the magic, of these communications
technologies is rarely acknowledged in this book. The best
Winston can do for television is to concede that public
"addictions to realism and narrative" were "background
supervening necessities" in its dissemination. For were he
to admit that people hungered to have this sweet stream of
moving images enter their homes he would have to admit that
a technology can have its own independent power; he would
have to admit that technologies sometimes (often?) do pull
the cart.
Another stretch: Winston implies that electronically
scanned television was delayed - suppressed? -- for forty
years, from 1911 until the mid-1950s. What happened in
1911? A Russian experimenter, Bosis Rozing, had managed to
send the image of four hazy lines through the air. In a
world more open to "radical potential" would all the best
engineers have instantly anointed Rozing the next Gutenberg
and joined together to perfect television? There seems
insufficient room in Winston's model for natural human
hesitation, inattention, stumbling and misunderstanding.
Hindsight seems too frequently to intrude.
Winston contends, with more merit, that a full-scale
commercial television system could have been introduced in
the United States as early as 1936. Such a system was
introduced eleven years later. Is that really such a
shocking delay, particularly given the fact that a war
intervened and the technology was still improving? Is it
sufficient to prove that a "law of suppression of radical
potential" was in operation? There is another way this
"law" that Winston sees governing the diffusion of new
media might be phrased: "It takes a little while."
And it takes a long while for the effects of new forms of
communication to become clear; that is one reason Winston
fails to spot them. Communications revolutions, as I
understand them, take place over centuries not over the
decades upon which he focuses.
Case in point: the European letter press. Its early
development fits Winston's model fairly well. Prototypes
existed in block printing and, of course, in Chinese and
Korean printing systems. Others besides Johannes Gutenberg
were certainly experimenting with a letter press in Europe
in the fifteenth century, and it is not at all clear that
his experiments were the first to succeed. Entrenched
forces often resisted the press's development. Conservative
forces often took control of it. And a century and a half
passed before the two forms most associated with printing -
- the printed newspaper and the novel -- arrived.
Nevertheless, a series of fairly radical developments --
from the spread of Luther's Reformation to the scientific
revolution to the Enlightenment to the American and French
Revolutions -- were, over the centuries, aided and abetted
by the printing press.
A similar argument could be made for writing, which worked
its revolution in philosophy, politics, science, history
and religion over millennia. Writing and printing are two
technologies that have been around long enough for us to
see that their effects were not in the end "accommodated by
preexisting social formations." Societies changed.
The radical potential of television and the Internet, or of
electronic communication in general, will likely express
itself, over the centuries, in new and different ways --
ways you or I or Brian Winston may have difficulty
accepting or even noticing. These technologies will
certainly not accomplish what they accomplish
independently; many other forces will be involved. The
media corporations may not shatter. The poor may not
overtake the rich. But societies likely will change once
again. Indeed, most of us believe that our societies have
already begun to change. A few years or decades of
hesitation, stumbling or even opposition as these media
technologies are getting started will mean little in the
end.
What is so valuable about Brian Winston's new book is the
close and detailed examination he provides of the early
development of electronic communication. What is most
disappointing about his arguments is his failure to step
back and see that this is but one stage in a longer
process.
Mitchell Stephens is chairman of the Department of
Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University.
His most recent book, [ital]the rise of the image the fall
of the word[ital] is published by Oxford University Press.
He is also the author of A History of News.