Topic: Did the emergence of mass media in the 19th and 20th centuries primarily serve to allow ordinary people to share and access ideas more freely and easily than before, or was its chief effect instead to enable governments (and powerful corporations) to manipulate mass publics in powerful new ways?
Since the late 19th century, both the amount and frequency of “information flow” across the world had risen to an unprecedented degree in history, thanked primarily to the advance of printing technology, the increase of literacy rate, and the construction of transcontinental submarine telegraph cables. Meanwhile, it also facilitated the emergence of mass media, which apart from newspapers includes radio, films (and news reel), and later televisions as well. Undoubtedly, under such phenomenon news were now gathered and processed in a much more collective way, which was very different from the past when most people in the society were still relying on oral news or gossips, and common readerships were also created in different small and large circles across the society. Given the facts that news were now permeated indiscriminately into everybody’s daily life and a global telegraphic network had started to take shape after 1860s, it is easy for some people to assert that the emergence of mass media had now provided chances for ordinary people to access and share ideas more freely and easily than before. However, as I would argue, the emergence of mass media had only brought centralization to the global transmissions of information as the power of “transmitting and screening information” was still retained by a handful of prominent corporations. Moreover, because of the reality that these corporations could not hope to completely exempt themselves from political interference (especially during wartime), most mass media would, and had in fact only become manipulative tools of the government toward the mass publics rather than being a neutral medium for ordinary people to share and access ideas liberally as some might have assumed.
I will start by analyzing the monopoly of those prominent telegraph companies in the news market in the late 19th century. As we know, the submarine telegraph cables, which were the prerequisite for transcontinental communication, were owned exclusively by them. And as at that time there were no governmental checking or regulations on how much transmission rates that those companies should charge their customers, so conceivably, the rates were usually extremely high and were obviously not affordable for ordinary people or small newspapers. Those companies also saw no incentives to lower their rates, given that they had all already struck bargains with one another and there were no other competitions in the market. For instance, at an Imperial Press Conference in 1909, both Reuters and the Australian press combination had unanimously turned a deaf ear to the British newspapers’ demands for reducing press cable rates (Potter 634). As Simon Potter argues, the conventional well-celebrated“Victorian internet” was in fact nothing more than a “system”that was primarily serving the commercial interest of a small portion of “telegraph owners”, and the commercial reality of that time had actually “obstructed” free communication (Potter 630). As a result, many small newspapers could only rely on the news excerpt delivered by the large newspapers, as the latter could afford the press cable fees, and news had then inevitably become more and more centralized. Apart from that, the invention of telegraph also changed the reading habit of the mass publics, as speaking of news now people thought that they “must have everything red-hot”, and this entails that they now had less patience for the news reports sent by mail (which was relatively slower, but usually contained more serious and in-depth reports on the events) (Potter 631). Moreover, this also gave rise to the so-called “sensationalism” in press, as now readers would mostly care about the topic of the news first than about the actual news content, which is a bit similar to the “clickbait” in nowadays internet. Therefore, to say fairly, the emergence of mass media had only made the mass publics become passive recipients of news from a few “dominant sources”. And unlike the situation that in the past when news were transmitted orally everyone could participate in the process of creating the “news”(such as in 18th century Paris everybody could craft their own songs about the news), now they were greatly homogenized, and most people were not “sharing” and “accessing” new ideas, as these terms are kind of “active” and “voluntary” in general sense, but were rather merely receiving, and likely to be numbed by the excessive, irrelevant, and sometimes phoney news content in a new world of “information”.
Then, I will move to discuss the effect of imperialism to the global transmission of information in the late 19th century. As mentioned before, a global telegraphic system had started to come into view after the 1860s, and it is clear that such system was not only serving the mercantilism of those big telegraph companies but also the imperial interests that laid behind. For example, from a map shown in week two’s lecture we can see that most submarine telegraph cables at that time were straightly connected to London, which means that news must pass through this “imperial centre” before they could be transmitted to other regions, so the whole picture was actually more like a “system” for information collection than an liberal “network” for global communication. Besides, from the case of late Qing China’s modernization on her national communication system as discussed by Wisecrack and Pike, we can see clearly how imperialism had exerted its influence over mass communication through both direct and indirect ways. For example, when the Great Northern Company smuggled their cables ashore to Shanghai in 1870s without obtaining approval from the Qing government, there was little can be done by the latter given that Shanghai was a still concession at the time and was de facto under the protection of the imperial powers (Wisecrack and Pike 116). This further shows that under the veil of mercantilism, imperialism was the real backing power and precondition of the companies’ commercial actions. Also, even when in the later stage the Qing government had fully embraced and realized the plan of national telegraphy system, ordinary people still had no say on whether not to accept the telegraphy, as well as on how the system should be implemented. All matters were decided by the Company and the Qing government, and no competition was allowed (Wisecrack and Pike 133). From the above, we could see that the newly-emergent global communication network was in fact nothing more than a property of the big companies and imperial powers, and obviously it concerned little about the interest and the“right to know” of the mass publics.
Lastly, I would like to focus on how politics had influenced the operation of mass media, as well as how had it changed people’s perception toward the latter during wartime. For example, as David Greenberg points out, during WWI the intimate linkage between mass media and governmental propaganda had become more and more visible. And because of the American ingrained distrust toward the latter, it also tended to make them cautiously distance themselves from the news provided by the former, as people did not know “when (should they) to believe” in a slogan or a statement (Greenberg 60, 62). Without public confidence in news, it is hard to see how people would share and talk about the information disseminated by mass media more enthusiastically than the past. There were also plenty of examples on how did government try to stifle public opinion through manipulating the mass media in wartime, and the most notorious one would be the Nazis Party. As in Hitler’s first radio address on 1 Feb. 1933, he had already made it plain that“In place of our turbulent instincts, (the task before us would be to) ...make national discipline govern our life” (Hitler). This evidently reveals his intention to make comprehensive governmental interference into all aspects of his people’s life, including mass media. As history has proven, the Nazis Party soon promulgated the Reichstag Fire Decree in the same year in the excuse of “defending communists’ threat”, and both the freedom of speech and the freedom of press were stripped straightway as accordingly to the law (Ross 292). In an excerpt of the UK’s House of Commons debate on overseas broadcasting in 1942, it also reported on how the Nazis would jam foreign broadcasting and prosecuted the people who dared openly listen to them. This further justified my thesis in the beginning of this paper, which is as mass media could not hope to completely exempt themselves from political interference especially during wartime, it is inevitable for them to be subsumed into politics and to either become mouthpieces of the government or to remain silence under a tyrannical regime.
16/10/2020
Bibliography
Adolf Hitler, Proclamation of the Reich Government to the German People (February 1, 1933). From (https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3940)
Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 266-301.
David Greenberg, “The Ominous Clang: Fears of Propaganda from World War I to World War II,” in Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 50-62.
Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, “Electronic Kingdom and Wired Cities in the ‘Age of Disorder’: The Struggle for Control of China’s National and Global Communication Capabilities, 1870-1901,” in Communication and Empire: Media Markets and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 113-41.
House of Commons (UK) debate on overseas broadcasting, 17 Feb. 1942. From (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1942/feb/17/broadcasting-overseas-services)
Simon J. Potter, “Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century British Empire,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 3 (2007): 621-46.
