The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  ORAL-PRINT MEDIA

  During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, scribes attacked the printing press on the grounds that this newer technology threatened their existence. Church leaders also feared the loss of control that would arise once ordinary individuals could read religious texts for themselves. From the mid-fifteenth century onward, oral culture persisted, adapted, and renewed itself over the course of three centuries, as the practices of orality were integrated into an evolving print culture (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 15, 25–26; Zaret, 2000). The period of the English Civil War is rightly depicted as the time of a spectacular outpouring of independent news-sheets, pamphlets, and petitions, but it was also punctuated by significant physical gatherings, such as the Putney Debates of 1647. Oral culture assumed renewed significance following the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 and the repression of the nascent free press and its replacement by a state-censored Gazette. Oral traditions were further rejuvenated in the old and new spaces of face-to-face exchange, such as pubs, clubs, learned societies, coffeehouses, bookstores, and churches (Zaret, 2000). By the early eighteenth century, London contained around three thousand coffeehouses, such as Button’s, Lloyd’s, Slaughter’s, and Garraway’s. These, and Parisian cafés like Le Procope, acted as the physical engine rooms of the Enlightenment, but they were also hybrid spaces in which printed newspapers, pamphlets, and books were read aloud and discussed in public. As Jürgen Habermas puts it, these were spaces in which “literature had to legitimate itself” (Habermas, 1989: 33).

  Public rituals, performances, games, festivals, and exhibitions of varying kinds were important parts of the hybrid media systems of early modern Europe. Religious and political street processions combined music, images, text, and the spoken word in dialogic flows of communication that bound together rulers and ruled through mutual gestures of goodwill. These rituals were also used to orchestrate critiques of the established order. During the late sixteenth century, organized public theater started to integrate these different media forms and give them an entertainment inflection, and theater later went on to play a role in the pre-revolutionary ferment in late eighteenth-century France, alongside a wide range of media forms and genres such as pornography, comedies, and utopias (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 36, 83; Darnton, 1995).

  The emergence of printed books and pamphlets was a major cause of the Protestant Reformation, but oral culture and visual media also played important roles here, too. Martin Luther’s vernacular translation of the Bible was undoubtedly instrumental, but so were his hymns and the many paintings and iconic woodcut prints depicting religious scenes and images of Luther and his wife. Following the wave of Calvinist-led iconoclasm that spread across Europe during the early sixteenth century, the Catholic church, initially reluctant to popularize visual representations of religious stories out of fear that to do so would empower worshippers to challenge the authority of the religious elite (Grabe & Bucy, 2010: 31), nevertheless responded with a renewed emphasis on grand sacred icons that specifically sought to counter the Protestant critique (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 68). The Reformation was therefore in part a power struggle about the perceived appropriateness of competing media forms to adequately represent the sacred.

  The character of these spaces of oral culture also influenced the genres of the emergent pamphlet, newspaper, and journal press of the time, helping to forge new practical norms of legitimacy and consent in political communication. The pages of the Spectator, published 1711–1712, contained a virtual “club” modeled on the real thing in London. It featured individuals drawn from diverse social groups, including a merchant, a country squire, a priest, and a “rake.” The first significant popular news journal, the Athenian Mercury, which ran from 1691 to 1697, fielded around six thousand questions from readers. Priests would arrange for their favorite sermons to be printed and they, in turn, would come under the influence of the sermons of others, as well as religious guidebooks, which emerged during the early fifteenth century. Performers would resell printed books after reciting from them in streets and market squares. Printed lyric sheets for popular folk ballads, some of them critical of Catholic orthodoxies during the Protestant Reformation, were frequently displayed in English and German taverns, to encourage public singing. During England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, these developments also intersected with the repertoires of street processions, as well as the growth of symbolic goods such as playing cards, medals, plates, and teapots (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 39–79). Print media were of huge significance during the French Revolution of 1789: around 250 new newspapers were founded in that year alone and published political writing flourished. But widespread illiteracy in French society also fueled the continued importance of face-to-face meetings in political clubs, in addition to the older traditions of iconoclasm, festivals, and processions. Sites of oral and physical interaction therefore became enmeshed with an emergent print culture, and print culture itself acted back upon oral culture and shaped it partly in its image.

  Print culture therefore took several centuries to fully deal with the vestiges of its pre-print past. Handwritten manuscripts continued to be used for the circulation of public documents until well into the eighteenth century. Some writers deliberately eschewed printed books and preferred to restrict the supply of their work to friends and networks of cultural and political elites, as a means of building communities around ideas or of escaping religious and political censorship. This was especially important in countries such as Russia, where most printing presses were based in monasteries, but it was also widespread in eighteenth-century Paris, where there was an organized industry of scribes churning out hundreds of underground texts critical of Louis XIV (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 37–38). Handwritten newsletters continued to circulate even after the rise of printed news-sheets, not least because they could be personalized according to their wealthy readers’ interests.

  The continuing importance of visual imagery also points to a further theme in the history of media hybridity: the integration of information and entertainment. The history of the press is often portrayed as the victory of reason and informed debate and what would in the twentieth century become known as “hard” news. But the reality is more complex. The press systems of Britain and the United States have always featured a hybrid blend of entertainment and information. As Bruce Williams and Michael Delli Carpini have argued, early American newspapers like the American Aurora (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011: 22–23) contained a bizarre mixture of political debate, sexual scandal, and satire. In the late eighteenth century there was no coherent understanding of what would, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerge as the policed boundaries between news and entertainment, and between producers and consumers. New York’s Sun, which ran from 1833 to 1950, featured entertainment alongside politics and public affairs, including a series of richly-illustrated hoax stories in 1835 supposedly revealing life on the moon. London’s Bell’s Weekly Messenger, which ran from 1796 to 1896, carried cartoons as well as sensational content and information related to horse racing, health, and court reports. Reynolds’s News, founded in 1850 by former Chartist G. W. M. Reynolds, combined news, radical liberal opinion pieces, short stories, and illustrations. Britain’s Daily Mail, founded in 1896 and very much a creature of the turn toward more overtly commercial models of journalism that occurred in the late nineteenth century, was the first daily paper to have a “women’s page” (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 181–195).

  As the nineteenth century progressed, conversational styles of journalism that borrowed from oral traditions continued to encourage lively and pluralistic representations of public opinion in the American press. These were based on multiple genres, including fictional storytelling and sensationalism, and were given new impetus in the 1880s with the growth of printing methods that enabled photographs and illustrations to be more faithfully reproduced. It was not until the American Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, which saw the professionalization and institutionaliza
tion of journalism, that these vestigial influences of oral and early print culture started to fade, as an informational model of “objectivity” in reporting began to edge out the older “storytelling” model. In the process, modern “scientific” understandings of the proper role of American news media emerged.

  Most influential here were the ideas of Walter Lippmann, who argued that a combination of expert media and political elites operating in the context of a citizenry with only limited capacities for political engagement was the best set of operating principles for a mass democracy. The social responsibility theory of the media cemented these ideas in the mid-twentieth century, as the separation of news and entertainment, fact and opinion, and producers and audiences—principles first developed for print during an era of increasing concentration of ownership—also came to characterize the bedrock of an even more concentrated power structure: American broadcasting (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011: 25, 32, 40–49, 57–60).

  Principles similar to those of Lippmann animated Britain’s BBC, founded in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company but transformed in 1927 into the devoutly noncommercial British Broadcasting Corporation. Its first director general, Lord Reith, argued that to hand over broadcasting solely to entertainment interests would amount to “prostitution” and he famously described the BBC’s mission as being to “inform, educate, and entertain.” His patrician public service vision of due impartiality in broadcast media heavily shaped the content of radio and television in Britain, guaranteeing the BBC a widely-admired, publicly-funded monopoly over broadcasting, until the foundation, in 1955, of a still heavily-regulated commercial alternative: the Independent Television Authority. In the United States, even though radio and television developed along more commercial and entertainment-driven lines and the idea of a fully-fledged publicly-funded broadcasting monopoly was rejected, the FCC, founded in 1934, exercised limited though still significant regulatory functions through its power as license holder. The “fairness doctrine” was introduced in 1949, and, though it was eventually repealed in 1987, acted as a means of guaranteeing news coverage of public affairs and the impartial treatment of opposing views. The introduction of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in 1967 gave information and education programming a more prominent, if still highly precarious role alongside entertainment in the American media system.

  PRINT-AURAL MEDIA

  The emergence of recorded sound in the late nineteenth century—the first genuinely mass medium not to be based on print—provides a particularly intriguing illustration of the power struggles that shape the hybridity of a newer medium (Gitelman, 2006: 25–86). Edison’s tinfoil phonograph first emerged during 1878 and was presented as a means of storing and reproducing speech, as the machine was paraded in a series of exhibitions at educational lyceums. Clockwork music boxes were very familiar to the nineteenth-century public and the first exhibitions of the transmission of sounds using telephones took place as early as 1876 and 1877. Early uses of the phonograph were rarely about music and performance, but were instead focused upon the social practices of public speech and the enunciation of printed texts. Exhibitors and their audiences would record their own sounds, including recitals of Shakespeare and popular poetry, but also everyday bodily noises like coughs and sneezes. These shows were genuinely interactive occasions. The hybridity of this newer media form was signaled literally by the inscribed surfaces of the scraps of indented tin foil that attendees would take home as “printed” mementos of their “recordings.” Until they were replaced by superior, non-removable wax cylinders, tinfoil souvenirs became an essential part of the shared rituals of Edison’s “talking machine” exhibitions, and helped to construct a nascent public around this emerging technological form.

  These talking machines were marketed as devices for businesses and Edison himself predicted that the phonograph would mark the end of printed books. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, however, in attempts to popularize the device, battery-powered motorized phonographs containing pre-recorded music on wax cylinders began to be installed in public spaces such as hotels, bars, and purpose-made public rooms, on a pay-for-play basis. Their educational uses were downgraded and these public installations offered no facility for self-recording. Still, the poor sound quality of the early models meant that users had to listen individually, using headphones or “hearing tubes.” Rooms often contained up to sixteen sets of headphones connected to a single machine. These pay-per-play public phonographs were based in part on older practices of public print culture. Not only were recorded announcements inserted into the beginning of each musical recording, cards containing promotional descriptions of what was to be heard were also placed above the machines; listeners would read these as the machine played the sounds. Individuals listened “together alone,” in hybrid public-private spaces that were portents of later media, particularly the cinema, but also radio, television, and the internet. Recorded sound was therefore first perceived as a “public” (or semipublic) rather than a private or domestic medium, and the phonograph’s design and its social practices were heavily influenced by the public cultures of print and performance in the late Victorian period.

  When phonograph companies began selling recordings to local stores, this contributed still further to the construction of a public whose identity was based upon listening to a shared repertoire of music. But by the turn of the twentieth century, things started to shift. Berliner’s rival gramophone device became more popular and cultural and economic changes combined to literally “domesticate” recorded sound, as it was increasingly designated entertainment to be consumed privately in the home. The result was the emergence of sound recordings as a newer mass medium. It represented a rupture with print, but the practices of print media still helped shape it during its first few decades.

  A recurring pattern in the history of the emergence of newer media is one that reverberates strongly in the present era of digital media. In the early stages, newer media, both technologically and in terms of their associated elites and publics, are very much up for grabs. The boundaries between producers and consumers blur as the medium is negotiated and defined through a series of technological innovations, competitive interventions, and boundary drawing among early users (Gitelman, 2006: 15). It was certainly the case with the phonograph’s transition from tinfoil sheets to wax cylinders to gramophone recordings. A technology that began life as a means of capturing dictated speech in offices steadily accreted a range of public, semipublic, and private social practices. Middle-class women were key shapers of the early recording industry, as were emerging conceptions of idealized domesticity reflected in the rise of consumer culture, with its popular monthly magazines, mail order catalogs, and department stores as sites for the marketing of new recordings to the public. The commercial model of the early recording industry, based as it was upon the collection, storage, display, and repetitive playback of categorized individual records (mostly excerpted versions of public performances) bore traces of print culture’s established practices around books. The social status associated with having certain types of music in the home was accompanied by the democratization of the rituals associated with collecting and curating cultural objects. But the read-write, user-shaped characteristics of the early phase of the medium faded as it spread to homes, and recorded sound evolved into an essential component of all mass broadcast media.

  “ELECTRIC” MEDIA

  The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also witnessed the invention and contested negotiation of other important newer communication media: the telephone, wireless transmission, and, most curiously, electric light (Marvin, 1988). Again, hybrid recombinations of older and newer media are much in evidence.

  The social embedding of these newer media was sparked by the broader public’s access to electrical power, but the process was also driven by new technical and professional elites: scientists, inventors, engineers, and businessmen who were eager to define the newer media and legitimate their en
hanced status and prestige with and within them. Like several of the phenomena I discuss in the rest of this book, these newer “electric” media were assemblages. They consisted of technologies, such as generators, wires, switches, batteries, and handsets; hierarchical divisions of labor between the technical and creative elites and the associated workers required to run the new communications infrastructure, such as telephone operators and maintenance staff; and older media-empowered groups, such as press proprietors, journalists, theatrical entertainers, and politicians, who sought to adapt and exploit the newer media for their own advantage.

  The emergence of electric media gave rise to a panoply of new cultural anxieties, social ambitions, modes of social control, and futuristic utopias, as many aspects of the older media rituals of nineteenth-century society became layered with newer affordances. Ithiel de Sola Pool’s extraordinary research of the early 1980s, published in his book Forecasting the Telephone, catalogs more than 180 distinct predictions about how the phone would change American (and global) culture, society, and politics (Pool, 1983a). There were particularly strong concerns over the telephone’s disinhibiting effects and the new ease with which social connections could be made using the technology. Among wealthy households, this was often expressed as distaste for the potential for untrammeled communication with those of lower social status. There was a public and political aspect to this. For example, Chauncey Depew, a U.S. senator between 1899 and 1911, was harassed by telephone “maniacs” eager to speak to him about his latest newspaper article. In 1889, a man was imprisoned on the grounds of lunacy after he insisted that a long-distance phone office in Syracuse connect him directly to the New York City home of the famous millionaire, Mrs. Vanderbilt. Doctors and other professionals complained of being constantly hounded by patients eager to be given detailed advice over the phone (Marvin, 1988: 67, 86–88).