The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  There was also much anxiety about the telephone’s capacity to erode the privacy and social stability of the middle-class home. Newspapers and periodicals contained panicked reports of servant couples eloping following long-distance romances, and of fraudsters using phones to target wealthy families. Phone company workers, such as maintenance staff and operators—the “all-night telephone girls”—were able to listen in on private conversations. Party lines, which were often shared among ten or more households, meant that inadvertent eavesdropping of neighbors’ conversations was inevitable. Domestic robberies were often reported as being the outcome of thieves listening in on party lines. Many hotels and stores kept a shared phone for use by customers, either for a small fee or as part of their service. The first successful prosecution under nascent wiretapping laws in the United States was an 1891 case involving betting fraud based on intercepting calls relaying horse racing results (Marvin, 1988: 69).

  Government and the law fought back using the same technologies. Boston’s police stations had phones as early as 1878. By the late 1880s, London police had their own separate phone system with special lines connecting senior police with Parliament, the War Office, and the Fire Brigade. The British government, eager to maintain control of its imperial periphery, was a prodigious user of electric media and at first resisted the democratization of the phone on the grounds that it ought to be their reserved domain; opening it up would compromise the quality of the official government service (Marvin, 1988: 98–101). Yet at the same time, journalism and scientific commentary was teeming with speculation about the educational and “civilizing” effects of using the phone to connect disparate societies around the globe, in a reference back to print culture. These were discourses of the potential for the disembodied pursuit of self-discovery through learning about the riches of other cultures, as the phone was presented as an ideal way to hear eloquent speeches by public figures and to learn about literature, museums, and picture galleries (Marvin, 1988: 204). The parallels with the reception of the internet in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century are striking.

  These social hopes and fears turned upon the idea that the phone’s newness as a medium was subverting established understandings of community, family, social hierarchy, and politics by blurring personal and professional boundaries and disturbing preexisting relations of power and influence. The phone reconfigured the rules of communication and social protocols around secrecy, publicity, and access.

  Later broadcasting practices also owe their origins to early experiments with using the telephone system to transmit live events. Though they were the preserve of the wealthy, in 1880s London and Paris, plays, concerts, opera, and even religious services were transmitted live from theaters and churches to remote dedicated rooms containing multiple phone headsets (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 145; Marvin, 1988: 209). Over the next three decades, the “theaterphone” practice of “broadcasting” theater, music, and sports spread across several major U.S. cities, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Interactive applause would scratch its way back across the party lines.

  Political campaigns were given the theaterphone treatment. During the elections of the 1890s the telephone was featured as a means of connecting politicians with journalists and the public. Real-space rallies and speeches were broadcast live to houses; people would pass around the headset and comments from the listeners would be relayed back to the candidates and the rally crowd. During the 1892 election, the telegraph started to be pushed aside, as the phone emerged as the medium of choice among journalists eager to send election results back to their editors in the shortest possible time. The phone was also a better means of informing the elite clientele of the clubs and hotels in the major U.S. cities. During this period, the American Bell Telephone company often combined the roles of reporter, editor, and broadcaster. Bell organized printed cards of previous election results for those who subscribed to its service, it edited the reports that it received from local papers, the police, and local officials, and it regularly sent fresh packages of results down the line to eager audiences. This organizational innovation was improved upon during the 1896 election by AT&T in New York, when more than a hundred staff managed a network of reporters, hotels, clubs, local exchanges, and subscriber lines allowing listeners to hear the results as they arrived and were read aloud by phone operators. And for those unable to connect by phone, the results were remediated in real time, projected onto cityscapes with huge electric lamps.

  While the phone and recorded sound were the major developments in electric media during the late nineteenth-century, this period also saw an explosion of announcements, news, and advertising mediated by electric light (Marvin, 1988: 152–190). This was a prototypical form of mass broadcasting, but it was based upon audiences viewing information en masse, together in the cityscape, not in private, but in public. In 1892, giant searchlights installed at New York’s Madison Square Garden and the roof of Joseph Pulitzer’s World Building were used to broadcast the incoming presidential election returns using color-coded streams of light projected onto clouds and nearby buildings (Marvin, 1988: 186). In an excellent historical example of the media hybridity I discuss later in this book, the color codes were publicized days in advance by the major New York newspapers, so that the public would be able to decode the signals in real time on the night of the election.

  During the early years of the twentieth century these prototypical broadcast news-making assemblages were increasingly professionalized, as demand increased for the immediacy offered by the phone and technological improvements made the telecommunications system more reliable. Yet, in their party lines, amateurs also had their own arenas for hearing and spreading news. These early examples almost always revolved around the live transmission of events, but it was not long before the idea of scheduled programming of a variety of entertainment and news content (some of it provided in-house, some of it aggregated from newspapers and magazines) was evident in telephone “broadcasting” “channels” such as Budapest’s Telefon Hirmondó and its American imitator, New Jersey’s Telephone Herald (Marvin, 1988: 218–218). Despite the diffusion of public telephone booths during the early twentieth century, these adventures in phone-mediated broadcasting were undoubtedly the preserve of a wealthy minority. And yet their significance is manifold. They were hybrids of visual and oral culture, newspapers and the telephone, and they offered glimpses of what would come later with the rise of radio and television, as the classic one-to-many scheduled broadcasting model would become entrenched, even though phone broadcasting had provided for one-to-one and many-to-many interaction in public and semipublic settings.

  ASSIMILATION AND PARASITISM

  Media hybridity also arises when newer media are assimilated into, or are parasitical upon, institutions once established for older media.

  For example, in its early years, the British telegraph was shaped by the signaling techniques developed by the rail networks. Railroad companies were among the early investors in telegraphy, and they, along with other private companies were bought up and placed under the control of the Post Office under the terms of the 1868 Telegraph Act (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 133). This Act, which laid the foundations for what would become known as “telecommunications policy,” introduced a new understanding of telegraphic messages, one based upon previous conceptions of the postal service. From then on, twenty-word telegrams were to be subject to a uniform charge, a development that pleased the press, who were increasingly reliant upon the wires for communicating news. The British telephone system developed in a similar fashion. In 1880 the Post Office took over the phone network and ran it on a license and royalty basis until 1912, when full public control was established. And in 1904, the Wireless Telegraphy Act positioned the Post Office as the license-granting body at the center of a regulatory system for emerging wireless radio.

  Telegraph and railroad companies were also closely aligned in the United States. Western Union capitalized on
its links with railroad interests and by the 1890s it was carrying 80 percent of America’s telegrams. Though there were calls for the U.S. Post Office to take over the company, the defenders of private monopoly successfully argued that a large, integrated system run by the private sector would be better for consumers and for future research and development. A similar approach was adopted with telephony. AT&T, established in 1885, grew quickly and in 1909 absorbed Western Union telegraphy. AT&T was exempted from the anti-trust Graham Act of 1921, and by the end of the 1930s, 83 percent of all U.S. telephones were under AT&T’s control (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 145–146). When it came to wireless radio, the U.S. Postal Service did not assume the power enjoyed by its British counterpart, but the pattern of emergence from existing institutions was similar in some respects. For example, during the American radio mania of the early 1920s, many of the stations grew out of newspapers, universities, cities, and even local stores.

  Similarly, the development of American national television networks was initially dependent upon long-distance telephone infrastructure. Before the emergence of cable and satellites, AT&T’s lines and microwave towers were the only reliable means of distributing programming across a vast territory. Part of the revolutionary nature of cable television when it arrived later in the twentieth century was its ability to bypass this infrastructure. It was a hybrid assemblage of satellites, receiving antennae, wired cable distribution, and local and national content production that enabled commercial pioneers like CNN-founder Ted Turner to emerge as a powerful player alongside the national free-to-air television networks during the late 1970s. Turner’s first “superstation,” WTCG, took content first beamed to the Atlanta area and distributed it via satellite across the entire United States at the flick of a switch in 1976. And, though the principle of packet-switching that was so essential to the development of internet communications was initially rejected by AT&T in the 1960s (Wu, 2010: 174), before the break-up of the Bell system in the early 1980s, the ARPANET was hugely dependent upon AT&T’s telephone network.

  It is also often forgotten that from the 1960s to the 1990s the fate of home computing, and the idea of information-based computer networks more generally, was dependent upon developments in television. From its very beginnings, but especially after the FCC’s 1969 ruling that American cable companies should provide local programming, cable television was often portrayed as a medium for the provision of a wide range of interactive information services. Firmly established in more than half of American homes by the mid-1980s, cable was the original “converged” medium for a “wired nation,” as journalist Ralph Lee Smith dubbed the United States in a 1970 essay for the Nation, later published as a book (R. L. Smith, 1972). The values of the early cable television industry bore many similarities to the do-it-yourself and hacker values that played such an important role in the development of the internet from the 1970s onward.

  Activist broadcasters such as Fred Friendly, who would later play a major role in the founding of PBS, pushed for public access cable television in New York during the late 1960s and hoped for cable channels that would be dedicated to political reporting and public debate (Wu, 2010: 183). Interactive television slowly stuttered into life during the 1970s, with the launch of local cable systems like QUBE in Columbus, Ohio, which featured interactive opinion polls. Across the advanced industrial economies, several so-called “viewdata” services were also launched, such as teletext or videotex. Designed for the display of text and very simple graphics on a television screen, viewdata services were delivered either by telephone line, cable, or wireless broadcasting. The British Post Office established Prestel (from the hybrid term “press telephone”) in 1979, and several newspapers opted to become information providers on the Prestel network, though tellingly the majority were antagonistic. The French Minitel system was more successful, and persisted until 2012.

  The interrelationship between television, telecommunications, and computing did not end there. Early home computers like the Commodore PET and the Sinclair Spectrum were designed to be viewed on a television. Their popularity was driven by games loaded into digital memory in suitably hybrid fashion via audio cassette players, but it was also due to their easy interface with what was already a familiar part of the domestic interior. And television interests soon weighed in on this new environment. The BBC, for example, launched its BBC Micro computer in 1981. And yet the sector could also be selective in its embrace of the television as a medium for digital communication. In the late 1980s, the BBC resisted the British government’s plans to approve the expansion of cable television, just as the U.S. networks had done through a number of legal challenges targeted at cable companies from the late 1950s to the 1970s.

  In many respects, therefore, television acted as the midwife of home computers and digital newer media. Competition, conflict, and interdependency among media and their publics—the characteristics of the hybrid media system—were in evidence once again, just as they were going all the way back to the emergence of print.

  RESERVED DOMAINS

  By now, it should be clear that throughout history the emergence of a newer medium is never a simple matter of the bursting into life of a revolutionary new technology that effortlessly finds a market and reconfigures culture, society, and politics. But nor is it about the simple and inevitable betrayal of the revolutionary change envisaged by a newer technology’s founders and early adopters. It is a combination of these two processes. Even the most obviously superior media can become sidelined for years or even decades, as powerful interests seek to defuse their impact. There is contingency, competition, and rivalry; subterfuge and naked self-interest; delay and blockage. There are attempts by those in positions of power derived from associations with older media to create reserved domains in which that power can be maintained, at least until they have attempted to shape newer media in their own image (for the discussion of reserved domains see chapter 1). These forces can often have perverse effects, further contributing to systemic hybridity. The surprisingly slow development of American television and the utterly tortuous development of its frequency modulation (FM) radio (Wu, 2010: 125–135, 136–156) provide some of the best examples of older media’s lingering power and the creation of reserved domains.

  First trialed in public by the idealist inventor, Edwin Armstrong, FM radio was a major advance on the amplitude modulation (AM) technology that had fueled the extraordinary growth of the U.S. radio industry during the 1920s. FM had a much higher signal to noise ratio and better sound quality. Unlike AM, FM required low power transmitters and was more efficient and cheaper to run. In the early 1930s, FM had the potential to create a second wave of radio innovation, but it was not to be. Edwin Armstrong was hired in the 1920s by his old friend and fellow amateur radio enthusiast, David Sarnoff. By the end of the decade, Sarnoff had become the legendary president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and director of the U.S. National Broadcasting Company (NBC). By 1934, Armstrong’s FM technology had been perfected, but Sarnoff and the RCA, backed by industry body the Radio Trust, deliberately stalled its further development for fear of undermining the business model they had established with AM. Sarnoff broke up Armstrong’s lab in the Empire State Building and spent the next twenty years employing a variety of methods to stall the replacement of AM by what was clearly a superior technology.

  By the 1930s, the American radio industry had established a large, government-sanctioned business based on advertising across its AM networks. Sarnoff and the Radio Trust conducted a public campaign to cast doubt on FM as a replacement for AM. These arguments jelled with others calling for a focus on television as the promising new medium of the era and they were given forceful backing by the RCA-NBC broadcasting duopoly that emerged in the 1930s. The AM radio industry successfully pushed the FCC to effectively ban the granting of commercial FM station licenses between 1934 and 1940, and RCA refused to switch to manufacturing FM radio sets. When the regulatory thaw came after World War II, the new
structure crippled FM. The FCC placed strict power limits on FM transmitters, a move that required FM stations to buy new machinery and instantly condemned four hundred thousand consumer radio sets to obsolescence. Almost twenty years after its inception, FM was dealt a huge blow from which it would not recover until the 1970s. AM remained alive and well, and would continue to dominate the U.S. radio landscape for decades.

  Similar forces shaped the early years of American television. By the end of the 1920s, mechanical television was a proven if fragile technology. A nascent independent industry was, however, beginning to form. In its early phase, it was characterized by competition among different inventors, such as John Baird, Charles Jenkins, and Philo Farnsworth. But powerful radio interests, most obviously David Sarnoff (again) of RCA and NBC, wished to mold television in the image of commercial radio. Sarnoff wanted to see the new medium develop according to the advertising and mass entertainment model that he had perfected with AM. More than that, following what he perceived would be a simple translation of radio programming into the new medium of television, Sarnoff wanted established radio industry players to run television in a similar regulatory environment of FCC-sanctioned oligopoly. As he did with radio, Sarnoff successfully lobbied the FCC, who were already receptive due to their desire to see such a valuable national resource led by what they saw as responsible and experienced industrial leaders. Sarnoff convinced the FCC that television was an immature technology that ought to be delayed because it was not ready for marketing to the public. As a consequence, the FCC restricted its licensing program to strictly experimental operators and refused to countenance commercial television for more than a decade. In the meantime, Sarnoff brazenly stole Philo Farnsworth’s electronic television technology and went on to gain a decisive advantage with the launch of RCA’s television system at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Not surprisingly, RCA television was a lot like commercial AM radio—with pictures.