The printed word was the dominant type of communication after it was invented

Toward the end of the last century this began to change

The Invention of Radio

• Telegraph à first device to make use of electricity for sending and receiving signals.

Samuel Morse, inventor à The Morse code à dots and dashes represented words

Used for many things à railroads; news from other regions became accessible

Limitations: many trained operators required; telegraph wires had to be strung à expensive

• Wireless communication needed

Heinrich Hertz à produced radio waves w/ an oscillator (rapidly generated electrical impulses)

Hertz focus was of purely scientific inquiry, but others saw practical application resulting from his work

• Radio à main use was for ship to shore applications

Transmit messages across oceans

Used during WWI

• Amateur radio operators began using radio to transmit personal messages, weather bulletins, musical recordings, etc.

• Corporations, inspired by profit, developed interest in radio (Westinghouse)

• First programs were low-budget à phonograph recordings has tiny royalties, live performers usually did so for free

• ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) began demanding fees

• Radio could only reach one sense à the desire for a mode of communication that contained sound and pictures was sought

• Early efforts to transmit the pictures electronically depended on the Niplow Disk

Screen containing selenium cells (could activate electrical current when light

Fell on it). As disk rotated, pinpoints of light moved across the screen, generating

A picture. Very slow and inefficient process.

• Vladimir Zworykin (Russian émigré) produced first workable television camera (1928)

• 1939 à Radio Corporation of America (RCA) bagan the regular broadcast of t.v. programs to a few thousand receivers in NYC

• Development of radio and t.v. largely private enterprise, but gov’t. played important role

• Westinghouse and American Telephone and Telegraph had financial stake in RCA in return for use of their patents.

• Federal Gov’t. used its regulatory power to insure an orderly environment for broadcasting

Broadcasters could only broadcast on a specific frequency

• Federal Gov’t establishes the Federal Radio Commission, which later becomes the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC)- 1934

• When TV went into its period of rapid growth in the late 1940’s and 50’s some of its success could be attributed to the the uniform technical standards developed by FCC

• FCC typically renews broadcasting license if broadcaster meets minimum requirements. Thus, quality control has often gone by the wayside

• FCC is often at the mercy of Industry, who has technical expertise, whereas FCC does not.

• FCC commissioners often leave FCC to work for broadcasting companies à Conflict of Interest

• FCC commissioners have "generally opted for the status quo…broadcasting [became] little more than a way of making large sums of money

1950 à 4.6 hours of TV watching per day

1970 à 5.9 hours of TV watching per day

1980 à 6.5 hours of TV watching per day

1988 à 7.1 hours of TV watching per day

1992 à 192 Million TV sets in America

98% of all American households own at least one TV

Qualifications

Just because TV is on doesn’t mean it is being actively viewed

TV is often in the background of American domestic life, much like wallpaper

Better-educated people don’t watch less TV, they watch different TV à public TV

Violence on Television and Its Consequences

18 year old will have seen 18,000 murders on TV

80% of TV programs have some violence

7 out of 10 characters on TV are involved in violence

Between 1 & 2 out of 10 are involved in killing

Does violence on TV cause aggressive behavior in its viewers? Hotly debated issue

• Children are more likely to play with toy guns after seeing filmed aggressive acts, even if gunplay did not appear in the film

• Laboratory experiments that study this relationship are NOT real life.

• Violence cannot be entirely linked to TV violence. The social world is far more complex than to be explained by a simple relationship

Violent behavior is a product of complex motivations and inhibitions

We do not commit an act of violence because:

1. We have learned that such actions are likely to result in retaliation
2. We know that they usually do not solve the problem
3. We have internalized a code of behavior that discourages such acts

TV can alter these inhibiting factors

Television, Information and News

• Until recent times most people were blissfully ignorant of the world around them

• Electronic communications has changed this

U.S. à 17,000 newspapers; 12,000 periodicals; 400 million radios; 192 million TVs

• TV has been the most important element in recent communication revolution

But TV is not completely dominant à

• TV much less important for local news than the local newspapers

• For national and international news TV is prime source for coverage

• News presented on TV is fundamentally different than news that appears in papers

News on TV presented as soundbite

Newspaper à impersonal; TV à storytelling

Television and Politics

Has TV fundamentally altered the political process?

• No doubt politics of today is far different from the days of Harry Truman, who campaigned from the back of a railroad car

• Today, TV advertising plays a big role in elections

Prime time TV ads à $200,000+

Typical political campaign budgets 1/3 for TV advertising

• Increased costs for campaigns may lead politicians under the influence of powerful, wealthy interest groups, which may or may not represent the will of the population

TV can influence elections

35% voters do not decide who they’ll vote for until the last week of election

10% undecided right up to the day of the election

It is these groups on which TV ads can have the most impact

• TV ads can be detrimental to the political process because ads often reduce a politician’s message to a sound bite. Real world problems are not so simple

"As some critics have argued, the greatest threat to democracy may not come from the assault of hostile nations, but from the trivialization of the political process that occurs when television dictates the basic mode of discourse and comprehension." (203)