twentieth century: new media and cultural transformations
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| Juline Duvivier Au Bonheur des Dames |
the twentieth century, the emergence of new technologies is to radical alterations in the field of culture. Film, disc, radio, television and internet imply changes in the economy and cultural practices. The book, theater, music hall, popular music, so take new forms. Information systems and communication is also changing when the radio and then television to replace the press as a normal information. These changes give rise to a critical contemporaries. The concepts of mass media and mass culture are developed during the 1930s and then criticized and questioned. We consider in the lessons of the second half both the development of cultural industries and the emergence of critical discourse against them.
I. twentieth century. New technologies
From the last decade of the nineteenth century, new technologies are emerging that share to allow the recording and reproducing works by mechanical processes and their dissemination to a mass audience.
a. Cinema (mute) appears in 1895 - The Lumiere Brothers, and industrial Pathe and Gaumont France in creating powerful companies. Edison United States controls the production until 1913. After some hesitation, the public screening required comme mode usuel de diffusion des films. Ces derniers sont projetés dans des « théâtres » spécialisés, souvent d’anciens music-halls. Au début des années 1930 les films deviennent « parlants »(1927 « The Jazz Singer »), ce qui entraîne un renouvellement complet des procédés de tournage et de projection. Les brevets pour l’enregistrement des disques, ceux du cinéma sonore et ceux de la radio sont contrôlés par des firmes apparentées. Les Etats-Unis et l’Allemagne sont en compétition pour le contrôle des techniques du son.
b. Hard radio. By the 1880s we can save words and music on wax cylinders and return for group listening. The American industrialist and inventor Edison has a strong presence in this market while the European market is dominated by British firms, German and French (Marconi Pathe). After 1925-30 it conducts electrical recordings on 33 rpm discs. Large companies are set up (Edison, Pathe, Decca). From 1922, all industrialized countries, networks of radio stations begin to live the association advertising and dissemination of music and recorded performances.
c. TV. Prototypes of television sets are presented to the public in late 1930 but the networks for dissemination to the general public does not really make up the United States and Europe after 1945. They take the technical and economic model of broadcast networks: networks of transmitters connected to each other, recording studios centralized funding through advertising. The value of advertising is pegged to the number of listeners. The hearing is measured by special devices ..
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| plants in Joinville Pathe |
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| A serial U.S. |
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| A movie adapted from a novel by Dickens |
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| Fantomas (sorry ! turning impossible) |
d. The appearance of VHS, DVD and Internet (1970-2000) forced to renegotiate the boundaries between the areas and economic interests involved. Only Internet, in the form taken by the network after 2000, significantly changes the economics of mass media by multiplying the sources of programs and generalizing the peer to peer exchanges.
II. shifts in cultural boundaries
The new media are developed based on the expertise of the oldest areas of arts and culture, they capture part of the public and mobilize creators.
Music. opera, operetta, vaudeville, music-hall, music hall feed the programming of "variety" of broadcasting. (Eg "American Jazz Band "). By the late 1920s the record industry and radio are associated and articulate their productions on the economics of performing arts. Airplay, record output and tours are expertly coordinated.
After 1930 film also based on the music industries. Movies music (operas, "musicals") is a genre in itself. Film music is an outlet for composers. In the song, movies, record companies and radio stations organized a successful title. For example, to The Blue Angel (Von Sternberg, 1930) Marlene Dietrich recorded "Ich bin die fesch Lola," released later in the disc and radio. In 1934 the producers decided to add the song Dita Parlo "The barge goes by" the film by Jean Vigo L'Atalante ensuring the success of a film audience difficult.
Written . The scholarly book and popular book provides stories to silent cinema. For example, a film of 10 minutes 30 seconds, drawn from the work of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol , est produit en 1910 dans les studios Edison. Le Fantômas de Pierre Feuillade est tiré d’un roman de Souvestre et Allain. Dans une veine plus populaire, on passe du feuilleton au « serial ». Aux Etats-Unis, The Perils of Pauline, (1914) adapte à l’écran la veine du feuilleton à rebondissements.
Theatre and performing arts . The theater, classical or popular, ready to film his intrigues, its players, its directors, its know-how. Les Films d'art (1908) French in France are created specifically to take advantage of the classical repertoire. It's English vaudeville theater that has Charlie Chaplin who has learned the art of pantomime.
III. new features
New technology rise to industries that are transforming the field of culture. They have common characteristics.
a. "Industrialization" of production.
The first is the adoption of industrial models of production: popular books, comic books , records, and even movies are mass produced by industrial processes, and sold as consumer goods.
The manufacture of the popular book has been industrialized since the last third nineteenth century. In Paris the manufacturing is outsourced in large print in the suburbs. There are specialist publishers to produce at lower cost of books printed on cheap paper, aimed at a popular city. The plots are stereotyped, simplified notation. The covers are illustrated. Publishers are turning to advertising. United States Western Novel is broadcast that way, as well as Comic books aimed at a few urban scholar.
Regarding music, Edison created in the suburbs New York (Orange) une usine qui produit des cylindres et appareils de lecture reproduisant la musique enregistrée. La gravure sur disque prend le pas en 1910 sur le cylindre, l’enregistrement électrique s’impose après 1925. le microsillon apparaît en 1949. Le marché de la musique enregistrée développé des les années 1930 aux Etats-Unis, ne touche le grand public en Europe qu’à la fin des années 1940 et surtout après 1960 (45 tours). Il accompagne des changements culturels de fond :diffusion du jazz, du rock, internationalisation et autonomisation de la culture « jeune ».
L’industrialisation du cinéma primarily concerned with the circulation of films for screenings fairground in the years 1900-1910. Machines and perform the drawing of short films reproduced in many copies in the factory of the French company Pathé in Joinville. The workers who are working on some films are coloring the chain model. In the U.S. the whole system of classical Hollywood production will be compared to the Fordist production system.
Ill. Pathé plant in Joinville - Factory Edison (NJ) - Decca Records 1934
b. Search Public maximum
The cheap book, film, and the disk are the mass market.
The search for the general public takes a particular form on the radio where the established audience measurement and funding by advertising.
c. Standardization, cultural domination
There product standardization, the internationalization of markets, economic and cultural domination of the United States.
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IV. Critical Reflections on the Mass Media
This industrialization is accompanied de transformations importantes dans la forme des produits culturels ainsi que dans leur mode de consommation. Les contemporains ont le sentiment de voir naître une nouvelle culture populaire, plus dynamique que la culture cultivée et susceptible de la mettre en péril. Intellectuels et universitaires élaborent de nouveaux concepts pour en rendre compte, voire pour la critiquer.
a. Naissance du concept de « mass médias »
Le mot « mass Media "appears in the U.S. around 1923. It combines two words of different origin.
"Medium" is a Latin word, already used by Victor Hugo, who saw the poet in a "medium" to mean "smuggler." It means the holder of the message. Note that both must be considered both art and the institution that can implement it: the broadcast television are "mass media". The radio technology is meaningless without the institution (business administration) which implements in a precise legal framework.
"Mass" refers to the size of the public of the new technologies, which are organized in the twentieth century, in order to reach the widest audience possible.
The term "mass media" into common parlance as "mass communication", no longer used in English. This Means "newspapers, magazines, movies, television, radio, advertising, sometimes the book - mostly popular fiction, and music (pop industry)" (Tim O'Sullivan and others Key concepts in mass communication and cultural studies , Routledge, 1994, reed.)
b. Analysis of the technological aspects of media and their impact on the creation and reception of works
strictly technical aspects of the media and their influence on the communication or access to works, will attract the attention of contemporaries of the 1930s. We will retain only a few authors.
The German sociologist and philosopher Walter Benjamin examines the loss of sacredness of the artwork in a text written in 1935 and again became famous in the 1970 "The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. "
Regarding the reception, the French writer Georges Duhamel, who during the 1930 (Scenes of a future life , 1930) examines the difference between the act of read and watch a movie that, in condemning the film (an entertainment helots)
Canadian writer Marshall McLuhan in a series of works extremely read in the 1970s, attempts to conceptualize effect on the culture of domination networks and the substitution of image written as the dominant medium ( Understanding Media , 1968, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1967 Message Is Massage, v.1967 ). It was he who introduced the concept of "global village".
A dimension that need not detain us here but that is important is the question of manipulation of public opinion through the mass media. The Americans, who attended during the First World War to sophisticated propaganda operations in their own countries produce books on handling minds.
c. birth of the concepts of "mass culture" and "industrialization of culture"
analysis " mass media "leads also to develop two related concepts: the industrialization of culture and" mass culture "
The word" mass " utilisé dès les années 1930 dans l’expression « culture de masse » possède des connotations idéologiques et politiques qui vont assurer d’abord sa fortune puis son déclin. Il s’inscrit dans la critique des rapports sociaux et politiques d’une société où les individus ne seraient plus inscrits dans les cadres sociaux traditionnels (église, village, professions) mais seraient atomisés au sein d’une société urbaine qui ne les considèrerait plus que comme des consommateurs. Dépourvues de cadres structurants (le parti, l’église, la nation) ces consommateurs seraient vulnérables to manipulation. Moreover, they would have to consume cultural products of poor quality, degraded form of merchandise. Products at low cost in a series by the "cultural industries", the "cultural products" would have lost the creative force and content of criticism of the world that are characteristic of "real" work Art.
This is particularly critical design developed by philosophers and social scientists gathered in what is called the Frankfurt School. Its first members are the German philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Forced to leave their chairs at the University of Frankfurt, they took refuge in the United States before returning to Frankfurt in 1953. They are both Marxists and representatives of the German intellectual elite steeped in culture. They are horrified by what they discover in the American mass culture seems to them a manipulation of American capitalism in order to disorganize the working class. The Dialectic of Enlightenment (published in German in 1947) is as much a protest a critical analysis.
The philosopher Herbert Marcuse Germano-American who is also in Frankfurt School teaches in California, where he became a reference for the movement of American culture-cons for years 1960-70. In One-Dimensional Man (1964) adapts to the contemporary world the Marxist concept of alienation by showing that the mass media contribute to making contemporary "strangers to themselves, oblivious to their true place in the world and their interests, and therefore "insane."
also belongs to the Frankfurt School essayist Siegfried Kracauer, who in 1948 published an analysis of German cinema " From Caligari to Hitler, a psychological analysis of German cinema "(published in French in 1973) in which he questioned the political responsibility of the fiction film.
The work of the Frankfurt School in Europe will be developed by introducing the thought of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the next generation which the thesis introduces the concept of "public space" Public space: Archaeology of advertising as a constitutive dimension of bourgeois society (1963).
The background of these clearly Marxist thinkers is underlined by other authors, mostly American, who see a bias limiting the relevance of their analysis.
d. Cultural studies and the question of popular culture
The cultural studies will address the issue of popular culture of the twentieth century from a perspective that is often involved but also more pragmatic Instead to conduct a philosophical analysis and a blanket condemnation, historians of cultural studies multiply fine analysis of communicative situation or popular cultural practices and examine how industrialization transformed the culture. Two English authors are important: with Hoggart The Uses of litteracy (1957, translated by The culture of the poor , Editions de Minuit, 1970) offers a sensitive analysis, based on personal experience, culture, English working in the middle of the twentieth century. Raymond Williams, founder of the New Left review , publishes Culture and Society (1958) and then analyzes the English television, often in reports commissioned by the BBC
vein American cultural studies is quite different. It is rooted in the desire to reconsider minorities (racial, sexual) and defend their rights. His early work wonder therefore how a dominant culture affects and diminished the representation of subordinate groups in society. They then development studies-colonial and post colonial, adapting to the challenges of the globalized economy of the media in the late twentieth century.
Conclusion
The current analysis of the mass media and their relationship with the transformation of popular culture again, often without the explicit, concepts or analysis borrowed from the authors cited above. We will consider in the following sessions of the course at a time that we say the historians of the establishment of cultural industries in the twentieth century and representation that have had some of the most influential contemporary.
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