As we discussed in class, if we plug the internet into the general timeline of communication technology that began with simpler mediums like stone and papyrus, the new medium should follow the generalization set up by Innis. If every new communication technology in the history of mankind, whether biased by time or space, has “caused” a social change, then the internet should not be an exception. Whether Innis’s argument would still “hold true” for the internet cannot really be established until a future historian looks back on our current situation and can demonstrate both that the space-biased internet created a revolution to overturn a time-biased medium (television) and that some as yet inexistent futuristic time-biased medium will cause a social revolution that makes the internet seem time-biased as well. Benkler seems to think this internet-based revolution is in progress.

Benkler, however, is much more tentative, and many times he declares that his speculative claims about the internet’s capacity to empower social justice through democratic potential, greater individual autonomy, increased peer production, widespread availability, working outside of dominating economic structures, enlarged social networking abilities, etc. may or may not actually cause social change in the future. Benkler is optimistic, if not utopian, while Innis, if forced to make a prediction about the internet’s capacity to effect social change, would probably encourage us to bet all our money on revolution.

So, even though Benkler and Innis utilize quite different research methods, they both assume that social change will occur and that communication technology will play a role in shaping, if not outright determining, the result. Hence, it makes sense that critics have written that Benkler suffers from the TD.

A final note: it’s amusing that Benkler’s sole reference to Innis seems to dismiss Innis as a technological determinist by lumping Innis in with Langdon Winner’s concept of technological objects’ politics (17). Indeed, Benkler appears to be agreeing with Innis and Winner throughout: the internet is the device with which we will change society’s politics. The main difference between Benkler and Innis thus comes down to Benkler’s wavering tentativeness in contrast to Innis’s certainty.

In theory, this assignment matches up with Susan Douglas’s book, but in practice I would probably have students read a much shorter essay from The Social Shaping of Technology, or one of its successors.

Goal: To get students to think about the many determining forces that inform technology practice. This could also be turned into a lesson about technological determinism, policy, materialism, or various other relevant areas of discussion depending on where the teacher places emphasis.

Procedure:
1. Have the students pick out the social factors that shape the development, production, adoption, and use of the technology in question. Make appropriate lists on the blackboard.
2. Using the same categories from the lists on the blackboard, have them brainstorm the same determining factors for an example technology as a class. This could be anything from toothbrushes to cell phones. Prompt them to dig deep into the less obvious connections between factors like cultural norms, manufacturing, and advertising.
3. Divide the class into smaller groups. Assign each group a technology relevant to the class, and then challenge each group to come up with as many determining factors as they can for their assigned technology. Set this up as some sort of friendly competition.
4. Make each group present their findings and allow the class to discuss/argue omissions, etc.

Adaptation: This assignment could be easily made into a writing assignment. Applying the social constructivism approach to a technology could be turned into anything from a short response paper to a long research paper. The same assignment procedure could also be used to teach any multi-faceted concept beyond the theme of technology.

On an even less abstract level, Howard makes an additional point that shows how structural and causal changes to campaigns have become common due to hypermedia. He writes: “the technology staff has the power to filter, destroy, or protect information for the campaign organization. Since so much political campaign business now occurs in digital form, the technology staff simultaneously plays the roles of archivist, accountant, and confidant” (168). On an informational level, hypermedia thus allow campaign IT personnel to rewrite or whitewash problematic digital information. Placing the control of information in the hands of IT staff causes or enables them to manipulate information as they see fit as they create the structure of both hypermedia software and politicians’ websites. An entirely new subset of workers has a hand in controlling the material presented to the public. Therefore, the changing technology puts much greater political agency into the hands of technicians where before such control was exercised by news media, speech writers, and public relations workers. The process of building a campaign diverts from the public spotlight to a bank of hidden computer terminals.

Howard’s first two methods of redlining place the targeted content-restricting or content-providing agency with the facilitators of political campaigns: politicians and their IT crews manage information dispersal. The choice of what content to provide and/or block lies wholly with the puppet masters, as the cover imagery of Howard’s book visualizes: a politician twitches his thumb, and targeted consumers of politics open (or delete without reading) the political email generated by the politician’s hypermedia machine. As Howard’s title suggests, politicians attempt to manage their citizen-constituents in a clear causal relationship.

In contrast, with Howard’s third method of individual political redlining, agency no longer lies with politicians and their webmasters, but with individual consumers of knowledge. The burden of proof is on Howard to prove that hypermedia somehow reverses the flow of power from consumer to politician. For example, Howard writes: “With hypermedia, though, many of these schema – and the tools themselves – are actually constructed by individuals, with or without their informed consent” (134). Or, in other words, “people assemble their own networks for conveying political information” (135). Certainly, individuals can choose, to an extent, how to navigate the internet, but how does an individual choosing between an infinite number of information providers and tools compare to politicians’ attempts to direct information according to class, race, and geographical voting record? The agential choice of the politician is to exclude people based on their assumed political stance whereas the agential choice of the individual includes or excludes information from their network. The first type of agency imposes information, or the lack thereof, on individuals. The second type of agency has no power over other people. Thus, the causal relationship in the second type of individual agency does not seem to compare to the top-down hierarchy of the first type. In other words, redlining implies some sort of power relationship between entities that an individual cannot exercise over him/herself.

Also, I don’t see how individuals choosing hypermedia content is any different than individuals choosing what information to encounter at any moment in an individual’s life. An implicit argument in Howard’s discussion of political redlining claims that individuals must politically redline themselves every time they choose one type or source of information over another, whether it be parking meter instructions or a jury’s verdict. At that point, the process of redlining is indistinguishable from the process of daily living. Our network of knowledge is always a constant choice, but surfing the internet in itself does not empower one person over another.

In contrast, the only obvious people who possess any individual agency to effect action are advocates for new information control models. According to Price’s argument, “Metaphors evolve into models, as the intuitive value of a figure of speech transfigures into a program of action” (86). For example, Charlotte Beers and Norman Pattiz helped to mold the United States’ information control response to 9/11. They advocated a media model, the United States government implemented it, and the Muslim masses were manipulated into obeisance to American values. The persuasive action on Beers and Pattiz’s parts was effective; their models became norms of operation. However, the rhetorical effect on Muslim populations constitutes near total rhetorical failure.

This response may seem quite negative, but I appreciate the importance of Price’s study. I learned a lot through his landslide of examples and evidence. My main complaint, and I think almost any scholar of rhetoric would agree, is that Price throws the term rhetoric around with flippancy. He provides an amazing contextual analysis and exposition of the rhetorical situation, but almost every time he gets to a juicy text, he doesn’t analyze it. The words just seem like mere elements of context rather than a focus of study. There are a couple brief exceptions, like his discussion of the Supreme Court decisions in Reno v. ACLU. Thus, ultimately, his analysis serves to strip agency from individuals by placing it wholly with institutions.

Following Innis’s process model, such upheaval sees a balance between a space-biased medium and a time-biased medium, before the newer of the two technologies achieves widespread and popular usage. So, if Innis looked at contemporary society in conjunction with the internet, would he see the roots of a stable period like that he posited for the cultural primacy of Ancient Greece before writing became rampant and helped transform Greece’s oral tradition? Or, would Innis see a period of revolutionary potential in which the internet is banishing the importance of a space-biased medium to transform society? In order to speculate Innis’s position on the internet, one must first decide where in his process theory of change our current society falls. If Innis rose from the grave to assess our situation, I don’t think he would see transformation in action. Like many other internet critics, he might see revolutionary potential in internet technology like hacktivists, multitude scholars, etc. However, at the same time, Innis would also observe the continued dominance of capitalist lifestyles around the globe. Thus, because the internet is still in its infancy, especially given the vast amounts of time that new communication technologies took to usurp the primacy of former communication technologies throughout history, I believe Innis would argue that ours is a civilization in the midst of its flourishing. However, like all flowering civilization in the past, ours must fall as well. But, at the moment, the internet coexists quite in peace with global capitalism, and our civilization and the internet seem to feed each others’ strengths.

Another question to consider: what is the time-biased medium that the internet will replace in importance? The internet has transformed print into a time-biased medium. Whereas print was once the communication technology of revolution due to its space-biased characteristics, now the internet has trumped print in terms of its ability to transcend large spaces. In turn, dusty institutional libraries seem like other monuments to lost cultures like the Pyramids and the Acropolis. Libraries have become traditional, bound in time. The internet usurps the library with its ease of use. We delete unwanted information with the touch of the mouse rather than a spectacular bonfire of books.

Of course, all of the other modern communications technologies, like telephony, television, radio, etc. have all become enmeshed with capitalism without causing a total revolution, so perhaps Innis would not put much faith in the internet.

Innis describes this process in action in each of the first three chapters of the book. For example, in “A Plea for Time,” Innis writes: “We are concerned with control not only over vast areas of space but also over vast stretches of time. We must appraise civilization in relation to its territory and in relation to its duration” (64). The issues at hand are governing power relations at specific historical moments, but because all hierarchies of power have had a limited duration, their overthrow remains an essential characteristic of any historical controlling power. Furthermore, “The character of the medium of communication tends to create a bias in civilization favourable to an overemphasis on the time concept or on the space concept and only at rare intervals are the biases offset by the influence of another medium and stability achieved” (64). Innis often cites ancient Greece as a paramount case of balance achieved between space and time bias due to the flexibility of their oral tradition to absorb the beginning of writing culture. When civilizations emphasize time or space in communication, balance disappears to set up a revolution via the spread of new communication technology. It seems like balance only occurs for a brief amount of time once one communication technology supersedes a previous one as in the following additional examples: clay => stone => balance with the Kassites; papyrus => parchment => balance in the Byzantine Empire; parchment => paper => balance in “modern” states (64).

Reading Innis, it seems that every new communication technology will cause a civilization-wide revolution, as his historical timeline/cycle demonstrates. A drawback to this approach comes with his analysis of present day communication technology. At the end of “A Plea for Time,” Innis rightly claims that our current civilization emphasizes the immediacy of communicating in time over the stability of space. However, the rapidity with which new communication technologies have become invented make me wonder if one technology can retain a lengthy primacy to induce a stability that must, in Innis’s model, counter the civilization-wide change brought upon us by radio, TV, the internet, etc. Does each new communication technology produce only localized stability and revolution? All of Innis’s examples come before the invention and improvement of global communications networks, so perhaps balance can only be achieved on a local level. And, perhaps each new communication technology has induced a revolution, but on a more local level. I’m not sure how Innis would even characterize the current civilization, but it seems he would emphasize the dominance of global capitalism, so this might preclude an emphasis on local power changes that have little effect on the global.

Miller and Slater describe three different approaches to Trini internet business practice that indicate the level of involvement certain businesses have with the technology. The three levels range from creating little more than internet pamphlets to have a minimal web presence, “mid-range ‘catalogue’ websites” that provide a greater level of ineractive buying and selling functions, and “fully functioning interface and ecommerce sites” that represent successful integration of local Trini business practice with globalized business practice. In terms of the other authors, the section of Fischer’s book that relates the uncontrolled spread of telephone companies in the wake of Bell’s patents expiring seems most relevant in comparison. However, whereas Fischer provides a history of unregulated business practice, he still writes his book in a historical moment that finds the world of telephony controlled by giant corporations with little deviation in business practice, and the latter part of his history describes how the telephone giants began to exert their power over other companies by expanding across the entirety of America in a relatively short amount of time. In contrast, Miller and Slater conduct their ethnography just at the moment in time when internet business practice has almost no regulation, despite the presence of giant corporations on the web. The subsequent rise of web 2.0 flea markets like e-Bay and the Amazon Marketplace, I believe, show that the period in which Miller and Slater wrote is still ongoing and morphing into new non-ossified forms of internet business practice. Indeed, the three types of website models that Miller and Slater describe still seem apt to describe the various types of business websites found online at this moment.

When Miller and Slater make the conclusion that Trini internet business practice embodies “frictionless economies” and/or “disintermediation,” (“a free flow of money, goods and desires, as smooth as electrons flowing through a superconductor, and with just as few regulatory hurdles to jump”), they do not seem to be engaging in hyperbole (168). However, if Fischer made the same claims about the early days of unregulated telephony, he would definitely seem like he was being overly idealistic given the eventual corporate takeover of telephone technology practice. The difference lies in timeliness. Miller and Slater write from the recent present to make extrapolations about the future of Trini internet business, whereas Fischer writes about a period many decades in the past to account for the development of telephone practice into its banal corporate form. Perhaps Miller and Slater should temper their conclusions and reign in their internet hype, but they seem to remain hopeful; the specter of a complete corporate takeover of the internet looms, but it has not become manifest yet, unlike with the telephone.

As a result of their lack of addressing this sub-element of one of their main dynamic categories, I wonder how useful “expansive potential” is for their project as a whole. It seems to be somewhat antithetical to the majority of Miller and Slater’s research in the first half of their book, because they concentrate on depicting Trini internet usage in practice rather than futuristic models of behavior. So, as Miller and Slater highlight family interconnectivity, internet dating practice, liming, etc, none of these practices points toward Trinis becoming anything radically new, whether utopian or dystopian. Life in general for Trinis, as Miller and Slater portray it, seems to go on pretty much as it had before, only with the internet as a novel and important communication technology that replaces telephony and letter writing.

As a result of the lack of empirical support for “expansive potential,” this category does not seem useful and/or applicable to their study in the first half of the book, since the “quite new things” that people/spaces may become are already normative. Furthermore, when speculating about long-term relationships between cousins communicating via the internet, Miller and Slater write: “the time depth of our study is too shallow for confident predictions” (60). If their study lacks “time depth,” then I don’t understand how they can expect to defend a category of analysis that depends on expansive time and speculation about future technology use. Also, Miller and Slater make other claims that seem to disparage any rigorous study of “expansive potential”: “We simply cannot predict the future impact of the Internet except to suggest that the impact is likely to be different in each of these diverse areas [commerce, religion, and nationalism]” (53). Thus, it already seems like Trini internet use, despite its newness, is already “mundane and taken for granted” (14).

The lack of support for “expansive potential” throughout the first half of their book also made me sensitive to how little the two authors reprise the other main dynamics highlighted in the introduction. On occasion, Miller and Slater would point out how a certain aspect of Trini internet use corroborates one of their “dynamics,” but this usually seems more of an afterthought than a guiding principle, which is surprising given the emphasis the two writers put on the dynamics at the beginning of the book.

Background/History

Barcode technology combines telematic and optoelectronic systems. Paul Virilio defines telematic as “the set of technologies and services using both information technology and telecommunications for collecting, storing, processing and communicating information,” and optoelectronic as “the branch of technology involving the convergence of optical and electronic technology and concerned with generation, processing and detection of optical signals that represent electrical quantities; major areas of application include communications and computing” (152 and 151).
[Insert history here]
Theory Section

At this introductory point I see multiple course readings applying to this project: To demonstrate some other examples of machine rhetoric, I can look at the unintended ramifications of technology design/use by using TV, radio, telephones, internet, etc. Williams, Douglas, and Fischer all provide examples, and all three also provide some analysis of why/how those technologies suggested their alternative uses. I’m not too familiar with the books we haven’t read yet, but if they analyze alternative uses for technology, they are obviously relevant. I’ll check out those books/authors you mentioned in class too.
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry makes some cogent arguments about how “the interior structure of the artifact” possesses a certain amount of force that affects the behavior of an object’s user. She does not make specific references to her theories’ applicability to technological artifacts, but they still have implicit relevance since her theories apply to all objects that humans find useful in a process whereby artifacts become sites of human projection and reciprocation. The two sites of projection and reciprocation, in Scarry’s model, demonstrate the force artifacts possess to affect human behavior: “In the attempt to understand making, attention cannot stop at the object . . . for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers” (307, emphasis hers). She terms the artifacts “lever” and “fulcrum”:
in order to underscore that it is itself only a midpoint in total action: the
act of human creation includes both the creating of the object and the
object’s recreating of human being, and it is only because of the second
that the first is undertaken: that ‘recreating’ action is accomplished by the
human makers and must be included in any account of the phenomenon of
making . . . the object . . . is invested with the power of creating and exists
only to complete this task of recreating us . . . (310).
Scarry also offers several other descriptions of this process: “the made object is simply the made-locus across which the power of creation is magnified and redirected back onto its human agents who are now caught up in the cascade of self-revision they have themselves authored” (323). Furthermore, “The object-as-lever also exposes . . . its nonimmunity from its own action. The imagination’s object is not simply to alter the external world, or to alter the human being in his or her full array of capacities and needs, but also and more specifically, to alter the power of alteration itself, to act on and continually revise the nature of creating” (324). Thus, first “an existing object, by recreating the maker, itself necessitates a new act of objectified projection . . . Second, just as the sentient needs and acuities are projected into objects, so objects themselves contain both capacities and needs that sponsor additional artifacts” (321). Scarry turns to invention to explain herself: “An invention may have a latent power that suggest a new application and so requires a new modification of the original invention” (321, emphasis hers). For example, “as the bodily lens of the eye is projected in a camera, eventually a new kind of camera that can enter into the interior of the human body (and film the events of conception, the passage of blood through the heart, or the action of the retina)” (321). Thus, Scarry describes the latent power as one of suggestion: the machine suggests further creation.
Fischer includes a number of relevant concepts in the introduction to Calling America.
In Television, Raymond Williams demonstrates how the ghosts in the machines of communication technologies suggest alternative uses. He concludes that the “social history of broadcasting” that he relates in the opening pages of the book “can be discussed on its own, at the levels of practice and principle. Yet it is unrealistic to extract from it another and perhaps more decisive process, through which, in particular economic situations, a set of scattered technical devices became an applied technology and then a social technology” (18). Williams then suggests two examples of how political economic regimes use broadcasting technology: “A fascist regime might quickly see the use of broadcasting for direct political and social control. But that, in any case, was when the technology had already been developed elsewhere. In capitalistic democracies, the thrust for conversion from scattered techniques to a technology was not political but economic” (18). “Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content . . . it is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of communication preceded their content” (18-19, emphasis his). Thus, economic pressures molded British broadcasting in a capitalistic fashion, but the entertainment content that came to dominate the culture of broadcasting came about due to broadcasters appropriation of radio and television for alternative uses not envisioned by the systems’ creators.
This process of appropriating communication technology for alternate uses is also visible in Williams’s description of user interaction with commercial broadcasting. Although corporations and broadcasters attempted to regulate radio and television behavior in Britain, not all viewers and listeners were passive absorbers of entertainment. Rather, radio and television technology suggested alternate uses to whom “controllers and programmers” considered “subjects”: if [viewers] were exposed by need in new ways, they were also exposed to certain uncontrollable opportunities. This complicated interaction is still very much in the process of working itself out” (134). In other words, “A controlled intention became an uncontrolled effect” (134-135). An apparatuses original design thus has determining effects on how a population uses technology both intended and unexpected. On one hand, the “element of intention is fundamental, but it is not exclusive. Original intention corresponds with the known or desired practices of a particular social group, and the pace and scale of development will be radically affected by that group’s specific intentions and its relative strength” (132). On the other hand, “at many subsequent stages other social groups, sometimes with other intentions or at least with different scales of priority, will adopt and develop the technology, often with different purposes and effects. Further, there will be in many cases unforeseen uses and unforeseen effects which are again a real qualification of the original intention” (132-133). To demonstrate his point, Williams turns to the alternative uses for explosives in both industry and warfare, but his more salient example points out the participatory democratic uses that have developed from television technology, like the televised town-meeting that “is a radically alternative definition of the relations between ‘broadcasters’ and ‘viewers’” (137). In turn, Williams sees the redefinition of technology practice as a place of social action: “whether the theory and the practice can be changed will depend not on the fixed properties of its institutions, but on a continually renewable social action and struggle” (138). The suggested uses of television technology thus have a certain amount of creative power that can alter human society by providing technology users with the impetus to alter and redefine the power relations that produced the original apparatus with the producers’ requisite intentions.
Toward bar code theory: In “The Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin writes: “What matters . . . is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers—that is, readers or spectators into collaborators” (233). DATA browser 02: Engineering Culture: On ‘The Author as (Digital) Producer’ celebrates Benjamin’s famous essay, and reproduces the above quotation multiple times, including the back cover. The editing of this book also reinforces the cogency of barcode fabrication and Benjamin’s essay by positioning the above quotation directly after Grinsted’s previously-quoted description of this “appropriated technology.”

Barcode Rhetorical Analysis

This section will concentrate on barcode technology and assume a “black box” user-familiarity with computer sticker printing and large stores’ self-service check out lanes. It will not be a training manual in barcode fabrication, but it will show that the key to barcoding’s black box is readily available online, in addition to the more restricted specialist environments of academic and professional engineering. Though barcode fabrication may be complex, they can be produced by following the directions, like cooking up a gourmet meal from recipes. Everyone could collaborate.
So what does the barcode suggest in its design? Rigidity/repetitiveness in its code combined with simplicity in its design, ubiquity, consumerism, etc. This section will be the heart of the paper.

Conclusion: Machine Rhetoric

The combination of barcodes with computer sticker printing has propelled the following social actions, or the current context. The fabrication of barcodes has become legitimated by specialists and tacitly approved by our legal apparatus: The IEEE and Indiana University websites show how the fabrication of barcodes has become institutionalized. Furthermore, Legal disclaimers absolve the barcode fabrication websites from liability for thieving/producing (depending on one’s position) collaborators.
Bar code technology has undergone further radical transformation with the combination of its design with radio technology to produce the controversial RFID movement as commercialized by the VeriChip corporation (www.verichipcorp.com).

Bibliography

“As an Art - HOW TO CRACK, by Bengaly, A TUTORIAL.” Addict3d.org. Accessed 2/13/07. .
Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Reflections. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1978. 220-238.
Douglas
Fischer, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Grinstead, George. “Appropriated Technology Wiki.” DATA browser 02: Engineering Culture: On ‘The Author as (Digital) Producer.’ New York: Autonomedia, 2005. 106-109.
Re-Code.com: .
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schutz, Pit. “The Producer as Power User.” DATA browser 02: Engineering Culture: On ‘The Author as (Digital) Producer.’ New York: Autonomedia, 2005. 111-125.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Translated by Julie Rose. New York: Verso, 1997.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Image Credits
“Barcode Number 5.” Area 10 Math and Technology Project. .

However, Fischer’s subsequent statistical analysis of the decline narrative ends up supporting these same general claims, but even though he supports the other general claims, he ends up reiterating the importance of financial strain over and over again so that he seems to emphasize this one claim over all the others. The financial argument becomes dominant. For example, he writes: “Within this technical and political economy, financial strains led many American farmers to abandon their telephones,” and “Faced with reduced incomes and higher real costs after 1920, many disconnected their telephones” (104 and 105). This only serves to demonstrate that all technology consumption probably declined during the Depression as depicted by the decline of automobile ownership, in general, in the early 1930s at almost the exact same rate as telephone ownership according to his graph on p. 44.

Furthermore, Fischer’s statistical analysis seems to blind him to other socio-historical and technological factors that may have led farmers to give up their phones, such as the ramifications of the Depression for rural mobility and the necessity of transportation. As the Depression forced farmers off the land in search of alternate stable or seasonal employment, they would no longer have use for telephones, whereas their need for transportation increased. Also, the great migration of African-Americans to northern cities was in full swing at this point. If they had phones on the farm, they would have abandoned them, and if they re-subscribed in the cities, then they would contribute to rising urban telephone usage. The same is true of “Okies” relocating to cities on the west coast. Thus, for many farmers, transportation was more important than telephony, “a luxury, a disposable good,” as Fischer aptly comments (114).

Thus, Fischer’s concentration on users’ consumption of telephone service, as a method, perhaps leads him to downplay the role of the Depression in causing the decline of usage among farmers, even as he makes multiple arguments for the importance of financial stress in causing the decline. It is a conflicted narrative that asserts multiple determining factors while returning again and again to an economic argument.

As much as these entrepreneurs tried to turn radio into a business, the almost free access to the technology granted by its conviviality foiled their attempts at every turn. Why would anyone pay for a product that their nine-year-old son could construct in the basement? However, future attempts by the giant telecommunications giants like GE, Bell, and Western Union proved somewhat successful as they adapted radio to their own business models by marketing inexpensive pre-assembled radio sets and advertiser-driven entertainment broadcasting. What happened to the great inventors? Marconi, driven to commercial defeat by the amateur operators, never stopped tinkering and earned a living by working for the London social elite, broadcasting their garden parties to friends in Wolverhampton. P.T. Barnum hired De Forest to broadcast a circus variety show. Fessenden got a job with the Navy.

The U.S. Navy never got a handle on wireless broadcasting. The constant pranks of ragamuffin amateur operators, the dunderheaded operators who squeaked through basic training, and the Navy’s inability to overcome patent regulations, despite their best efforts at thievery, led naval communications experts to abandon wireless audio technology for a much more promising technology: televisual communication.

Despite worries that the radio spectrum would become a miasma of anarchic cacophony, amateur and commercial practice became self-regulated: the interpersonal communications of various random operators, the commercial entertainment funded by the culture industry, and the emergency communication needed by local and national authorities all found plenty of bandwidth on what is now known as CB, broadband, shortwave, am, fm, and the innumerable channels taken up by remote control garage door openers. Free access to radio technology and mass communication never bowed down to corporate or military pressure, so we can all build our sets out of newspapers and umbrellas and start communicating.

Rather, the wider importance of Williams’s analysis of TV derives from his situating of the first TV generation in a specific set of socio-historical circumstances. Williams gives us some tentative answers to how TV and its flow became valuable to a society by emphasizing that TV is more than either its technology or its shows: “In all these ways, and in their essential combination, this is the flow of meanings and values of a specific culture” (120). Beyond TV, this is a classic Marxist/organizational critique of how all technologies work in society: “What has to be seen . . . is the radically different position in which technology, including communication technology, and specifically television, is at once an intention and an effect of a particular social order” (131-132). There is no one force that determines TV’s value in the “expanded, mobile and complex society” that Williams analyzes, but he does cover quite a few, including the “specific military, administrative and commercial intentions . . . [and] scientific intentions” (13 and 133). The evolution of TV technology, like the intermingling of TV and internet with YouTube, will likewise depend on specific socio-historical factors. Needless to say, Williams provides neither a complete depiction of the interanimation of these determining forces, nor an exhaustive list of them, in a 150 page book, but the importance of his book lies in its impetus to look beyond the then standard critiques of TV.

Hence Williams moves away from the critique of specific content, or discrete shows (his own function as a former TV critic), to a critique of the social function of all of the shows/trailers/ads as a social force or ideology that incorporates more factors, like intent, commerce, politics, families, militaries etc, than do deterministic models, like that of McLuhan. Thus, in terms of Neuman’s overall critique that Williams’s study lacks sophistication and focus, this seems especially bogus to me, since one of Williams’s main purposes is to explode the “focus” of TV research by widening the field of study to incorporate a complete socio-historical conjuncture. Williams may not deliver the complete goods here, but as a founding father of Cultural Studies, his followers have more than taken up the slack by providing more detailed socio-historical critiques of TV’s value over the past few decades. Right now, for instance, SPCM’s own James Hay is working on a big Reality TV project.