Notes to: "Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

Material covered:

""Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication" by John V. Pavlik and Shawn McIntosh

Chapter one: Mass Communication and Its Digital Transformation

• "One concern critics have long had about the internet and digital media is our ability to create 'The Daily Me,' a highly personalized digital news stream that contains only information of expressed interest to the user. The problem with The Daily Me is that we may self-select such a unique range of interests that it leaves us unable to discuss in a meaningful way with others matters of broader public importance." 
• Thomas Friedman: "At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool we've ever had. At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool we've ever had."
• "Telegraph operators were specially trained to code and decode messages, and the result was a thriving new industry that grew during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. This innovative form of instantaneous communication led to entirely new kinds of business enterprises; personal messaging services and 'newswire' services such as Reuters and Associated Press are examples."
• "Initially, especially in Europe, the telephone acted as a kind of early radio. Wealthy patrons paid a fee to listen to music performances that were sent along the wires, and some public venues would pipe in sermons or performances for their patrons. For several years in Budapest, Hungary, Telefon Hirmondo delivered news over the telephone, with subscribers dialing in at certain times to listen to someone reading the news of the day. A similar service was also tried in 1911 in Newark, New Jersey, but lasted for only a few months before closing." 
• "The decision whether to make the telephone a government-run agency or a private enterprise was an important crossroad, and the choices made in Europe (government) differed from those made in the United States (private enterprise). These choices had profound repercussions even into the twenty-first century that have influenced the development and perceptions of the control and use of the Internet." 
• "In the United States, leaving the early development of telephone systems up to private enterprise resulted in many incompatibilities among competing systems. Local telephone companies often sold their own telephones, and these were often incompatible with other telephone systems. This might have prevented a person from calling somebody who used a competing phone provider." 
• "During the formative years of the telephone industry, the U.S. government sought to eliminate such incompatibilities in the phone network by granting one company, AT&T, a monopoly on the telephone system... Just as the monopoly telegraph company, Western Union, had done in the late 1800s when it became apparent the telephone was a threat to its business, AT&T in the 1960s and 1970s tried to hamper the development of a new kind of network that would potentially hurt its business. The network that was needed for development of the Internet was not compatible with the system that AT&T used. Even though AT&T realized the new network was more efficient, the telephone company feared losing dominance and refused to adopt it." 
• "Communications scholar James Carey was a leading cultural-studies theorist and developed what he calls a ritual view of communication. He claimed that 'communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.' From this view, the act of reading a newspaper has less to do with receiving information than with participating in a shared cultural experience that portrays and confirms the world in a certain way. By reading the paper, we are actually participating in a ritual that produces and reproduces certain sociocultural norms that are played out through our actions and interactions with others." 

Chapter two: Media Literacy in the Digital Age

• "Why can we take a class n high school on how to dismantle a car engine but not one that teaches us how to deconstruct our modern systems of media and mass communications?" 
• "Semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols, goes back in some form to Plato and Aristotle. Today the field of semiotics has been greatly influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of linguistics, and his notion of signs as having dual properties. These properties are the signifier, or the form, and the signified, or whatthe form represents (some semioticians claim a third component, an interpretant, between these two)."
• "It is also important to remember that in semiotics 'sign' does not simply refer to visual images but includes words as well. Words could be considered a more complex form of sign, for we have to learn that certain sounds carry particular meanings (which are often arbitrary). There is no logical reason that the color red is called 'red' in English, 'rojo' in Spanish, and 'raka' in Japanese; all of these are simply linguistic conventions for those particular languages."
• "Rene Magritte's famous painting of a pipe that also says 'This is not a pipe' is an example of how we typically take the sign as reality." 
• "Once we learn what certain sounds mean (or what certain visual images mean), we take what we have learned as 'natural' and accept it largely without question. This fact makes the creation and use of signs extremely powerful because it not only influences our thinking but even directs certain behaviors." Story that messes with symbols, filled with a host of easily-recognizable symbols but transforming their meaning into something else. 
• Umberto Eco: "Every act of communication to or between human beings-- or any other intelligent biological or mechanical apparatus-- presupposes a significant system as its necessary condition." 
• "Framing is done in all forms of mass communication, including news, and works in much the same way that signs in semiotics do. It relies on the notion that we classify, organize, and interpret things into certain schema, or frameworks, in order to simplify our complex lives... We take mental 'shortcuts' with much of what we encounter, letting something go unexamined as we carry on with our lives." 
• "Framing may simply sound like spin, but it is not. We all frame our world, and good communicators know how to frame debates in ways that favor their views and disadvantage their opponents'. If a persuasive communicator wins the framing battle, she has likely won that particular debate."
• Plato: "Children cannot distinguish between what is allegory and what isn't, and opinions formed at that age are usually difficult to eradicate or change; it is therefore o the utmost importance that the first stories they hear shall aim at producing the right moral effect." 
• After the invention of writing, "a storyteller could lose control of his or her words once they were in written form. Someone could take a person's words and twist their meaning, with no chance for an immediate response or perhaps any response at all. In fact, the author of a work had no way of knowing who might read it or when." 
• "Talk radio is one of the few traditional mass-communication formats to include such a high degree of interactivity between media producers and the audience..."
• "In the early history of film, most movies were only a few minutes long and either simply recorded daily activities or were essentially filmed short stage plays. Filmmakers started producing more sophisticated storylines for their short films and introduced a technique that was unique to film at the time-- crosscut scenes. By crosscutting different scenes to simulate events happening simultaneously in two different locations... filmmakers were able to tell much more complex and dramatic stories. Further, increasing the speed between crosscut scenes helped increase dramatic tension in the audience." 

Chapter three: Print Media: Books, Newspapers, and Magazines

• "Between the first century BCE and the sixth century CE the codex, a manuscript of bound individual pages, began replacing the scroll, establishing the modern book form. Book publishing continued to evolve through innovation and invention: block printing in China by 600 CE; movable copper-alloy type in Korea in 1234 CE; and the Western World's first mechanical printing press in Germany in 1455 CE." 
• "In the Middle Ages specially trained monks, or scribes, copied religious and classical works in monastic writing rooms called scriptoria." 
• "Born to an upper-class merchant family in Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg met the silversmith Waldvogel in Avignon in 1444, who taught the craft of 'artificial writing,' as early printmaking was called. In 1450 Gutenberg formed a partnership with the wealthy Mainz burgher Johann Fust to complete his own printing invention and to print the famous Gutenberg Bible, or 'forty-two line Bible,' whose 1455 publication is considered the beginning of mechanical printing." 
• "Despite the advent of new printing technology, the handmade tradition continued. Books were still bound by hand, and illustrators embellished printed pages with drawings and artistic flourishes to match the expectations for handwritten manuscripts." 
• "In 1783 Noah Webster, known today for Webster's Dictionary, wrote A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, a response to the popular textbooks imported from England that conveyed English cultural values." 
• "In 1939, Robert de Graff's company, Pocket Books, introduced mass-market paperbacks in the United States, a line of plastic-laminated books adorned with its familiar Kangaroo mascot, Gertrude, priced at twenty-five cents, and sized small enough for a back pocket. The paperback revolution stemmed from offering books in places like drugstores and supermarkets, a mass-distribution network alternative to established bookstores. The post-World War II baby boomers, who became the students of the 1950s and '60s, were dubbed 'the paperback generation.'" 
• "In 2002, the Internet Archive formed (www.archive.org), a group dedicated to digitizing and archiving all kinds of media. In its first year, the Internet Bookmobile, a Ford minivan with a computer and a POD printer, toured U.S. cities, giving people access to more than twenty thousand public domain books in its digital archive, all available in minutes and at a fraction of bookstore costs."
• "The New York Times, the 'paper of record' in the United States, also known as the 'Old Gray Lady,' offers especially strong coverage of international events and issues. The Wall Street Journal, bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in 2007, is the nation's leading newspaper covering business and finance... In 1982, newspaper mogul Al Neuharth launched USA Today, a strong mix of general-interest news featuring colorful graphics and easy-to-read sections, an overall design inspired by television. Prior to its launch, most newspapers were drab and filled with long columns of text." 
• "About 75 percent of the top 100 best-selling papers are in Asia, including the largest English-language newspaper, the Times of India (4 million). In the United Kingdom, the three top dailies are all sensationalist tabloids, The Sun (2.8 million), The Daily Mail (2.1 million), and the Daily Mirror (1.4 million)." 
• "The first English-language newspaper published in what is today the United States was Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick. Although it was published only once-- on September 25, 1690, in Boston-- more newspapers followed... Merchants published the commercial papers. The Boston Daily Advertiser and the Daily Mercantile Advertiser, for example, reported on ship arrivals, departures, and cargo as well as weather and other items of commercial interest. After Independence and prior to the 1830s, most U.S. newspapers were affiliated with a political party or platform."
• "A subscription to either a commercial or a political paper cost eight to ten dollars per year, about six cents an issue. This was beyond the reach of the average worker, who made just eighty-five cents a day. Readership was largely limited to those who supported the political position of the paper and to society's well-educated, land-owning, and affluent groups."
• "Prior to the 1830s, printing presses, powered by hand (and briefly by horses), could print only two hundred to six hundred one-sided sheets per hour, severely limiting circulation. But in the 1830s, the development of steam-powered presses producing up to four thousand sheets per hour on both sides made mass-scale printing possible. Seizing the opportunity, publisher Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun on September 3, 1833. Instead of traditional subscriptions, newsboys in the streets sold the daily newspaper and its sensationalized stories for only one cent. The penny press truly offered news for the masses, reaching a circulation of eight thousand almost immediately and thirty thousand within three years, enormous success that astounded contemporary publishers." 
• "A new marketing function also emerged with the penny press, which attracted large audiences and, consequently, businesses hoping to reach mass markets. The newspaper price did not cover printing and distribution costs, but the penny press began advertising medicines, entertainment, and jobs as well as items on which the commercial and partisan press frowned, such as theater, lotteries, and abortionists." 
• "Newspapers proliferated in the Golden Age, feeding the appetite for news in large eastern cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Between 1870 and 1900, the U.S. population doubled, the urban population tripled, and the number of daily newspapers quadrupled. The 1880 U.S. Census counted 11,314 newspapers." 
• "After World War II, the urban society that had supported the penny press shifted to a more suburban population that spent considerable time commuting by automobile and relied more on radio, TV, and eventually the Internet. Tired suburban commuters preferred television for both news and entertainment in the evenings, driving afternoon papers into decline. Eventually, one paper or a morning and evening edition supplanted two or more competing dailies." 
• "The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 was intended to preserve diverse editorial opinion in communities where only two competing, or independently owned, daily newspapers exist. The two papers are ostensibly competitors but can sometimes be owned by the same company or work under a joint operating arrangement, or JOA, provided for by the Act. A JOA is a legal agreement that permits newspapers in the same market to merge their business operations yet maintain separate editorial operations. Today, ten cities in the United States are served by two or more major daily newspapers operating under a JOA, with eleven cities served by different newspapers under common ownership. Critics argue, however, that JOAs essentially permit monopolies." 
• "Most adaptations involve some combination of an expanded online presence and greater interactivity, including user-generated content, which begins to blur the traditional line between reporter and reader." 
• "Pelle Tornberg launched a free daily newspaper in Stockholm for subway commuters. Designed to be read in fifteen minutes, the Metro was a colorful tabloid, with short articles on a variety of topics. Its target audience was an elusive yet lucrative readership for advertisers-- the young, affluent, and urban-- precisely the demographic that had largely stopped reading newspapers. Now there are 210 free newspapers in fifty countries, with a total worldwide circulation of 40 million. The Metro chain of freesheets has expanded throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia and into New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. They are now in a hundred cities in twenty countries and publish in eighteen languages." 
• "Advertising generates close to two-thirds of U.S. newspaper revenue, with the rest from subscriptions. In other countries, such as Japan, subscription prices are higher and the revenue split closer to 50-50." 
• "Sites like Craigslist and eBay and services like Groupon have siphoned away classifieds ads, down 75 percent since 2005, traditionally a large portion of newspaper advertising revenue." 
• "Every year, however, hundreds of new magazine titles are published. Most do not survive more than two years. Even well-established or big names go out of business each year or move to digital-only editions, as Hearst Publications did in 2008 with CosmoGirl." 
• "Certain magazines can also serve an important social function. Publicly reading The New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly imparts a very different impression of the reader than Popular Hot Rodding or Guns & Ammo. In fact, magazines considered prestigious can often operate as subtle social markers simply by being displayed on the coffee table in the home or office, even if the magazine is never actually read."

Chapter four: Audio Media: Music Recordings, Radio

• "Digital media and the Internet have afforded the music consumer exactly the kind of freedom that threatens the major record labels, which have traditionally controlled the mass production and marketing of albums by a select number of artists." 
• "In 1877, Thomas Edison patented his first 'talking machine,' the phonograph, using a tinfoil cylinder to record telephone messages. Edison held a monopoly in the recording industry for nine years until telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell and inventor Charles Tainter invented an improved audio-recording device, the graphophone, which used beeswax rather than tinfoil."
• "The Columbia Phonograph Company soon entered the picture with its own technology, selling recordings on wax cylinders that could be played on coin-operated machines. The Victor Talking Machine Company also launched the gramophone. Developed by inventor Emile Berliner, it used a flat disc rather than a cylinder to record sound." 
• "Electromagnetic tapes such as eight-track tapes, and later cassettes, created in 1965, actually provided poorer sound quality than LPs, but consumers were willing to trade audio quality for portability." 
• "By 1983, Motown was the largest black-owned company in the United States, with annual revenues of $104 million." 
• "A three-way corporate oligarchy dominated the music industry until the 1950s, when a variety of notable industry-wide changes set in. These included greater competition due to the growth of rock and roll and diverse new recording labels such as Motown." 
• "Independent labels-- ranging from small local companies producing and distributing music of even only one or two single artists to large labels such as Disney-- have the majority of music titles, estimated at about 66 percent by SoundScan and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), yet only about 20 percent of the sales." 
• "Many subscriptions operate on a freemium model: Some content is free, but a monthly subscription is required to take advantage of all the site has to offer. Different versions of the freemium model are currently being tested, such as advertising-supported content for the free service but no ads for the premium service." 
• "At least 99 percent of all U.S. households have at least one radio receiver, similar to most industrialized countries. Even developing nations have relatively high radio penetration."
• "Amplitude Modulation (AM): Radio carrier signal modified by variations in wave amplitude." 
• "Frequency Modulation (FM): Radio carrier signal modified by variations in wave length/frequency."
• "Another scientist experimenting with radio technology was African American Granville T. Woods, who in 1887 invented 'railway telegraphy,' allowing messages to be sent between moving trains and a railroad station. This invention decreased railway collisions and alerted engineers to obstructions ahead on tracks."
• "Kentucky farmer Nathan B. Stubblefield, called by some the real inventor of radio, created and demonstrated in 1892 a wireless communications device that could even transmit voice and music over a short distance, about five hundred feet. Stubblefield made his invention available to the Wireless Telephone Company, which proved to be a fraud. Because he never patented his device, he failed to reap the commercial rewards, dying tragically of starvation in 1928, alone and penniless on the dirt floor of a shack."
• "Using the perfected vacuum-tube radio transmitter, de Forest's Highbridge Station 2XG introduced nightly broadcasts, a so-called wireless newspaper for amateur radio operations. All this activity ceased when the United States entered World War I in April 1917. At that point, the U.S. government either took over or completely shut down all radio stations. For the duration of the war, private citizens could not legally own or operate a radio transmitter or receiver without special permission." 
• "Throughout most of the twentieth century, radio ownership in the United States was relatively diverse. This was partly a result of federal laws preventing any one person or organization from owning more than twenty FM stations and twenty AM stations nationwide. Regulatory changes in 1922 and the passage of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 resulted in new FCC rules that eliminated such restrictions, although an owner must still be a U.S. citizen." 
• "For most of the first fifty years of radio broadcasting, radio was a small business, and owners, even if affiliated with a national network, were long-time residents of their station's town."

Chapter five: Visual Media: Photography, Movies, and Television

• "Aptly named Yap.TV delivers on its promise, letting television viewers easily enter a social media world of chat about shows in real time." 
• "In the future, you and a friend may be watching the same program and texting each other about it but receiving different advertisements."
• "The earliest use of a camera obscura, a dark box or room with a small hole that allows an inverted image of an outside scene to be shown on the opposite inner wall, is in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci, who explains how a camera obscura can aid drawing scenery, moving a sheet of paper around until the scene comes into sharp focus for tracing." 
• "Brady and other photographers helped the public see the conflict in the Civil War through the lens of the press, the first war documented by means of photography."
• "Silent films could more easily cross language barriers than their 'talkie' descendants because their few words, usually presented as text on the screen, could easily be translated into the local language." 
• "For the first several years, actors' and actresses' names did not even appear in the movie credits. Then shrewd studio heads cultivated fan interest, creating personas for popular stars, complete with false histories to market them better, a practice that continues today to some degree... During this era, stars were unable to seek their own contracts for individual films but could be loaned to another studio, often in exchange for other stars. They were also expected to be highly productive, sometimes starring in five or six films a year." 

Chapter six: Interactive Media: The Internet, Video Games, and Augmented Reality"

• "Today, the audience can choose not only the type of content and media source but, in many cases, how and when to engage with it." 
• "Although computer makers originally borrowed from television in creating monitors, television has returned the favor in borrowing from the online world of screen windows, scrolling text or tickers, and multiple items on various topics on a single screen. This can be seen especially in newscasts."
• "The first TV remote control was introduced in 1950. Zenith introduced the Lazy Bones, a remote control connected by a wire to your TV set. In 1955, Zenith introduced the Flash-matic, the first wireless TV remote, which used a flashlight to change channels. Then, in 1956, Zenith's Space Command used ultrasound to change channels but also produced unfortunate reactions from household pets. Most modern TV remote controls use infrared technology." 
• "Remote controls changed our media behavior in subtle yet important ways, preparing us for human-computer interactions."
• "According to Tomlinson, the symbol @ ('at') was the obvious choice for the symbol to separate the names of individuals from their machines: 'As it turns out, @ is the only preposition on the keyboard. I just looked at it and it was there. I didn't even try any others." 
• "In 1974, the Control Data Corporation (CDC) introduced PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations), the first computer system to have a touch-sensitive video display terminal. Before tablet computers and smartphones, ATMs were the most common example of touch-sensitive screens." 

Chapter seven: The Impact of Social Media

• "A complete media ecosystem can be created and sustained through social interaction using tools that social media provide." 
• "In what is called distributed computing, any number of volunteers can assist a project without inconveniencing themselves, since the program works in the background. The free computing power amassed through the various users is much greater than any research project could afford." 
• "Sites such as Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube have all encouraged tagging among users, which makes the content more searchable and helps users recognize relations among terms they may never have seen before." 
• "Civic hackathons, in which coders and others gather over one or two days to work on computing solutions for government or civic issues, have become increasingly popular in recent years."
• "Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo, founded in 2009, has been likened to a Chinese version of Twitter, even though it has more functions than Twitter. It is still popular with over 500 million users, but its posts declined in 2012 and 2013 as text and voicemail service WeChat, launched in 2011, gained nearly 300 million users and is rising in popularity." 
• Big Data: "A collection of data sets so large that it is impossible to use traditional analytic techniques to sort, analyze, and visualize the data and what it means." 

Chapter eight: Journalism: From Information to Participation

• "In 2010, ProPublica was the first not-for-profit online news operation awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In April 2012, the Huffington Post became the first commercial news website and blog to win." 
• "In addition to mobilizing the puiblic, news is integral to three of the four main functions of mass communication: surveillance, correlation, and cultural transmission." 
• "Pseudo-events: Events staged specifically to attract media attention, particularly the news." 
• "Most newspapers and magazines actually have more space devoted to advertising than to news." 
• "Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, sensational journalism, news that exaggerated or featured lurid details and depictions of crimes or other events, dominated content." 
• Randolph Hearst: "Make the news thorough. Print all the news. Condense it if necessary. Frequently it is better when intelligently condensed. But get it in." 
• "One reason news became more impartial-- a core value in journalism known as objectivity-- was the emergence of the news wire service in the 1840s. In 1846, publishers of six New York newspapers organized the Associated Press (AP), in large part to take advantage of the telegraph, a high-speed communications medium too expensive for any single newspaper to afford. Gathering news for half a dozen papers with varying political viewpoints meant AP reports had to be politically neutral, and by the dawn of the twentieth century, these dispatches were virtually free of editorial comment. Still based in New York, the Associated Press provides textual, audio, and video news, photos, and graphics for its not-for-profit members' cooperative, including 1,500 newspapers and 5,000 radio and television news operations. Members provide much of the AP content, which in turn any member can use. It employs 3,200 people (two-thirds of whom work as journalists) in over 280 locations worldwide." 

Chapter nine: Advertising and Public Relations: The Power of Persuasion

• "Even though most television programming time is dedicated to content rather than commercials, consider the number of times the audience sees the same commercial during the course of a program, what advertising media planners call 'frequency of exposure.' Studies have shown that children tend to remember commercial jingles and catchphrases better than basic facts about U.S. government or history" 
• "The theory of cognitive dissonance claims that we acts first and then rationalize or create reasons for our behavior afterward to make our actions consistent with self-perceived notions of who we are." 
• "In ancient Egypt, papyrus advertisements were posted in common, pulic areas."
• "In 1856, publisher Robert Bonner ran the first full-page advertisement to promote his own literary paper, the New York Ledger."