Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T14:08:47.027Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Historicizing media, globalizing media research: infrastructures, publics, and everyday life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Ralph Schroeder
Ralph Schroeder*
Affiliation:
Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, UK
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Visions of media spanning the globe and connecting cultures have been around at least since the birth of telegraphy, yet they have always fallen short of realities. Nevertheless, with the internet, a global infrastructure has emerged, which, together with mobile and smartphones, has rapidly changed the media landscape. This far-reaching digital connectedness makes it increasingly clear that the main implications of media lie in the extent to which they reach into everyday life. This article puts this reach into historical context, arguing that, in the pre-modern period, geographically extensive media networks only extended to a small elite. With the modern print revolution, media reach became both more extensive and more intensive. Yet it was only in the late nineteenth century that media infrastructures penetrated more widely into everyday life. Apart from a comparative historical perspective, several social science disciplines can be brought to bear in order to understand the ever more globalizing reach of media infrastructures into everyday life, including its limits. To date, the vast bulk of media research is still concentrated on North America and Europe. Recently, however, media research has begun to track broader theoretical debates in the social sciences, and imported debates about globalization from anthropology, sociology, political science, and international relations. These globalizing processes of the media research agenda have been shaped by both political developments and changes in media, including the Cold War, decolonization, the development of the internet and other new media technologies, and the rise of populist leaders.

Keywords

digital mediaeveryday lifeinternetmedia infrastructuresmedia systems
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Special Issue 3: Historicizing the global: an interdisciplinary perspective , November 2019 , pp. 437 - 453
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I would like to thank William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, and the editors of this special issue for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1 Mann, Michael, The sources of social power, volume I: a history of power from the beginning to 1760 AD, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Headrick, Daniel, Power over peoples: technology, environments, and Western imperialism, 1400 to the present, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010 Google Scholar.

2 But see Hughes, Thomas, Rescuing Prometheus, New York: Pantheon Books, 1998, pp. 255–300 Google Scholar, who argues that ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, was primarily developed for research purposes rather than to create a network that was resistant to military attack, as is often thought.

3 Cairncross, Frances, The death of distance: how the communications revolution will change our lives, London: Orion Business Books, 1997 Google Scholar; McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding media: the extensions of man, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964 Google Scholar; Marvin, Carolyn, When old technologies were new: thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 Google Scholar.

4 Czitrom, Daniel, Media and the American mind: from Morse to McLuhan, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p. 11 Google Scholar; see also Standage, Tom, The Victorian internet: the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century’s online pioneers, London: Phoenix, 1988 Google Scholar.

5 Luhmann, Niklas, The reality of the mass media, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000 Google Scholar.

6 Neuman, Russell W., The digital difference: media technology and the theory of communication effects, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid ., p. 18.

8 Briggs, Asa and Burke, Peter, A social history of the media: from Gutenberg to the internet, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002 Google Scholar.

9 Drayton, Richard and Motadel, David, ‘Discussion: the futures of global history’, Journal of Global History, 13, 2018, pp. 1–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Pooley, Jefferson and Katz, Elihu, ‘Further notes on why American sociology abandoned mass communication research’, Journal of Communication, 58, 4, 2008, pp. 767–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Ang, Ien, Watching Dallas: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination, London: Methuen, 1985 Google Scholar.

12 Ginsburg, Faye, Abu-Lughod, Lila, and Larkin, Brian, ‘Introduction’, in Ginsburg, Faye, Abu-Lughod, Lila, and Larkin, Brian, eds., Media worlds: anthropology on new terrain, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002, p. 14 Google Scholar.

13 Miller, Daniel et al., How the world changed social media, London: UCL Press, 2016 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Lange, Matthew, Comparative-historical methods, London: Sage, 2018 Google Scholar.

15 Josephson, Paul, Resources under regimes: technology, environment, and the state, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 Google Scholar; Arnold, David, Everyday technology: machines and the making of India’s modernity, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Doron, Assa and Jeffrey, Robin, The great Indian phone book: how the cheap cell phone changes business, politics, and daily life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Hallin, Daniel and Mancini, Paolo, Comparing media systems: three models of media and politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Hallin, Daniel and Mancini, Paolo, eds., Comparing media systems beyond the Western world, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 Google Scholar.

19 Stockmann, Daniela, Media commercialization and authoritarian rule in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 Google Scholar.

20 Norris, Pippa and Inglehart, Roland, Cosmopolitan communication: cultural diversity in a globalized world, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Xiao Wu, Angela and Taneja, Harsh. ‘Reimagining internet geographies: a user-centric ethnological mapping of the world wide web’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21, 3, 2016, pp. 230–46Google Scholar.

22 See, for example, the contributions in Brügger, Niels and Schroeder, Ralph, eds., The web as history: using web archives to understand the past and the present, London: UCL Press, 2017 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Guldi, Jo and Armitage, David, The history manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Mounk, Yascha, The people vs. democracy: why our freedom is in danger and how to save it, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, esp. pp. 137–50Google Scholar.

25 Katherine Viner, ‘How technology disrupted the truth’, The Guardian, 12 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth (consulted 11 December 2018).

26 UNESCO, ‘Unesco declaration on mass media’, Political Communication, 1, 4, 2010, pp. 391–7 (originally published 22 November 1978).

27 Blyth, Mark, Great transformations: economic ideas and institutional change in the twentieth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Hallin and Mancini, Comparing media systems beyond the Western world.

29 Chakravarty, Paula, ‘Telecom, national development and the Indian State: a postcolonial critique’, Media, Culture and Society, 26, 2, 2004, pp. 227–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Athique, Adrian, Indian media, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, p. 146 Google Scholar.

31 Bardhan, Pranab, Awakening giants, feet of clay: assessing the economic rise of India and China, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Most recently, Roberts, Margaret, Censored: distraction and diversion inside China’s great firewall, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018 Google Scholar.

33 Rauchfleisch, Adrian and Schäfer, Mike, ‘Multiple public spheres of Weibo: a typology of forms and potentials of online public spheres in China’, Information, Communication & Society, 18, 2, 2015, pp. 139–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Han, Rongbin, Contesting cyberspace in china: online expression and authoritarian resilience, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Nye, Joseph S. Jr, ‘Soft power’, in Power in the global information age: from realism to globalization, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 76–88 Google Scholar.

36 Shambaugh, David, China goes global: the partial power, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 207–68Google Scholar.

37 Kokas, Aynne, Hollywood made in China, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017 Google Scholar.

38 Doron and Jeffrey, Great Indian phone book.

39 Ibid ., p. 224.

40 Donner, Jonathan, After access: inclusion, development, and a more mobile internet, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 ‘Clinton’s words on China: trade is the smart thing’, New York Times, 9 March 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/09/world/clinton-s-words-on-china-trade-is-the-smart-thing.html (consulted 22 February 2019).

42 Moffitt, Benjamin, The global rise of populism: performance, political style, and representation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017 Google Scholar. See also Schroeder, Ralph, Social theory after the internet: media, technology, and globalization, London: UCL Press, 2018, pp. 60–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Froio, Caterina and Ganesh, Bharath, ‘The transnationalisation of far right discourse on Twitter’, European Societies, 2018, pp. 1–27 Google Scholar.

44 Miller, Daniel and Sinanan, Jolynna, Visualizing Facebook, London: UCL Press, 2017 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Randall Collins, ‘Four theories of informalization and how to test them’, Human Figurations, 3, 2, 2014, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11217607.0003.207.

46 Wilkinson, David and Thelwall, Mike, ‘Trending Twitter topics in English: an international comparison’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63, 8, 2012, pp. 1631–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Porter, Theodore, ‘Statistics and statistical methods’, in Porter, Theodore and Ross, Dorothy, eds., The modern social sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2008, pp. 238–50Google Scholar.

48 For the telephone in the US, see Fischer, Claude, America calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992 Google Scholar. For Sweden, see Arne Kajser, I fådrens spår: den svenska infrastrukturens historiska utveckling och framtida utmaningar (In our fathers’ tracks: the historical development of the Swedish infrastructure and future challenges), Stockholm: Carlssons, 1994. For comparisons between Sweden and the United States, see Ralph Schroeder, Rethinking science, technology, and social change, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 44–59.

49 Duara, Prasenjit and Perry, Elizabeth,‘Beyond regimes: an introduction’, in Duara, Prasenjit and Perry, Elizabeth, eds., Beyond regimes: China and India compared, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, p. 5 Google Scholar.

50 Doron and Jeffrey, Great Indian phone book.

51 Castells, Manuel, Communication power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 Google Scholar.

52 Frankopan, Peter, The silk roads: a new history of the world, London: Bloomsbury, 2015 Google Scholar; Frankopan, Peter, The new silk roads: the present and future of the world, London: Bloomsbury, 2018 Google Scholar.

53 Shambaugh, China goes global, pp. 207–68; Kishan Thussu, Daya, De Burgh, Hugo, and Shi, Anbin, eds., China’s media go global, Abingdon: Routledge, 2018 Google Scholar.

54 Hughes, Thomas P., Networks of power: electrification in Western society, 1880–1930, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983 Google Scholar; Hughes, Thomas P., ‘The evolution of large technological systems,’ in Bijker, Wiebe, Hughes, Thomas, and Pinch, Trevor, eds., The social construction of technological systems, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, pp. 51–82 Google Scholar.

55 Ling, Rich, Taken for grantedness: the embedding of mobile communication into society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Silverstone, Roger and Hirsch, Eric, eds., Consuming technologies: media and information in domestic spaces, London: Routledge, 1992 Google Scholar.

57 Wajcman, Judy, Pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015 Google Scholar.

58 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French village 1294–1324, New York: Vintage Books, 2013, p. 58 Google Scholar.

59 Ibid ., p. 282.

60 Ibid ., p. 287.

61 Gernet, Jacques, Daily life in China on the eve of the Mongol invasion, 1250–1276, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970, p. 14 Google Scholar.

62 Ibid ., p. 241.

63 Ibid ., pp. 106–7.

64 Collins, Randall, Weberian sociological theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 45–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Inkster, Ian, Science and technology in history: an approach to historical development, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wuthnow, Robert, Communities of discourse: ideology and social structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European socialism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mokyr, Joel, The gifts of Athena: historical origins of the knowledge economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002 Google Scholar.

66 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The printing revolution in early modern Europe, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London: Verso Books, 2006 Google Scholar; Gellner, Ernest, Nations and nationalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983 Google Scholar.

67 For example, Morley, David, Media, modernity and technology: the geography of the new, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 320 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Habermas, Jürgen, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982 Google Scholar.

69 Briggs and Burke, Social history of the media, pp. 70, 72, 76.

70 Alan Bayly, Christopher, The birth of the modern world 1780–1914, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 19–20 Google Scholar.

71 Osterhammel, Jürgen, Die Verwandlung der Welt: eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009, pp. 74–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Ibid ., p. 64.

73 De Grazia, Victoria, Irresistible empire: America’s advance through twentieth-century Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005 Google Scholar.

74 Terhi Rantanen, The media and globalization, London: Sage, 2005, p. 88.

75 Ward, Ken, Mass communications and the modern world, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, p. 132 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Miller et al., How the world changed social media.

77 Noam, Eli, Who owns the world’s media? Media concentration and ownership around the world, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 This paragraph is based on Hindman, Matthew, The internet trap: how the digital economy builds monopolies and undermines democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018 Google Scholar.

79 Fischer, America calling, p. 266, and see also p. 262.

80 Ling, Rich, Bjelland, Johannes, Sundsøy, Pål, and Campbell, Scott, ‘Small circles: mobile telephony and the cultivation of the private sphere’, The Information Society, 30, 4, 2014, p. 288 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 Aspray, William and Hayes, Barbara. Everyday information: the evolution of information seeking in America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Tkacz, Nathaniel, Wikipedia and the politics of openness, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 4–5 Google Scholar.

83 See Michael Mann’s Wiles lectures, ‘Imposing labels on ages: modernity and globalization’, 2000, summarized at http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~hafa3/mann.htm (consulted 16 October 2018).

84 Alan Bayly, Christopher, Remaking the modern world, 1900–2015, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2018, p. 327 Google Scholar.

85 Howard, Philip, The digital origins of dictatorship and democracy: information technology and political Islam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Hjarvard, Stig, ‘The mediatization of society: a theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change’, Nordicom Review, 29, 2, 2008, pp. 105–34Google Scholar.