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by Alice Teeple We celebrate the advent of technology. It is programmed into our human DNA, right next to the strand that programs us to gravitate towards water. We are quite proud of our achievements. Thanks to the miracles of technology, humans have not only seen, but split the tiniest entities of nature. Humans have sent their creations hurtling heavenward to photograph places and things which we shall never see with our eyes alone. We have done marvellous things: we've written glorious symphonies, learnt how to communicate instantly with each other across thousands of miles...and produced a lovely little programme called Will You Marry My Dad? WILL YOU MARRY MY DAD??? Yup.
Man has proven time and again to be simultaneously
ingenious and idiotic. This is especially true in the case of mass media.
When Gutenberg (voted by A&E as the most important person of the last
millennium) invented the printing press, literacy rates eventually skyrocketed.
People found empowerment through literacy. When Martin Luther When we think of Renaissance literature arriving with the dawn of the printing press, we generally think good things. We think "Sir Francis Bacon." "William Shakespeare." We tend to overlook the less-palatable things that this advent of technology brought, however...and, in particular, one of special significance to the people of the United States. It involves one Amerigo Vespucci, after whom this mighty nation was named. Vespucci came to the world's attention chiefly through the publication in 1503 and 1504 of two brief letters he purportedly wrote toLorenzo de Medici about a voyage undertaken for the king of Portugal. Obviously the work of an educated man...the letters managedto be both scholarly and entertaining, combining a sober discussion of navigational issues with the news that the natives of the NewWorld would have sex with anybody, including Mom. Vespucci, or perhaps his anonymous publisher, also had the wit to entitle thefirst letter Novus Mundus, the New World, an audacious, and, as it turned out, accurate claim.
That's right, kiddies. The land of the free was named after the man responsible for the mass exodus to the New World...not solely for the fact that he was a "map-maker," as we were taught in school (although this was indeed a fact). Of COURSE the Europeans were "taken with Vespucci's idea." After reading his account, people left in droves to....ahem....discover the "New World" for themselves. It was the first mass-produced pornography in world history, and it's the main reason why we're here. Fast-forward three hundred years to Europe, when the invention of photogrpahy shook the art world. Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, within three weeks of each other, had discovered the ability to reproduce exact images of people. No longer would portraiture be distorted (no matter how minutely) by human error. More importantly, as alluded to in Plato's Republic, humans could at last be subjected to images of truth.
It may be purported that the Victorians
were more "demure" with their porn - and yes, in many cases, Victorian
porn was tame compared to modern standards. Ankles were the cleavage
of 1885. The Nineteenth century, however, like any other century,
had its share of perverts. "French postcards" proved rather a hot
commodity. These photos were not of the Hustler and Geocities
website variety. A daguerrotype print takes up to three minutes to
develop whilst the model poses. Many French postcards, subsequently,
are of thoughtful composition and highly posed. In fact, many modern
art critics consider them high art and elevate them as such. It doesn't
seem to matter what the subject matter is; whether it is a family portrait
of the Royal Family or an orgy scene in a makeshift studio "harem"; composition
and aesthetics are the defining factors in the art world.
When radio was invented, its key people such as Lee deForest envisioned the common people at last finding it possible to experience live "high" cultire in the comfort of their own living rooms. Edwin Howard Armstrong, in turn, envisioned a radio-political democracy utopia, where leaders of every nation could meet in a public forum and discuss important issues and VOTE. Though both men had lovely ideas for this new technology, it was David Sarnoff who discovered the TRUE power of mass-communcation...because it's always been with us....and that was popular entertainment. During the 1920s, there were independent radio stations everywhere. Thousands of them. Due to lack of regulations, however, these stations began fighting over frequencies. No one, other than th people selling the radios and the equipment for the exciting average mom-and-pop radio station, made much money from this new medium. Between 1920 and 1930, radio operated as a service medium...a place to perform the popular music of the time. Now the whole neighbourhood could hear Joe Blow squeezing out Sweet Rosie O'Grady from the comfort of their own homes. People, clamouring for attention on the airwaves, started trying to cut off each other's frequencies. Professionalism and shrewdness equalled success. Copyright SNAFUs also got in the way...rather like what happened with Napster, which only goes to say that very little changes in eighty years. "Since the media mergers have been increasng,
the media industry is becoming more and more about turning quarterly profits
than creating quality media, forcing producers to dumb everything down
to the lowest common denominator."
The answer is: the FCC wouldn't allow the
new technology.
Riiiiight. Television's advent, of course, mirrored the story of radio, of photography, of the printing press. The common people aren't using their televisions to watch Pavarotti performances or Carl Sagan...they're using them to watch American Idol and Sex and the City. When people actually WANT to expand their minds and watch educational programmes, they are forced to pay for that programming out of their own pockets. It's a never-ending cycle. Yes, we have the capabilities to produce wonderful special effects in movies, but is that really all that important when the writing and acting is shitty? It doesn't matter. People complain about the FCC censoring everything, but they are incorrect. The FCC does not censor anything. That's the job of NAB, or the Bureau of Standards and Practices. It determines what content is acceptable or unacceptable. It is controlled by the networks and speaks for the networks. It also controls our ideologies, our consuming patterns, and our lifestyles. If you want to get pissed off about the quality of television today, get pissed at NAB. It's their fault. James Cameron and Catherine Bigelow's 1995 movie Strange Days takes this story one step further. Ralph Fiennes' character, Lenny Nero, lives in a mildly futuristic world where virtual reality images could be stored digitally and wired directly into the cerebral cortex, whereupon the user could re-experience an event not only as the person who lived it, but experience their perception as well. Lenny Nero uses this potentially fantastic, wonderful technology for....yup, porn. For every Beatles there is a Monkees. For every Carl Perkins there is a Pat Boone. For every Jim Morrison there is a Britney Spears. Quality will always be good, and it will always be bad, regardless of technology. Your duty, then, is to discern which is mindless drivel...and which could make a positive difference in your life. I'll give you a hint...you ain't gonna
find it in a Cosmo.
I'm ending this with lyrics from a Divine Comedy song, Dumb It Down.
You've got a personality;
Intelligence is dangerous;
Well, down and down and down we slide.
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The
first lesson any alien life form must learn about humanity is that there
is a lowest common denominator factor present: one that drives us to wrestle
in lime Jell-o; one that sends us to monster truck rallies; one that persuades
us to read Cosmo and
Maxim. Moreover (and this is the
real kicker, folks) humans derive PLEASURE from these things.
translated
the Bible into German, people could at last interpret Scripture on their
own, rather than having to rely on a priest to do it for them. Holy
Mary mother of god, the priests did shudder. This revolutionary act, in
turn, led to the Reformation, and its repercussions continue to haunt the
modern Christian world.
The letters were by far the most interesting account of explorations in
the Americas that had appeared up to that time, and caused asensation that,
if anything, exceeded that created by Columbus's description of his first
voyage ten years earlier. The letters werereprinted in every European
language and soon came to the attention of Waldseemueller and his friends,
who were members of a thinktank of sorts in the town of Saint Die, Lorraine,
now part of France. The Waldseemueller group published CosmographieIntroduction
- the first attempt ro update the geography texts of the ancients.
They were quite taken with Vespucci's idea that theAmericas were a new
land, since it meant they had gone beyond the knowledge of the ancients,
whose shadow they had long toiled.
Photography
became the defining illustration of reality. People could not deny
what the photograph showed. The photograph depicted the true horrors
of war during the American Civil War (no matter that many of the dead bodies
from the Battle of Gettysburg were moved and arranged....some actually
being the same bodies, dressed in different uniforms). Photography
also brought the industrial world to its knees when Lewis Hines documented
the harsh, potentially deadly conditions for young children in factories.
Photography, during the sexually-repressed Victorian era, also brought
forth many...you guessed it! Pornographers.
By
the 1930s, one Vladimir Zworykin had already produced the first TV camera
(called the kinescope). Philo "There You Are, Electronic Television"
Farnsworth wowed the world with his maize-inspired cathode ray: that little
gun thing in your TV which shoots light in horizontal rows at a zillionth
of a second. But if television was such a good idea, why wasn't it
on the mass market during the 1930s?
