Comm 158 Final Flashcards
(71 cards)
Newspaper compared to books
Accelerated producing schedule. Information could be spread and standardized more rapidly. It is the beginning of the mass media.
American Newspaper in the Colonial Period
Very old news. Los transmission speed. News only really about ship arrivals and departures.
American Newspaper Printing in the Colonial Period
Printing was really a sideline business in coffee shops, postmasters, and copy shops. It was a limited market.
First paper in the Colonial Period and American Revolution
Publick Occurences both Forreign and Domestick. It was shut down right after the first issue by the British government because it did not have a license before publication.
Many newspapers were published in support of the American revolution and against the
Partisan Press Era
Most newspapers were subsidized by certain parties. They provided stories and contracts. They were able to target their audience.
Limited circulation. Only about 1200 a day. Still focused on the elite because it was expensive.
1830: Penny Press
Once cent paper due to Mass advertising. This was a new business model that reduced costs for consumers and they received profits from ads. Led to 77,000 in circulation. The news was not of the day. No mandatory subscription. It was soft content, such as gossip. Shift from the wealthy to the ordinary like love stories and accidents.
Results from the Rise of the Penny Press
Annual circulation grew exponentially. Higher literacy among common people in the labor class. Cheaper paper, better machinery, and easier distribution and news collecting was made available. Paper boys. Sell their attention to an advertiser. NEW BUSINESS MODEL.
Yellow Journalism
News content became more violent, extreme, sensational, and attractive to viewers. Propaganda in war. Led to agenda setting: media set public agenda, determine what we should think about. Media agenda transfers over to public agenda.
Multimodality of Newspaper
Visual depictions of politicians in media are correlated with public opinion and are stronger than text. News outlets want to seem fair in text, but the same does not apply to photographs. (political cartoons)
Latency of Newspaper
News production and delivery. It used to take weeks or months to send news stories over long distances- before the telegraph. Now, latency is much, much less.
Long-distance communication technologies before the telegraph
physical transportation, pigeons, humans, ponies, drumming, etc
Longer distance = faster speed (lower latency)
Light or fire to signal at great speed over great distances. Usually low channel capacity- binary and 1 bit at a time. Can use temporal dimension to encode more complex messages, but requires both parties to share the same codebook.
Optical Telegraph
Towers with two movable arms. Huge codebook (8400+) 1-3 symbols a minute with ona character reaching 5 miles. Expensive to operate. Popular in France, but they
Electricity & Electromagnetism
People believed it could be used for communication. It converted electricity into mechanical energy.
Many began working on coding the telegraph.
Initial Setup of the Telegraph & Growth
First connection made between DC and Baltimore. Commonly built along railroad. Rapid grown aimed at the globalization of networks connecting the whole world.
Used a thick cable that could pass weak signals and a pneumatic tube for complicated message cending. Physically transcribe messages to operators, then tube to a telegraph station. It was inefficient.
Morse Code
Dash and dots reflecting the frequence of English alphabet occurence. It was discrete. Charged by the # of words in each message, so people shortened them and used acronyms.
Reform Newspaper Industry
News story went from 6 weeks to an hour. Went from local to nationwide.
Ownership of Telegraph
Monopolized by Western Unioon. Speed and reliable and required for business communication. In Europe, it was controlled by the government. UK was independent system, which allowed private communication.
Another example of cultural technological determinism.
Telegraph and Economy
Enlarged the scale of economy dramatically. Real-time continous delivery of new infromation (stocks and gold price). More than once a day. Large companies leased lines for internal communication. Beginning of hierarchical corporations.
Telephone
Transmitting vocal or any other sound, rather than coded texts, over existing telegraph wires. (Phonoautograph recorded sounds, but everything else was the same as the telegraph)
Telephone and its Operation
It operated on any electrical wires- WU owned the largest telegraph network. Bell wanted to buy WU patent, but they didnt believe it would ever transmit speech over miles, want to. Eventually the core mechanical part of WU was acquired by American Bell and it is now known at ATT.
Dsitruptive Innovation
Graph with time on the x and performance on the y. Over time, technology A’s performance goes up and then goes stagnant. Halfway through that same time, Disruptive technology B appears, goes up higher than A and leads to its demise.
Telephone Exchange and Women
Telegraph and early telephone directly connected in a local telephone office connecting local subscribers. Women connected telephones, since they were becoming independent, barely coming into the workforce, so you could pay them less.
Automatic Switchboard and Dialing & In Homes
As the number of subscribers rapidly increased for the telegraph, ATT replaced the manual exchange replacing operators.
Eventually, many companies and homes installed telephone lines. Much faster than the telegraph. Led to a growth in the economy.
