Chapter One
Trends in Media Technology and Theory
Abstract:
This chapter surveys the history of television and looks at it current condition. The new and newly varied nature of video is examined with some of its implications, including the convergence of media, and the effect of the ubiquitous camcorder. Teledramatics is defined and the basis is established for the discussion of teaching media.
Table of Contents:
From Television to Video
Emerging Media Worlds
The Internet
Convergence
High Definition Television
A New Video Reality
"Camcorder Culture"
Teaching Media: A New Literacy
Teledramatics Defined
From Television to Video
Before World War Two television technology already had a history of over 20 years. Many different versions of the technology had been demonstrated. There had even been regular broadcasts to tiny audiences in London and New York, but after the war television broadcasting began in earnest.
In its first years television was significantly different than the television we know today. In the United States, the National Broadcasting Company (at this point not technically a network but a corporate conglomerate of unconnected broadcasting stations) was owned by the receiver manufacturer Radio Corporation of America; as in the early days of radio, a major goal of broadcasters was to promote the sales of receivers. As a result advertising revenue was secondary for the two or three networks that existed. Advertisers bought entire time blocks and controlled program content. It wasn't until later, when production costs and revenue increased, that the networks began selling spots within programs and assumed control of content. With no videotape recorders until 1957, most programming was live. The cult of personality had not developed in news broadcasts, producers felt "the commentator was secondary to the news itself"(Bretz, in Kisseloff, 1995, p. 356), and attempted to stay focused on newsreel footage, maps and camera cards.
Television grew explosively in reach and popularity in the 1950's. Local broadcasting stations were connected by wire and microwave links into a few national networks. The latest antics of Milton Berle and the intrigues of game shows became the hot topic of conversation across the nation, a common ground, a shared experience. The representations on the screen did not reflect the diversity of the society, yet the fresh experience of these two or three channels of black and white moving pictures with sound unified the nation in a common focus. With vitality and innocence the medium was born that later came to be called "America's wasteland","the plug in drug", "America's babysitter", and "the boob tube". A pervasive new communications environment had enveloped the nation, entering the family living room and captivating eyes and ears in a way that no medium had done before.
Elsewhere on the earth the same technology arrived in different ways. Outside of the Americas and Australia, the other industrialized nations established television as government monopolies, using licensing fees and government subsidies instead of advertising to finance it. The Western European countries implemented a social service model, the rest a state controlled model (Dovey, 1996). In these first fifty years of its existence, television has been a medium of the urban, industrial world. The manufacture of production equipment only occurs in a few first world nations. This is a consideration for third world countries who wish to build a local television infrastructure. A concern for the cultural and political influences of television spilling across their borders, whether as broadcast or satellite signals, often spurs developing nations to establish an internal video voice to resist "cultural imperialism," but the expense in foreign exchange can be a burden. The attempt to maintain cultural integrity then entangles them financially with the industrialized countries.
Television has gradually arrived in most third world countries, though the viewing experience for these populations is often different than in the industrialized world. The cost of television receivers means that viewing is more likely to be done communally in a central location rather than in the home.(Sinclair & Jacka & Cunningham, 1995)
Beginning in the late 1960's, the growth of television is an ironic story of simultaneous connection and fragmentation. The penetration of American households continued until 98% now contain televisions, more than have telephones. Yet technologies such as videotape recording (which allows broadcasters to time shift programs, and allows viewers to watch tapes instead of broadcasts), and cable distribution and satellites (which provide an exploding number of channels) have facilitated a plethora of program sources dividing the audience into ever smaller demographic fractions. The unified audience of the early days of television broadcasting is gone. While this has enabled a certain increase in representations of diversity, with cable channels such as Univisión and Black Entertainment Network providing a presence for groups which are still under represented on the other networks, the high cost and complexity of the television infrastructure still guarantees that what appears on the screen has been selected by a corporate system. It is also still a system of passive consumption in which individual participation goes no further than operating the remote control or going to the video rental store. As Scholle & Denski (1994) say, this is a system which provides a "definition of freedom as a broad choice of consumption objects. The contemporary popular media fragments, creates dissensus, threatens/erases the practical base of knowledge that marginal or powerless groups need in order to take hold of their everyday lives and work toward changing their historical conditions."
With the prolonged trend toward concentration of wealth in fewer hands and the concentration of media ownership into a handful of transnational megacorporations, the term "marginal or powerless groups" is coming to include just about everybody. (http://www.mediaspace.org/MMI/mmi_frame.html)
Emerging Media Worlds: the Internet and "Camcorder Culture"
Countering this established top-down system of broadcast television is the emergence of media that are accessible and interactive. This movement can be seen on two fronts: the growth of camcorder recording and desktop editing capabilities, and the growth of the Internet.
Beginning with the introduction of the Sony Portapak in the late 1960's, television production capabilities have become increasingly accessible. By the turn of the millennium low cost cameras have evolved from clunky low resolution devices to broadcast quality camcorders that are priced within the means of small groups or avid individuals (with prices coming down yearly). Similarly, very recently personal computers have become powerful enough to do video editing on an affordable desktop computer, or even on a laptop. All that remains is the emergence of accessible distribution systems such as broadband Internet, and a popularly accessible global video communication system will be in place. [discuss the restrictions that may come with broadband, the potential workaround of DVD. Breakdown of the network relationships, KRON bailing, Nets dropping out of NAB, Comish's statements about over the air DTV. Then to reinforce convergence there's digital distribution & projection of films, and HDTV production of latest Star Wars.]
The Internet
The Internet as a pervasive, popular medium is only a decade old. Sparked by the invention of HTML and the World Wide Web in the last years of the 1980s it has created a potent new aspect of our media environment that is successfully competing for "viewers" with the already subdivided television establishment. The Internet is interactive, and it is based on a highly adaptable suite of technologies which are highly accessible, allowing millions of individuals to become electronic publishers. The Internet is also global, as much of a challenge to the control of national governments as are multinational corporations. This creates profound changes in our media ecology.
Prior to 1990 the industry, inspired partly by the potential demonstrated in the control of video laserdiscs by personal computers, had been looking at "interactive television," a television model, as their image of the future. Then the graphic capabilities of the World Wide Web burst on the scene, taking nearly everyone by surprise with its print publishing model. Even the low bandwidth telephone connections and the limited capabilities of PCs in the early1990s were enough to ignite a revolution. The increased bandwidth of Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) using twisted pair phone lines and of cable modems using the coaxial television cables are poised to blend with the new ability of PCs to handle full resolution video and sound to create a new dimension to the Internet experience. This is the technology through which interactive video and video on demand (VOD) are finally expected to arrive. The potential here is to extend the electronic publishing opportunity of the web to include video, enabling diverse individuals to become broadcasters, or rather narrowcasters. (1) It is likely that this second phase of Internet growth will be less free, in both the economic and political sense, than the original explosion (Platt, C. 2001), but non-corporate producers can be expected to exploit any new opportunity offered in order to find an outlet for their video expression. If broadband Internet fails to provide an opening, DVD recording is another technology that can facilitate the popular voice.
Convergence
The arrival of the Internet combined with the penetration of camcorders and desktop editors into the professional production environment had given rise to the term "convergence" throughout the media production industries. At the user level it refers to the convergence of the PC and TV - products of heretofore separate industries. Moves in that direction can be seen in television set top boxes for Internet access such as Microsoft's Web TV, and the hard disk based capture devices such as Tivo that store incoming video for later playback in a much more dynamic, randomly accessible way than videocassette recorders. These are the beginnings of user interface technologies that will blur the active sit-up-and-interact mode of the PC with the passive sit-back-and-watch mode of the television.
On the production side, "convergence" acknowledges that media production at all levels is increasingly done digitally, that the same media products are increasingly being re-purposed for (digital) delivery through multiple outlets - the same content is often delivered on broadcast and cable television, on the Internet, in theaters, and on videotape to as many audiences as possible - and that as a result formerly separate industries such as television, film, and computers are being drawn into closer working relationships that include exchange of personnel and common ownership. Corporate examples of this are numerous, including the relationship between the computer company Microsoft and the broadcasting company NBC, and the merger of AOL and Time-Warner. (Especially notable because Time-Warner was an already merged conglomerate of print, motion pictures, and cable television, and because it was the Internet upstart AOL that bought the old media giant, not the other way around.) Often these relationships are marriages of content providers and delivery systems.
High Definition Television
High Definition Television (HDTV) is another area in flux that illuminates the facets of convergence. HDTV transmits a sharper picture that has twice as many lines of resolution as our current standard definition (SD), along with a wide screen format that makes the viewing experience much more like the motion picture theater experience. In the United States the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ( http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html) removed regulatory obstacles to adaptation to technological change for the whole array of telecommunications media. One of the provisions of the act gave existing television broadcasting stations an additional six megahertz television channel for ten years for them to use as a bridge in the shift to digital television transmission. A schedule was set up requiring the largest markets to begin digital broadcasting first, followed in increments by the smaller markets until the end of the ten year period ending in 2006.
Digital TV is separate from High Definition TV. The digital signal is a flexible transmission that is capable of carrying multiple channels of standard definition TV, or any of several formats of HDTV. Broadcasters are ambivalent about the use of the digital signal, tantalized by the possibility of expanding their programming/advertising real estate by broadcasting 3 or 4 standard definition signals instead of one high definition channel, all without the expensive replacement of equipment that HDTV requires. Nevertheless, the intent of Congress in the 1996 act was to push HDTV to market (even if the 1996 Act did not enforce it), and the industry is moving in that direction in a sluggish confused way, debating over transmission standards and waiting for a resolution of the "why produce HDTV programs when there are no HDTV receivers, why buy HDTV receivers when there are no HD programs" conundrum.
In the meantime producers are beginning to move from film to HDTV. As film producers recognize the quality of high definition, the economy of video over film is drawing them to HD, while the television producers are motivated by the desire to preserve the marketability of their product when HDTV becomes prevalent. The result is a convergence of skills and personnel from both industries. The unforgiving sharpness of HD is requiring video people to adopt the precision of film techniques just as film people are having to learn video technology. (Hirsh, M. 1999)
The debate over the future of HDTV is lively (Johnson, B. 2001). The new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has declared an intention to let the marketplace decide if broadcasters will transmit HDTV or if it will be left to broadband networks (Pegg, J. 2001). Whether it arrives over the air or through data networks, HD will arrive. This raises the interesting possibility of a split level video future: one an institutional level of expensive to produce High Definition corporate video typically viewed in more traditional settings, the other a more diverse level of vernacular video produced inexpensively in standard definition and appearing through a variety of venues, a realm of multiple voices, experimentation, and no doubt highly variable quality - and a realm with an aesthetic and point of view that will percolate into the institutional level, being coopted by commercial interests whenever they sense a potentially profitable trend. During the next decades, as we will see below, it may well be in this realm of vernacular video in which we work out the new ways of knowing that carry us conclusively from the industrial age to the information age.
Streaming video for the Internet is the stage for another front of convergence that is affecting producers. Bandwidth limitations and the compression schemes that they require impose new considerations on video producers when they know, or hope, that their product is going to be initially distributed on the Internet, or re-purposed for it. (As a result, a new job title, Compressionist, has sprung up in this field.)
A New Video Reality
With interactive global reach, this is a much more complex electronic audiovisual environment than the simple national broadcast network realm of television's first couple of decades. The ubiquity of video display screens serving so many different purposes has relegated the word "television" strictly to the broadcast realm, and we currently use the word "video" to describe the multifold audiovisual medium as we now know it. In fact Cubitt (1993, p. 192) argues that the multiplicity of uses for video and its function as a medium of media requires us to refer to it in the plural: "the video media". He says "Video is a medium only in the sense that it mediates between: people, fundamentally. . . .video [also] mediates between senses [audial, visual, and others], between media and, at an even more profound level, between technologies."
"Camcorder Culture"
The previously mentioned availability of camcorders and inexpensive production equipment is having an effect that is beginning to be apparent - the use of the camcorder cultivates a new aesthetic, a new understanding of truth, and brings a new element to the sociopolitical dynamic. Since so many individuals are now involved in making video, analyses are beginning to arise that look at the personal and interpersonal effects of the medium rather than simply the mass social effects.(Humm, 1998; Dovey, 1996)
As a mass medium, television in many circumstances still mediates social continuity from the center, especially during events of social transition such as transfers of power, wars, etc. (Dayan & Katz, 1995) However, recent examples abound which illustrate the application of video to subvert television. Palestinians began to use video when Israeli state TV was the only voice reporting, as did individuals in Thailand in 1989 when brutal suppression of anti government demonstrations was not reported on national TV. (Dovey, J. 1996, p. 121) In the U.S. the opportunistic recording of the Rodney King tape had wide repercussions. (Ronell, A. 1995) In recent years it has become routine for camcorders to supply alternate points of view of events such as the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle.
On a more intimate level camcorders mediate personal events -- weddings, graduations, babies, private parties, vacations - carrying the "shock, horror, and delight of self recognition. . . . 'us-ness' rather than 'otherness'". (Dovey, 1996 p. 120) This intimate, subjective vernacular video pleases us without the narrative organization and technical sophistication of institutional video. Many have held a camcorder in their hands and made videotapes, so we have come to accept camcorder footage as "real", the same sense of reality that we ascribed to photographs when the Kodak camera arrived a century ago. This perception and aesthetic has rippled out in concentric circles of decreasing validity through commercial television: the "reality TV" phenomena. Starting with entertaining collections of clips of family accidents and pranks, moving on to a surveillance and counter surveillance style of video as in "Cops", and further out to alleged documentaries of contests such as "Survivor", this genre has a long way to go as it works its way through our consciousness and we re-examine what truth and reality are. (Humm, P., 1998)
Teaching Media: A New Literacy
It is in this complex and rapidly changing electronic media environment that we attempt to teach media production - including media literacy, which is analogous to print literacy both in its productive form as the "writing" of media, and in its analytical form as the critical "reading" of media. As in print literacy, these two aspects are meant to arrive at a synthesis in graduates who not only have the capacity to create media productions with integrity and depth of understanding, but also to view media critically.
Typically, video production has been taught as television production - a vocational approach that emphasizes preparation for careers in existing industries, remains largely apolitical, and is characterized by separate classes for practice and critical theory. Sholle & Denski (1994) decry that separation of practice and criticism as a kind of schizophrenia (using schizophrenia in the colloquial sense of a pathologically split personality.) They note that media production has political consequences, whether intended or not, so it is disingenuous to affect an apolitical approach to its teaching. In addition to these considerations, the media production landscape is changing so rapidly that it is not honestly possible to prepare a student for exact working conditions in static industries, as could be done 15 or 20 years ago.
In three decades of work in commercial television, this writer has experienced a de-professionalization of that industry. The proliferation of channels divided the market into smaller revenue streams. Educational and licensing standards for employees were reduced, and so were pay levels. As corporations trend toward merging into global giants, they also organize into smaller production units intended to be more responsive to changing market conditions and business opportunities. The result is a fluid employment picture with less long term security for workers. Along with this trend, the increased accessibility of production equipment can be expected to result in a diffusion of media production throughout organizations. Production skills will not be employed solely within organizations dedicated to media production, and such skills will be an advantageous supplement to other professional skills, in the same way that writing and public speaking skills are.
With fundamental change being a way of life in all aspects of communications, media students need a broad education that prepares them to think actively while continually learning so that they can adapt to changing conditions. They need critical skills so that they can consciously fulfill their responsibilities as builders of a new environment. As McLuhan said, "we make our media, then our media make us" in an ongoing, evolving interaction that determines what kind of people we will become. The responsibility of educated media producers is doubled, since they are presumed to have insights which make them implicit teachers of media literacy to the rest of society.
Ultimately all students should be media students. With the availability of inexpensive production equipment there is little to prevent students from grade school on from learning media writing skills. They spend more of their time consuming media than they do in the classroom, yet there is little connection between the two experiences. This is another aspect of Sholle & Denski's "schizophrenia". "From an early age, students learn that media and all the other areas of popular culture are separate from education and have very little place in it." (1994, p. 117) Thus the educational establishment is providing students with few skills to deal with the immersive electronic environment that, second to family, is the most potent and pervasive influence on their lives. Media literacy pedagogy that is delivered in a traditional print-based, teacher-centered manner is better than nothing, but cannot connect very persuasively with the complex, multisensual environment that students actually live in. There are some scattered initiatives to teach media literacy in schools, finding their way thinly into some state standards. (Kubey & Baker, 1999) These must be expanded, continually rethought, and reinforced. An active dialogue between K-12 and higher education is needed as part of the effort to articulate media education throughout the curriculum and make it more effective.
Traditional media education pedagogy is not adequate to achieve these goals. We will look at the foundations of a new media pedagogy based on the Teledramatic approach, the broad needs of industry, and the pedagogical techniques of outcome based education and project based education.
Teledramatics Defined
Teledramatics is an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to teaching media production along with media literacy that takes into account the convergence of media that is being propelled by digital technology. It utilizes the threads of a pair of continua to unify a coherent philosophy and authentic learning experience:
The first is the continuum of the three phases of the production process with a focus on the roles individuals fill: the pre-production phase which employs writers, producers, etc.; the production phase which employs videographers/cinematographers, performers, sound recordists, etc.; through the post-production phase which is the realm of editors, special effects artists, etc. This reflects the actual integrative reality of production which employs teams of diversely skilled people working together organically on a common project - the union of arts and sciences that is required to bring storytelling creations to fruition.
The second is a continuum from the ancient art of theater through radio, film, video, to cyberspace that fuses formerly separate disciplines. Convergence, the historic breakdown of boundaries between media that is briefly described above, has only just begun. An increasing crossover of techniques and personnel is making the distinctions between formerly separate media far less significant, especially in the production industries. There will still be divisions of labor, diversities of skills, but the situation is becoming much more fluid, with thin barriers between industries and frequent career changes for individuals. The traditional academic divisions between separate departments of Theater, Film, Radio-TV, and Computer Communications are becomingly increasingly irrelevant.
The Teledramatic approach relies on a grounding in fundamental communication techniques and storytelling principles that have persisted since the millennia of oral memory - along with an ethical concern for the social effect of a work of media art, and its verisimilitude, its truth. Theatrical and rhetorical techniques that were already mature when they were codified by Aristotle 2300 years ago [have been reworked by philosophers since then] thread through the new media that have evolved and provide a common foundation [theory, practice,] for creators in any medium.
The next chapter will carry this understanding of the historic and current media landscape and pragmatically query the media production industries to discover the characteristics they want in prospective workers. It should be noted that this does not imply a belief that the purpose of media education is simply the "training of contented labor for industry." (Sholle & Denski, 1994, p. 151) The shifting world that our communications environment is creating needs a broadly informed media literate citizenry who can contribute to the struggle to understand what is happening to us. This includes both media professionals and all graduates who profess to be educated.
References
Cubitt, S. (1993) Videography: video media as art and culture. New York: St Martin's Press
Dayan, D. & Katz, E. (1995) Political ceremony and instant history. In Smith, A. (Ed.) (1995) Television: an international history. (pp. 169-188) Oxford University Press
Dovey, J. (Ed.) (1996) Fractal dreams, New Media in a social context Lawrence and Wishart: London
Federal Communications Commission, Telecommunications Act of 1996 & subsequent rulings.
http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
Hirsh, M. (1999, April) A high-concept drama in high-def. American Cinematographer,80 (4), 56-63
Humm, P. (1995) Real TV: camcorders, access, and authenticity. In Geraghty, C. & Lusted, D. (Eds.) The television studies book (pp. 228-237)
Johnson, B. A. (2001, Jan.) Why the DTV transition will fail. Digital Video, 9 (1), 62-67
(Available at www.dv.com)
Kisseloff, J. (1995) The box, an oral history of television, 1920-1961. New York: Penguin Books
Kubey, R. & Baker, F. (1999, Oct. 27) Has media literacy found a curricular foothold? Education Week on the web http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=09ubey2.h19&keywords=media%20literacy
Mediaspace, a web site produced by the Media Education Foundation to track the concentration of media ownership.
http://www.mediaspace.org/MMI/mmi_frame.htmlPegg, J. (2001, May 2) FCC chairman skeptical of what the future holds for terrestrial TV. TV Technology,19 (9), 10
Ronell, A. (1995) Video/television/Rodney King: twelve steps beyond the pleasure principle. In d'Agustino, P. & Tafler, D. (1995) (Eds.) Transmission, toward a post-television culture, 2nd edition. (pp. 105-119) Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications
Sholle, D. & Denski, S. (1994) Media education and the (re)production of culture Wesport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey
Sinclair, J & Jacka, E. & Cunningham, S. (Eds.) (1996) Patterns in global television: peripheral vision. Oxford University Press
1. When discussing this transition to broadband connections in the "last mile," it is important to note the little mentioned issue of symmetry The typical home Internet connection over twisted pair telephone lines has reached a technical limit of 56 kilobytes per second that everyone is impatient with, but this technology offers the same speed upstream as it does downstream. The new broadband technologies that are being offered are asymmetrical, they have a slower upstream speed than downstream. This may be unavoidable at the moment as network engineers acknowledge typical usage patterns while trying to squeeze the maximum throughput from the existing network technology, yet it is a trend toward another top down system that citizens should be alert to.