The Rise of the Feature

In these early years, theaters were still running single-reel films, which came at a standard length of 1,000 feet, allowing for about 16 minutes of playing time. However, companies began to import multiple-reel films from European producers around 1907, and the format gained popular acceptance in the United States in 1912 with Louis Mercanton’s highly successful Queen Elizabeth, a three-and-a-half reel “feature,” starring the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. As exibitors began to show more features—as the multiple-reel film came to be called—they discovered a number of advantages over the single-reel short. For one thing, audiences saw these longer films as special events and were willing to pay more for admission, and because of the popularity of the feature narrativesFeature films that tell a story., features generally experienced longer runs in theaters than their single-reel predecessors.“Pre World-War I US Cinema,” Motion Pictures: The Silent Feature: 1910-27, http://www.uv.es/EBRIT/macro/macro_5004_39_4.html#0009. Additionally, the feature film gained popularity among the middle classes, who saw its length as analogous to the more “respectable” entertainment of live theater.“Pre World-War I US Cinema,” Motion Pictures: The Silent Feature: 1910-27, http://www.uv.es/EBRIT/macro/macro_5004_39_4.html#0009. Following the example of the French film d’art, U.S. feature producers often took their material from sources that would appeal to a wealthier and better educated audience, such as histories, literature, and stage productions.David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 135, 144.

As it turns out, the feature film was one factor that brought about the eventual downfall of the MPPC. The inflexible structuring of the Trust’s exhibition and distribution system made the organization resistant to change. When movie studio, and Trust member, Vitagraph began to release features like A Tale of Two Cities (1911) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1910), the Trust forced it to exhibit the films serially in single-reel showings to keep with industry standards. The MPPC also underestimated the appeal of the star system, a trend that began when producers chose famous stage actors like Mary Pickford and James O’Neill to play the leading roles in their productions and to grace their advertising posters.David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 140. Because of the MPPC’s inflexibility, independent companies were the only ones able to capitalize on two important trends that were to become film’s future: single-reel features and star power. Today, few people would recognize names like Vitagraph or Biograph, but the independents that outlasted them—Universal, Goldwyn (which would later merge with Metro and Mayer), Fox (later 20th Century Fox), and Paramount (the later version of the Lasky Corporation)—have become household names.

Hollywood

As moviegoing increased in popularity among the middle class, and as the feature films began keeping audiences in their seats for longer periods of time, exhibitors found a need to create more comfortable and richly decorated theater spaces to attract their audiences. These “dream palaces,” so called because of their often lavish embellishments of marble, brass, guilding, and cut glass, not only came to replace the nickelodeon theater, but also created the demand that would lead to the Hollywood studio system. Some producers realized that the growing demand for new work could only be met if the films were produced on a regular, year-round system. However, this was impractical with the current system that often relied on outdoor filming and was predominately based in Chicago and New York—two cities whose weather conditions prevented outdoor filming for a significant portion of the year. Different companies attempted filming in warmer locations such as Florida, Texas, and Cuba, but the place where producers eventually found the most success was a small, industrial suburb of Los Angeles called Hollywood.

Hollywood proved to be an ideal location for a number of reasons. Not only was the climate temperate and sunny year-round, but land was plentiful and cheap, and the location allowed close access to a number of diverse topographies: mountains, lakes, desert, coasts, and forests. By 1915, more than 60 percent of U.S. film production was centered in Hollywood.Britannica Online. s.v. “History of the Motion Picture.” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/394161/history-of-the-motion picture

The Art of Silent Film

While the development of narrative film was largely driven by commercial factors, it is also important to acknowledge the role of individual artists who turned it into a medium of personal expression. The motion picture of the silent era was generally simplistic in nature; acted in overly animated movements to engage the eye; and accompanied by live music, played by musicians in the theater, and written titles to create a mood and to narrate a story. Within the confines of this medium, one filmmaker in particular emerged to transform the silent filmFilm without recorded sound. into an art and to unlock its potential as a medium of serious expression and persuasion. D. W. Griffith, who entered the film industry as an actor in 1907, quickly moved to a directing role in which he worked closely with his camera crew to experiment with shots, angles, and editing techniques that could heighten the emotional intensity of his scenes. He found that by practicing parallel editingAn editing technique in which a film alternates between two or more scenes of action., in which a film alternates between two or more scenes of action, he could create an illusion of simultaneity. He could then heighten the tension of the film’s drama by alternating between cuts more and more rapidly until the scenes of action converged. Griffith used this technique to great effect in his controversial film The Birth of a Nation, which will be discussed in greater detail later on in this chapter. Other techniques that Griffith employed to new effect included panning shotsShots that turn the camera horizontally, vertically, or diagonally., through which he was able to establish a sense of scene and to engage his audience more fully in the experience of the film, and tracking shotsShots that travel with the movement of a scene., or shots that traveled with the movement of a scene,“Griffith,” Motion Pictures, http://www.uv.es/EBRIT/macro/macro_5004_39_6.html#0011. which allowed the audience—through the eye of the camera—to participate in the film’s action.

MPAA: Combating Censorship

As film became an increasingly lucrative U.S. industry, prominent industry figures like D. W. Griffith, slapstick comedian/director Charlie Chaplin, and actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks grew extremely wealthy and influential. Public attitudes toward stars and toward some stars’ extravagant lifestyles were divided, much as they are today: On the one hand, these celebrities were idolized and imitated in popular culture, yet at the same time, they were criticized for representing a threat, on and off screen, to traditional morals and social order. And much as it does today, the news media liked to sensationalize the lives of celebrities to sell stories. Comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who worked alongside future icons Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was at the center of one of the biggest scandals of the silent era. When Arbuckle hosted a marathon party over Labor Day weekend in 1921, one of his guests, model Virginia Rapp, was rushed to the hospital, where she later died. Reports of a drunken orgy, rape, and murder surfaced. Following World War I, the United States was in the middle of significant social reforms, such as Prohibition. Many feared that movies and their stars could threaten the moral order of the country. Because of the nature of the crime and the celebrity involved, these fears became inexplicably tied to the Artbuckle case.“Post World War I US Cinema,” Motion Pictures, http://www.uv.es/EBRIT/macro/macro_5004_39_10.html#0015. Even though autopsy reports ruled that Rapp had died from causes for which Arbuckle could not be blamed, the comedian was tried (and acquitted) for manslaughter, and his career was ruined.

The Arbuckle affair and a series of other scandals only increased public fears about Hollywood’s impact. In response to this perceived threat, state and local governments increasingly tried to censor the content of films that depicted crime, violence, and sexually explicit material. Deciding that they needed to protect themselves from government censorship and to foster a more favorable public image, the major Hollywood studios organized in 1922 to form an association they called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributers of America (later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America,An association of major Hollywood studios designed to set industry standards and give filmmakers artistic freedom. or MPAA). Among other things, the MPAA instituted a code of self-censorship for the motion picture industry. Today, the MPAA operates by a voluntary rating system, which means producers can voluntarily submit a film for review, which is designed to alert viewers to the age-apropriateness of a film, while still protecting the filmmakers’ artistic freedom.Motion Picture Association of America, “History of the MPAA,” http://www.mpaa.org/about/history.

Birth of a Nation

In 1915, director D. W. Griffith established his reputation with the highly successful film The Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, a prosegregation narrative about the American South during and after the Civil War. At the time, The Birth of a Nation was the longest feature film ever made, at almost 3 hours, and contained huge battle scenes that amazed and delighted audiences. Griffith’s storytelling ability helped solidify the narrative style that would go on to dominate feature films. He also experimented with editing techniques such as close-ups, jump cuts, and parallel editing that helped make the film an artistic achievement.

Griffith’s film found success largely because it captured the social and cultural tensions of the era. As American studies specialist Lary May has argued, “[Griffith’s] films dramatized every major concern of the day.”Lary May, “Apocalyptic Cinema: D. W. Griffith and the Aesthetics of Reform,” in Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John Belton (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 26. In the early 20th century, fears about recent waves of immigrants had led to certain racist attitudes in mass culture, with “scientific” theories of the time purporting to link race with inborn traits like intelligence and other capabilities. Additionally, the dominant political climate, largely a reaction against populist labor movements, was one of conservative elitism, eager to attribute social inequalities to natural human differences.“Birth of a Nation,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. William A. Darity, Jr., Gale Virtual Reference Library, 1:305–306. According to a report by the New York Evening Post after the film’s release, even some Northern audiences “clapped when the masked riders took vengeance on Negroes.”Charles Higham. The Art of the American Film: 1900–1971. (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1973), 13. However, the outrage many groups expressed about the film is a good reminder that American culture is not monolithic, that there are always strong contingents in opposition to dominant ideologies.

While critics praised the film for its narrative complexity and epic scope, many others were outraged and even started riots at several screenings because of its highly controversial, openly racist attitudes, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and blamed Southern blacks for the destruction of the war.Charles Higham. The Art of the American Film: 1900–1971. (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1973), 10–11. Many Americans joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in denouncing the film, and the National Board of Review eventually cut a number of the film’s racist sections.Lary May, “Apocalyptic Cinema: D. W. Griffith and the Aesthetics of Reform,” in Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John Belton (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 46. However, it’s important to keep in mind the attitudes of the early 1900s. At the time the nation was divided, and Jim Crow laws and segregation were enforced. Nonetheless, The Birth of a Nation was the highest grossing movie of its era. In 1992, the film was classified by the Library of Congress among the “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” in U.S. history.

“The American Way”

Until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, American films after World War I generally reflected the neutral, isolationist stance that prevailed in politics and culture. However, after the United States was drawn into the war in Europe, the government enlisted Hollywood to help with the war effort, opening the federal Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs in Los Angeles. Bureau officials served in an advisory capacity on the production of war-related films, an effort with which the studios cooperated. As a result, films tended toward the patriotic and were produced to inspire feelings of pride and confidence in being American and to clearly establish that America and its allies were forced of good. For instance, critically acclaimed Casablanca paints a picture of the ill effects of fascism, illustrates the values that heroes like Victor Laszlo hold, and depicts America as a place for refugees to find democracy and freedom.Review of Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz, Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/bureau_casablanca.cfm.

These early World War II films were sometimes overtly propagandist, intended to influence American attitudes rather than present a genuine reflection of American sentiments toward the war. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight films, for example, the first of which was produced in 1942, were developed for the U.S. Army and were later shown to general audiences; they delivered a war message through narrative.Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Los Angeles: The Free Press, 1987), 122. As the war continued, however, filmmakers opted to forego patriotic themes for a more serious reflection of American sentiments, as exemplified by films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.

Youth versus Age: From Counterculture to Mass Culture

In Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman, as the film’s protagonist, enters into a romantic affair with the wife of his father’s business partner. However, Mrs. Robinson and the other adults in the film fail to understand the young, alienated hero, who eventually rebels against them. The Graduate, which brought in more than $44 million at the box office, reflected the attitudes of many members of a young generation growing increasingly dissatisfied with what they perceived to be the repressive social codes established by their more conservative elders.Tim Dirks, review of The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols, Filmsite, http://www.filmsite.org/grad.html.

This baby boomer generation came of age during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Not only did the youth culture express a cynicism toward the patriotic, prowar stance of their World War II–era elders, but they displayed a fierce resistance toward institutional authority in general, an antiestablishmentism epitomized in the 1967 hit film Bonnie and Clyde. In the film, a young, outlaw couple sets out on a cross-country bank-robbing spree until they’re killed in a violent police ambush at the film’s close.John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 286.

Bonnie and Clyde’s violence provides one example of the ways films at the time were testing the limits of permissible on-screen material. The youth culture’s liberal attitudes toward formally taboo subjects like sexuality and drugs began to emerge in film during the late 1960s. Like Bonnie and Clyde, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Western The Wild Bunch, displays an early example of aestheticized violence in film. The wildly popular Easy Rider (1969)—containing drugs, sex, and violence—may owe a good deal of its initial success to liberalized audiences. And in the same year, Midnight Cowboy, one of the first Hollywood films to receive an X rating (in this case for its sexual content), won three Academy Award awards, including Best Picture.John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 288–89. As the release and subsequently successful reception of these films attest, what at the decade’s outset had been countercultural had, by the decade’s close, become mainstream.

The Hollywood Production Code

When the MPAA (originally MPPDA) first banded together in 1922 to combat government censorship and to promote artistic freedom, the association attempted a system of self-regulation. However, by 1930—in part because of the transition to talking pictures—renewed criticism and calls for censorship from conservative groups made it clear to the MPPDA that the loose system of self-regulation was not enough protection. As a result, the MPPDA instituted the Production Code, or Hays Code (after MPPDA director William H. Hays), which remained in place until 1967. The code, which according to motion picture producers concerned itself with ensuring that movies were “directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking,”“Complete Nudity is Never Permitted: The Motion Picture Code of 1930,” http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5099/. was strictly enforced starting in 1934, putting an end to most public complaints. However, many people in Hollywood resented its restrictiveness. After a series of Supreme Court cases in the 1950s regarding the code’s restrictions to freedom of speech, the Production Code grew weaker until it was finally replaced in 1967 with the MPAA rating system.“The Production Code of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributers of America, Inc.—1930–1934,” American Decades Primary Sources, ed. Cynthia Rose (Detroit: Gale, 2004), vol. 4, 12–15.

MPAA Ratings

As films like Bonnie and Clyde and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) tested the limits on violence and language, it became clear that the Production Code was in need of replacement. In 1968, the MPAA adopted a ratings sytem to identify films in terms of potentially objectionable content. By providing officially designated categories for films that would not have passed Production Code standards of the past, the MPAA opened a way for films to deal openly with mature content. The ratings system originally included four categories: G (suitable for general audiences), M (equivalent to the PG rating of today), R (restricted to adults over age 16), and X (equivalent to today’s NC-17).

The MPAA rating systems, with some modifications, is still in place today. Before release in theaters, films are submitted to the MPAA board for a screening, during which advisers decide on the most apropriate rating based on the film’s content. However, studios are not required to have the MPAA screen releases ahead of time—some studios release films without the MPAA rating at all. Commercially, less restrictive ratings are generally more beneficial, particularly in the case of adult-themed films that have the potential to earn the most restrictive rating, the NC-17. Some movie theaters will not screen a movie that is rated NC-17. When filmmakers get a more restrictive rating than they were hoping for, they may resubmit the film for review after editing out objectionable scenes.Kirby Dick, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, September 13, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6068009.

The New War Film: Cynicism and Anxiety

Unlike the patriotic war films of the World War II era, many of the films about U.S. involvement in Vietnam reflected strong antiwar sentiment, criticizing American political policy and portraying war’s damaging effects on those who survived it. Films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), M*A*S*H (1970), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979) portray the military establishment in a negative light and dissolve clear-cut distinctions, such as the “us versus them” mentality, of earlier war films. These, and the dozens of Vietnam War films that were produced in the 1970s and 1980s—Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), for example—reflect the sense of defeat and lack of closure Americans felt after the Vietnam War and the emotional and psychological scars it left on the nation’s psyche.Tim Dirks, “1980s Film History,” Filmsite, 2010, http://www.filmsite.org; Michael Anderegg, introduction to Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, ed. Michael Anderegg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 6–8. A spate of military and politically themed films emerged during the 1980s as America recoverd from defeat in Vietnam, while at the same time facing anxieties about the ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Fears about the possibility of nuclear war were very real during the 1980s, and some film critics argue that these anxieties were reflected not only in overtly political films of the time but also in the popularity of horror films, like Halloween and Friday the 13th, which feature a mysterious and unkillable monster, and in the popularity of the fantastic in films like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Wars, which offer imaginative escapes.Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 168.

Film and the Rise of Mass Culture

During the 1890s and up until about 1920, American culture experienced a period of rapid industrialization. As people moved from farms to centers of industrial production, urban areas began to hold larger and larger concentrations of the population. At the same time, film and other methods of mass communication (advertising and radio) developed, whose messages concerning tastes, desires, customs, speech, and behavior spread from these population centers to outlying areas across the country. The effect of early mass-communication media was to wear away regional differences and create a more homogenized, standardized culture.

Film played a key role in this development, as viewers began to imitate the speech, dress, and behavior of their common heroes on the silver screen.Steven Mintz, “The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture,” Digital History, 2007, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=455. In 1911, the Vitagraph company began publishing The Motion Picture Magazine, America’s first fan magazine. Originally conceived as a marketing tool to keep audiences interested in Vitagraph’s pictures and major actors, The Motion Picture Magazine helped create the concept of the film star in the American imagination. Fans became obsessed with the off-screen lives of their favorite celebrities, like Pearl White, Florence Lawrence, and Mary Pickford.Jack Doyle, “A Star is Born: 1910s,” Pop History Dig, 2008, http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=film-stars-mass-culture.

American Myths and Traditions

American identity in mass society is built around certain commonly held beliefs, or myths about shared experiences, and these American myths are often disseminated through or reinforced by film. One example of a popular American myth, one that dates back to the writings of Thomas Jefferson and other founders, is an emphasis on individualism—a celebration of the common man or woman as a hero or reformer. With the rise of mass culture, the myth of the individual became increasingly appealing because it provided people with a sense of autonomy and individuality in the face of an increasingly homogenized culture. The hero myth finds embodiment in the Western, a film genre that was popular from the silent era through the 1960s, in which the lone cowboy, a seminomadic wanderer makes his way in a lawless, and often dangerous, frontier. An example is 1952’s High Noon. From 1926 until 1967, Westerns accounted for nearly a quarter of all films produced. In other films, like Frank Capra’s 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life, the individual triumphs by standing up to injustice, reinforcing the belief that one person can make a difference in the world.John Belton, introduction to Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John Belton, 12. And in more recent films, hero figures such as Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker (Star Wars), and Neo (The Matrix) have continued to emphasize individualism.

Social Issues in Film

As D. W. Griffith recognized nearly a century ago, film has enormous power as a medium to influence public opinion. Ever since Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation sparked strong public reactions in 1915, filmmakers have been producing movies that address social issues, sometimes subtly, and sometimes very directly. More recently, films like Hotel Rwanda (2004), about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, or The Kite Runner (2007), a story that takes place in the midst of a war-torn Afghanistan, have captured audience imaginations by telling stories that raise social awareness about world events. And a number of documentary films directed at social issues have had a strong influence on cultural attitudes and have brought about significant change.

In the 2000s, documentaries, particularly those of an activist nature, were met with greater interest than ever before. Films like Super Size Me (2004), which documents the effects of excessive fast-food consumption and criticizes the fast-food industry for promoting unhealthy eating habits for profit, and Food, Inc. (2009), which examines corporate farming practices and points to the negative impact these practices can have on human health and the environment, have brought about important changes in American food culture.Kim Severson, “Eat, Drink, Think, Change,” New York Times, June 3, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/movies/07seve.html. Just 6 weeks after the release of Super Size Me, McDonald’s took the supersize option off its menu and since 2004 has introduced a number of healthy food options in its restaurants.Suemedha Sood, “Weighing the Impact of ‘Super Size Me,’” Wiretap, June 29, 2004. http://www.wiretapmag.org/stories/19059/. Other fast-food chains have made similar changes.Suemedha Sood, “Weighing the Impact of ‘Super Size Me,’” Wiretap, June 29, 2004. http://www.wiretapmag.org/stories/19059/.

Other documentaries intended to influence cultural attitudes and inspire change include those made by director Michael Moore. Moore’s films present a liberal stance on social and political issues such as health care, globalization, and gun control. His 2002 film Bowling for Columbine, for example, addressed the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, presenting a critical examination of American gun culture. While some critics have accused Moore of producing propagandistic material under the label of documentary because of his films’ strong biases, his films have been popular with audiences, with four of his documentaries ranking among the highest grossing documentaries of all time. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which criticized the second Bush administration and its involvement in the Iraq War, earned $119 million at the box office, making it the most successful documentary of all time.Tim Dirks, “Film History of the 2000s,” Filmsite; Washington Post, “The 10 Highest-Grossing Documentaries,” July 31, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/07/31/GR2006073100027.html.

The Blockbuster Standard

While it may seem like the major studios are making heavy profits, moviemaking today is a much riskier, less profitable enterprise than it was in the studio system era. The massive budgets required for the global marketing of a film are huge financial gambles. In fact, most movies cost the studios much more to market and produce—upward of $100 million—than their box-office returns ever generate. With such high stakes, studios have come to rely on the handful of blockbuster films that keep them afloat,New World Encyclopedia, s.v. “Film Industry,” www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hollywood. movies like Titanic, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Avatar.New World Encyclopedia, s.v. “Film Industry,” www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hollywood. The blockbuster film becomes a touchstone, not only for production values and story lines, but also for moviegoers’ expectations. Because studios know they can rely on certain predictable elements to draw audiences, they tend to invest the majority of their budgets on movies that fit the blockbuster mold. Remakes, movies with sequel setups, or films based on best-selling novels or comic books are safer bets than original screenplays or movies with experimental or edgy themes.

James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), the second highest grossing movie of all time, saw such success largely because it was based on a well-known story, contained predictable plot elements, and was designed to appeal to the widest possible range of audience demographics with romance, action, expensive special effects, and an epic scope—meeting the blockbuster standard on several levels. The film’s astronomical $200 million production cost was a gamble indeed, requiring the backing of two studios, Paramount and 20th Century Fox.Steve Hanson and Sandra Garcia-Myers, “Blockbusters,” in St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast (Detroit: St. James Press, 2000), vol. 1 However, the rash of high-budget, and high-grossing, films that have appeared since—Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone and its sequels (2002–2011), Avatar (2009), Alice in Wonderland (2010), The Lord of the Rings films (2001–2003), The Dark Knight (2008), and others—are an indication that, for the time being, the blockbuster standard will drive Hollywood production.

The Role of Independent Films

While the blockbuster still drives the industry, the formulaic nature of most Hollywood films of the 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s has opened a door for independent films to make their mark on the industry. Audiences have welcomed movies like Fight Club (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), and Juno (2007) as a change from standard Hollywood blockbusters. Few independent films reached the mainstream audience during the 1980s, but a number of developments in that decade paved the way for their increased popularity in the coming years. The Sundance Film Festival (originally the U.S. Film Festival) began in Park City, Utah, in 1980 as a way for independent filmmakers to showcase their work. Since then, the festival has grown to garner more public attention, and now often represents an opportunity for independents to find market backing by larger studios. In 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, released by Miramax, was the first independent to break out of the art-house circuit and find its way into the multiplexes.

In the 1990s and 2000s, independent directors like the Coen brothers, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino made significant contributions to contemporary cinema. Tarantino’s 1994 film, Pulp Fiction, garnered attention for its experimental narrative structure, witty dialogue, and nonchalant approach to violence. It was the first independent film to break $100 million at the box office, proving that there is still room in the market for movies produced outside of the big six studios.Ronald Bergan, Film (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2006), 84.

The Role of Foreign Films

English-born Michael Apted, former president of the Director’s Guild of America, once said, “Europeans gave me the inspiration to make movies … but it was the Americans who showed me how to do it.”Michael Apted, “Film’s New Anxiety of Influence,” Newsweek, December 28, 2007. http://www.newsweek.com/2007/12/27/film-s-new-anxiety-of-influence.html. Major Hollywood studio films have dominated the movie industry worldwide since Hollywood’s golden age, yet American films have always been in a relationship of mutual influence with films from foreign markets. From the 1940s through the 1960s, for example, American filmmakers admired and were influenced by the work of overseas auteursDirectors whose personal, creative visions were reflected in their work.—directors like Ingmar Bergman (Sweden), Federico Fellini (Italy), François Truffaut (France), and Akira Kurosawa (Japan), whose personal, creative visions were reflected in their work.Richard Pells, “Is American Culture ‘American’?” eJournal USA, February 1, 2006, http://www.america.gov/st/econ-english/2008/June/20080608102136xjyrreP0.3622858.html. The concept of the auteur was particularly important in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s when French filmmaking underwent a rebirth in the form of the New Wave movementThe French New Wave was characterized by an independent production style that showcased the personal authorship of its young directors.. The French New Wave was characterized by an independent production style that showcased the personal authorship of its young directors.Ronald Bergan, Film (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2006), 60. The influence of the New Wave was, and continues to be, felt in the United States. The generation of young, film school-educated directors that became prominent in American cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s owe a good deal of their stylistic techniques to the work of French New Wave directors.

In the current era of globalization, the influence of foreign films remains strong. The rapid growth of the entertainment industry in Asia, for instance, has led to an exchange of style and influence with U.S. cinema. Remakes of a number of popular Japanese horror films, including The Ring (2005), Dark Water (2005), and The Grudge (2004), have fared well in the United States, as have Chinese martial arts films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002), and House of Flying Daggers (2004). At the same time, U.S. studios have recently tried to expand into the growing Asian market by purchasing the rights to films from South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong for remakes with Hollywood actors.Diana Lee, “Hollywood’s Interest in Asian Films Leads to Globalization,” UniOrb.com, December 1, 2005, http://uniorb.com/ATREND/movie.htm.

Cultural Imperialism or Globalization?

With the growth of Internet technology worldwide and the expansion of markets in rapidly developing countries, American films are increasingly finding their way into movie theaters and home DVD players around the world. In the eyes of many people, the problem is not the export of a U.S. product to outside markets, but the export of American culture that comes with that product. Just as films of the 1920s helped to shape a standardized, mass culture as moviegoers learned to imitate the dress and behavior of their favorite celebrities, contemporary film is now helping to form a mass culture on the global scale, as the youth of foreign nations acquire the American speech, tastes, and attitudes reflected in film.Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “A European Considers the Influence of American Culture,” eJournal USA, February 1, 2006, http://www.america.gov/st/econenglish/2008/June/20080608094132xjyrreP0.2717859.html.

Staunch critics, feeling helpless to stop the erosion of their national cultures, accuse the United States of cultural imperialism through flashy Hollywood movies and commercialism—that is, deliberate conquest of one culture by another to spread capitalism. At the same time, others argue that the worldwide impact of Hollywood films is an inevitable part of globalization, a process that erodes national borders, opening the way for a free flow of ideas between cultures.Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “A European Considers the Influence of American Culture,” eJournal USA, February 1, 2006, http://www.america.gov/st/econenglish/2008/June/20080608094132xjyrreP0.2717859.html.

Rising Costs and Big Budget Movies

In the days of the vertically integrated studio system, filmmaking was a streamlined process, neither as risky nor as expensive as it is today. When producers, directors, screenwriters, art directors, actors, cinematographers, and other technical staff were all under contract with one studio, turnaround time for the casting and production of a film was often as little as 3 to 4 months. Beginning in the 1970s, after the decline of the studio system, the production costs for films increased dramatically, forcing the studios to invest more of their budgets in marketing efforts that could generate presalesSales of distribution rights for a film in different sectors before the film’s release.—that is, sales of distribution rights for a film in different sectors before the movie’s release.Steve Hanson and Sandra Garcia-Myers, “Blockbusters,” in St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast (Detroit: St. James Press, 2000), vol. 1, 282. This is still true of filmmaking today. With contracts that must be negotiated with actors, directors, and screenwriters, and with extended production times, costs are exponentially higher than they were in the 1930s—when a film could be made for around $300,000.Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 50. By contrast, today’s average production budget, not including marketing expenses, is close to $65 million today.Nash Information Services, “Glossary of Movie Business Terms,” The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers.com/glossary.php

Consider James Cameron’s Avatar, released in 2009, which cost close to $340 million, making it one of the most expensive films of all time. Where does such an astronomical budget go? When weighing the total costs of producing and releasing a film, about half of the money goes to advertising. In the case of Avatar, the film cost $190 million to make and around $150 million to market.Mojgan Sherkat-Massoom, “10 Most Expensive Movies Ever Made,” Access Hollywood, 2010, http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/34368822/ns/entertainment-access_hollywood/?pg=2#ENT_AH_MostExpensiveMovies; Rebecca Keegan, “How Much Did Avatar Really Cost?” Vanity Fair, December 2009, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2009/12/how-much-did-avatar-really-cost.html. Of that $190 million production budget, part goes toward above-the-line costsCosts in the production of a film that are negotiated before filming begins., those that are negotiated before filming begins, and part to below-the-line costsCosts in the production of a film that are generally fixed., those that are generally fixed. Above-the-line costs include screenplay rights; salaries for the writer, producer, director, and leading actors; and salaries for directors’, actors’, and producers’ assistants. Below-the-line costs include the salaries for nonstarring cast members and technical crew, use of technical equipment, travel, locations, studio rental, and catering.Aldo-Vincenzo Tirelli, “Production Budget Breakdown: The Scoop on Film Financing,” Helium, http://www.helium.com/items/936661-production-budget-breakdown-the-scoop-on-film-financing. For Avatar, the reported $190 million doesn’t include money for research and development of 3-D filming and computer-modeling technologies required to put the film together. If these costs are factored in, the total movie budget may be closer to $500 million.Rebecca Keegan, “How Much Did Avatar Really Cost?” Vanity Fair, December 2009, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2009/12/how-much-did-avatar-really-cost.html. Fortunately for 20th Century Fox, Avatar made a profit over these expenses in box-office sales alone, raking in $750 million domestically (to make it the highest-grossing movie of all time) in the first 6 months after its release.Box Office Mojo, “Avatar,” May 31, 2010, http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.htm. However, one thing you should keep in mind is that Avatar was released in both 2-D and 3-D. Because 3-D ticket prices are more expensive than traditional 2-D theaters, the box-office returns are inflated.

The Big Budget Flop

However, for every expensive film that has made out well at the box office, there are a handful of others that have tanked. Back in 1980, when United Artists (UA) was a major Hollywood studio, its epic western Heaven’s Gate cost nearly six times its original budget: $44 million instead of the proposed $7.6 million. The movie, which bombed at the box office, was the largest failure in film history at the time, losing at least $40 million, and forcing the studio to be bought out by MGM.Sheldon Hall and Stephen Neale, “Super Blockbusters: 1976–1985,” in Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2010), 231. Since then, Heaven’s Gate has become synonymous with commercial failure in the film industry.Tim Dirks, “1980s Film History,” Filmsite, 2010, http://www.filmsite.org

More recently, the 2005 movie Sahara lost $78 million, making it one of the biggest financial flops in film history. The film’s initial production budget of $80 million eventually doubled to $160 million, due to complications with filming in Morocco and to numerous problems with the script.Glenn F. Bunting, “$78 Million of Red Ink?” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2007, http://articles.latimes.com/2007/apr/15/business/fi-movie15/4.

The Optical Disc System

In 1980, around the time when consumers were just beginning to purchase VCRs for home use, Pioneer Electronics introduced another technology, the LaserDisc, an optical storage disc that produced higher quality images than did VHS tapes. Nonetheless, because of its large size (12 inches in diameter) and lack of recording capabilities, this early disc system never became popular in the U.S. market. However, the LaserDisc’s successor, the digital versatile disc (DVD) was a different story. Like LaserDisc, the DVD is an optical storage disc—that is, a device whose encoded information follows a spiral pattern on the disc’s surface and can be read when illuminated by a laser diode. However, unlike the analog-formatted LaserDisc, the DVD’s information storage is entirely digital, allowing for a smaller, lighter, more compressed medium.

The first DVDs were released in stores in 1997, impressing consumers and distributers with their numerous advantages over the VHS tape: sharper-resolution images, compactness, higher durability, interactive special features, and better copy protection. In only a few years, sales of DVD players and discs surpassed those of VCRs and videos, making the DVD the most rapidly adopted consumer electronics product of all time.Entertainment Merchant Association, “History of Home Video”; Tim Dirks, “1990s Film History,” Filmsite, 2010, http://www.filmsite.org

In 1999, the movie rental market was revolutionized by Netflix. Netflix began in 1997 as a video rental store in California. In 1999, the company began offering a subscription service online. Subscribers would select movies that they wanted to see on Netflix’s website, and the movies would arrive in their mailbox a few days later, along with a prepaid return envelope. This allowed users to select from thousands of movies and television shows in the privacy of their own home.

More recently, DVD technology has been surpassed by the Blu-ray Disc format, intended for storing and producing high-definition video. Released in 2006, the Blu-ray Disc technology has the same physical dimensions as DVDs, but because they are encoded to be read by lasers with a shorter wavelength, the discs have more than five times the storage capacity of the DVD.Blu-Ray.com, “Blu-Ray Disc,” http://www.blu-ray.com/info/. By 2009 there were 10.9 million Blu-ray Disc players in U.S. homes.Henning Molbaek, “10.7 Million Blu-Ray Players in U.S. Homes,” DVDTown.com, Jan 9, 2009, http://www.dvdtown.com/news/107-million-blu-ray-players-in-us-homes/6288. However, the technology has yet to replace the DVD in rental stores and among the majority of U.S. consumers.

DVD Revenues and Decline

DVD rentals and sales make up a major source of revenue for the movie industry, accounting for nearly half of the returns on feature films. In fact, for some time the industry has been exploiting the profitability of releasing some films directly to DVD without ever premiering them in theaters or of releasing films on DVD simultaneously with their theater releases. According to one estimate, for every movie that appears in theaters, there are three that go straight to DVD.Robert W. Court, “Straight to DVD,” New York Times, May 6, 2006, Opinion section, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/opinion/06cort.html. While direct-to-DVD has become synonymous with poor production values and ill-conceived sequels, there are a number of reasons why a studio might bypass the multiplexes. Prequels and sequels of box-office hits, shot on a lower production budget, are often released this way and can generate considerable income from the niche market of hard-core fans. The fourth American Pie film, Bring It On: In It to Win It, and Ace Ventura Pet Detective, Jr. are all examples of successful direct-to-DVD films. However, in other cases, the costs of theatrical promotion and release may simply be too high for a studio to back. This is especially true among independently produced films that lack the big-studio marketing budgets. Slumdog Millionaire (2009) was almost one of these cases. However, the film did make it to theaters, going on to win eight Academy Award awards in 2009, including Best Picture.Tom Charity. “Review: Why Some Films Go Straight to DVD,” CNN, February 27, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/02/27/review.humboldt/index.html. Finally, a film may go straight to DVD when its content is too controversial to be released in theaters. For example, almost all porn films are direct-to-DVD releases.

Between 2005 and 2008, the number of direct-to-DVD releases grew 36 percent as studios began to see the profitability of the strategy.Brooks Barnes, “Direct-to-DVD Releases Shed Their Loser Label,” New York Times, January 28, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/business/media/28dvd.html. After a movie’s success at the box office, a prequel, sequel, or related movie might earn the same profit pound-for-pound at the rental store if filmmakers slash the production budget, often replacing the original celebrity actors with less expensive talent. In 2008, direct-to-DVD brought in around $1 billion in sales.Brooks Barnes, “Direct-to-DVD Releases Shed Their Loser Label,” New York Times, January 28, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/business/media/28dvd.html.

Despite the profitability of the DVD market, the economic downturn that began in 2007, along with the concurrent release of Blu-ray Disc technology and online digital downloads, have brought about a decline in DVD sales among U.S. consumers.Dianne Garrett, “DVD Sales Down 3.6% in ’07,” January 7, 2008, www.variety.com/article/VR1117978576?refCatId=20. With the rise in digital downloads, Netflix broadened its appeal in 2007 by offering subscribers live-streaming movies and TV shows. This allowed viewers to watch programs on their computers, handheld devices, the Nintendo Wii game system, the Sony PlayStation 3 game system, and the Microsoft Xbox 360 game system without ever having the disc itself.

Additionally, by late 2007 film studios also became anxious over another trend: the Redbox rental system. Redbox, an American company that places DVD rental vending machines in pharmacies, grocery stores, and fast-food chains around the country, had placed a kiosk in approximately 22,000 locations by 2009.Brookes Barnes, “Movie Studios see a Threat in Growth of Redbox,” New York Times, September 6, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/business/media/07redbox.html. For the movie industry, the trouble isn’t the widespread availability of Redbox rentals, it’s the price. As of March 2001, customers can rent DVDs from a Redbox kiosk for only $1 per day, which has already led to a severe decline in rental revenue for the film industry.Carl DiOrio, “$1 DVD Rentals Costing Biz $1 Bil: Study,” Hollywood Reporter, December 7, 2009, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/1-dvd-rentals-costing-biz-92098. According to the traditional pricing model, prices for rentals are based on a release window; newly released films cost more to rent for a specified period of time after their release. When customers can rent both older and newly released movies at the same low price, rentals don’t produce the same returns.Jesse Hiestand, “MPAA Study: ’05 Piracy Cost $6.1 Bil.,” Hollywood Reporter, May 3, 2006. http://business.highbeam.com/2012/article-1G1-146544812/mpaa-study-05-piracy-cost-61-bil.

Hollywood has also suffered major losses from online piracy. Since 2007, studios have been teaming up to turn this potential threat into a source of income. Now, instead of illegally downloading their favorite movies from file-sharing sites, fans can go to legal, commercial-supported sites like Hulu.com, where they can access a selected variety of popular movies and TV shows for the same price as accessing NBC, ABC, and CBS—free. In April 2010, Hulu announced it has already launched this service, the Hulu Plus service, in addition to its free service, for users who want access to even more programs, such as Glee.Reuters, “Hulu Launches Paid Subscription TV Service,” Fox News, June 30, 2010, http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/06/30/hulu-starts-paid-subscription-tv-service/. Hulu doesn’t allow viewers to download the films to their home computers, but it does provide a home-viewing experience through online streaming of content.Hulu, “Media Info,” 2010, http://www.hulu.com/about.

The Resurgence of 3-D

After World War II, as movie attendance began to decline, the motion picture industry experimented with new technologies to entice audiences back into increasingly empty theaters. One such gimmick, the 3-D picture, offered the novel experience of increased audience “participation” as monsters, flying objects, and obstacles appeared to invade the theater space, threatening to collide with spectators. The effect was achieved by manipulating filming equipment to work like a pair of human eyes, mimicking the depth of field produced through binocular vision. By joining two cameras together and spacing them slightly apart with their lenses angled fractionally toward one another, filmmakers could achieve an effect similar to that created by the overlapping fields of vision of the right and left eye. In theaters, the resulting images were played simultaneously on two separate projectors. The 3-D glasses spectators wore were polarized to filter the images so that the left eye received only “left eye” projections and the right eye received only “right eye” projections.Matt Buchanan, “Giz Explains 3D Technologies,” Gizmodo (blog), November 12, 2008, http://gizmodo.com/5084121/giz-explains-3d-technologies.

3-D was an instant sensation. House of Wax, the first big-budget 3-D movie, released in 1953, brought in over $1 million during its first 3 weeks in theaters, making it one of the most successful films of the year. Best of all for investors, 3-D could be created with fairly inexpensive equipment. For this reason, a boom of 3-D development soon occurred nationwide. Forty-six 3-D movies were filmed in a span of 2 years. However, 3-D proved to be a brief success, with its popularity already beginning to wane by the end of 1953.John Hayes, “‘You See Them WITH Glasses!’ A Short History of 3D Movies,” Wide Screen Movies Magazine, 2009, http://widescreenmovies.org/wsm11/3D.htm.

3-D soon migrated from the realm of common popular entertainment to novelty attraction, appearing in IMAX cinemas, as an occasional marketing draw for kids’ movies, and in theme-park classics like Captain Eo and Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. Captain Eo, a Disneyland attraction from 1986 to 1993, featured pop sensation Michael Jackson in his heyday. Following Jackson’s death, the film was rereleased for a limited time in 2010.Heather Hust Rivera, “Captain EO Returns to Disneyland Resort.” Disney Parks Blog, December 18, 2009. http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2009/12/captain-eo-returns-to-disneyland-resort/.

Despite the marginal role 3-D has played since the midcentury fad died out, new technologies have brought about a resurgence in the trend, and the contemporary 3-D experience seems less like a gimmick and more like a serious development in the industry. DreamWorks animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, for one, likened the new 3-D to the introduction of color.Erin McCarthy, “The Tech Behind 3D’s Big Revival,” Popular Mechanics, April 1, 2009, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/3d/4310810. One of the downfalls that lead to the decline of 3-D in the 1950s was the “3-D headache” phenomenon audiences began to experience as a result of technical problems with filming.John Hayes, “‘You See Them WITH Glasses!’ A Short History of 3D Movies,” Wide Screen Movies Magazine, 2009, http://widescreenmovies.org/wsm11/3D.htm. To create the 3-D effect, filmmakers need to calculate the point where the overlapping images converge, an alignment that had to be performed by hand in those early years. And for the resulting image to come through clearly, the parallel cameras must run in perfect sync with one another—another impossibility with 35-millimeter film, which causes some distortion by the very fact of its motion through the filming camera.

Today the 3-D headache is a thing of the past, as computerized calibration makes perfect camera alignment a reality and as the digital recording format eliminates the celluloid-produced distortion. Finally, a single digital projector equipped with a photo-optical device can now perform the work of the two synchronized projectors of the past. For the theater chains, 3-D provides the first real incentive to make the conversion to digital. Not only do audiences turn out in greater numbers for an experience they can’t reproduce at home, even on their HD television sets, but theaters are also able to charge more for tickets to see 3-D films. In 2008, for example, Journey to the Center of the Earth, which grossed $102 million, earned 60 percent of that money through 3-D ticket sales, even though it played in 3-D on only 30 percent of its screens.Erin McCarthy, “The Tech Behind 3D’s Big Revival,” Popular Mechanics, April 1, 2009, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/3d/4310810. Two of the top-grossing movies of all time, Avatar (2009) and Alice in Wonderland (2010), were both released in 3-D.

Mechanical Television versus Electronic Television

From the early experiments with visual transmissions, two types of television systems came into existence: mechanical television and electronic television. Mechanical televisionA television system that used mechanical moving parts to capture and display images. Mechanical television was phased out during the 1930s in favor of electronic television. developed out of Nipkow’s disk system and was pioneered by British inventor John Logie Baird. In 1926, Baird gave the world’s first public demonstration of a television system at Selfridge’s department store in London. He used mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electrical impulses, which were transmitted by cable to a screen. Here they showed up as a low-resolution pattern of light and dark. Baird’s first television program showed the heads of two ventriloquist dummies, which he operated in front of the camera apparatus out of the audience’s sight. In 1928, Baird extended his system by transmitting a signal between London and New York. The following year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adopted his mechanical system, and by 1932, Baird had developed the first commercially viable television system and sold 10,000 sets. Despite its initial success, mechanical television had several technical limitations. Engineers could get no more than about 240 lines of resolution, meaning images would always be slightly fuzzy (most modern televisions produce images of more than 600 lines of resolution). The use of a spinning disk also limited the number of new pictures that could be seen per second, resulting in excessive flickering. The mechanical aspect of television proved to be a disadvantage that required fixing in order for the technology to move forward.

At the same time Baird (and, separately, American inventor Charles Jenkins) was developing the mechanical model, other inventors were working on an electronic televisionAll-electronic television system that scanned images using an electronic camera and received images by cathode ray tube. Electronic television replaced mechanical television in the 1930s. system based on the CRT. While working on his father’s farm, Idaho teenager Philo Farnsworth realized that an electronic beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines, reproducing the image almost instantaneously. In 1927, Farnsworth transmitted the first all-electronic television picture by rotating a single straight line scratched onto a square piece of painted glass by 90 degrees.

Farnsworth barely profited from his invention; during World War II, the government suspended sales of television sets, and by the time the war ended, Farnsworth’s original patents were close to expiring. However, following the war, many of his key patents were modified by RCA and were widely applied in broadcasting to improve television picture quality.

Having coexisted for several years, electronic television sets eventually began to replace mechanical systems. With better picture quality, no noise, a more compact size, and fewer visual limitations, the electronic system was far superior to its predecessor and rapidly improving. By 1939, the last mechanical television broadcasts in the United States had been replaced with electronic broadcasts.

Early Broadcasting

Television broadcasting began as early as 1928, when the Federal Radio Commission authorized inventor Charles Jenkins to broadcast from W3XK, an experimental station in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Silhouette images from motion picture films were broadcast to the general public on a regular basis, at a resolution of just 48 lines. Similar experimental stations ran broadcasts throughout the early 1930s. In 1939, RCA subsidiary NBC (National Broadcasting Company) became the first network to introduce regular television broadcasts, transmitting its inaugural telecast of the opening ceremonies at the New York World’s Fair. The station’s initial broadcasts transmitted to just 400 television sets in the New York area, with an audience of 5,000 to 8,000 people.Lenox Lohr, Television Broadcasting (New York: McGraw Hill, 1940).

Television was initially available only to the privileged few, with sets ranging from $200 to $600—a hefty sum in the 1930s, when the average annual salary was $1,368.Library, Lone Star College: Kinwood, “American Cultural History 1930–1939,” http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade30.html. RCA offered four types of television receivers, which were sold in high-end department stores such as Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, and received channels 1 through 5. Early receivers were a fraction of the size of modern television sets, featuring 5-, 9-, or 12-inch screens. Television sales prior to World War II were disappointing—an uncertain economic climate, the threat of war, the high cost of a television receiver, and the limited number of programs on offer deterred numerous prospective buyers. Many unsold television sets were put into storage and sold after the war.

NBC was not the only commercial network to emerge in the 1930s. RCA radio rival CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) also began broadcasting regular programs. So that viewers would not need a separate television set for each individual network, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) outlined a single technical standard. In 1941, the panel recommended a 525-line system and an image rate of 30 frames per second. It also recommended that all U.S. television sets operate using analog signalsBroadcast signal made of varying radio waves. Analog signals were used to broadcast television programming for 60 years. They were replaced by digital signals in 2009. (broadcast signals made of varying radio waves). Analog signals were replaced by digital signalsSignals transmitted as binary code. Digital signals replaced analog signals as the universal method of transmitting television broadcasts in 2009. (signals transmitted as binary code) in 2009.

With the outbreak of World War II, many companies, including RCA and General Electric, turned their attention to military production. Instead of commercial television sets, they began to churn out military electronic equipment. In addition, the war halted nearly all television broadcasting; many television stations reduced their schedules to around 4 hours per week or went off the air altogether.

Color Technology

Although it did not become available until the 1950s or popular until the 1960s, the technology for producing color television was proposed as early as 1904, and was demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1928. As with his black-and-white television system, Baird adopted the mechanical method, using a Nipkow scanning disk with three spirals, one for each primary color (red, green, and blue). In 1940, CBS researchers, led by Hungarian television engineer Peter Goldmark, used Baird’s 1928 designs to develop a concept of mechanical color television that could reproduce the color seen by a camera lens.

Following World War II, the National Television System Committee (NTSC) worked to develop an all-electronic color system that was compatible with black-and-white television sets, gaining FCC approval in 1953. A year later, NBC made the first national color broadcast when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade. Despite the television industry’s support for the new technology, it would be another 10 years before color television gained widespread popularity in the United States, and black-and-white television sets outnumbered color television sets until 1972.John Klooster, Icons of Invention: The Makers of the Modern World from Gutenberg to Gates (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 442.

The Golden Age of Television

The 1950s proved to be the golden age of television, during which the medium experienced massive growth in popularity. Mass-production advances made during World War II substantially lowered the cost of purchasing a set, making television accessible to the masses. In 1945, there were fewer than 10,000 television sets in the United States. By 1950, this figure had soared to around 6 million, and by 1960 more than 60 million television sets had been sold.World Book Encyclopedia (2003), s.v. “Television.” Many of the early television program formats were based on network radio shows and did not take advantage of the potential offered by the new medium. For example, newscasters simply read the news as they would have during a radio broadcast, and the network relied on newsreel companies to provide footage of news events. However, during the early 1950s, television programming began to branch out from radio broadcasting, borrowing from theater to create acclaimed dramatic anthologies such as Playhouse 90 (1956) and The U.S. Steel Hour (1953) and producing quality news film to accompany coverage of daily events.

Two new types of programs—the magazine format and the television spectacular—played an important role in helping the networks gain control over the content of their broadcasts. Early television programs were developed and produced by a single sponsor, which gave the sponsor a large amount of control over the content of the show. By increasing program length from the standard 15-minute radio show to 30 minutes or longer, the networks substantially increased advertising costs for program sponsors, making it prohibitive for a single sponsor. Magazine programs such as the Today show and The Tonight Show, which premiered in the early 1950s, featured multiple segments and ran for several hours. They were also screened on a daily, rather than weekly, basis, drastically increasing advertising costs. As a result, the networks began to sell spot advertisements that ran for 30 or 60 seconds. Similarly, the television spectacular (now known as the television special) featured lengthy music-variety shows that were sponsored by multiple advertisers.

In the mid-1950s, the networks brought back the radio quiz-show genre. Inexpensive and easy to produce, the trend caught on, and by the end of the 1957–1958 season, 22 quiz shows were being aired on network television, including CBS’s $64,000 Question. Shorter than some of the new types of programs, quiz shows enabled single corporate sponsors to have their names displayed on the set throughout the show. The popularity of the quiz-show genre plunged at the end of the decade, however, when it was discovered that most of the shows were rigged. Producers provided some contestants with the answers to the questions in order to pick and choose the most likable or controversial candidates. When a slew of contestants accused the show Dotto of being fixed in 1958, the networks rapidly dropped 20 quiz shows. A New York grand jury probe and a 1959 congressional investigation effectively ended prime-time quiz shows for 40 years, until ABC revived the genre with its launch of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 1999.William Boddy, “The Seven Dwarfs and the Money Grubbers,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 98–116.

The Rise of Cable Television

Formerly known as Community Antenna Television, or CATV, cable televisionA system of providing television and other media services to consumers via coaxial cable. Subscribers are connected through a central community antenna, which picks up satellite signals for distribution. was originally developed in the 1940s in remote or mountainous areas, including in Arkansas, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, to enhance poor reception of regular television signals. Cable antennas were erected on mountains or other high points, and homes connected to the towers would receive broadcast signals.

In the late 1950s, cable operators began to experiment with microwave to bring signals from distant cities. Taking advantage of their ability to receive long-distance broadcast signals, operators branched out from providing a local community service and began focusing on offering consumers more extensive programming choices. Rural parts of Pennsylvania, which had only three channels (one for each network), soon had more than double the original number of channels as operators began to import programs from independent stations in New York and Philadelphia. The wider variety of channels and clearer reception the service offered soon attracted viewers from urban areas. By 1962, nearly 800 cable systems were operational, serving 850,000 subscribers.

Cable’s exponential growth was viewed as competition by local television stations, and broadcasters campaigned for the FCC to step in. The FCC responded by placing restrictions on the ability of cable systems to import signals from distant stations, which froze the development of cable television in major markets until the early 1970s. When gradual deregulation began to loosen the restrictions, cable operator Service Electric launched the service that would change the face of the cable television industry—pay TVSubscription-based television service in which consumers pay a fee to the program provider.. The 1972 Home Box Office (HBO) venture, in which customers paid a subscription fee to access premium cable television shows and video-on-demand products, was the nation’s first successful pay cable service. HBO’s use of a satellite to distribute its programming made the network available throughout the United States. This gave it an advantage over the microwave-distributed services, and other cable providers quickly followed suit. Further deregulation provided by the 1984 Cable Act enabled the industry to expand even further, and by the end of the 1980s, nearly 53 million households subscribed to cable television (see Section 6.3 "Current Popular Trends in the Music Industry"). In the 1990s, cable operators upgraded their systems by building higher-capacity hybrid networks of fiber-optic and coaxial cable. These broadbandA high-speed network connection that can carry data, voice, television, and video at higher speeds and in greater quantities than traditional connections. networks provide a multichannel television service, along with telephone, high-speed Internet, and advanced digital video services, using a single wire.

The Emergence of Digital Television

Following the FCC standards set out during the early 1940s, television sets received programs via analog signals made of radio waves. The analog signal reached television sets through three different methods: over the airwaves, through a cable wire, or by satellite transmission. Although the system remained in place for more than 60 years, it had several disadvantages. Analog systems were prone to static and distortion, resulting in a far poorer picture quality than films shown in movie theaters. As television sets grew increasingly larger, the limited resolution made scan lines painfully obvious, reducing the clarity of the image. Companies around the world, most notably in Japan, began to develop technology that provided newer, better-quality television formats, and the broadcasting industry began to lobby the FCC to create a committee to study the desirability and impact of switching to digital televisionTelevision that uses signals that translate television images and sounds into binary code. Digital television replaced analog television in 2009.. A more efficient and flexible form of broadcast technology, digital television uses signals that translate television images and sounds into binary code, working in much the same way as a computer. This means they require much less frequency space and also provide a far higher quality picture. In 1987, the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services began meeting to test various television systems, both analog and digital. The committee ultimately agreed to switch from analog to digital format in 2009, allowing a transition period in which broadcasters could send their signal on both an analog and a digital channel. Once the switch took place, many older analog television sets were unusable without a cable or satellite service or a digital converter. To retain consumers’ access to free over-the-air television, the federal government offered $40 gift cards to people who needed to buy a digital converter, expecting to recoup its costs by auctioning off the old analog broadcast spectrum to wireless companies.Jacques Steinberg, “Converters Signal a New Era for TVs,” New York Times, June 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/technology/07digital.html. These companies were eager to gain access to the analog spectrum for mobile broadband projects because this frequency band allows signals to travel greater distances and penetrate buildings more easily.

The Era of High-Definition Television

Around the same time the U.S. government was reviewing the options for analog and digital television systems, companies in Japan were developing technology that worked in conjunction with digital signals to create crystal-clear pictures in a wide-screen format. High-definition televisionWide-screen television system with a much higher resolution than standard televisions, creating a cinematic experience for the viewer., or HDTV, attempts to create a heightened sense of realism by providing the viewer with an almost three-dimensional experience. It has a much higher resolution than standard television systems, using around five times as many pixels per frame. First available in 1998, HDTV products were initially extremely expensive, priced between $5,000 and $10,000 per set. However, as with most new technology, prices dropped considerably over the next few years, making HDTV affordable for mainstream shoppers.

As of 2010, nearly half of American viewers are watching television in high definition, the fastest adoption of television technology since the introduction of the VCR in the 1980s.Brian Stelter, “Crystal-Clear, Maybe Mesmerizing,” New York Times, May 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/media/24def.html. The new technology is attracting viewers to watch television for longer periods of time. According to the Nielsen Company, a company that measures television viewership, households with HDTV watch 3 percent more prime-time televisionProgramming screened between the hours of 7 and 11 p.m., when the largest audience is available.—programming screened between 7 and 11 p.m., when the largest audience is available—than their standard-definition counterparts.Brian Stelter, “Crystal-Clear, Maybe Mesmerizing,” New York Times, May 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/media/24def.html. The same report claims that the cinematic experience of HDTV is bringing families back together in the living room in front of the large wide-screen television and out of the kitchen and bedroom, where individuals tend to watch television alone on smaller screens. However, these viewing patterns may change again soon as the Internet plays an increasingly larger role in how people view television programs. The impact of new technologies on television is discussed in much greater detail in Section 9.4 "Influence of New Technologies" of this chapter.

Violence and Escapism in the 1960s

During the 1960s, television news broadcasts brought the realities of real-world events into people’s living rooms in vivid detail. The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, which debuted in 1962, quickly became the country’s most popular newscast, and by the end of the decade, journalist Walter Cronkite was known as the most trusted man in America. Following John F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency at the beginning of the decade, the 1960s took an ominous turn. Shocked viewers tuned into Cronkite’s broadcast on November 22, 1963, to learn about the assassination of their president. During the next few days, viewers followed every aspect of the tragedy on television, from the tremor in Cronkite’s voice as he removed his glasses and announced the news of Kennedy’s death, to the frantic scenes from Dallas police headquarters where the assassin, Lee Harvery Oswald, was gunned down by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, to the thousands of mourners lining up next to the president’s flag-draped coffin.

Around the same time as Kennedy’s assassination, horrific images from Vietnam were streaming into people’s living rooms during the nation’s first televised war. With five camera crews on duty in the Saigon bureau, news crews captured vivid details of the war in progress. Although graphic images were rarely shown on network television, several instances of violence reached the screen, including a CBS report in 1965 that showed Marines lighting the thatched roofs of the village of Cam Ne with Zippo lighters and an NBC news report in 1968 that aired a shot of South Vietnamese General Nyuyen Ngoc Loan executing a captive on a Saigon street. Further images, of children being burned and scarred by napalm and prisoners being tortured, fueled the antiwar sentiments of many Americans. In addition to the devastation caused by the president’s death and the Vietnam War, Americans were also feeling the pressure of the Cold War—the clash between the United States and the Soviet Union in the years following World War II. This pressure was especially great during periods of tension throughout the 1950s and 1960s, such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation that caused many people to fear nuclear war.

As a result of the intense stress faced by many Americans during the 1960s, broadcasters and viewers turned to escapist programs such as I Dream of Jeannie, a fantasy show about a 2,000-year-old genie who marries an astronaut, and Bewitched, a supernatural-themed show about a witch who tries to live as a surburban housewife. Both shows typified the situation comedyComedy genre, also known as a sitcom, that features a recurring cast of characters who resolve zany situations based on their everyday lives., or sitcom, a comedy genre featuring a recurring cast of characters who resolve zany situations based on their everyday lives. Other popular sitcoms in the 1960s included The Beverly Hillbillies, a show about a poor backwoods family who move to Beverly Hills, California, after finding oil on their land, and Gilligan’s Island, the ultimate escapist comedy about seven characters shipwrecked on an uncharted island. None of the 1960s sitcoms mentioned any of the political unease that was taking place in the outside world, providing audiences with a welcome diversion from real life. Other than an occasional documentary, television programming in the 1960s consisted of a sharp dichotomy between prime-time escapist comedy and hard news.

Diversity and Politics in the 1970s

During the 1970s, broadcasters began to diversify families on their shows to reflect changing social attitudes toward formerly controversial issues such as single parenthood and divorce. Feminist groups including the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women pushed for equality on issues such as pay and encouraged women to enter the workforce. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned women’s right to abortion, giving them control over their reproductive rights. Divorce rates skyrocketed during the 1970s, as states adopted no-fault divorce laws, and the change in family dynamics was reflected on television. Between 1972 and 1978, CBS aired the socially controversial sitcom Maude. Featuring a middle-aged feminist living with her fourth husband and divorced daughter, the show exploded the dominant values of the white middle-class domestic sitcom and its traditional gender roles. Throughout its 7-year run, Maude tackled social and political issues such as abortion, menopause, birth control, alcoholism, and depression. During its first four seasons, the show was in the top 10 in Nielsen ratings, illustrating the changing tastes of the viewing audience, who had come of age during the era of civil rights and Vietnam protests and developed a taste for socially conscious television. Other 1970s sitcoms took the same approach, including Maude’s CBS predecessor, All in the Family, which covered issues ranging from racism and homophobia to rape and miscarriage, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which reflected changing attitudes toward women’s rights by featuring television’s first never-married independent career woman as the central character. Even wholesome family favorite The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 to 1974, featured a non-nuclear family, reflecting the rising rates of blended families in American society.

In addition to changing family dynamics on sitcoms and other prime-time shows, variety and comedy sketch shows developed a political awareness in the 1970s that reflected audiences’ growing appetite for social and political commentary. Sketch comedyA series of short comedy scenes or vignettes that are often featured on variety shows, talk shows, or comedy shows. During the 1970s, comedy sketches that parodied American popular culture and politics grew in popularity. show Saturday Night Live (SNL) premiered on NBC in 1975 and has remained on air ever since. Featuring a different celebrity guest host every week and relatively unknown comedy regulars, the show parodies contemporary popular culture and politics, lambasting presidential candidates and pop stars alike. Earlier NBC sketch comedy show Laugh-In, which ran from 1968 to 1973, also featured politically charged material, though it lacked the satirical bite of later series such as SNL. By the end of the decade, television broadcasting reflected a far more politically conscious and socially aware viewing audience.

The Influence of Cable Television in the 1980s

Until the mid-1980s, the top three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) dominated television broadcasting in the United States. However, as cable services gained popularity following the deregulation of the industry in 1984, viewers found themselves with a multitude of options. Services such as Cable News Network (CNN), Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN), and Music Television (MTV) profoundly altered the television landscape in the world of news, sports, and music. New markets opened up for these innovative program types, as well as for older genres such as the sitcom. During the 1980s, a revival of family sitcoms took place with two enormous hits: The Cosby Show and Family Ties. Both featured a new take on modern family life, with the mothers working outside of the home and the fathers pitching in with housework and parental duties. Despite their success on network television, sitcoms faced stiff competition from cable’s variety of choices. Between 1983 and 1994, weekly broadcast audience shares (a measure of the number of televisions in use that are tuned to a particular show) for network television dropped from 69 to 52, while cable networks’ shares rose from 9 to 26.Horace Newcomb, ed., Encyclopedia of Television (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 389.

With a growing number of households subscribing to cable television, concern began to grow about the levels of violence to which children were becoming exposed. In addition to regularly broadcast network programs, cable offered viewers the chance to watch films and adult-themed shows during all hours, many of which had far more violent content than normal network programming. One study found that by the time an average child leaves elementary school, he or she has witnessed 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 other acts of violence on television.Rea Blakey, “Study Links TV Viewing Among Kids to Later Violence,” CNN Health, March 28, 2002, http://archives.cnn.com/2002/HEALTH/parenting/03/28/kids.tv.violence/index.html. Although no conclusive links have been drawn between witnessing violence on television and carrying out violence in real life, the loosening boundaries regarding sexual and violent content on television is a persistent cause for concern for many parents. For more information on the social effects of violence in the media, please refer to .

Specialization in the 1990s and 2000s

Although television viewership is growing, the vast number of cable channels and other, newer content delivery platforms means that audiences are thinly stretched. In recent years, broadcasters have been narrowing the focus of their programming to meet the needs and interests of an increasingly fragmented audience. Entire cable channels devoted to cooking, music, news, African American interests (see sidebar below), weather, and courtroom drama enable viewers to choose exactly what type of show they want to watch, and many news channels are further specialized according to viewers’ political opinions. This trend toward specialization reflects a more general shift within society, as companies cater increasingly to smaller, more targeted consumer bases. Business magazine editor Chris Anderson explains, “We’re leaving the watercooler era, when most of us listened, watched and read from the same relatively small pool of mostly hit content. And we’re entering the microculture era, when we are all into different things.”Marc Gunther, “The Extinction of Mass Culture, CNN Money, July 12, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/11/news/economy/pluggedin_gunther.fortune/index.htm. Just as cable broadcasters are catering to niche markets, Internet-based companies such as Amazon.com and Netflix are taking advantage of this concept by selling large numbers of books, DVDs, and music albums with narrow appeal. and of this chapter will cover the recent trends and issues of this era in television.

Social Controversy

The issue of whether television producers have a responsibility to promote particular social values continues to generate heated discussion. When the unmarried title character in the CBS series Murphy Brown—a comedy show about a divorced anchorwoman—got pregnant and chose to have the baby without any involvement from the father, then–Vice President Dan Quayle referenced the show as an example of degenerating family values. Linking the 1992 Los Angeles riots to a breakdown of family structure and social order, Quayle lambasted producers’ poor judgment, saying, “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’”Time, “Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown,” June 1, 1992, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,975627,00.html. Quayle’s outburst sparked lively debate between supporters and opponents of his viewpoint, with some praising his outspoken social commentary and others dismissing him as out of touch with America and its growing number of single mothers.

Similar controversy arose with the portrayal of openly gay characters on prime-time television shows. When the lead character on the ABC sitcom Ellen came out in 1997 (2 weeks after Ellen DeGeneres, the actress who played the role, announced that she was gay), she became the first leading gay character on both broadcast and cable networks. The show proved to be a test case for the nation’s tolerance of openly gay characters on prime-time television and became the subject of much debate. Embraced by liberal supporters and lambasted by conservative objectors (evangelical Baptist minister Jerry Falwell infamously dubbed her “Ellen DeGenerate”), both the actress and the show furthered the quest to make homosexuality acceptable to mainstream audiences. Although Ellen was canceled the following year (amid disagreements with producers about whether it should contain a parental advisory warning), DeGeneres successfully returned to television in 2003 with her own talk show. Subsequent shows with prominent gay characters were quick to follow in Ellen’s footsteps. According to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), 18 lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender characters accounted for 3 percent of scripted series regulars in the 2009–2010 broadcast television schedule, up from 1.3 percent in 2006.Wendy Mitchell, “GLAAD Report: Gay Characters on Network TV Still on the Rise,” Entertainment Weekly, September 30, 2009, http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2009/09/30/glaad-report-gay-characters-on-rise/.

Creating Stars via Reality Television

Emerging out of the 1948 television series Candid Camera, in which people were secretly filmed responding to elaborate practical jokes, reality televisionTelevision that attempts to capture unscripted, real-life situations. Many reality television shows are contrived or deliberately manufactured by producers. aimed to capture real, unscripted life on camera. The genre developed in several different directions, from home-video clip shows (America’s Funniest Home Videos, America’s Funniest People) to true-crime reenactment shows (America’s Most Wanted, Unsolved Mysteries) to thematic shows based on professions of interest (Project Runway, Police Women of Broward County, Top Chef). Near the turn of the millennium, the genre began to lean toward more voyeuristic shows, such as MTV’s The Real World, an unscripted “documentary” that followed the lives of seven strangers selected to live together in a large house or apartment in a major city. The show drew criticisms for glamorizing bad behavior and encouraging excessive drinking and casual sex, although its ratings soared with each successive controversy (a trend that critics claim encouraged producers to actively stage rating-grabbing scenarios). During the late 1990s and 2000s, a wave of copycat reality television shows emerged, including the voyeuristic series Big Brother, which filmed a group of strangers living together in an isolated house full of cameras in an attempt to win large amounts of cash, and Survivor, a game show in which participants competed against each other by performing endurance challenges on an uninhabited island. Survivor’s success as the most popular show on television in the summer of 2000 ensured the continued growth of the reality television genre, and producers turned their attention to reality dating shows such as The Bachelor, Temptation Island, and Dating in the Dark. Cheap to produce, with a seemingly never-ending supply of willing contestants and eager advertising sponsors, reality television shows continue to bring in big ratings. As of 2010, singing talent competition American Idol is television’s biggest revenue generator, pulling in $8.1 million in advertising sales every 30 minutes it is on the air.Paul Bond, “‘Idol’ Listed as TV’s Biggest Revenue Generator,” Hollywood Reporter, May 5, 2010, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i8f1f42046a622bda2d602430b16d3ed9.

Reality television has created the cultural phenomenon of the instant celebrity. Famous for simply being on the air, reality show contestants are extending their 15 minutes in the spotlight. Kate Gosselin, star of Jon & Kate Plus 8, a cable television show about a couple who have eight children, has since appeared in numerous magazine articles, and in 2010 she starred on celebrity reality dance show Dancing with the Stars. Survivor contestant Elisabeth Hasselbeck became a co-host on television talk show The View, and several American Idol contestants (including Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood) have become household names. The genre has drawn criticism for creating a generation that expects to achieve instant wealth without having to try very hard and also for preying on vulnerable people whom critics call “disposable.” When Britain’s Got Talent star Susan Boyle suffered a public meltdown in 2009 after the stress of transitioning from obscurity to stardom in an extremely short time period, the media began to point out the dangers of reality television. In 2009, TheWrap.com investigated the current lives of former stars of reality shows such as The Contender, Paradise Hotel, Wife Swap, and Extreme Makeover and found that at least 11 participants had committed suicide as an apparent result of their appearances on screen.Guy Adams, “Lessons From America on the Dangers of Reality Television,” Independent (London), June 6, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/lessons-from-america-on-the-dangers-of-reality-television-1698165.html; Frank Feldlinger, “TheWrap Investigates: 11 Players Have Committed Suicide,” TheWrap, http://www.thewrap.com/television/article/thewrap-investigates-11-players-have-committed-suicide-3409.

Public Television and Corporate Sponsorship

Corporate sponsorship does not just affect network television. Even public television has become subject to the influence of advertising. Established in 1969, Public Broadcasting ServicePublic television network established in 1969. The service was intended to enable universal access to television for viewers in rural areas and viewers who could not afford to pay for private television services. (PBS) developed out of a report by the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, which examined the role of educational, noncommercial television on society. The report recommended that the government finance public television in order to provide diversity of programming during the network era—a service created “not to sell products” but to “enhance citizenship and public service.”Michael P. McCauley, Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 239. Public television was also intended to provide universal access to television for viewers in rural areas or viewers who could not afford to pay for private television services. PBS focused on educational program content, targeting viewers who were less appealing to the commercial networks and advertisers, such as the over-50 age demographic and children under 12.

The original Carnegie Commission report recommended that Congress create a federal trust fund based on a manufacturer’s excise tax on the sale of television sets to finance public television. Following intense lobbying by the National Association of Broadcasters, the proposal was removed from the legislation that established the service. As a result, public television subsists on viewer contributions and federal funding and the latter has been drastically reduced in recent years. Although a 2007 proposal by President George W. Bush to eliminate more than half of the federal allocation to public broadcasting ($420 million out of $820 million) was overturned, PBS has become increasingly dependent on corporate sponsorship to stay afloat. By 2006, corporate sponsors funded more than 25 percent of all public television. Sponsorship has saved many programs that would otherwise have been lost, but critics have bemoaned the creeping commercialism of public television. When PBS began selling banner advertisements on its website in 2006, Gary Ruskin, executive director of consumer group Commercial Alert, commented, “It’s just one more intrusion of the commercial ethos into an organization that was supposed to be firmly noncommercial. The line between them and the commercial networks is getting fuzzier and fuzzier.”Matea Gold, “Marketing Tie-ins Finding Their Way to PBS Sponsors,” Baltimore Sun, October 23, 2006, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2006-10-23/features/0610230151_1_pbs-corporate-underwriters-public-television. Despite such criticisms, the drop in federal funding has forced public television executives to seek more creative ways of obtaining financial backing—for example, through online banner ads. In 2009, PBS shortened the length of time companies were required to sponsor some programs in an effort to encourage advertisers.Brian Stelter, “PBS to Shorten Time Commitments for Sponsorships,” New York Times, May 7, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/business/media/08adco.html. As of 2010, the future of PBS remained uncertain. With better-funded cable channels offering niche-interest shows that were traditionally public television’s domain (BBC nature series Planet Earth was shown on the Discovery Channel, while historical dramas John Adams and The Tudors are shown on premium cable channels HBO and Showtime), PBS is left to rely on shows that have been around for decades, such as Nova and Nature, to attract audiences.Charles McGrath, “Is PBS Still Necessary?” New York Times, February 17, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/arts/television/17mcgr.html. Only time will tell how PBS fares in the face of competition.

Cable Challenges the Networks

A far greater challenge to network television than the emergence of smaller competitors was the increasing dominance of cable television. Between 1994 and 2009, the percentage of U.S. households watching the Big Four networks during prime time plummeted from 43 percent to 27 percent.James Poniewozik, “Here’s to the Death of Broadcast,” Time, March 26, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1887840,00.html. Two key factors influenced the rapid growth of cable television networks: industry deregulationThe removal of government regulations from an industry. Government deregulation of the cable industry in the 1980s enabled its extensive growth throughout the next two decades. and the use of satellites to distribute local television stations around the country.

During the 1970s, the growth of cable television was restricted by FCC regulations, which protected broadcasters by establishing franchising standards and enforcing anti-siphoning rules that prevented cable from taking sports and movie programming away from the networks. However, during the late 1970s, a court ruled that the FCC had exceeded its authority, and the anti-siphoning rules were repealed. This decision paved the way for the development of cable movie channels, contributing to the exponential growth of cable in the 1980s and 1990s. Further deregulation of cable in the 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act removed restrictions on cable rates, enabling operators to charge what they wanted for cable services as long as there was effective competition to the service (a standard that over 90 percent of all cable markets could meet). Other deregulatory policies during the 1980s included the eradication of public-service requirements and the elimination of regulated amounts of advertising in children’s programming, expanding the scope of cable channel stations. Deregulation was intended to encourage competition within the industry but instead enabled local cable companies to establish monopolies all over the country. In 1989, U.S. Senator Al Gore of Tennessee commented, “Precipitous rate hikes of 100 percent or more in one year have not been unusual since cable was given total freedom to charge whatever the market will bear…. Since cable was deregulated, we have also witnessed an extraordinary concentration of control and integration by cable operators and program services, manifesting itself in blatantly anticompetitive behavior toward those who would compete with existing cable operators for the right to distribute services.”Adam M. Zaretsky, “The Cable TV Industry and Regulation,” Regional Economist, July 1995, http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional/95/07/CableTV.pdf. The FCC reintroduced regulations for basic cable rates in 1992, by which time more than 56 million households (over 60 percent of the households with televisions) subscribed to a cable service.

The growth of cable television was also assisted by a national satellite distribution system. Pioneered by Time Inc., which founded cable network company HBO, the corporation used satellite transmission in 1975 to beam the “Thrilla from Manila”—the historic heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier—into people’s homes. Shortly afterward, entrepreneur Ted Turner, owner of independent Atlanta-based station WTBS, uplinked his station’s signal onto the same satellite as HBO, enabling cable operators to downlink the station on one of their channels. Initially provided free to subscribers to encourage interest, the station offered television reruns, wrestling, and live sports from Atlanta. Having created the first “superstation,” Turner expanded his realm by founding 24-hour news network CNN in 1980. At the end of the year, 28 national programming services were available, and the cable revolution had begun. Over the next decade, the industry underwent a period of rapid growth and popularity, and by 1994 viewers could choose from 94 basic and 20 premium cable services.

The Current Satellite Market: DirecTV versus Dish Network

As of 2010, the two biggest players in the satellite television industry are DirecTV and Dish Network. Assisted by the passing of the Satellite Television Home Viewers Act in 1999, which enabled satellite providers to carry local television stations (putting them on equal footing with cable television), both companies have grown rapidly over the past decade. In the first quarter of 2010, DirecTV boasted 18.6 million subscribers, placing it ahead of its rival, Dish Network, which reported a total of 14.3 million subscribers.Franklin Paul, “Dish Network Subscriber Gain, Profit Beat Street,” Reuters, May 10, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6492MW20100510. Dish courts customers who have been hit by the economic downturn, aggressively cutting its prices and emphasizing its low rates. Conversely, DirecTV targets affluent consumers, emphasizing quality and choice in its advertising campaigns and investing in advanced services and products such as multiroom viewing (enabling a subscriber to watch a show in one room, pause it, and continue watching the same show in another room) to differentiate itself from rival satellite and cable companies.

Since the 1999 legislation put satellite television in direct competition with cable, the major satellite companies have increasingly pitted themselves against cable broadcasters, offering consumers numerous incentives to switch providers. One of these incentives is the addition of premium networks for satellite subscribers in the same vein as premium cable channel HBO. In 2005, DirecTV expanded its 101 Network channel to include original shows, becoming the first satellite station to air first episodes of a broadcast television series with NBC daytime soap opera Passions in 2007. The station aired first-run episodes of football drama series Friday Night Lights in 2008 and set its sights on the male over-35 demographic by obtaining syndication rights to popular HBO series Oz and Deadwood a year later. Commenting on the satellite company’s programming plans, executive vice president for entertainment for DirecTV Eric Shanks said, “We’d like to become a pre-cable window for these premium channels.”Bill Carter, “DirecTV Raises Its Sights for a Channel,” New York Times, January 23, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/business/media/24direct.html. In other words, the company hopes to purchase HBO shows such as Sex and the City before HBO sells the series to basic-cable channels like TBS.

In another overt bid to lure cable customers over to satellite television, both DirecTV and Dish Network offer a number of comprehensive movies and sports packages, benefiting from their additional channel capacity (satellite television providers typically offer around 350 channels, compared with 180 channels on cable) and their ability to receive international channels often unavailable on cable. In the mid-2000s, the satellite companies also began encroaching on cable television’s domination of bundled packages, by offering all-in-one phone, Internet, and television services. Despite being ideally suited to offering such packages with their single telecommunications pipe into the house, cable companies such as Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner had developed a reputation for offering poor service at extortionate prices. In the first three quarters of 2004, the eight largest cable providers (with the exception of bankrupt Adelphia) lost 552,000 basic-cable subscribers. Between 2000 and 2004, cable’s share of the television market fell from 66 percent to 62 percent, while the number of U.S. households with satellite television increased from 12 percent to 19 percent.Ken Belson, “Cable’s Rivals Lure Customers With Packages,” New York Times, November 22, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/22/technology/22satellite.html. Despite reports that cash-strapped consumers are switching off pay-TV services to save money during strained economic times, satellite industry revenues have risen steadily over the past decade.

New Viewing Outlets: YouTube and Hulu

Of the many recent Internet phenomenons, few have made as big an impact as video-sharing website YouTubeVideo-sharing website founded in 2005 that enables users to upload personal videos, television clips, music videos, and snippets of movies that can be watched by other users worldwide.. Created by three PayPal engineers in 2005, the site enables users to upload personal videos, television clips, music videos, and snippets of movies that can be watched by other users worldwide. Although it initially drew unfavorable comparisons with the original music-sharing site Napster (see ), which was buried under an avalanche of copyright infringement lawsuits, YouTube managed to survive the controversy by forming agreements with media corporations, such as NBC Universal Television, to legally broadcast video clips from shows such as The Office. In 2006, the company, which showed more than 100 million video clips per day, was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion.Associated Press, “Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion,” MSNBC, October 10, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15196982/ns/business-us_business/. Correctly predicting that the site was the “next step in the evolution of the Internet,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt has watched YouTube’s popularity explode since the takeover. As of 2010, YouTube shows more than 2 billion clips per day and allows people to upload 24 hours of video every single minute.YouTube, “YouTube Fact Sheet,” http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet. To secure its place as the go-to entertainment website, YouTube is expanding its boundaries by developing a movie rental service and showing live music concerts and sporting events in real time. In January 2010, Google signed a deal with the Indian Premier League, making 60 league cricket matches available on YouTube’s IPL channel and attracting 50 million viewers worldwide.Heather Timmons, “Google Sees a New Role for YouTube: An Outlet for Live Sports,” New York Times, May 2, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/business/media/03cricket.html.

While YouTube remains focused on user-generated material, viewers looking for commercial videos of movies and television shows are increasingly turning to HuluWebsite founded in 2007 that gives users access to an entire library of video clips without charge and syndicates its material to partner distribution sites such as MySpace and Facebook.. Established in 2007 following a deal between NBC Universal, News Corporation, and a number of leading Internet companies (including Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and MySpace), the site gives users access to an entire library of video clips without charge and syndicates its material to partner distribution sites. The videos include full episodes of current hit shows such as House, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons, as well as older hits from the studios’ television libraries. Supported through advertising, the venture, which is only available to viewers in the United States, became the premier video broadcast site on the web within 2 years. In July 2009, the site received more than 38 million viewers and delivered more videos than any site except YouTube.Chuck Salter, “Can Hulu Save Traditional TV?” Fast Company, November 1, 2009, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/140/the-unlikely-mogul.html. Throughout the entire year, Hulu generated an estimated $120 million in revenue and increased its advertiser base to 250 sponsors.Chuck Salter, “Can Hulu Save Traditional TV?” Fast Company, November 1, 2009, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/140/the-unlikely-mogul.html. Its advertising model appeals to viewers, who need only to watch two minutes of promotion in 22 minutes of programming, compared with 8 minutes on television. Limiting sponsorship to one advertiser per show has helped make recall rates twice as high as those for the same advertisements on television, benefiting the sponsors as well as the viewers.

Some critics and television executives claim that the Hulu model has been too successful for its own good, threatening the financial underpinnings of cable television by reducing DVD sales and avoiding carriage feesFees paid to cable operators by broadcasters for transmitting their channels on the operators’ systems.—in 2009, Fox pulled most of the episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia from Hulu’s site. Per the networks’ request, Hulu also shut off access to its programming from Boxee, a fledgling service that enabled viewers to stream online video to their television sets. “We have to find ways to advance the business rather than cannibalize it,” stated the distribution chief at TNT, a network that refused to stream episodes of shows such as The Closer on Hulu’s site.Frank Rose, “Hulu, a Victim of Its Own Success?” Wired, May 12, 2009, http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/hulu-victim-success/. However, many television executives realize that if they do not cannibalize their own material, others will. When a viral video of Saturday Night Live short “Lazy Sunday” hit the web in 2005, generating millions of hits on YouTube, NBC did not earn a dime. Broadcast networks—the Big Four and the CW—have also begun streaming shows for free in an effort to stop viewers from watching episodes on other websites.

Hulu executives are considering introducing paid content on the site in an effort to subsidize advertising revenue, a blow to consumers that would likely be softened by perks such as early access to content, ad-free shows, and more comprehensive archives.

Video-on-Demand

Originally introduced in the early 1990s, the concept of video on demand (VOD)A pay-per-view system that enables viewers to order or download a film via television or Internet and watch it at their convenience.—a pay-per-view system that allows viewers to order or download a film via television or the Internet and watch it at their convenience—was not immediately successful because of the prohibitive cost of ordering a movie compared to buying or renting it from a store. Another early complaint about the service was that studios withheld movies until long after they were available on DVD, by which time most people who wanted to view the film had already seen it. Both of these disadvantages have since been remedied, with movies now released at the same time on VOD as they are on DVD at competitive rental prices. Currently, most cable and satellite television providers offer some form of on-demand service, either VOD, which provides movies 24 hours a day and enables viewers all the functionality of a DVD player (such as the ability to pause, rewind, or fast forward films), or NVOD (near video on demand)A system that broadcasts multiple copies of a film or program over short time intervals but does not allow viewers to control the video by pausing or rewinding it., which broadcasts multiple copies of a film or program over short time intervals but does not allow viewers to control the video.

As an alternative to cable or satellite VOD, viewers can also readily obtain movies and television shows over the Internet, via free services such as YouTube and Hulu or through paid subscriptions to sites that stream movies to a computer. Online DVD rental service Netflix started giving subscribers instant access to its catalog of older television programs and films in 2007, while Internet giant Amazon.com set up a rival service resembling the pay-per-view model in 2008. Viewers can also stream free episodes of their favorite shows via cable and broadcast networks’ websites. With the increasing popularity of smartphonesCell phones that provide services similar to those of a personal computer. Most contain built-in applications and Internet access.—cell phones that contain built-in applications and Internet access—viewers are using VOD as a way of watching television while they are out of the house. Having discovered that consumers are willing to watch entire television episodes or even films on their smartphones, industry executives are looking for ways to capitalize on smartphone technology. In 2010, News Corporation’s Fox Mobile Group was planning to launch Bitbop, a service that will stream television episodes to smartphones for $9.99 a month. Discussing the project, Bitbop architect Joe Bilman said that “the marriage of on-demand content and mobility has the power to light a fire in the smartphone space.”Brian Stelter, “Audiences, and Hollywood, Flock to Smartphones,” New York Times, May 2, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/business/media/03mobile.html. The shift from traditional television viewing to online viewing is making a small but noticeable dent in the $84 billion cable and satellite industry. Between the beginning of 2008 and the end of 2009, an estimated 800,000 U.S. households cut the cable cord in favor of web viewing.Erick Schonfeld, “Estimate: 800,000 U.S. Households Abandoned Their TVs for the Web,” TechCrunch, April 13, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/13/800000-households-abandoned-tvs-web/.

Interactive Television

Moving a step beyond VOD, cable and satellite television providers are combining aspects of traditional television viewing with online content to create an entirely new way of watching shows—interactive television (iTV)Television programming that enables viewers to engage with and control aspects of their viewing experience—for example, by playing a quiz using a remote control.. Using an additional set-top box and their remote control, viewers can utilize several different features that go beyond simply watching a television show. For example, interactive television enables users to take part in quiz shows, vote for a favorite contestant on a game show, view highlights or look up statistics during sports matches, create a music playlist or photo slideshow, and view local information such as weather and traffic through a tickerAn electronic banner that scrolls across the bottom of the television screen. Tickers usually provide up-to-date information about news or weather. under a current television program. Software such as Microsoft’s UltimateTV, released in 2001, even brought interactivity to individual television shows. For example, a viewer watching CBS crime series CSI can click on the interactive icon in the corner of the screen and obtain instant information about forensic analysis techniques, along with an episode guide, character biographies, and a map of the show’s Las Vegas setting.

Interactive television is beginning to take on the social format of the web, linking viewers with online communities who use communication tools such as Twitter and Skype IM to discuss what they just saw on television in real time. When popular musical comedy show Glee hit the screens in 2009, marketing experts at Fox pushed for a strong online presence, airing the pilot episode well in advance of the actual season debut and generating buzz on social networking sites such as Twitter and FacebookA social networking service that allows users to instant message and to publicly post thoughts, photographs, videos, links, and more.. Once the show gained widespread popularity, Fox launched an interactive hypertrailer on its website, allowing viewers to click on and “like” the show’s cast members on Facebook. The Glee cast also participates in weekly “tweet-peats,” which feature live Twitter feeds that scroll across the bottom of the screen during reruns of the show, providing behind-the-scenes details and answering fan questions. The CW network uses a similar technique with its “TV to Talk About” campaign, a tagline that changes from ad to ad to include iterations such as “TV to text about,” “blog about,” or “tweet about.” Its website offers forums where viewers can discuss episodes and interact with video extras, photos, and background clips about various shows. Online television forum Television Without Pity provides viewers with an alternative place for discussion that is not affiliated with any one network.

Despite the shift toward interactive television, one barrier that manufacturers seem to be unwilling to cross is the addition of Internet to people’s television sets. Although Internet-enabled televisions began trickling into the market in 2008 and 2009, many industry executives remained skeptical of their potential. In February 2009, Sony spokesman Greg Belloni said, “Sony’s stance is that consumers don’t want an Internet-like experience with their TVs, and we’re really not focused on bringing anything other than Internet video or widgets to our sets right now.”Matt Richtel, “What Convergence? TV’s Hesitant March to the Net,” New York Times, February 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/technology/internet/16chip.html. Although some analysts predict that up to 20 percent of televisions will be Internet-enabled by 2012, consulting firm Deloitte anticipates the continued concurrent use of television sets with laptops, MP3 players, and other browser-enabled devices.Deloitte, “Deloitte Analyses Top Trends for the Media Industry for 2010,” news release, http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_GB/uk/industries/tmt/press-release/37df818581646210VgnVCM100000ba42f00aRCRD.htm.

Arcade Games

The first coin-operated arcade gameA coin-operated video game placed in public establishments. was modeled on Spacewar! It was called Computer Space, and it fared poorly among the general public because of its difficult controls. In 1972, Pong, the table-tennis simulator that has come to symbolize early computer games, was created by the fledgling company AtariThe video game company that was responsible for the arcade game Pong and that led the home console market in the 1970s and 1980s., and it was immediately successful. Pong was initially placed in bars with pinball machines and other games of chance, but as video games grew in popularity, they were placed in any establishment that would take them. By the end of the 1970s, so many video arcades were being built that some towns passed zoning laws limiting them.Steven Kent, “Super Mario Nation,” American Heritage, September 1997, http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1997/5/1997_5_65.shtml.

The end of the 1970s ushered in a new era—what some call the golden age of video games—with the game Space Invaders, an international phenomenon that exceded all expectations. In Japan, the game was so popular that it caused a national coin shortage. Games like Space Invaders illustrate both the effect of arcade games and their influence on international culture. In two different countries on opposite sides of the globe, Japanese and American teenagers, although they could not speak to one another, were having the same experiences thanks to a video game.

Video Game Consoles

The first video game consoleA video game system designed to be attached to a television to simulate arcade video games. for the home began selling in 1972. It was the Magnavox Odyssey, and it was based on prototypes built by Ralph Behr in the late 1960s. This system included a Pong-type game, and when the arcade version of Pong became popular, the Odyssey began to sell well. Atari, which was making arcade games at the time, decided to produce a home version of Pong and released it in 1974. Although this system could only play one game, its graphics and controls were superior to the Odyssey, and it was sold through a major department store, Sears. Because of these advantages, the Atari home version of Pong sold well, and a host of other companies began producing and selling their own versions of Pong.Leonard Herman, “Early Home Video Game Systems,” in The Video Game Explosion: From Pong to PlayStation and Beyond, ed. Mark Wolf (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 54.

A major step forward in the evolution of video games was the development of game cartridgesInterchangeable cartridges containing video games for use in home consoles. that stored the games and could be interchanged in the console. With this technology, users were no longer limited to a set number of games, leading many video game console makers to switch their emphasis to producing games. Several groups, such as Magnavox, Coleco, and Fairchild, released versions of cartridge-type consoles, but Atari’s 2600 console had the upper hand because of the company’s work on arcade games. Atari capitalized off of its arcade successes by releasing games that were well known to a public that was frequenting arcades. The popularity of games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man made the Atari 2600 a successful system. The late 1970s also saw the birth of companies such as Activision, which developed third-party games for the Atari 2600.Mark J. P. Wolf, “Arcade Games of the 1970s,” in The Video Game Explosion (see note 7), 41.

Home Computers

The birth of the home computer market in the 1970s paralleled the emergence of video game consoles. The first computer designed and sold for the home consumer was the Altair. It was first sold in 1975, several years after video game consoles had been selling, and it sold mainly to a hobbyist market. During this period, people such as Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, were building computers by hand and selling them to get their start-up businesses going. In 1977, three important computers—Radio Shack’s TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II—were produced and began selling to the home market.Jeremy Reimer, “Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures,” Ars Technica (blog), December 14, 2005, http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/2.

The rise of personal computers allowed for the development of more complex games. Designers of games such as Mystery House, developed in 1979 for the Apple II, and Rogue, developed in 1980 and played on IBM PCs, used the processing power of early home computers to develop video games that had extended plots and story lines. In these games, players moved through landscapes composed of basic graphics, solving problems and working through an involved narrative. The development of video games for the personal computer platform expanded the ability of video games to act as media by allowing complex stories to be told and new forms of interaction to take place between players.

The Rise of Nintendo

Nintendo, a Japanese card and novelty producer that had begun to produce electronic games in the 1970s, was responsible for arcade games such as Donkey Kong in the early 1980s. Its first home console, developed in 1984 for sale in Japan, tried to succeed where Atari had failed. The Nintendo system used newer, better microchips, bought in large quantities, to ensure high-quality graphics at a price consumers could afford. Keeping console prices low meant Nintendo had to rely on games for most of its profits and maintain control of game production. This was something Atari had failed to do, and it led to a glut of low-priced games that caused the crash of 1983. Nintendo got around this problem with proprietary circuits that would not allow unlicensed games to be played on the console. This allowed Nintendo to dominate the home video game market through the end of the decade, when one-third of homes in the United States had a Nintendo system.Gary Cross and Gregory Smits, “Japan, the U.S. and the Globalization of Children’s Consumer Culture,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 4 (2005).

Nintendo introduced its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the United States in 1985. The game Super Mario Brothers, released with the system, was also a landmark in video game development. The game employed a narrative in the same manner as more complicated computer games, but its controls were accessible and its objectives simple. The game appealed to a younger demographic, generally boys in the 8–14 range, than the one targeted by Atari.Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 119. Its designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, tried to mimic the experiences of childhood adventures, creating a fantasy world not based on previous models of science fiction or other literary genres.Rus McLaughlin, “IGN Presents the History of Super Mario Bros.,” IGN Retro, November 8, 2007, http://games.ign.com/articles/833/833615p1.html. Super Mario Brothers also gave Nintendo an iconic character who has been used in numerous other games, television shows, and even a movie. The development of this type of character and fantasy world became the norm for video game makers. Games such as The Legend of Zelda became franchises with film and television possibilities rather than simply one-off games.

As video games developed as a form of media, the public struggled to come to grips with the kind of messages this medium was passing on to children. These were no longer simple games of reflex that could be compared to similar non-video games or sports; these were forms of media that included stories and messages that concerned parents and children’s advocates. Arguments about the larger meaning of the games became common, with some seeing the games as driven by ideas of conquest and gender stereotypes, whereas others saw basic stories about traveling and exploration.Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins, “Nintendo and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 57–72.

Computer Games Flourish and Innovate

The enormous number of games available for Atari consoles in the early 1980s took its toll on video arcades. In 1983, arcade revenues had fallen to a 3-year low, leading game makers to turn to newer technologies that could not be replicated by home consoles. This included arcade games powered by laser discs, such as Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, but their novelty soon wore off, and laser-disc games became museum pieces.Aljean Harmetz, “Video Arcades Turn to Laser Technology as Queues Dwindle,” Morning Herald (Sydney), February 2, 1984. In 1989, museums were already putting on exhibitions of early arcade games that included ones from the early 1980s. Although newer games continued to come out on arcade platforms, they could not compete with the home console market and never achieved their previous successes from the early 1980s. Increasingly, arcade gamers chose to stay at home to play games on computers and consoles. Today, dedicated arcades are a dying breed. Most that remain, like the Dave & Buster’s and Chuck E. Cheese’s chains, offer full-service restaurants and other entertainment attractions to draw in business.

Home games fared better than arcades because they could ride the wave of personal computer purchases that occurred in the 1980s. Some important developments in video games occurred in the mid-1980s with the development of online games. Multiuser dungeons, or MUDs, were role-playing games played online by multiple users at once. The games were generally text-based, describing the world of the MUD through text rather than illustrating it through graphics. The games allowed users to create a character and move through different worlds, accomplishing goals that awarded them with new skills. If characters attained a certain level of proficiency, they could then design their own area of the world. Habitat, a game developed in 1986 for the Commodore 64, was a graphic version of this type of game. Users dialed up on modems to a central host server and then controlled characters on screen, interacting with other users. Jeremy Reimer, “The Evolution of Gaming: Computers, Consoles, and Arcade,” Ars Technica (blog), October 10, 2005, http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/10/gaming-evolution.ars/4.

During the mid-1980s, a demographic shift occurred. Between 1985 and 1987, games designed to run on business computers rose from 15 percent to 40 percent of games sold.Philip Elmer-Dewitt and others, “Computers: Games that Grownups Play,” Time, July 27, 1987, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,965090,00.html. This trend meant that game makers could use the increased processing power of business computers to create more complex games. It also meant adults were interested in computer games and could become a profitable market.

Console Wars

Nintendo’s dominance of the home console market throughout the late 1980s allowed it to build a large library of games for use on the NES. This also proved to be a weakness, however, because Nintendo was reluctant to improve or change its system for fear of making its game library obsolete. Technology had changed in the years since the introduction of the NES, and companies such as NEC and Sega were ready to challenge Nintendo with 16-bit systems.Andy Slaven, Video Game Bible, 1985–2002, (Victoria, BC: Trafford), 70–71.

The Sega Master System had failed to challenge the NES, but with the release of its 16-bit system, Sega Genesis, the company pursued a new marketing strategy. Whereas Nintendo targeted 8- to 14-year-olds, Sega’s marketing plan targeted 15- to 17-year olds, making games that were more mature and advertising during programs such as the MTV Video Music Awards. The campaign successfully branded Sega as a cooler version of Nintendo and moved mainstream video games into a more mature arena. Nintendo responded to the Sega Genesis with its own 16-bit system, the Super NES, and began creating more mature games as well. Games such as Sega’s Mortal Kombat and Nintendo’s Street Fighter competed to raise the level of violence possible in a video game. Sega’s advertisements even suggested that its game was better because of its more violent possibilities.Gamespot, “When Two Tribes Go to War: A History of Video Game Controversy,” http://www.gamespot.com/features/6090892/p-5.html.

By 1994, companies such as 3DO, with its 32-bit system, and Atari, with its allegedly 64-bit Jaguar, attempted to get in on the home console market but failed to use effective marketing strategies to back up their products. Both systems fell out of production before the end of the decade. Sega, fearing that its system would become obsolete, released the 32-bit Saturn system in 1995. The system was rushed into production and did not have enough games available to ensure its success.CyberiaPC.com, “Sega Saturn (History, Specs, Pictures),” http://www.cyberiapc.com/vgg/sega_saturn.htm. Sony stepped in with its PlayStation console at a time when Sega’s Saturn was floundering and before Nintendo’s 64-bit system had been released. This system targeted an even older demographic of 14- to 24-year-olds and made a large effect on the market; by March of 2007, Sony had sold 102 million PlayStations.Edge staff, “The Making Of: Playstation,” Edge, April 24, 2009, http://www.next-gen.biz/features/the-making-of-playstation.

Computer Games Gain Mainstream Acceptance

Computer games had avid players, but they were still a niche market in the early 1990s. An important step in the mainstream acceptance of personal computer games was the development of the first-person shooterA video game genre developed in the 1990s that puts the player in the perspective of a character who primarily uses guns to defeat enemies. genre. First popularized by the 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D, these games put the player in the character’s perspective, making it seem as if the player were firing weapons and being attacked. Doom, released in 1993, and Quake, released in 1996, used the increased processing power of personal computers to create vivid three-dimensional worlds that were impossible to fully replicate on video game consoles of the era. These games pushed realism to new heights and began attracting public attention for their graphic violence.

Another trend was reaching out to audiences outside of the video-game-playing community. Myst, an adventure game where the player walked around an island solving a mystery, drove sales of CD-ROM drives for computers. Myst, its sequel Riven, and other nonviolent games such as SimCity actually outsold Doom and Quake in the 1990s.Stephen C. Miller, “News Watch; Most-Violent Video Games Are Not Biggest Sellers,” New York Times, July 29, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/29/technology/news-watch-most-violent-video-games-are-not-biggest-sellers.html. These nonviolent games appealed to people who did not generally play video games, increasing the form’s audience and expanding the types of information that video games put across.

Online Gaming Gains Popularity

A major advance in game technology came with the increase in Internet use by the general public in the 1990s. A major feature of Doom was the ability to use multiplayer gaming through the Internet. Strategy games such as Command and Conquer and Total Annihilation also included options where players could play each other over the Internet. Other fantasy-inspired role-playing games, such as Ultima Online, used the Internet to initiate the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG)A genre of video games that allows a large number of players to simultaneously engage in a role-playing game. genre.Jeremy Reimer, “The Evolution of Gaming: Computers, Consoles, and Arcade,” Ars Technica (blog), October 10, 2005, http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/10/gaming-evolution.ars/4. These games used the Internet as their platform, much like the text-based MUDs, creating a space where individuals could play the game while socially interacting with one another.

Portable Game Systems

The development of portable game systems was another important aspect of video games during the 1990s. Handheld games had been in use since the 1970s, and a system with interchangeable cartridges had even been sold in the early 1980s. Nintendo released the Game Boy in 1989, using the same principles that made the NES dominate the handheld market throughout the 1990s. The Game Boy was released with the game Tetris, using the game’s popularity to drive purchases of the unit. The unit’s simple design meant users could get 20 hours of playing time on a set of batteries, and this basic design was left essentially unaltered for most of the decade. More advanced handheld systems, such as the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear, could not compete with the Game Boy despite their superior graphics and color displays. Joe Hutsko, “88 Million and Counting; Nintendo Remains King of the Handheld Game Players,” New York Times, March 25, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/25/business/88-million-and-counting-nintendo-remains-king-of-the-handheld-game-players.html.

The decade-long success of the Game Boy belies the conventional wisdom of the console wars that more advanced technology makes for a more popular system. The Game Boy’s static, simple design was readily accessible, and its stability allowed for a large library of games to be developed for it. Despite using technology almost a decade old, the Game Boy accounted for 30 percent of Nintendo of America’s overall revenues at the end of the 1990s. Joe Hutsko, “88 Million and Counting; Nintendo Remains King of the Handheld Game Players,” New York Times, March 25, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/25/business/88-million-and-counting-nintendo-remains-king-of-the-handheld-game-players.html.

The Console Wars Continue

1999 saw Sega’s last effort in the console wars with its Sega Dreamcast. This console could connect to the Internet, emulating the sophisticated computer games of the 1990s. The new features of the Sega Dreamcast were not enough to save the brand, however, and Sega discontinued production in 2001, leaving the console market entirely.“Sega Dreamcast,” slide in “A Brief History of Game Console Warfare,” Business Week, http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/10/game_consoles/.

A major problem for Sega’s Dreamcast was Sony’s release of the PlayStation 2 (PS2) in 2000. The PS2 could function as a DVD player, expanding the role of the console into an entertainment device that did more than play video games. This console was incredibly successful, enjoying a long production run, with more than 106 million units sold worldwide by the end of the decade.“PlayStation 2,” slide in “A Brief History of Game Console Warfare.” Business Week, http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/10/game_consoles/

In 2001, two major consoles were released to compete with the PS2: the Xbox and the Nintendo GameCube. The Xbox was an attempt by Microsoft to enter the market with a console that expanded on the functions of other game consoles. The unit had features similar to a PC, including a hard drive and an ethernet port for online play through its service, Xbox Live. The popularity of the first-person shooter game Halo, an Xbox exclusive release, boosted sales as well. Nintendo’s GameCube did not offer DVD playback capabilities, choosing instead to focus on gaming functions. Both of these consoles sold millions of units but did not come close to the sales of the PS2.

Computer Gaming Becomes a Niche Market

As consoles developed to rival the capabilities of personal computers, game developers began to focus more on games for consoles. From 2000 to the end of the decade, the popularity of personal computer games has gradually declined. The computer gaming community, while still significant, is focused on game players who are willing to pay a lot of money on personal computers that are designed specifically for gaming, often including multiple monitors and user modifications that allow personal computers to play newer games. This type of market, though profitable, is not large enough to compete with the audience for the much cheaper game consoles. Kristin Kalning, “Is PC Gaming Dying? Or Thriving?” MSNBC, March 26, 2008, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23800152/wid/11915773/.

The Evolution of Portable Gaming

Nintendo continued its control of the handheld game market into the 2000s with the 2001 release of the Game Boy Advance, a redesigned Game Boy that offered 32-bit processing and compatibility with older Game Boy games. In 2004, anticipating Sony’s upcoming handheld console, Nintendo released the Nintendo DS, a handheld console that featured two screens and Wi-Fi capabilities for online gaming. Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) was released the following year and featured Wi-Fi capabilities as well as a flexible platform that could be used to play other media such as MP3s.Penelope Patsuris, “Sony PSP vs. Nintendo DS,” Forbes, June 7, 2004, http://www.forbes.com/2004/06/07/cx_pp_0607mondaymatchup.html. These two consoles, along with their newer versions, continue to dominate the handheld market.

One interesting innovation in mobile gaming occurred in 2003 with the release of the Nokia N-Gage. The N-Gage was a combination of a game console and mobile phone that, according to consumers, did not fill either role very well. The product line was discontinued in 2005, but the idea of playing games on phones persisted and has been developed on other platforms.Brad Stone, “Play It Again, Nokia. For the Third Time,” New York Times, August 27, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/technology/27nokia.html. Apple currently dominates the industry of mobile phone games; in 2008 and 2009 alone, iPhone games generated $615 million in revenue.Peter Farago, “Apple iPhone and iPod Touch Capture U.S. Video Game Market Share,” Flurry (blog), March 22, 2010, http://blog.flurry.com/bid/31566/Apple-iPhone-and-iPod-touch-Capture-U-S-Video-Game-Market-Share. As mobile phone gaming grows in popularity and as the supporting technology becomes increasingly more advanced, traditional portable gaming platforms like the DS and the PSP will need to evolve to compete. Nintendo is already planning a successor to the DS that features 3-D graphics without the use of 3-D glasses that it hopes will help the company retain and grow its share of the portable gaming market.

Home Consoles

The current state of the home console market still involves the three major companies of the past 10 years: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. The release of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 led this generation of consoles in 2005. The Xbox 360 featured expanded media capabilities and integrated access to Xbox Live, an online gaming service. Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) was released in 2006. It also featured enhanced online access as well as expanded multimedia functions, with the additional capacity to play Blu-ray discs. Nintendo released the Wii at the same time. This console featured a motion-sensitive controller that departed from previous controllers and focused on accessible, often family-oriented games. This combination successfully brought in large numbers of new game players, including many older adults. By June 2010, in the United States, the Wii had sold 71.9 million units, the Xbox 360 had sold 40.3 million, and the PS3 trailed at 35.4 million.VGChartz, “Weekly Hardware Chart: 19th June 2010,” http://www.vgchartz.com. In the wake of the Wii’s success, Microsoft and Sony have introduced their own motion-sensitive systems.J. P. Mangalindan, “Is Casual Gaming Destroying the Traditional Gaming Market?” Fortune, March 18, 2010, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/18/is-casual-gaming-destroying-the-traditional-gaming-market/.

Television

Television programs based on video games were an early phenomenon. Pac-Man, Pole Position, and Q*bert were among the animated programs that aired in the early 1980s. In the later 1980s, shows such as The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! and The Legend of Zelda promoted Nintendo games. In the 1990s, Pokémon, originally a game developed for the Nintendo Game Boy, was turned into a television series, a card game, several movies, and even a musical.Internet Move Database, “Pokémon,” http://www.imdb.com/. Recently, several programs have been developed that revolve entirely around video games—the web series The Guild, for instance, tells the story of a group of friends who interact through an unspecified MMORPG.

Nielsen, the company that tabulates television ratings, has begun rating video games in a similar fashion. In 2010, this information showed that video games, as a whole, could be considered a kind of fifth networkTerm used to describe the potential for video games to rival the top four television networks., along with the television networks NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox.Mike Shields, “Nielsen: Video Games Approach 5th Network Status,” Adweek, March 25, 2009, http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i4f087b1aeac6f008d0ecadfeffe4a191. Advertisers use Nielsen ratings to decide which programs to support. The use of this system is changing public perceptions to include video game playing as a habit similar to television watching.

Video games have also influenced the way that television is produced. The Rocket Racing League, scheduled to be launched in 2011, will feature a “virtual racetrack.” Racing jets will travel along a virtual track that can only be seen by pilots and spectators with enabled equipment. Applications for mobile devices are being developed that will allow spectators to race virtual jets alongside the ones flying in real time.Adam Hadhazy, “’NASCAR of the Skies’ to Feature Video Game-Like Interactivity,” TechNewsDaily, April 26, 2010, http://www.technewsdaily.com/nascar-of-the-skies-to-feature-video-game-like-interactivity–0475/. This type of innovation is only possible with a public that has come to demand and rely on the kind of interactivity that video games provide.

Film

The rise in film adaptations of video games accompanies the increased age of video game users. In 1995, Mortal Kombat, a live-action movie based on the video game, grossed over $70 million at the box office, placing it 22nd in the rankings for that year.Box Office Mojo, “Mortal Kombat,” http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=mortalkombat.htm. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, released in 2001, starred well-known actress Angelina Jolie and ranked No. 1 at the box office when it was released, and 15th overall for the year.Box Office Mojo, “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=tombraider.htm. Films based on video games are an increasingly common sight at the box office, such as producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Prince of Persia, or the recent sequel to Tron, based on the idea of a virtual gaming arena.

Another aspect of video games’ influence on films is how video game releases are marketed and perceived. The release date for anticipated game Grand Theft Auto IV was announced and marketed to compete with the release of the film Iron Man. Grand Theft Auto IV supposedly beat Iron Man by $300,000,000 million in sales. This kind of comparison is, in some ways, misleading. Video games cost much more than a ticket to a movie, so higher sales does not mean that more people bought the game than the movie. Also, the distribution apparatus for the two media is totally different. Movies can only be released in theaters, whereas video games can be sold at any retail outlet.Associated Press, “‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ Beats ‘Iron Man’ by $300 Million,” Fox News, May 9, 2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354711,00.html. What this kind of news story proves, however, is that the general public considers video games as something akin to a film. It is also important to realize that the scale of production and profit for video games is similar to that of films. Video games include music scores, actors, and directors in addition to the game designers, and the budgets for major games reflect this. Grand Theft Auto IV cost an estimated $100 million to produce.Gillian Bowditch, “Grand Theft Auto Producer is Godfather of Gaming,” Times (London), April 27, 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article3821838.ece.

Music

Video games have been accompanied by music ever since the days of the arcade. Video game music was originally limited to computer beeps turned into theme songs. The design of the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and Sony PlayStation made it possible to use sampled audio on new games, meaning songs played on physical instruments could be recorded and used on video games. Beginning with the music of the Final Fantasy series, scored by famed composer Nobuo Uematsu, video game music took on film score quality, complete with full orchestral and vocal tracks. This innovation proved beneficial to the music industry. Well-known musicians such as Trent Reznor, Thomas Dolby, Steve Vai, and Joe Satriani were able to create the soundtracks for popular games, giving these artists exposure to new generations of potential fans.“Video Games Music Big Hit,” Wilmington (NC) Morning Star, February 1, 1997, 36. Composing music for video games has turned into a profitable means of employment for many musicians. Schools such as Berklee College of Music, Yale, and New York University have programs that focus on composing music for video games. The students are taught many of the same principles that are involved in film scoring.Joseph P. Khan, “Berklee is Teaching Its Students to Compose Scores for Video Games,” Boston Globe, January 19, 2010, http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/01/19/berklee_is_teaching_students_to_compose_scores_for_video_games/.

Many rock bands have allowed their previously recorded songs to be used in video games, similar to a hit song being used on a movie soundtrack. The bands are paid for the rights to use the song, and their music is exposed to an audience that otherwise might not hear it. As mentioned earlier, games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero have been used to promote bands. The release of The Beatles: Rock Band was timed to coincide with the release of digitally remastered reissues of the Beatles’ albums.

Another phenomenon relating to music and video games involves musicians covering video game music. A number of bands perform only video game covers in a variety of styles, such as the popular Japanese group the Black Mages, which performs rock versions of Final Fantasy music. Playing video game themes is not limited to rock bands, however. An orchestra and chorus called Video Games Live started a tour in 2005 dedicated to playing well-known video game music. Their performances are often accompanied by graphics projected onto a screen showing relevant sequences from the video games.Jason Michael Paul Productions, “About,” Play! A Video Game Symphony, http://www.play-symphony.com/about.php.

The Building Blocks of the Internet

In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began research on protocols to allow computers to communicate over a distributed networkA web of computers connected to one another, allowing intercomputer communication.. This work paralleled work done by the RAND Corporation, particularly in the realm of a web-based network model of communication. Instead of using electronic signals to send an unending stream of ones and zeros over a line (the equivalent of a direct voice connection), DARPA used this new packet-switching technology to send small bundles of data. This way, a message that would have been an unbroken stream of binary data—extremely vulnerable to errors and corruption—could be packaged as only a few hundred numbers.

Imagine a telephone conversation in which any static in the signal would make the message incomprehensible. Whereas humans can infer meaning from “Meet me [static] the restaurant at 8:30” (we replace the static with the word at), computers do not necessarily have that logical linguistic capability. To a computer, this constant stream of data is incomplete—or “corrupted,” in technological terminology—and confusing. Considering the susceptibility of electronic communication to noise or other forms of disruption, it would seem like computer-to-computer transmission would be nearly impossible.

However, the packets in this packet-switching technology have something that allows the receiving computer to make sure the packet has arrived uncorrupted. Because of this new technology and the shared protocols that made computer-to-computer transmission possible, a single large message could be broken into many pieces and sent through an entire web of connections, speeding up transmission and making that transmission more secure.

One of the necessary parts of a network is a host. A host is a physical node that is directly connected to the Internet and “directs traffic” by routing packets of data to and from other computers connected to it. In a normal network, a specific computer is usually not directly connected to the Internet; it is connected through a host. A host in this case is identified by an Internet Protocol, or IP, address (a concept that is explained in greater detail later). Each unique IP address refers to a single location on the global Internet, but that IP address can serve as a gateway for many different computers. For example, a college campus may have one global IP address for all of its students’ computers, and each student’s computer might then have its own local IP address on the school’s network. This nested structure allows billions of different global hosts, each with any number of computers connected within their internal networks. Think of a campus postal system: All students share the same global address (1000 College Drive, Anywhere, VT 08759, for example), but they each have an internal mailbox within that system.

The early Internet was called ARPANET, after the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (which added “Defense” to its name and became DARPA in 1973), and consisted of just four hosts: UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Now there are over half a million hosts, and each of those hosts likely serves thousands of people.Central Intelligence Agency, “Country Comparison: Internet Hosts,” World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2184rank.html. Each host uses protocols to connect to an ever-growing network of computers. Because of this, the Internet does not exist in any one place in particular; rather, it is the name we give to the huge network of interconnected computers that collectively form the entity that we think of as the Internet. The Internet is not a physical structure; it is the protocols that make this communication possible.

One of the other core components of the Internet is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) gateway. Proposed in a 1974 paper, the TCP gateway acts “like a postal service.”Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, “Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program,” December 1974, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675. Without knowing a specific physical address, any computer on the network can ask for the owner of any IP address, and the TCP gateway will consult its directory of IP address listings to determine exactly which computer the requester is trying to contact. The development of this technology was an essential building block in the interlinking of networks, as computers could now communicate with each other without knowing the specific address of a recipient; the TCP gateway would figure it all out. In addition, the TCP gateway checks for errors and ensures that data reaches its destination uncorrupted. Today, this combination of TCP gateways and IP addresses is called TCP/IP and is essentially a worldwide phone book for every host on the Internet.

You’ve Got Mail: The Beginnings of the Electronic Mailbox

Email has, in one sense or another, been around for quite a while. Originally, electronic messages were recorded within a single mainframe computer system. Each person working on the computer would have a personal folder, so sending that person a message required nothing more than creating a new document in that person’s folder. It was just like leaving a note on someone’s desk,Ian Peter, “The History of Email,” The Internet History Project, 2004, http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html. so that the person would see it when he or she logged onto the computer.

However, once networks began to develop, things became slightly more complicated. Computer programmer Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing the naming system we have today, using the @ symbol to denote the server (or host, from the previous section). In other words, name@gmail.com tells the host “gmail.com” (Google’s email server) to drop the message into the folder belonging to “name.” Tomlinson is credited with writing the first network email using his program SNDMSG in 1971. This invention of a simple standard for email is often cited as one of the most important factors in the rapid spread of the Internet, and is still one of the most widely used Internet services.

The use of email grew in large part because of later commercial developments, especially America Online, that made connecting to email much easier than it had been at its inception. Internet service providers (ISPs) packaged email accounts with Internet access, and almost all web browsers (such as Netscape, discussed later in the section) included a form of email service. In addition to the ISPs, email services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail provided free email addresses paid for by small text ads at the bottom of every email message sent. These free “webmail” services soon expanded to comprise a large part of the email services that are available today. Far from the original maximum inbox sizes of a few megabytes, today’s email services, like Google’s Gmail service, generally provide gigabytes of free storage space.

Email has revolutionized written communication. The speed and relatively inexpensive nature of email makes it a prime competitor of postal services—including FedEx and UPS—that pride themselves on speed. Communicating via email with someone on the other end of the world is just as quick and inexpensive as communicating with a next-door neighbor. However, the growth of Internet shopping and online companies such as Amazon.com has in many ways made the postal service and shipping companies more prominent—not necessarily for communication, but for delivery and remote business operations.

Hypertext: Web 1.0

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of Oxford University and software engineer at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory), had the idea of using a new kind of protocol to share documents and information throughout the local CERN network. Instead of transferring regular text-based documents, he created a new language called hypertext markup language (HTML). Hypertext was a new word for text that goes beyond the boundaries of a single document. Hypertext can include links to other documents (hyperlinks), text-style formatting, images, and a wide variety of other components. The basic idea is that documents can be constructed out of a variety of links and can be viewed just as if they are on the user’s computer.

This new language required a new communication protocol so that computers could interpret it, and Berners-Lee decided on the name hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Through HTTP, hypertext documents can be sent from computer to computer and can then be interpreted by a browser, which turns the HTML files into readable web pages. The browser that Berners-Lee created, called World Wide Web, was a combination browser-editor, allowing users to view other HTML documents and create their own.Tim Berners-Lee, “The WorldWideWeb Browser,” 2009, http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.

Modern browsers, like Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, only allow for the viewing of web pages; other increasingly complicated tools are now marketed for creating web pages, although even the most complicated page can be written entirely from a program like Windows Notepad. The reason web pages can be created with the simplest tools is the adoption of certain protocols by the most common browsers. Because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and other browsers all interpret the same code in more or less the same way, creating web pages is as simple as learning how to speak the language of these browsers.

In 1991, the same year that Berners-Lee created his web browser, the Internet connection service Q-Link was renamed America Online, or AOL for short. This service would eventually grow to employ over 20,000 people, on the basis of making Internet access available (and, critically, simple) for anyone with a telephone line. Although the web in 1991 was not what it is today, AOL’s software allowed its users to create communities based on just about any subject, and it only required a dial-up modem—a device that connects any computer to the Internet via a telephone line—and the telephone line itself.

In addition, AOL incorporated two technologies—chat rooms and Instant Messenger—into a single program (along with a web browser). Chat rooms allowed many users to type live messages to a “room” full of people, while Instant Messenger allowed two users to communicate privately via text-based messages. The most important aspect of AOL was its encapsulation of all these once-disparate programs into a single user-friendly bundle. Although AOL was later disparaged for customer service issues like its users’ inability to deactivate their service, its role in bringing the Internet to mainstream users was instrumental.Tom Zeller, Jr., “Canceling AOL? Just Offer Your Firstborn,” New York Times, August 29, 2005, allhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/technology/29link.html.

In contrast to AOL’s proprietary services, the World Wide Web had to be viewed through a standalone web browser. The first of these browsers to make its mark was the program Mosaic, released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Mosaic was offered for free and grew very quickly in popularity due to features that now seem integral to the web. Things like bookmarks, which allow users to save the location of particular pages without having to remember them, and images, now an integral part of the web, were all inventions that made the web more usable for many people.National Center for Supercomputing Appliances, “About NCSA Mosaic,” 2010, http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/Projects/mosaic.html.

Although the web browser Mosaic has not been updated since 1997, developers who worked on it went on to create Netscape Navigator, an extremely popular browser during the 1990s. AOL later bought the Netscape company, and the Navigator browser was discontinued in 2008, largely because Netscape Navigator had lost the market to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, which came preloaded on Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system. However, Netscape had long been converting its Navigator software into an open-source program called Mozilla Firefox, which is now the second-most-used web browser on the Internet (detailed in ).NetMarketShare, “Browser Market Share,” http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcal=1&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=132. Firefox represents about a quarter of the market—not bad, considering its lack of advertising and Microsoft’s natural advantage of packaging Internet Explorer with the majority of personal computers.

For Sale: The Web

As web browsers became more available as a less-moderated alternative to AOL’s proprietary service, the web became something like a free-for-all of startup companies. The web of this period, often referred to as Web 1.0, featured many specialty sites that used the Internet’s ability for global, instantaneous communication to create a new type of business. Another name for this free-for-all of the 1990s is the “dot-com boom.” During the boom, it seemed as if almost anyone could build a website and sell it for millions of dollars. However, the “dot-com crash” that occurred later that decade seemed to say otherwise. Quite a few of these Internet startup companies went bankrupt, taking their shareholders down with them. Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, called this phenomenon “irrational exuberance,”Alan Greenspan, “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society, ” (lecture, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC, December 5, 1996), http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm. in large part because investors did not necessarily know how to analyze these particular business plans, and companies that had never turned a profit could be sold for millions. The new business models of the Internet may have done well in the stock market, but they were not necessarily sustainable. In many ways, investors collectively failed to analyze the business prospects of these companies, and once they realized their mistakes (and the companies went bankrupt), much of the recent market growth evaporated. The invention of new technologies can bring with it the belief that old business tenets no longer apply, but this dangerous belief—the “irrational exuberance” Greenspan spoke of—is not necessarily conducive to long-term growth.

Some lucky dot-com businesses formed during the boom survived the crash and are still around today. For example, eBay, with its online auctions, turned what seemed like a dangerous practice (sending money to a stranger you met over the Internet) into a daily occurrence. A less-fortunate company, eToys.com, got off to a promising start—its stock quadrupled on the day it went public in 1999—but then filed for bankruptcy in 2001.Cecily Barnes, “eToys files for Chapter 11,” CNET, March 7, 2001, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-253706.html.

One of these startups, theGlobe.com, provided one of the earliest social networking services that exploded in popularity. When theGlobe.com went public, its stock shot from a target price of $9 to a close of $63.50 a share.Dawn Kawamoto, “TheGlobe.com’s IPO one for the books,” CNET, November 13, 1998, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-217913.html. The site itself was started in 1995, building its business on advertising. As skepticism about the dot-com boom grew and advertisers became increasingly skittish about the value of online ads, theGlobe.com ceased to be profitable and shut its doors as a social networking site.theglobe.com, “About Us,” 2009, http://www.theglobe.com/. Although advertising is pervasive on the Internet today, the current model—largely based on the highly targeted Google AdSense service—did not come around until much later. In the earlier dot-com years, the same ad might be shown on thousands of different web pages, whereas now advertising is often specifically targeted to the content of an individual page.

However, that did not spell the end of social networking on the Internet. Social networking had been going on since at least the invention of Usenet in 1979 (detailed later in the chapter), but the recurring problem was always the same: profitability. This model of free access to user-generated content departed from almost anything previously seen in media, and revenue streams would have to be just as radical.

How Did We Get Here? The Late 1970s, Early 1980s, and Usenet

Almost as soon as TCP stitched the various networks together, a former DARPA scientist named Larry Roberts founded the company Telnet, the first commercial packet-switching company. Two years later, in 1977, the invention of the dial-up modem (in combination with the wider availability of personal computers like the Apple II) made it possible for anyone around the world to access the Internet. With availability extended beyond purely academic and military circles, the Internet quickly became a staple for computer hobbyists.

One of the consequences of the spread of the Internet to hobbyists was the founding of Usenet. In 1979, University of North Carolina graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis connected three computers in a small network and used a series of programming scripts to post and receive messages. In a very short span of time, this system spread all over the burgeoning Internet. Much like an electronic version of community bulletin boards, anyone with a computer could post a topic or reply on Usenet.

The group was fundamentally and explicitly anarchic, as outlined by the posting “What is Usenet?” This document says, “Usenet is not a democracy … there is no person or group in charge of Usenet …Usenet cannot be a democracy, autocracy, or any other kind of ‘-acy.’”Mark Moraes, Chip Salzenberg, and Gene Spafford, “What is Usenet?” December 28, 1999, http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/. Usenet was not used only for socializing, however, but also for collaboration. In some ways, the service allowed a new kind of collaboration that seemed like the start of a revolution: “I was able to join rec.kites and collectively people in Australia and New Zealand helped me solve a problem and get a circular two-line kite to fly,” one user told the United Kingdom’s Guardian.Simon Jeffery and others, “A People’s History of the Internet: From Arpanet in 1969 to Today,” Guardian (London), October 23, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2009/oct/23/internet-arpanet.

GeoCities: Yahoo! Pioneers

Fast-forward to 1995: The president and founder of Beverly Hills Internet, David Bohnett, announces that the name of his company is now “GeoCities.” GeoCities built its business by allowing users (“homesteaders”) to create web pages in “communities” for free, with the stipulation that the company placed a small advertising banner at the top of each page. Anyone could register a GeoCities site and subsequently build a web page about a topic. Almost all of the community names, like Broadway (live theater) and Athens (philosophy and education), were centered on specific topics.While GeoCities is no longer in business, the Internet Archive maintains the site at http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php. Information taken from December 21, 1996.

This idea of centering communities on specific topics may have come from Usenet. In Usenet, the domain alt.rec.kites refers to a specific topic (kites) within a category (recreation) within a larger community (alternative topics). This hierarchical model allowed users to organize themselves across the vastness of the Internet, even on a large site like GeoCities. The difference with GeoCities was that it allowed users to do much more than post only text (the limitation of Usenet), while constraining them to a relatively small pool of resources. Although each GeoCities user had only a few megabytes of web space, standardized pictures—like mailbox icons and back buttons—were hosted on GeoCities’s main server. GeoCities was such a large part of the Internet, and these standard icons were so ubiquitous, that they have now become a veritable part of the Internet’s cultural history. The Web Elements category of the site Internet Archaeology is a good example of how pervasive GeoCities graphics became.Internet Archaeology, 2010, http://www.internetarchaeology.org/swebelements.htm.

GeoCities built its business on a freemium model, where basic services are free but subscribers pay extra for things like commercial pages or shopping carts. Other Internet businesses, like Skype and Flickr, use the same model to keep a vast user base while still profiting from frequent users. Since loss of online advertising revenue was seen as one of the main causes of the dot-com crash, many current web startups are turning toward this freemium model to diversify their income streams.Claire Cain Miller, “Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet,” New York Times, May 24, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/start-ups/25startup.html.

GeoCities’s model was so successful that the company Yahoo! bought it for $3.6 billion at its peak in 1999. At the time, GeoCities was the third-most-visited site on the web (behind Yahoo! and AOL), so it seemed like a sure bet. A decade later, on October 26, 2009, Yahoo! closed GeoCities for good in every country except Japan.

Diversification of revenue has become one of the most crucial elements of Internet businesses; from the Wall Street Journal online to YouTube, almost every website is now looking for multiple income streams to support its services.

Going Viral

In 2009, Susan Boyle, an unemployed middle-aged Scottish woman, appeared on Britain’s Got Talent and sang “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical Les Misérables, becoming an international star almost overnight. It was not her performance itself that catapulted her to fame and sent her subsequently released album to the top of the UK Billboard charts and kept it there for 6 weeks. What did it was a YouTube video of her performance, viewed by 87,000,000 people and counting.BritainsSoTalented, “Susan Boyle - Singer - Britains Got Talent 2009,” 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY.

Media that is spread from person to person when, for example, a friend sends you a link saying “You’ve got to see this!” is said to have “gone viralWhen a video, news story, or photo is emailed or sent from person to person, without any direction from a mainstream source..” Marketing and advertising agencies have deemed advertising that makes use of this phenomenon as “viral marketingAn attempt by marketers to produce things that “go viral” in order to build hype for a product..” Yet many YouTube sensations have not come from large marketing firms. For instance, the four-piece pop-punk band OK Go filmed a music video on a tiny budget for their song “Here It Goes Again” and released it exclusively on YouTube in 2006. Featuring a choreographed dance done on eight separate treadmills, the video quickly became a viral sensation and, as of May 2011, has over 7,265,825 views. The video helped OK Go attract millions of new fans and earned them a Grammy award in 2007, making it one of the most notable successes of viral Internet marketing. Viral marketing is, however, notoriously unpredictable and is liable to spawn remixes, spin-offs, and spoofs that can dilute or damage the messages that marketers intend to spread. Yet, when it is successful, viral marketing can reach millions of people for very little money and can even make it into the mainstream news.

Recent successes and failures in viral marketing demonstrate how difficult it is for marketers to control their message as it is unleashed virally. In 2007, the band Radiohead released their album In Rainbows online, allowing fans to download it for any amount of money they chose—including for free. Despite practically giving the album away, the digital release of In Rainbows still pulled in more money than Radiohead’s previous album, Hail to the Thief, while the band simultaneously sold a huge number of $80 collector editions and still sold physical CDs months after the digital release became available.New Musical Express, “Radiohead Reveal How Successful ‘In Rainbows’ Download Really Was,” October 15, 2008, http://www.nme.com/news/radiohead/40444. In contrast, the food giant Healthy Choice enlisted Classymommy.com blogger Colleen Padilla to write a sponsored review of its product, leading to a featured New York Times article on the blogger (not the product), which gave the product only a passing mention.Pradnya Joshi, “Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor,” New York Times, July 12, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/technology/internet/13blog.html. Often, a successfully marketed product will reach some people through the Internet and then break through into the mainstream media. Yet as the article about Padilla shows, sometimes the person writing about the product overshadows the product itself.

Not all viral media is marketing, however. In 2007, someone posted a link to a new trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV on the video games message board of the web forum 4chan.org. When users followed the link, they were greeted not with a video game trailer but with Rick Astley singing his 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” This technique—redirecting someone to that particular music video—became known as Rickrolling and quickly became one of the most well-known Internet memesAny catchphrase, video, or piece of media that becomes a cultural symbol on the Internet. of all time.Fox News, “The Biggest Little Internet Hoax on Wheels Hits Mainstream,” April 22, 2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352010,00.html. An Internet meme is a concept that quickly replicates itself throughout the Internet, and it is often nonsensical and absurd. Another meme, “Lolcats,” consists of misspelled captions—“I can has cheezburger?” is a classic example—over pictures of cats. Often, these memes take on a metatextual quality, such as the meme “Milhouse is not a meme,” in which the character Milhouse (from the television show The Simpsons) is told that he is not a meme. Chronicling memes is notoriously difficult, because they typically spring into existence seemingly overnight, propagate rapidly, and disappear before ever making it onto the radar of mainstream media—or even the mainstream Internet user.

Privacy Issues With Social Networking

Social networking provides unprecedented ways to keep in touch with friends, but that ability can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Users can update friends with every latest achievement—“[your name here] just won three straight games of solitaire!”—but may also unwittingly be updating bosses and others from whom particular bits of information should be hidden.

The shrinking of privacy online has been rapidly exacerbated by social networks, and for a surprising reason: conscious decisions made by participants. Putting personal information online—even if it is set to be viewed by only select friends—has become fairly standard. Dr. Kieron O’Hara studies privacy in social media and calls this era “intimacy 2.0,”Zoe Kleinman, “How Online Life Distorts Privacy Rights for All,” BBC News, January 8, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8446649.stm. a riff on the buzzword “Web 2.0.” One of O’Hara’s arguments is that legal issues of privacy are based on what is called a “reasonable standard.” According to O’Hara, the excessive sharing of personal information on the Internet by some constitutes an offense to the privacy of all, because it lowers the “reasonable standard” that can be legally enforced. In other words, as cultural tendencies toward privacy degrade on the Internet, it affects not only the privacy of those who choose to share their information, but also the privacy of those who do not.

Internet-Only Sources

The threshold was crossed in 2008: The Internet overtook print media as a primary source of information for national and international news in the United States. Television is still far in the lead, but especially among younger demographics, the Internet is quickly catching up as a way to learn about the day’s news. With 40 percent of the public receiving their news from the Internet (see ),Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet,” December 23, 2008, http://people-press.org/report/479/internet-overtakes-newspapers-as-news-source. media outlets have been scrambling to set up large presences on the web. Yet one of the most remarkable shifts has been in the establishment of online-only news sources.

The conventional argument claims that the anonymity and the echo chamber of the Internet undermine worthwhile news reporting, especially for topics that are expensive to report on. The ability of large news organizations to put reporters in the field is one of their most important contributions and (because of its cost) is often one of the first things to be cut back during times of budget problems. However, as the Internet has become a primary news source for more and more people, new media outlets—publications existing entirely online—have begun to appear.

In 2006, two reporters for the Washington Post, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, left the newspaper to start a politically centered website called Politico. Rather than simply repeating the day’s news in a blog, they were determined to start a journalistically viable news organization on the web. Four years later, the site has over 6,000,000 unique monthly visitors and about a hundred staff members, and there is now a Politico reporter on almost every White House trip.Michael Wolff, “Politico’s Washington Coup,” Vanity Fair, August 2009, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/wolff200908.

Far from being a collection of amateurs trying to make it big on the Internet, Politico’s senior White House correspondent is Mike Allen, who previously wrote for The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time. His daily Playbook column appears at around 7 a.m. each morning and is read by much of the politically centered media. The different ways that Politico reaches out to its supporters—blogs, Twitter feeds, regular news articles, and now even a print edition—show how media convergence has even occurred within the Internet itself. The interactive nature of its services and the active comment boards on the site also show how the media have become a two-way street: more of a public forum than a straight news service.

“Live” From New York …

Top-notch political content is not the only medium moving to the Internet, however. Saturday Night Live (SNL) has built an entire entertainment model around its broadcast time slot. Every weekend, around 11:40 p.m. on Saturday, someone interrupts a skit, turns toward the camera, shouts “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” and the band starts playing. Yet the show’s sketch comedy style also seems to lend itself to the watch-anytime convenience of the Internet. In fact, the online television service Hulu carries a full eight episodes of SNL at any given time, with regular 3.5-minute commercial breaks replaced by Hulu-specific minute-long advertisements. The time listed for an SNL episode on Hulu is just over an hour—a full half-hour less than the time it takes to watch it live on Saturday night.

Hulu calls its product “online premium video,” primarily because of its desire to attract not the YouTube amateur but rather a partnership of large media organizations. Although many networks, like NBC and Comedy Central, stream video on their websites, Hulu builds its business by offering a legal way to see all these shows on the same site; a user can switch from South Park to SNL with a single click, rather than having to move to a different website.

Premium Online Video Content

Hulu’s success points to a high demand among Internet users for a wide variety of content collected and packaged in one easy-to-use interface. Hulu was rated the Website of the Year by the Associated PressJake Coyle, “On the Net: Hulu Is Web Site of the Year,” Seattle Times, December 19, 2008, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2008539776_aponthenetsiteoftheyear.html. and even received an Emmy nomination for a commercial featuring Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey, the stars of the NBC comedy 30 Rock.Dan Neil, “‘30 Rock’ Gets a Wink and a Nod From Two Emmy-Nominated Spots,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jul/21/business/fi-ct-neil21. Hulu’s success has not been the product of the usual dot-com underdog startup, however. Its two parent companies, News Corporation and NBC Universal, are two of the world’s media giants. In many ways, this was a logical step for these companies to take after fighting online video for so long. In December 2005, the video “Lazy Sunday,” an SNL digital short featuring Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, went viral with over 5,000,000 views on YouTube before February 2006, when NBC demanded that YouTube take down the video.John Biggs, “A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It,” New York Times, February 20, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/business/media/20youtube.html. NBC later posted the video on Hulu, where it could sell advertising for it.

Hulu allows users to break out of programming models controlled by broadcast and cable television providers and choose freely what shows to watch and when to watch them. This seems to work especially well for cult programs that are no longer available on television. In 2008, the show Arrested Development, which was canceled in 2006 after repeated time slot shifts, was Hulu’s second-most-popular program.

Hulu certainly seems to have leveled the playing field for some shows that have had difficulty finding an audience through traditional means. 30 Rock, much like Arrested Development, suffered from a lack of viewers in its early years. In 2008, New York Magazine described the show as a “fragile suckling that critics coddle but that America never quite warms up to.”Adam Sternbergh, “‘The Office’ vs. ‘30 Rock’: Comedy Goes Back to Work,” New York Magazine, April 10, 2008, http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/04/the_office_vs_30_rock_comedy_g.html. However, even as 30 Rock shifted time slots mid-season, its viewer base continued to grow through the NBC partner of Hulu. The nontraditional media approach of NBC’s programming culminated in October 2008, when NBC decided to launch the new season of 30 Rock on Hulu a full week before it was broadcast over the airwaves.Jenna Wortham, “Hulu Airs Season Premiere of 30 Rock a Week Early,” Wired, October 23, 2008, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2008/10/hulu-airs-seaso/. Hulu’s strategy of providing premium online content seems to have paid off: As of March 2011, Hulu provided 143,673,000 viewing sessions to more than 27 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen.“ComScore release March 2011 US Online Video Rankings,” April 12, 2011, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/comScore_Releases_March_2011_U.S._Online_Video_Rankings.

Unlike other “premium” services, Hulu does not charge for its content; rather, the word premium in its slogan seems to imply that it could charge for content if it wanted to. Other platforms, like Sony’s PlayStation 3, block Hulu for this very reason—Sony’s online store sells the products that Hulu gives away for free. However, Hulu has been considering moving to a paid subscription model that would allow users to access its entire back catalog of shows. Like many other fledgling web enterprises, Hulu seeks to create reliable revenue streams to avoid the fate of many of the companies that folded during the dot-com crash.Greg Sandoval, “More Signs Hulu Subscription Service Is Coming,” CNET, October 22, 2009, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10381622-261.html.

Like Politico, Hulu has packaged professionally produced content into an on-demand web service that can be used without the normal constraints of traditional media. Just as users can comment on Politico articles (and now, on most newspapers’ articles), they can rate Hulu videos, and Hulu will take this into account. Even when users do not produce the content themselves, they still want this same “two-way street” service.

The “Internet Paradox” and Facebook

As they developed, it became quickly apparent that the Internet generation did not suffer from perpetual loneliness as a rule. After all, the generation that was raised on instant messaging invented Facebook and still makes up most of Facebook’s audience. As detailed earlier in the chapter, Facebook began as a service limited to college students—a requirement that practically excluded older participants. As a social tool and as a reflection of the way younger people now connect with each other over the Internet, Facebook has provided a comprehensive model for the Internet’s effect on social skills and especially on education.

A study by the Michigan State University Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media has shown that college-age Facebook users connect with offline friends twice as often as they connect with purely online “friends.”Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe, “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14, no. 4 (2007). In fact, 90 percent of the participants in the study reported that high school friends, classmates, and other friends were the top three groups that their Facebook profiles were directed toward.

In 2007, when this study took place, one of Facebook’s most remarkable tools for studying the ways that young people connect was its “networks” feature. Originally, a Facebook user’s network consisted of all the people at his or her college email domain: the “mycollege” portion of “me@mycollege.edu.” The MSU study, performed in April 2006, just 6 months after Facebook opened its doors to high school students, found that first-year students met new people on Facebook 36 percent more often than seniors did. These freshmen, in April 2006, were not as active on Facebook as high schoolers (Facebook began allowing high schoolers on its site during these students’ first semester in school).Ellen Rosen, “THE INTERNET; Facebook.com Goes to High School,” New York Times, October 16, 2005, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05EEDA173FF935A25753C1A9639C8B63&scp=5&sq=facebook &st=nyt. The study concluded that they could “definitively state that there is a positive relationship between certain kinds of Facebook use and the maintenance and creation of social capital.”Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe, “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14, no. 4 (2007). In other words, even though the study cannot show whether Facebook use causes or results from social connections, it can say that Facebook plays both an important and a nondestructive role in the forming of social bonds.

Although this study provides a complete and balanced picture of the role that Facebook played for college students in early 2006, there have been many changes in Facebook’s design and in its popularity. In 2006, many of a user’s “friends” were from the same college, and the whole college network might be mapped as a “friend-of-a-friend” web. If users allowed all people within a single network access to their profiles, it would create a voluntary school-wide directory of students. Since a university email address was required for signup, there was a certain level of trust. The results of this Facebook study, still relatively current in terms of showing the Internet’s effects on social capital, show that not only do social networking tools not lead to more isolation, but that they actually have become integral to some types of networking.

However, as Facebook began to grow and as high school and regional networks (such as “New York City” or “Ireland”) were incorporated, users’ networks of friends grew exponentially, and the networking feature became increasingly unwieldy for privacy purposes. In 2009, Facebook discontinued regional networks over concerns that networks consisting of millions of people were “no longer the best way for you to control your privacy.”Mark Zuckerberg, “An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg,” Facebook, December 1, 2009, http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=190423927130. Where privacy controls once consisted of allowing everyone at one’s college access to specific information, Facebook now allows only three levels: friends, friends of friends, and everyone.

Meetup.com: Meeting Up “IRL”

Of course, not everyone on teenagers’ online friends lists are actually their friends outside of the virtual world. In the parlance of the early days of the Internet, meeting up “IRL” (shorthand for “in real life”) was one of the main reasons that many people got online. This practice was often looked at with suspicion by those not familiar with it, especially because of the anonymity of the Internet. The fear among many was that children would go into chat rooms and agree to meet up in person with a total stranger, and that stranger would turn out to have less-than-friendly motives. This fear led to law enforcement officers posing as underage girls in chat rooms, agreeing to meet for sex with older men (after the men brought up the topic—the other way around could be considered entrapment), and then arresting the men at the agreed-upon meeting spot.

In recent years, however, the Internet has become a hub of activity for all sorts of people. In 2002, Scott Heiferman started Meetup.com based on the “simple idea of using the Internet to get people off the Internet.”Scott Heiferman, “The Pursuit of Community,” New York Times, September 5, 2009, csehttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/jobs/06boss.html. The entire purpose of Meetup.com is not to foster global interaction and collaboration (as is the purpose of something like Usenet) but rather to allow people to organize locally. There are Meetups for politics (popular during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign), for New Yorkers who own Boston terriers,Amanda M. Fairbanks, “Funny Thing Happened at the Dog Run,” New York Times, August 23, 2008, csehttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/nyregion/24meetup.html. for vegan cooking, for board games, and for practically everything else. Essentially, the service (which charges a small fee to Meetup organizers) separates itself from other social networking sites by encouraging real-life interaction. Whereas a member of a Facebook group may never see or interact with fellow members, Meetup.com actually keeps track of the (self-reported) real-life activity of its groups—ideally, groups with more activity are more desirable to join. However much time these groups spend together on or off the Internet, one group of people undoubtedly has the upper hand when it comes to online interaction: World of Warcraft players.

Social Interaction on the Internet Among Low-Income Groups

In 2006, the journal Developmental Psychology published a study looking at the educational benefits of the Internet for teenagers in low-income households. It found that “children who used the Internet more had higher grade point averages (GPA) after one year and higher scores after standardized tests of reading achievement after six months than did children who used it less” and that continuing to use the Internet more as the study went on led to an even greater increase in GPA and standardized test scores in reading (there was no change in mathematics test scores).Linda A. Jackson and others, “Does Home Internet Use Influence the Academic Performance of Low-Income Children?” Developmental Psychology 42, no. 3 (2006): 433–434.

One of the most interesting aspects of the study’s results is the suggestion that the academic benefits may exclude low-performing children in low-income households. The reason for this, the study suggests, is that children in low-income households likely have a social circle consisting of other children from low-income households who are also unlikely to be connected to the Internet. As a result, after 16 months of Internet usage, only 16 percent of the participants were using email and only 25 percent were using instant messaging services. Another reason researchers suggested was that because “African-American culture is historically an ‘oral culture,’” and 83 percent of the participants were African American, the “impersonal nature of the Internet’s typical communication tools” may have led participants to continue to prefer face-to-face contact. In other words, social interaction on the Internet can only happen if your friends are also on the Internet.

Rural Areas and Access to Information

One of the founding principles of many public library systems is to allow for free and open access to information. Historically, one of the major roadblocks to achieving this goal has been a simple one: location. Those living in rural areas or those with limited access to transportation simply could not get to a library. But with the spread of the Internet, the hope was that a global library would be created—an essential prospect for rural areas.

One of the most remarkable educational success stories in the Department of Education’s study is that of the Chugach School District in Alaska. In 1994, this district was the lowest performing in the state: over 50 percent staff turnover, the lowest standardized test scores, and only one student in 26 years graduating from college.U.S. Department of Education, Toward a New Golden Age in American Education: How the Internet, the Law and Today’s Students Are Revolutionizing Expectations, National Education Technology Plan, 2004, http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/site/theplan/edlite-intro.html. The school board instituted drastic measures, amounting to a complete overhaul of the system. They abolished grade levels, focusing instead on achievement, and by 2001 had increased Internet usage from 5 percent to 93 percent.

The Department of Education study emphasizes these numbers, and with good reason: The standardized test percentile scores rose from the 1920s to the 1970s in a period of 4 years, in both math and language arts. Yet these advances were not exclusive to low-performing rural students. In Florida, the Florida Virtual School system allowed rural school districts to offer advanced-placement coursework. Students excelling in rural areas could now study topics that were previously limited to districts that could fill (and fund) an entire classroom. Just as the Interstate Highway System commercially connected the most remote rural communities to large cities, the Internet has brought rural areas even further into the global world, especially in regard to the sharing of information and knowledge.

The Cloud: Instant Updates, Instant Access

As technology has improved, it has become possible to provide software to users as a service that resides entirely online, rather than on a person’s personal computer. Since people can now be connected to the Internet constantly, they can use online programs to do all of their computing. It is no longer absolutely necessary to have, for example, a program like Microsoft Word to compose documents; this can be done through an online service like Google Docs or Zoho Writer.

“Cloud computingRunning a program on a remote server via a web browser. In cloud computing, the computer viewing the program is not actually doing the processing, but is rather just communicating with a remote server to send and receive information; the local computer is essentially only a display.” is the process of outsourcing common computing tasks to a remote server. The actual work is not done by the computer attached to the user’s monitor, but by other (maybe many other) computers in the “cloud.” As a result, the computer itself does not actually need that much processing power; instead of calculating “1 + 1 = 2,” the user’s computer asks the cloud, “What does 1 + 1 equal?” and receives the answer. Meanwhile, the system resources that a computer would normally devote to completing these tasks are freed up to be used for other things. An additional advantage of cloud computing is that data can be stored in the cloud and retrieved from any computer, making a user’s files more conveniently portable and less vulnerable to hardware failures like a hard drive crash. Of course, it can require quite a bit of bandwidthEquivalent to the number of lanes on a highway: the maximum amount of data that can be sent per second. to send these messages back and forth to a remote server in the cloud, and in the absence of a reliable, always-on Internet connection, the usefulness of these services can be somewhat limited.

The concept of the cloud takes into account all the applications that are hosted on external machines and viewed on a user’s computer. Google Docs, which provides word processors, spreadsheets, and other tools, and Microsoft’s Hotmail, which provides email access, both constitute aspects of the “cloud.” These services are becoming even more popular with the onset of mobile applications and netbooks, which are small laptops with relatively little processing power and storage space that rely on cloud computing. A netbook does not need the processing power required to run Microsoft Word; as long as it has a web browser, it can run the Google Docs word processor and leave (almost) all of the processing to the cloud. Because of this evolution of the Internet, computers can be built less like stand-alone machines and more like interfaces for interacting with the larger system in the cloud.

One result of cloud computing has been the rise in web applications for mobile devices, such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and devices that use Google’s Android operating system. 3G networksThird-generation cell phone networks capable of high-speed transfer of both voice and data., which are cell phone networks capable of high-speed data transfer, can augment the computing power of phones just by giving the phones the ability to send data somewhere else to be processed. For example, a Google Maps application does not actually calculate the shortest route between two places (taking into account how highways are quicker than side roads, and numerous other computational difficulties) but rather just asks Google to do the calculation and send over the result. 3G networks have made this possible in large part because the speed of data transfer has now surpassed the speed of cell phones’ calculation abilities. As cellular transmission technology continues to improve with the rollout of the next-generation 4G networksFourth-generation cell phone networks that improve on the connectivity speeds of 3G networks and provide more comprehensive access to multimedia. (the successors to 3G networks), connectivity speeds will further increase and allow for a focus on ever-more-comprehensive provisions for multimedia.

Just Trust Me: Bias on the Web

One noticeable thing on Paul Krugman’s site is that all of his book reviews are positive. Although these are probably real reviews, they may not be representative of his critical reception at large. Mainstream journalistic sources usually attempt to achieve some sort of balance in their reporting; given reasonable access, they will interview opposing viewpoints and reserve judgment for the editorial page. Corporate sources, like on Krugman’s site, will instead tilt the information toward their product.

Often, the web is viewed as a source of entertainment, even in its informational capacity. Because of this, sites that rely on advertising may choose to publish something more inflammatory that will be linked to and forwarded more for its entertainment value than for its informational qualities.

On the other hand, a website might attempt to present itself as a credible source of information about a particular product or topic, with the end goal of selling something. A website that gives advice on how to protect against bedbugs that includes a direct link to its product may not be the best source of information on the topic. While so much on the web is free, it is worthwhile looking into how websites actually maintain their services. If a website is giving something away for free, the information might be biased, because it must be getting its money from somewhere. The online archive of Consumer Reports requires a subscription to access it. Ostensibly, this subscription revenue allows the service to exist as an impartial judge, serving the users rather than the advertisers.

Occasionally, corporations may set up “credible” fronts to disseminate information. Because sources may look reliable, it is always important to investigate further. Global warming is a contentious topic, and websites about the issue often represent the bias of their owners. For example, the Cato Institute publishes anti-global-warming theory columns in many newspapers, including well-respected ones such as the Washington Times. Patrick Basham, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, published the article “Live Earth’s Inconvenient Truths” in the Washington Times on July 11, 2007. Basham writes, “Using normal scientific standards, there is no proof we are causing the Earth to warm, let alone that such warming will cause an environmental catastrophe.”Patrick Basham, “Live Earth’s Inconvenient Truths,” Cato Institute, July 11, 2007, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8497.

However, the website ExxposeExxon.com states that the Cato Institute received $125,000 from the oil giant ExxonMobil, possibly tainting its data with bias.Exxpose Exxon, “Global Warming Deniers and ExxonMobil,” 2006, http://www.exxposeexxon.com/facts/gwdeniers.html. In addition, ExxposeExxon.com is run as a side project of the international environmental nonprofit Greenpeace, which may have its own reasons for producing this particular report. The document available on Greenpeace’s site (a scanned version of Exxon’s printout) states that in 2006, the corporation gave $20,000 to the Cato InstituteGreenpeace, ExxonMobil 2006 Contributions and Community Investments, October 5, 2007, http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=view&d=4381. (the other $105,000 was given over the previous decade).

This back-and-forth highlights the difficulty of finding credible information online, especially when money is at stake. In addition, it shows how conflicting sources may go to great lengths—sorting through a company’s corporate financial reports—in order to expose what they see as falsehoods. What is the upside to all of this required fact-checking and cross-examination? Before the Internet, this probably would have required multiple telephone calls and plenty of time waiting on hold. While the Internet has made false information more widely available, it has also made checking that information incredibly easy.

Hacking email: From LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU to Google in China

Another explosive scandal involving email account hacking also occurred in late 2009, when Google’s Gmail service was hacked by IP addresses originating in China. Gmail was one of the primary services used by human rights activists due to its location in the United States and its extra encryption. To understand the magnitude of this, it is important to understand the history of email hacking and the importance of physical server location and local laws.

In 2000, a computer virusA program that spreads itself from computer to computer, often with adverse effects. was unleashed by a student in the Philippines that simply sent a message with the subject line “I Love You.” The email had a file attached, called LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs. The suffix “.txt” is generally used for text files and was meant, in this case, as a distraction; the file’s real suffix was “.vbs,” which means that the file is a script. When run, this script ran and emailed itself across the user’s entire address book, before sending any available passwords to an email address in the Philippines. One of the key aspects of this case, however, was a matter of simple jurisdiction: the student was not prosecuted, due to the lack of computer crime laws in the Philippines.Kim Zetter, “Nov. 10, 1983: Computer ‘Virus’ Is Born,” Wired, November 10, 2009, http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/11/1110fred-cohen-first-computer-virus/.

The encryption that Gmail uses resulted in only two of the accounts being successfully hacked, and hackers were only able to see email subject lines and timestamps—no message content was available.Kim Zetter, “Google to Stop Censoring Search Results in China After Hack Attack,” Wired, January 12, 2010, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/google-censorship-china/. Since the chaos that ensued after the “I Love You” virus, email users and service providers have become more vigilant in their defensive techniques. However, the increased reliance on email for daily communication makes it an attractive target for hackers. The development of cloud computing will likely lead to entirely new problems with Internet security; just as a highway brings two communities together, it can also cause these communities to share problems.

Can’t Wait: Denial of Service

Although many people increasingly rely on the Internet for communication and access to information, this reliance has come with a hefty price. Most critically, a simple exploit can cause massive roadblocks to Internet traffic, leading to disruptions in commerce, communication, and, as the military continues to rely on the Internet, national security.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks work like cloud computing, but in reverse. Instead of a single computer going out to retrieve data from many different sources, DDoS is a coordinated effort by many different computers to bring down (or overwhelm) a specific website. Essentially, any web server can only handle a certain amount of information at once. While the largest and most stable web servers can talk to a huge number of computers simultaneously, even these can be overwhelmed.

During a DDoS attack on government servers belonging to both the United States and South Korea in July 2009, many U.S. government sites were rendered unavailable to users in Asia for a short time.Siobhan Gorman and Evan Ramstad, “Cyber Blitz Hits U.S., Korea,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701806176209691.html. Although this did not have a major effect on U.S. cyber-security, the ease with which these servers could be exploited was troubling. In this case, the DDoS attacks were perpetuated by an email virus known as MyDoom, which essentially turned users’ computers into server-attacking “zombies.” This exploit—coupling an email scam with a larger attack—is difficult to trace, partly because the culprit is likely not one of the original attackers, but rather the victim of a virus used to turn vulnerable computers into an automated hacker army. Since the attack, President Barack Obama has committed to creating a new post for a head of cyber-security in the government.

Net Neutrality Legislation: The FCC and AT&T

One of the key roadblocks to Internet legislation is the difficulty of describing the Internet and the Internet’s place among communication bills of the past. First of all, it is important to realize that legislation relating to the impartiality of service providers is not unheard-of. Before the 1960s, AT&T was allowed to restrict its customers to using only its own telephones on its networks. In the 1960s, the FCC launched a series of “Computer Inquiries,” stating, in effect, that any customer could use any device on the network, as long as it did not actually harm the network. This led to inventions such as the fax machine, which would not have been possible under AT&T’s previous agreement.

A key point today is that these proto–net neutrality rules protected innovation even when they “threatened to be a substitute for regulated services.”Robert Cannon, “The Legacy of the Federal Communications Commission’s Computer Inquiries,” Federal Communication Law Journal 55, no. 2 (2003): 170. This is directly relevant to a controversy involving Apple’s iPhone that culminated in October 2009 when AT&T agreed to allow VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) on its 3G data networks. VoIP services, like the program Skype, allow a user to place a telephone call from an Internet data line to a traditional telephone line. In the case of the iPhone, AT&T did not actually block the transmission of data—it just had Apple block the app from its App Store. Since AT&T runs the phone service as well as the data lines, and since many users have plans with unlimited data connections, AT&T could see its phone profits cut drastically if all its users suddenly switched to using Skype to place all their telephone calls.

Misleading Metaphors: It’s Not a Big Truck

Senator Ted Stevens, the former head of the committee in charge of regulating the Internet, said on the floor of the Senate that the Internet is “not a big truck … it’s a series of tubes.”Alex Curtis, “Senator Stevens Speaks on Net Neutrality,” Public Knowledge, June 28, 2006, http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/497. According to this metaphor, an email can get “stuck in the tubes” for days behind someone else’s material, leading to poorer service for the customer. In reality, service providers sell data-usage plans that only set a cap on the amount of data that someone can send over the Internet (measured in bits per secondThe most common measure of Internet bandwidth. Bit is a computing term meaning a one or a zero., where a bit is the smallest measurement of data). If a service is rated at 1.5 million bits per second (megabits per second, or 1.5 Mbps), it may only reach this once in a while—no one can “clog the tubes” without paying massive amounts of money for the service. Theoretically, the company will then invest this service fee in building more robust “tubes.”

Net neutrality is difficult to legislate in part because it can be confusing: It relies on understanding how the Internet works and how communications are regulated. Stevens’s metaphor is misleading because it assumes that Internet capacity is not already regulated in some natural way. To use the superhighway analogy, Stevens is suggesting that the highways are congested, and his solution is to allow companies to dedicate express lanes for high-paying customers (it should be noted that the revenue would go to the service providers, even though the government has chipped in quite a bit for information superhighway construction). The danger of this is that it would be very difficult for a small business or personal site to afford express-lane access. Worse yet, the pro–net neutrality organization Save the Internet says that a lack of legislation would allow companies to “discriminate in favor of their own search engines” and “leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.”Save the Internet, “FAQs,” 2010, http://www.savetheinternet.com/faq. For areas that only have access to one Internet service, this would amount to a lack of access to all the available content.

Ancient and Medieval Advertising

In 79 CE, the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius destroyed and, ultimately, preserved the ancient city of Pompeii. Historians have used the city’s archaeological evidence to piece together many aspects of ancient life. Pompeii’s ruins reveal a world in which the fundamental tenets of commerce and advertising were already in place. Merchants offered different brands of fish sauces identified by various names such as “Scaurus’ tunny jelly.” Wines were branded as well, and their manufacturers sought to position them by making claims about their prestige and quality. Toys and other merchandise found in the city bear the names of famous athletes, providing, perhaps, the first example of endorsement techniques.John Hood, Selling the Dream: Why Advertising Is Good Business (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 12–13.

The invention of the printing press in 1440 made it possible to print advertisements that could be put up on walls and handed out to individuals. By the 1600s, newspapers had begun to include advertisements on their pages. Advertising revenue allowed newspapers to print independently of secular or clerical authority, eventually achieving daily circulation. By the end of the 16th century, most newspapers contained at least some advertisements.William M. O’Barr, “A Brief History of Advertising in America,” Advertising & Society Review 6, no. 3 (2005), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v006/6.3unit02.html.

Selling the New World

European colonization of the Americas during the 1600s brought about one of the first large-scale advertising campaigns. When European trading companies realized that the Americas held economic potential as a source of natural resources such as timber, fur, and tobacco, they attempted to convince others to cross the Atlantic Ocean and work to harvest this bounty. The advertisements for this venture described a paradise without beggars and with plenty of land for those who made the trip. The advertisements convinced many poor Europeans to become indentured servants to pay for the voyage.Christina B. Mierau, Accept No Substitutes: The History of American Advertising (Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2000), 7–8.

The Rise of Brand Names

Another ubiquitous aspect of advertising developed around this time: brands. During most of the 19th century, consumers purchased goods in bulk, weighing out scoops of flour or sugar from large store barrels and paying for them by the pound. Innovations in industrial packaging allowed companies to mass produce bags, tins, and cartons with brand names on them. Although brands existed before this time, they were generally reserved for goods that were inherently recognizable, such as china or furniture. Advertising a particular kind of honey or flour made it possible for customers to ask for that product by name, giving it an edge over the unnamed competition.Christina B. Mierau, Accept No Substitutes: The History of American Advertising (Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2000), 42.

The rise of department stores during the late 1800s also gave brands a push. Nationwide outlets such as Sears, Roebuck & Company and Montgomery Ward sold many of the same items to consumers all over the country. A particular item spotted in a big-city storefront could come to a small-town shopper’s home thanks to mail-order catalogs. Customers made associations with the stores, trusting them to have a particular kind of item and to provide quality wares. Essentially, consumers came to trust the store’s name rather than its specific products.John Hood, Selling the Dream: Why Advertising Is Good Business (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 28–51.

Advertising Makes Itself Useful

World War I fueled an advertising and propoganda boom. Corporations that had switched to manufacturing wartime goods wanted to stay in the public eye by advertising their patriotism. Equally, the government needed to encourage public support for the war, employing such techniques as the famous Uncle Sam recruiting poster. President Woodrow Wilson established the advertiser-run Committee on Public Information to make movies and posters, write speeches, and generally sell the war to the public. Advertising helped popularize World War I on the homefront, and the war in turn gave advertising a much-needed boost in stature. The postwar return to regular manufacturing initiated the 1920s as an era of unprecedented advertising.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 74–77.

New Media

The rising film industry made celebrity testimonials, or product endorsementsSupport from a celebrity or well-known person for a particular product or service., an important aspect of advertising during the 1920s. Film stars including Clara Bow and Joan Crawford endorsed products such as Lux toilet soap. In these early days of mass-media consumer culture, film actors and actresses gave the public figures to emulate as they began participating in popular culture.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 89.

As discussed in , radio became an accepted commercial medium during the 1920s. Although many initially thought radio was too intrusive a medium to allow advertising, as it entered people’s homes by the end of the decade, advertising had become an integral aspect of programming. Advertising agencies often created their own programs that networks then distributed. As advertisers conducted surveys and researched prime time slots, radio programming changed to appeal to their target demographics. The famous Lux Radio Theater, for example, was named for and sponsored by a brand of soap. Product placement was an important part of these early radio programs. Ads for Jell-O appeared during the course of the Jack Benny Show,JackBennyShow.com, “Jell-O,” Jack Benny Show, http://jackbennyshow.com/index_090.htm. and Fibber McGee and Molly scripts often involved their sponsor’s floor wax.Read G. Burgan, “Radio Fun with Fibber McGee and Molly,” RGB Digital Audio, January 24, 1996, http://www.rgbdigitalaudio.com/OTR_Reviews/Fibber_McGee_OTRArticle.htm. The relationship between a sponsor and a show’s producers was not always harmonious; the producers of radio programs were constrained from broadcasting any content that might reflect badly on their sponsor.

The Great Depression and Backlash

Unsurprisingly, the Great Depression, with its widespread decreases in levels of income and buying power, had a negative effect on advertising. Spending on ads dropped to a mere 38 percent of its previous level. Social reformers added to revenue woes by again questioning the moral standing of the advertising profession. Books such as Through Many Windows and Our Master’s Voice portrayed advertisers as dishonest and cynical, willing to say anything to make a profit and unconcerned about their influence on society. Humorists also questioned advertising’s authority. The Depression-era magazine Ballyhoo regularly featured parodies of ads, similar to those seen later on Saturday Night Live or in The Onion. These ads mocked the claims that had been made throughout the 1920s, further reducing advertising’s public standing.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 121–124.

This advertising downturn lasted only as long as the Depression. As the United States entered World War II, advertising again returned to encourage public support and improve the image of businesses.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 168. However, there was one lasting effect of the Depression. The rising consumer movement made false and misleading advertising a major public policy issue. At the time, companies such as Fleischmann’s (which claimed its yeast could cure crooked teeth) were using advertisements to pitch misleading assertions. Only business owners’ personal morals stood in the way of such claims until 1938, when the federal government created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and gave it the authority to halt false advertising.

Postwar Television

In 1955, television outpaced all other media for advertising. television provided advertisers with unique, geographically oriented mass markets that could be targeted with regionally appropriate ads.Lawrence Samuel, Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 88–94. The 1950s saw a 75 percent increase in advertising spending, faster than any other economic indicator at the time.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 173.

Single sponsors created early television programs. These sponsors had total control over programs such as Goodyear TV Playhouse and Kraft Television Theatre. Some sponsors went as far as to manipulate various aspects of the programs. In one instance, a program run by the DeSoto car company asked a contestant to use a false name rather than his given name, Ford. The present-day network model of television advertising took hold during the 1950s as the costs of television production made sole sponsorship of a show prohibitive for most companies. Rather than having a single sponsor, the networks began producing their own shows, paying for them through ads sold to a number of different sponsors.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 210–215. Under the new model of advertising, television producers had much more creative control than they had under the sole-sponsorship model.

The quiz shows of the 1950s were the last of the single-sponsor–produced programs. In 1958, when allegations of quiz show fraud became national news, advertisers moved out of programming entirely. The quiz show scandals also added to an increasing scepticism of ads and consumer culture.William Boddy, “The Seven Dwarfs and the Money Grubbers: The Public Relations Crisis of US Television in the Late 1950s,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 110.

Advertising research during the 1950s had used scientifically driven techniques to attempt to influence consumer opinion. Although the effectiveness of this type of advertising is questionable, the idea of consumer manipulation through scientific methods became an issue for many Americans. Vance Packard’s best-selling 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders targeted this style of advertising. The Hidden Persuaders and other books like it were part of a growing critique of 1950s consumer culture. The U.S. public was becoming increasingly wary of advertising claims— not to mention increasingly weary of ads themselves. A few adventurous ad agencies used this consumer fatigue to usher in a new era of advertising and American culture.Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 41.

The Creative Revolution

Burdened by association with Nazi Germany, where the company had originated, Volkswagen took a daring risk during the 1950s. In 1959, the Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) agency initiated an ad campaign for the company that targeted skeptics of contemporary culture. Using a frank personal tone with the audience and making fun of the planned obsolescence that was the hallmark of Detroit automakers, the campaign stood apart from other advertisements of the time. It used many of the consumer icons of the 1950s, such as suburbia and game shows, in a satirical way, pitting Volkswagen against mainstream conformity and placing it strongly on the side of the consumer. By the end of the 1960s, the campaign had become an icon of American anticonformity. In fact, it was such a success that other automakers quickly emulated it. Ads for the Dodge Fever, for example, mocked corporate values and championed rebellion.Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 60–67, 159.

This era of advertising became known as the “creative revolution” for its emphasis on creativity over straight salesmanship. The creative revolution reflected the values of the growing anticonformist movement that culminated in the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. The creativity and anticonformity of 1960s advertising quickly gave way to more product-oriented conventional ads during the 1970s. Agency conglomeration, a recession, and cultural fallout were all factors in the recycling of older ad techniques. Major television networks dropped their long-standing ban on comparative advertising early in the decade, leading to a new trend in positioning ads that compared products. Advertising wars such as Coke versus Pepsi and, later, Microsoft versus Apple were products of this trend.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 324–325.

Innovations in the 1980s stemmed from a new television channel: MTV. Producers of youth-oriented products created ads featuring music and focusing on stylistic effects, mirroring the look and feel of music videos. By the end of the decade, this style had extended to more mainstream products. Campaigns for the pain reliever Nuprin featured black-and-white footage with bright yellow pills, whereas ads for Michelob used grainy atmospheric effects.New York Times, “How MTV Has Rocked Television Commercials,” October 9, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/09/business/the-media-business-how-mtv-has-rocked-television-commercials.html.

Advertising Stumbles

During the late 1980s, studies showed that consumers were trending away from brands and brand loyalty. A recession coupled with general consumer fatigue led to an increase in generic brand purchases and a decrease in advertising. In 1983, marketing budgets allocated 70 percent of their expenditures to ads and the remaining 30 percent to other forms of promotion. By 1993, only 25 percent of marketing budgets were dedicated to ads.Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), 14.

These developments resulted in the rise of big-box stores such as Walmart that focused on low prices rather than expensive name brands. Large brands remade themselves during this period to focus less on their products and more on the ideas behind the brand. Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, endorsed by basketball star Michael Jordan, gave the company a new direction and a new means of promotion. Nike representatives have stated they have become more of a “marketing-oriented company” as opposed to a product manufacturer.Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), 12–22.

As large brands became more popular, they also attracted the attention of reformers. Companies such as Starbucks and Nike bore the brunt of late 1990s sweatshop and labor protests. As these brands attempted to incorporate ideas outside of the scope of their products, they also came to represent larger global commerce forces.Margot Hornblower, “Wake Up and Smell the Protest,” Time, April 17, 2000. This type of brandingThe association of a particular brand with cultural values or lifestyles. increasingly incorporated public relations techniques that will be discussed later in this chapter.

The Rise of Digital Media

Twenty-first-century advertising has adapted to new forms of digital media. Internet outlets such as blogs, social media forums, and other online spaces have created new possibilities for advertisers, and shifts in broadcasting toward Internet formats have threatened older forms of advertising. Video games, smartphones, and other technologies also present new possibilities. Specific new media advertising techniques will be covered in the next section.

Newspapers and Magazines

Although print ads have been around for centuries, Internet growth has hit newspaper advertising hard. A 45 percent drop in ad revenue between 2007 and 2010 signaled a catastrophic decline for the newspaper industry.Bruce Sterling, “More Newspaper Calamity,” Wired, March 15, 2010, http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/03/more-newspaper-calamity/. Traditionally, newspapers have made money through commercial and classified advertising. Commercial advertisers, however, have moved to electronic media forms, and classified ad websites such as Craigslist offer greater geographic coverage for free. The future of newspaper advertising—and of the newspaper industry as a whole—is up in the air.

Print magazines have suffered from many of the same difficulties as newspapers. Declining advertising revenue has contributed to the end of popular magazines such as Gourmet and to the introduction of new magazines that cross over into other media formats, such as Food Network Magazine. Until a new, effective model is developed, the future of magazine advertising will continue to be in doubt.

Radio

Compared to newspapers and magazines, radio’s advertising revenue has done well. Radio’s easy adaptation to new forms of communication has made it an easy sell to advertisers. Unlike newspapers, radio ads target specific consumers. Advertisers can also pay to have radio personalities read their ads live in the studio, adding a sense of personal endorsement to the business or product. Because newer forms of radio such as satellite and Internet stations have continued to use this model, the industry has not had as much trouble adapting as print media have.

Television

Television advertisement relies on verbal as well as visual cues to sell items. Promotional ad time is purchased by the advertiser, and a spot usually runs 15 to 30 seconds. Longer ads, known as infomercials, run like a television show and usually aim for direct viewer response. New technologies such as DVR allow television watchers to skip through commercials; however, studies have shown that these technologies do not have a negative effect on advertising.James Gallagher, “Duke Study: TiVo Doesn’t Hurt TV Advertising,” Triangle Business Journal, May 3, 2010, 20advertisinghttp://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2010/05/03/daily6.html. This is party due to product placement. Product placement is an important aspect of television advertising, because it incorporates products into the plots of shows. Although product placement has been around since the 1890s, when the Lumière brothers first placed Lever soap in their movies, the big boom in product placement began with the reality television show Survivor in 2000.Nate Anderson, “Product placement in the DVR era,” Ars Technica (blog), March 19, 2006, http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2006/03/productplacement.ars. Since then, product placement has been a staple of prime-time entertainment. Reality television shows such as Project Runway and American Idol are known for exhibiting products on screen, and talk-show host Oprah Winfrey made news in 2004 when she gave away new Pontiacs to her audience members.Tanner Stansky, “14 Milestones in TV Product Placement,” Entertainment Weekly, July 28, 2008, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20215225,00.html. Even children’s shows are known to hock products; a new cartoon series recently began on Nickelodeon featuring characters that represent different Sketchers sneakers.Wayne Friedman, “Product Placement in Kids’ TV Programs: Stuff Your Footwear Can Slip On,” TV Watch, September 16, 2010, http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=135873.

Digital Media

Emerging digital media platforms such as the Internet and mobile phones have created many new advertising possibilities. The Internet, like television and radio, offers free services in exchange for advertising exposure. However, unlike radio or television, the Internet is a highly personalized experience that shares private information.

The Formation of the FTC

Founded in 1914, the Federal Trade Commission became responsible for regulating false advertising claims. Although federal laws concerning these practices made plaintiffs prove that actual harm was done by the advertisement, state laws passed during the early 1920s allowed prosecution of misleading advertisements regardless of harm done.John Hood, Selling the Dream: Why Advertising Is Good Business (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 74–75. The National Association of Attorneys General has helped states remain an important part of advertising regulation. In 1995, 13 states passed laws that required sweepstakes companies to provide full disclosure of rules and details of contests.Thomas O’Guinn, Chris Allen, and Richard Semenik, Advertising and Integrated Brand Promotion (Mason, OH: Cengage Learning, 2009), 133.

During the Great Depression, New Deal legislation threatened to outlaw any misleading advertising, a result of the burgeoning consumer movement and the public outcry against advertising during the period.Time, “The Press: Advertising v. New Deal,” September 1, 1941, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,850703,00.html. The reformers did not fully achieve their goals, but they did make a permanent mark on advertising history. The 1938 Wheeler-Lea Amendment expanded the FTC’s role to protect consumers from deceptive advertising. Until this point, the FTC was responsible for addressing false advertising complaints from competitors. With this legislation, the agency also became an important resource for the consumer movement.

Truth in Advertising

In 1971, the FTC began the Advertising Substantiation Program to force advertisers to provide evidence for the claims in their advertisements. Under this program, the FTC gained the power to issue cease-and-desist orders to advertisers regarding specific ads in question and to order corrective advertising. Under this provision, the FTC can force a company to issue an advertisement acknowledging and correcting an earlier misleading ad. Regulations under this program established that supposed experts used in advertisements must be qualified experts in their field, and celebrities must actually use the products they endorse.Thomas O’Guinn, Chris Allen, and Richard Semenik, Advertising and Integrated Brand Promotion (Mason, OH: Cengage Learning, 2009), 131–137. In 2006, Sunny Health Nutrition was brought to court for advertising height-enhancing pills called HeightMax. The FTC found the company had hired an actor to appear as an expert in its ads and that the pills did not live up to their claim. Sunny Health Nutrition was forced to pay $375,000 to consumers for misrepresenting its product.ConsumerAffairs.com, “Feds Slam ‘Height-Enhancing’ Pills,” November 29, 2006, http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/11/ftc_chitosan.html.

In 1992, the FTC introduced guidelines defining terms such as biodegradable and recyclable. The growth of the environmental movement in the early 1990s led to an upsurge in environmental claims by manufacturers and advertisers. For example, Mobil Oil claimed their Hefty trash bags were biodegradable. While technically this statement is true, a 500- to 1,000-year decomposition cycle does not meet most people’s definitions of the term.Juliet Lapidos, “Will My Plastic Bag Still Be Here in 2507?” Slate, June 27, 2007, http://www.slate.com/id/2169287. The FTC guidelines made such claims false by law.Keith Schneider, “Guides on Environmental Ad Claims,” New York Times, July 29, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/29/business/guides-on-environmental-ad-claims.html.

Regulation of the Internet

The FTC has also turned its attention to online advertising. The Children’s Online Privacy Act of 1998 was passed to prohibit companies from obtaining the personal information of children who access websites or other online resources. Because of the youth orientation of the Internet, newer advertising techniques have drawn increasing criticism. Alcohol companies in particular have come under scrutiny. Beer manufacturer Heineken’s online presence includes a virtual city in which users can own an apartment and use services such as email. This practice mirrors that of children’s advertising, in which companies often create virtual worlds to immerse children in their products. However, the age-verification requirements to participate in this type of environment are easily falsified and can lead to young children being exposed to more mature content.Amanda Gardner, “Alcohol Companies Use New Media to Lure Young Drinkers: Report,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 19, 2010, http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/639266.html.

Consumer and privacy advocates who are concerned over privacy intrusions by advertisers have also called for Internet ad regulation. In 2009, the FTC acted on complaints against Sears that resulted in an injunction against the company for not providing sufficient disclosure. Sears offered $10 to consumers to download a program that tracked their Internet browsing. The FTC came down on Sears because the downloaded software tracked sensitive information that was not fully disclosed to the consumer. Similar consumer complaints against Facebook and Google for their consumer tracking have, at present, not resulted in FTC actions; however, the growing outcry makes new regulation of Internet advertising likely.Mike Shields, “Pitching Self-Regulation,” Adweek, February 15, 2010.

Advertising and the Rise of Consumer Culture

George Babbitt, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt, was a true believer in the growing American consumer culture:

Just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief … so did the national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, and then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1922), 95.

Although Lewis’s fictional representation of a 1920s-era consumer may not be an actual person, it indicates the national consumer culture that was taking shape at the time. As it had always done, advertising sought to attach products to larger ideas and symbols of worth and cultural values. However, the rise of mass media and of the advertising models that these media embraced made advertising take on an increasingly influential cultural role.

Automobile ads of the 1920s portrayed cars as a new, free way of life rather than simply a means of transportation. Advertisers used new ideas about personal hygiene to sell products and ended up breaking taboos about public discussion of the body. The newly acknowledged epidemics of halitosis and body odor brought about products such as mouthwash and deodorant. A Listerine campaign of the era transformed bad breath from a nuisance into the mark of a sociopath.Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008), 245–247. Women’s underwear and menstruation went from being topics unsuitable for most family conversations to being fodder for the pages of national magazines.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 95–96.

Creating the Modern World

World War I bond campaigns had made it clear that advertising could be used to influence public beliefs and values. Advertising focused on the new—making new products and ideas seem better than older ones and ushering in a sense of the modernity. In an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in 1926, President Coolidge went as far as to hold advertisers responsible for the “regeneration and redemption of mankind.”Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 7–9.

Up through the 1960s, most advertising agencies were owned and staffed by affluent white men, and advertising’s portrayals of typical American families reflected this status quo. Mainstream culture as propagated by magazine, radio, and newspaper advertising was that of middle- or upper-class white suburban families.Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 77–79. This sanitized image of the suburban family, popularized in such TV programs as Leave It to Beaver, has been mercilessly satirized since the cultural backlash of the 1960s.

A great deal of that era’s cultural criticism targeted the image of the advertiser as a manipulator and promulgator of superficial consumerism. When advertisers for Volkswagen picked up on this criticism, turned it to their advantage, and created a new set of consumer symbols that would come to represent an age of rebellion, they neatly co-opted the arguments against advertising for their own purposes. In many instances, advertising has functioned as a codifier of its own ideals by taking new cultural values and turning them into symbols of a new phase of consumerism. This is the goal of effective advertising.

Apple’s 1984 campaign is one of the most well-known examples of defining a product in terms of new cultural trends. A fledgling company compared to computer giants IBM and Xerox, Apple spent nearly $2 million on a commercial that would end up only being aired once.Curt McAloney, “The 1984 Apple Commercial: The Making of a Legend,” Curt’s Media, http://www.curtsmedia.com/cine/1984.html. During the third quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl, viewers across the United States watched in amazement as an ad unlike any other at the time appeared on their TV screens. The commercial showed a drab gray auditorium where identical individuals sat in front of a large screen. On the screen was a man, addressing the audience with an eerily captivating voice. “We are one people, with one will,” he droned. “Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”Curt McAloney, “The 1984 Apple Commercial: The Making of a Legend,” Curt’s Media, http://www.curtsmedia.com/cine/1984.html. While the audience sat motionlessly, one woman ran forward with a sledgehammer and threw it at the screen, causing it to explode in a flash of light and smoke. As the scene faded out, a narrator announced the product. “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”Ted Friedman, “Apple’s 1984: The Introduction of the Macintosh in the Cultural History of Personal Computers,” http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/mac.htm. With this commercial, Apple defined itself as a pioneer of the new generation. Instead of marketing its products as utilitarian tools, it advertised them as devices for combating conformity.Ted Friedman, “Apple’s 1984: The Introduction of the Macintosh in the Cultural History of Personal Computers,” http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/mac.htm. Over the next few decades, other companies imitated this approach, presenting their products as symbols of cultural values.

In his study of advertising’s cultural impact, The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank compares the advertising of the 1960s with that of the early 1990s:

How [advertisers] must have rejoiced when the leading minds of the culture industry announced the discovery of an all-new angry generation, the “Twenty-Somethings,” complete with a panoply of musical styles, hairdos, and verbal signifiers ready-made to rejuvenate advertising’s sagging credibility…. The strangest aspect of what followed wasn’t the immediate onslaught of even hipper advertising, but that the entire “Generation X” discourse repeated … the discussions of youth culture that had appeared in Advertising Age, Madison Avenue, and on all those youth-market panel discussions back in the sixties.Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 233–235.

To be clear, advertisers have not set out to consciously manipulate the public in the name of consumer culture. Rather, advertisers are simply doing their job—one that has had an enormous influence on culture.

Advertising Stereotypes

The white, middle-class composition of ad agencies contributed to advertisements’ rare depictions of minority populations. DDB—the agency responsible for the Volkswagen ads of the 1960s—was an anomaly in this regard. One of its more popular ads was for Levy’s rye bread. Most conventional advertisers would have ignored the ethnic aspects of this product and simply marketed it to a mainstream white audience. Instead, the innovative agency created an ad campaign that made ethnic diversity a selling point, with spots featuring individuals from a variety of racial backgrounds eating the bread with the headline “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”

During the 1950s, stereotypical images of African Americans promulgated by advertisers began to draw criticism from civil rights leaders. Icons such as Aunt Jemima, the Cream of Wheat chef, and the Hiram Walker butler were some of the most recognizable black figures in U.S. culture. Unlike the African Americans who had gained fame through their artistry, scholarship, and athleticism, however, these advertising characters were famous for being domestic servants.

During the 1960s, meetings of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) hosted civil rights leaders, and agencies began to respond to the criticisms of bias. A New York survey in the mid-1960s discovered that blacks were underrepresented at advertising agencies. Many agencies responded by hiring new African American employees, and a number of black-owned agencies started in the 1970s.Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 278–284.

Early advertising frequently reached out to women because they made approximately 80 percent of all consumer purchases. Thus, women were well represented in advertising. However, those depictions presented women in extremely narrow roles. Through the 1960s, ads targeting women generally showed them performing domestic duties such as cooking or cleaning, whereas ads targeting men often placed women in a submissive sexual role even if the product lacked any overt sexual connotation. A National Car Rental ad from the early 1970s featured a disheveled female employee in a chair with the headline “Go Ahead, Take Advantage of Us.” Another ad from the 1970s pictured a man with new Dacron slacks standing on top of a woman, proclaiming, “It’s nice to have a girl around the house.”Mark Frauenfelder, “Creepy Slacks Ad From 1970,” Boing Boing, (blog), May 12, 2008, http://boingboing.net/2008/05/12/creepy-slacks-ad-fro.html.

An advertising profile printed in Advertising Age magazine gave a typical advertiser’s understanding of the housewife at the time:

She likes to watch TV and she does not enjoy reading a great deal. She is most easily reached through TV and the simple down-to-earth magazines…. Mental activity is arduous for her…. She is a person who wants to have things she can believe in rather than things she can think about.Jerome Rodnitzky, Feminist Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of a Feminist Counterculture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 114–115.

The National Organization for Women (NOW) created a campaign during the early 1970s targeting the role of women in advertisements. Participants complained about the ads to networks and companies and even spray-painted slogans on offensive billboards in protest.

Representation of minorities and women in advertising has improved since the 1960s and 1970s, but it still remains a problem. The 2010 Super Bowl drew one of the most diverse audiences ever recorded for the event, including a 45 percent female audience. Yet the commercials remained focused strictly on men. And of 67 ads shown during the game, only four showed minority actors in a lead role. Despite the obvious economic benefit of diversity in marketing, advertising practices have resisted change.Sam Ali, “New Study: Super Bowl Ads Created by White Men,” DiversityInc.com, May 10, 2010., http://www.diversityinc.com/article/7566/New-Study-Super-Bowl-Ads-Created-by-White-Men/.

Advertising to Children

The majority of advertisements that target children feature either toys or junk food. Children under the age of 8 typically lack the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and many advertisers use this to their advantage. Studies have shown that most children-focused food advertisenments feature high-calorie, low-nutrition foods such as sugary cereals. Although the government regulates advertising to children to a degree, the Internet has introduced new means of marketing to youth that have not been addressed. Online video games called advergamesOnline video games that feature particular products and are marketed to children. feature famous child-oriented products. The games differ from traditional advertising, however, because the children playing them will experience a much longer period of product exposure than they do from the typical 30-second television commercial. Child advocacy groups have been pushing for increased regulation of advertising to children, but it remains to be seen whether this will take place.Sandra Calvert, “Children as Consumers: Advertising and Marketing,” The Future of Children 18, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 205–211.

Traditional Publicity Model

Under the traditional publicity modelA PR model that aims to gain media attention., PR professionals seek to create media coverage for a client, product, or event. These efforts can range from wild publicity stunts to simple news conferences to celebrity interviews in fashion magazines. P. T. Barnum was an early American practitioner of this kind of PR. His outrageous attempts at publicity worked because he was not worried about receiving negative press; instead, he believed that any coverage was a valuable asset. More recent examples of this style of extreme publicity include controversy-courting musicians such as Lady Gaga and Marilyn Manson. More restrained examples of this type of PR include the modern phenomenon of faded celebrities appearing on television shows, such as Paula Abdul’s long-running appearances on American Idol.

Public Information Model

The goal of the public information modelA PR model that attempts to pass information on to the public. is to release information to a constituency. This model is less concerned with obtaining dramatic, extensive media coverage than with disseminating information in a way that ensures adequate reception. For example, utility companies often include fliers about energy efficiency with customers’ bills, and government agencies such as the IRS issue press releases to explain changes to existing codes. In addition, public interest groups release the results of research studies for use by policy makers and the public.

Persuasive Communication: Two-Way Asymmetric

The persuasive communication modelA PR model that uses persuasive techniques to elicit a particular response from the target group., or the two-way asymmetric, works to persuade a specific audience to adopt a certain behavior or point of view. To be considered effective, this model requires a measured response from its intended audience.

Government propagandaThe organized spreading of information to assist or weaken a cause. is a good example of this model. Propaganda is the organized spreading of information to assist or weaken a cause.Dictionary.com, s.v. “Propaganda,” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/propaganda. Edward Bernays has been called the founder of modern PR for his work during World War I promoting the sale of war bonds. One of the first professional PR experts, Bernays made the two-way asymmetric model his early hallmark. In a famous campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes, he convinced a group of well-known celebrities to walk in the New York Easter parade smoking Lucky Strikes. Most modern corporations employ the persuasive communication model.

Two-Way Symmetric Model

The two-way symmetric modelA PR model that seeks to achieve consensus between two groups. requires true communication between the parties involved. By facilitating a back-and-forth discussion that results in mutual understanding and an agreement that respects the wishes of both parties, this PR model is often practiced in town hall meetings and other public forums in which the public has a real effect on the results. In an ideal republic, Congressional representatives strictly employ this model. Many nonprofit groups that are run by boards and have public service mandates use this model to ensure continued public support.

Commercial ventures also rely on this model. PR can generate media attention or attract costumers, and it can also ease communication between a company and its investors, partners, and employees. The two-way symmetric model is useful in communicating within an organization because it helps employees feel they are an important part of the company. Investor relations are also often carried out under this model.

Anatomy of a PR Campaign

PR campaigns occur for any number of reasons. They can be a quick response to a crisis or emerging issue, or they can stem from a long-term strategy tied in with other marketing efforts. Regardless of its purpose, a typical campaign often involves four phases.

Diamonds for the Common Man

During the 1930s, the De Beers company had an enormous amount of diamonds and a relatively small market of luxury buyers. They launched a PR campaign to change the image of diamonds from a luxury good into an accessible and essential aspect of American life. The campaign began by giving diamonds to famous movie stars, using their built-in publicity networks to promote De Beers. The company created stories about celebrity proposals and gifts between lovers that stressed the size of the diamonds given. These stories were then given out to selected fashion magazines. The result of this campaign was the popularization of diamonds as one of the necessary aspects of a marriage proposal.Stuart Reid, “The Diamond Myth,” Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/12/the-diamond-myth/5491/.

Big Tobacco Aids Researchers

In 1953, studies showing the detrimental health effects of smoking caused a drop in cigarette sales. An alliance of tobacco manufacturers hired the PR group Hill & Knowlton to develop a campaign to deal with this problem. The first step of the campaign Hill & Knowlton devised was the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) to promote studies that questioned the health effects of tobacco use. The TIRC ran advertisements featuring the results of these studies, giving journalists who were addressing the subject an easy source to quote. The groups working against smoking were not familiar with media relations, making it harder for journalists to quote them and use their arguments.

The campaign was effective, however, not because it denied the harmful effects of smoking but because it stressed the disagreements between researchers. By providing the press with information favorable to the tobacco manufacturers and publicly promoting new filtered cigarettes, the campaign aimed to replace the idea that smoking was undeniably bad with the idea that there was disagreement over the effects of smoking. This strategy served tobacco companies well up through the 1980s.

Taco Bell Targets Mir

When the Russian space station Mir was set to crash land in the Pacific Ocean in 2001, Taco Bell created a floating vinyl target that the company placed in the Pacific. Taco Bell promised to give every American a free taco if the space station hit the target. This simple PR stunt gave all the journalists covering the Mir crash landing a few lines to add to their stories. Scientists even speculated on the chances of the station hitting the target—slim to none. Ultimately, the stunt gained Taco Bell global advertising.BBC World, “Taco Bell Cashes in on Mir,” March 20, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1231447.stm.

Branding

While advertising is an essential aspect of initial brand creation, PR campaigns are vital to developing the more abstract aspects of a brand. These campaigns work to position a brand in the public arena in order to give it a sense of cultural importance.

Political Branding

Politics has also embraced branding. Former President Bill Clinton described his political battles in terms of a brand war:

[The Republicans] were brilliant at branding. They said they were about values…. Everybody is a values voter, but they got the brand … they said they were against the death tax … what a great brand…. I did a disservice to the American people not by putting forth a bad plan, but by not being a better brander, not being able to explain it better.David Kiley, “How Will Bill Clinton Manage His Brand?” BusinessWeek, June 10, 2008, analysishttp://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2008/db2008069_046398.htm.

Branding has been used to great effect in recent elections. A consistently popular political brand is that of the outsider, or reform-minded politician. Despite his many years of service in the U.S. Senate, John McCain famously adopted this brand during the 2008 presidential election. McCain’s competitor, Barack Obama, also employed branding strategies. The Obama campaign featured several iconic portraits and slogans that made for a consistent brand and encouraged his victory in 2008. Before Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, an unprecedented amount of merchandise was sold, a further testament to the power of branding.Sheldon Alberts, “Brand Obama,” Financial Post, January 17, 2009, http://www.financialpost.com/m/story.html?id=1191405.

Print Media

Print media fall into three basic categories: books, newspapers, and magazines. The book publishing industry is basically an oligopoly; the top 10 trade publishers made up 72 percent of the total market in 2009, with the top five alone comprising 58 percent of this.Michael Hyatt, “Top Ten U.S. Book Publishers for 2009,” January 15, 2010, http://michaelhyatt.com/2010/01/top-ten-u-s-book-publishers-for-2009.html. Newspapers tend toward local monopolies and oligopolies, as there are generally few local news sources. In the past classified advertising made up a substantial portion of newspaper revenue. However, the advent of the Internet—particularly free classified services such as Craigslist—has weakened the newspaper industry through dwindling classified advertising revenues.

Television and Radio

As discussed in , large media conglomerates own nearly all television networks. Both national networks and local affiliates are typically owned by conglomerates; however, stations such as Fox-owned WNYW in New York or CBS-owned KCNC in Denver are able to mix local content with national reporting and programming, much as large newspaper companies do.

In a local market, one cable company usually dominates the cable service market. In many places, one cable company, such as Comcast—the largest of the cable companies—is the only option. Over the past several years, however, satellite companies such as Dish Network and DirecTV, which are able to reach any number of consumers with limited local infrastructure, have introduced increased, albeit limited, levels of competition.

Even as cable is expanding, radio has become heavily consolidated. Since the 1990s, massive radio networks such as Clear Channel Communications have bought up many local stations in an effort to control every radio station in a given media market. However, the FCC has designated the lower part of the FM radio band for noncommercial purposes, including nonprofit programming such as educational, religious, or public radio stations—and continues to hold public discussion on frequency allocations. These practices help retain a certain level of programming diversity in the face of increased homogenization, largely because such stations are not supported through advertising. Because they are funded by donations or nonprofit institutions, these stations benefit economically from catering to a minority of listeners who may support the station directly, rather than a larger majority that has other options for entertainment.

Music and Film

Because both the music and film industries face unique business opportunities and challenges, each operates on an economic model unlike either print or broadcast media. Just like those forms of media, however, music and film have undergone significant changes due to consolidation and technological and consumer shifts in recent years.

Internet by Google

Search-engine company Google has been working to perfect this type of targeted advertising search. Low-cost text ads may appear next to its search results, on various web pages, and in the sidebar of its free web-based email service, Gmail. More than just using algorithms to sort through massive amounts of data and matching advertising to content, Google has lowered the cost barrier to advertising, as well as the volume barrier to hosting advertising. Because Google automatically matches sites with advertisers, an independent site can sign up for its advertising service and get paid for each person who follows the text links. Likewise, relatively small companies can buy advertising space in specialized niches without having to go through a large-volume ad buyer. This business has proven extremely productive; the bulk of Google’s revenue comes from advertising even as it gives away services such as email and document sharing.

Google News

One of Google’s more controversial projects is Google News, a news aggregator that automatically collects news stories from various sources on the Internet. This service allows users to view the latest news from many different sources conveniently in one location. However, the project has been met with opposition from a number of those news sources, who contend that Google has infringed on their copyrights and cost them revenue. The Wall Street Journal has been one of the more vocal critics of Google News. In April 2009, editor Robert Thomson said that news aggregators are “best described as parasites.”Jane Schulze, “Google Dubbed Internet Parasite by WSJ Editor,” Australian (Sydney), April 6, 2009, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/google-dubbed-internet-parasite/story-e6frg996-1225696931547. In December 2009, Google responded to these complaints by allowing publishers to set a limit on the number of articles per day a reader can view for free through Google.

Music and File Sharing

The recent confrontation between Google and the traditional news media is only one of many problems resulting from digital technology. Digital technology can create exact copies of data so that one copy cannot be distinguished from the other. In other words, although a printed book might be nicer than a photocopy of that book, a digitization of the book is exactly the same as all other digitized copies and can be transmitted almost instantly. Similarly, although cassette tape copies of recorded music offered lower sound fidelity than the originals, the emergence of writable CD technology during the 1990s allowed for the creation of a copy of a digital audio CD that was identical to the original.

As data storage and transmission costs dropped, CDs no longer had to be physically copied to other CDs. With the advent of MP3 digital encoding, the music information on a CD could be compressed into a relatively small, portable format that could be transmitted easily over the Internet, and music file sharing took off. Although these recordings were not exactly the same as their CD-quality counterparts, most listeners could not tell the difference—or they just didn’t care, because they were now able to share music files conveniently and for free. The practice of transmitting music over the Internet through services such as Napster quickly ballooned.

Video Streaming

As high-bandwidth Internet connections proliferated, video-sharing and streaming sites such as YouTube started up. Although these sites were supposedly intended for users to upload and share their own amateur videos, one of the big draws of the site was the high quantity of television show episodes, music videos, and other commercial content that has been posted illegally. The replication potential inherent in digital technology combined with online transmission has caused a sea change in media industries that rely on income directly from consumers, such as books and recorded music. However, as the next section will show, the shift of media and information to the Internet can pose the risk of a digital divide, where those without Internet access are at an even greater disadvantage than they were before.

Computer Skills and Older Workers

Access to the Internet is an essential aspect of many successful job hunts, but it is also important to consider computer skills themselves. Many older adults who grew up without the Internet lack the computer and technology skills that contemporary jobs require. MSNBC reported in October 2009 that unemployment rates for older workers were at a 60-year high, having doubled in the period between late 2007 and the fall of 2009.Alex Johnson, “Lack of Computer Skills Foils Many Job-Seekers,” MSNBC, October 2, 2009, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33106445. While the overall unemployment rate at that time had reached a 26-year high, older workers who lacked the skills of younger, computer-savvy adults were suffering disproportionately. Lack of computer skills can be a crippling impediment to job success, even if a person can find a job in difficult economic times.

In response to these challenges, libraries and other nonprofit groups have taken on the task of training older unemployed workers to effectively use the Internet for job-related needs. These training courses, beginning with turning on a computer and using the mouse and ranging into advanced office program use, seek to provide skills necessary to allow older workers to reenter the work force. These organizations also aim to show users that they can increase their quality of life by setting up email for communication with friends and family members.

The Bottom Billion

One contentious issue in bridging the digital divide is which billion to focus on—of the 6.8 billion people in the world, only an estimated 1.6 billion are connected to the Internet.Central Intelligence Agency, “World,” World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html. Therefore, the discussion of bridging the digital divide is quickly complicated by this question: To whom should we build the bridge? While some organizations such as the Digital Divide Institute suggest that the global “pyramid” should focus on the next billion—countries such as Indonesia with wide cell-phone coverage but little access to useful, global digital technology. Other organizations see it differently.

Many believe that everyone in the world can benefit from technology if it is deployed properly. The organization One Laptop per Child (OLPC) seeks to achieve exactly what its name implies with a low-cost design that runs on free software and requires very little energy.One Laptop per Child Association, “One Laptop per Child (OLPC): Laptop.” http://laptop.org/en/laptop/index.shtml. Central to OLPC’s goal is the idea that learning to use technology needs to be recalibrated toward learning through technology. Another crucial idea is the organization’s conception of networks as essentially localized with the potential to be expanded. OLPC’s XO laptop connects to its neighbors, creating many small networks through a fairly wide wireless range. In addition, its ability to access the Internet through this wide wireless range allows remote educational opportunities for children in developing countries. Although it may seem to leap directly from no communication access to wireless Internet video streaming, this program has shown that it may even be more cost effective than traditional connective technologies like phone lines.

A Brief History of Antitrust Legislation

The main tool that the government employs to keep healthy competition in the information marketplace is antitrust legislation. The seminal Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 helped establish modern U.S. antitrust legislation. Although originally intended to dissolve the monopolistic enterprises of late-19th-century industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the law’s basic principles have applied to media companies as well. The antitrust office has also grown since the original Sherman Act; although the office of the attorney general originally brought antitrust lawsuits after the act’s passage, this responsbility shifted to its own Antitrust Division in 1933 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlined many propositions and goals that legislators deemed necessary to foster a competitive marketplace. For example, Chapter 1, Section 2, of the act states that “Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States … shall be deemed guilty of a felony.”Legal Information Institute, “Monopolizing trade a felony; penalty,” Cornell University Law School, January 5, 2009, http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode15/usc_sec_15_00000002----000-.html. This establishment of monopolization as a felony was remarkable; before, free-market capitalism was the rule regardless of the public good, making the Sherman Antitrust Act an early proponent of the welfare of people at large.

Two additional pieces of legislation, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1911 and the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950, refined the Sherman Antitrust Act in order to make the system of antitrust suits work more effectively. For instance, the Clayton Act makes it unlawful for one company to “acquire … the whole or any part of the stock” of another company when the result would encourage the development of a monopoly.Legal Information Institute, “Acquisition by one corporation of stock of another,” Cornell University Law School, January 5, 2009, http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode15/usc_sec_15_00000018----000-.html. More than just busting trusts, the Clayton Act thus seeks to stop anticompetitive practices before they take hold. The Celler-Kefauver Act made it more difficult for corporations to get around antitrust legislation; while the Clayton Act allowed the government to regulate the purchase of a competitor’s stock, the Celler-Kefauver Act extended this to include the competitor’s assets.

Deregulation and the Telecommunications Act of 1996

Although the early part of the 20th century seemed to be devoted to breaking up trusts and keeping monopolies in check, the media—particularly in the latter part of the century—was still able to move steadily toward conglomeration (companies joining together to form a larger, more diversified corporations). Widespread deregulation (the removal of legal regulations on an industry) took place during the 1980s, in large part through the efforts of free-market economists who argued that deregulation would foster more competition in the information marketplace. However, possibly due in large part to the media economy’s focus on economies of scale, this was not the case in practice. Companies became increasingly conglomerated, and corporations such as Comcast and Time Warner came to dominate the marketplace. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped solidify this trend. Although touted as a way to let “any communications business compete in any market against any other” and to foster competition, this act in practice sped up the conglomeration of media.Federal Communications Commission, “FCC — Telecommunications Act of 1996,” November 15, 2008, http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html.

Corporate Advantages of Vertical Integration

Almost all of the major media players in today’s market practice extensive vertical integration through either administrative managementThe potential for divisions of a single company to share the same higher-level management structure. or content integrationThe ability of a company to use the same content across platforms.. Administrative management refers to the potential for divisions of a single company to share the same higher-level management structure, which presents opportunities for increased operational efficiency. For example, Disney manages theme parks and movie studios. Although these two industries are not very closely connected through content, both are large, multinational ventures. Placing both of these divisions under a single corporation allows them to share certain structural similarities, accounting practices, and any other administrative resources that may be helpful across multiple industries.

Content integration—an important practice for media industries—is the ability of these companies to use the same content across multiple platforms. Disney’s theme parks would lose much of their charm and meaning without Mickey Mouse and Cinderella’s castle; the integration of these two industries—Disney’s theme parks and Disney’s animated characters—proves profitable for both. Behind the scenes, Disney is also able to reap some excellent benefits from their consolidation. For example, Disney could release a movie through its studio, and then immediately book the stars on news programs that air on Disney-owned broadcast television network ABC. Beyond just the ABC broadcast network, Disney also has many cable channels that it can use to directly market its movies and products to the targeted demographics. Unlike a competitor that might be wary of promoting a Disney movie, Disney’s ownership of many different media outlets allows it to single-handedly reach a large audience.

Ethical Issues of Vertical Integration

However, this high level of vertical integration raises several ethical concerns. In the above situation, for example, Disney could entice reviewers on its television outlets to give positive reviews to a Disney studio movie. Therefore, this potential for misused trust and erroneous information could be harmful.

In many ways, the conglomeration of media companies takes place behind the scenes, with only a minority of consumers aware of vertically intergrated holdings. Media companies often try to foster a sense of independence from a larger corporation. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule; the NBC sitcom 30 Rock often delves into the troubles of running a satirical sketch-comedy show (a parody of NBC’s Saturday Night Live) under the ownership of GE, NBC’s real-life owner.

Digital Downloads and DRM

Although music companies have had some success selling music through digital outlets, they have not been pioneers in online music sales. Rather, technology companies such as Apple and Amazon.com, sensing a large market for digital downloads coupled with a sleek delivery system, have led the way. Already accustomed to downloading MP3s, consumers readily adopted the model. However, record companies believed that the lack of digital rights management (DRM) protection offered by MP3s represnted a major downside.

Apple provided a way to strike a compromise between accessibility and rights control. Having already captured much of the personal digital audio player market with the iPodthat uses other Apple products, Apple has also long prided itself on creating highly integrated systems of both software and hardware. Because so many people were already using the iPod, Apple had a huge potential market for a music store even if it offered DRM-locked tracks that would only play on Apple devices. This inflexibility even offered a small benefit for consumers; Apple succeeded in convincing companies to price their digital downloads lower than CDs.

This compromise may have sold a lot of iPods and MP3s, but it did not satisfy the record companies. When consumers started to download one hit single for 99 cents—rather than buying the whole album for $15 on CD—the music industry felt the pain. Still, huge monetary advances in digital music have taken place. Between 2004 and 2008, digital music sales increased from $187 million to $1.8 billion.

Piracy

The music industry has wasted no amount of firepower to blame piracy for the decline in album sales: “There’s no minimizing the impact of illegal file-sharing. It robs songwriters and recording artists of their livelihoods, and it ultimately undermines the future of music itself,” said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.Cary Sherman, “File-Sharing Is Illegal. Period,” USA Today, September 18, 2003. However, economists see the truth of the matter as significantly more ambiguous. Analyzing over 10,000 weeks of data distributed over many albums, a pair of economists at the Harvard Business School and University of North Carolina found that “Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy 115, no. 1 (February 2007): 1–42. Either way, two things are clear: Consumers are willing to pay for digital music, and digital downloads are on the market to stay for the foreseeable future.

Vertical Integraton and Globalization

Because globalization has as much to do with the corporate structure of a media company as with the products that a media company produces, vertical integration in multinational media companies becomes a necessary aspect of studying globalized media. Many large media companies practice vertical integration: Newspaper chains take care of their own reporting, printing, and distribution; television companies control their own production and broadcasting; and even small film studios often have parent companies that handle international distribution.

A media company often benefits greatly from vertical integration and globalization. Because of the proliferation of U.S. culture abroad, media outlets are able to use many of the same distribution structures with few changes. Because media rely on the speedy ability to react to current events and trends, a vertically integrated company can do all of this in a globalized rather than a localized marketplace; different branches of the company are readily able to handle different markets. Further, production values for single-country distribution are basically the same as those for multiple countries, so vertical integration allows, for example, a single film studio to make higher-budget movies than it may otherwise be able to produce without a distribution company that has as a global reach.

Foreign Markets and Titanic

Worth considering is the reciprocal influence of foreign culture on American culture. Certainly, American culture is increasingly exported around the world thanks to globalization, and many U.S. media outlets count strongly on their ability to sell their product in foreign markets. But what Americans consider their own culture has in fact been tailored to the tastes not only of U.S. citizens but also to those of worldwide audiences. The profit potential of foreign markets is enormous: If a movie does well abroad, for example, it might make up for a weak stateside showing, and may even drive interest in the movie in the United States.

One prime example of this phenomenon of global culture and marketing is James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic. One of the most expensive movies ever produced up to that point, with an official budget of around $200 million, Titanic was not anticipated to perform particularly well at the U.S. box office. Rather, predictions of foreign box-office receipts allowed the movie to be made. Of the total box-office receipts of Titanic, only about one-third came from the domestic market. Although Titanic became the highest-grossing film up to that point, it grossed just $140 million more domestically than Star Wars did 20 years earlier.Box Office Mojo, “All Time Domestic Box Office Results,” http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm. The difference was in the foreign market. While Star Wars made about the same amount—$300 million—in both the domestic and foreign markets, Titanic grossed $1.2 billion in foreign box-office receipts. In all, the movie came close to hitting the $2 billion mark, and now sits in the No. 2 position behind Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster, Avatar.

One reason that U.S. studios can make these kinds of arrangements is their well-developed ties with the worldwide movie industry. Hollywood studios have agreements with theaters all over the world to show their films. By contrast, the foreign market for French films is not nearly as established, as the industry tends to be partially subsidized by the French government. Theaters showing Hollywood studio films in France funnel portions of their box-office receipts to fund French films. However, Hollywood has lobbied the World Trade Organization—a largely pro-globalization group that pushes for fewer market restrictions—to rule that this French subsidy is an unfair restriction on trade.Roman Terrill, “Globalization in the 1990s,” University of Iowa Center for International Finance and Development, 1999, http://www.uiowa.edu/ifdebook/ebook2/contents/part3-I.shtml#B.

In many ways, globalization presents legitimate concerns about the endangerment of indigenous culture. Yet simple concerns over the transfer of culture are not the only or even the biggest worries caused by the spread of American culture and values.

Spreading American Tastes Through McDonaldization

A key danger of cultural imperialism is the possibility that American tastes will crowd out local cultures around the globe. The McDonaldizationAn economic force that promotes efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. of the globe applies not just to its namesake, McDonald’s, with its franchises in seemingly every country, but to any industry that applies the technique of McDonald’s on a large scale. Coined by George Ritzer in his book The McDonaldization of Society (1993), the concept is rooted in the process of rationalization. With McDonaldization, four aspects of the business are taken to the extreme: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. These four things are four of the main aspects of free markets. Applying the concepts of an optimized financial market to cultural and human items such as food, McDonaldization enforces general standards and consistency throughout a global industry.

Unsurprisingly, McDonald’s is the prime example of this concept. Although the fast-food restaurant is somewhat different in every country—for example, Indian restaurants offer a pork-free, beef-free menu to accommodate regional religious practices—the same fundamental principles apply in a culturally specific way. The branding of the company is the same wherever it is; the “I’m lovin’ it” slogan is inescapable, and the Golden Arches are, according to Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, “more widely recognized than the Christian cross.”Schlosser, Eric, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 4. Yet, more importantly, the business model of McDonald’s stays relatively the same from country to country. Although culturally specific variations exist, any McDonald’s in a particular area has basically the same menu as any other. In other words, wherever a consumer is likely to travel within a reasonable range, the menu options and the resulting product remain consistent.

McDonaldizing Media

Media works in an uncannily similar way to fast food. Just as the automation of fast food—from freeze-dried french fries to prewrapped salads—attempts to lower a product’s marginal costs, thus increasing profits, media outlets seek to achieve a certain degree of consistency that allows them to broadcast and sell the same product throughout the world with minimal changes. The idea that media actually spreads a culture, however, is controversial. In his book Cultural Imperialism, John Tomlinson argues that exported American culture is not necessarily imperialist because it does not push a cultural agenda; it seeks to make money from whatever cultural elements it can throughout the world. According to Tomlinson, “no one really disputes the dominant presence of Western multinational, and particularly American, media in the world: what is doubted is the cultural implications of this presence.”John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (London: Continuum, 2001).

There are, of course, by-products of American cultural exports throughout the world. American cultural mores, such as the Western standard of beauty, have increasingly made it into global media. As early as 1987, Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times about a young Chinese woman who was planning to have an operation to make her eyes look rounder, more like the eyes of Caucasian women. Western styles—“newfangled delights like nylon stockings, pierced ears and eye shadow”—also began to replace the austere blue tunics of Mao-era China. The pervasiveness of cultural influence is difficult to track, however, as the young Chinese woman says that she wanted to have the surgery not because of Western looks but because “she thinks they are pretty.”Nicholas D. Kristof, “In China, Beauty Is a Big Western Nose,” New York Times, April 29, 1987, http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/29/garden/in-china-beauty-is-a-big-western-nose.html.

Freedom, Democracy, and Rock ’n’ Roll

The spread of culture works in mysterious ways. Hollywood probably does not actually have a master plan to export the American way of life around the globe and displace local culture, just as American music may not necessarily be a progenitor of democratic government and economic cooperation. Rather, local cultures respond to the outside culture of U.S. media and democracy in many different ways. First of all, media are often often much more flexible than believed; the successful exportation of the film Titanic was not an accident in which everyone in the world suddenly wanted to experience movies like an American. Rather, the film’s producers had judged that it would succeed on a world stage just as on a domestic stage. Therefore, in some ways U.S. media have become more widespread, and also more worldwide in focus. It could even be argued that American cultural exports promote intercultural understanding; after all, to sell to a culture, a business must first understand that culture.

By contrast, some local cultures around the world have taken to Western-style business models so greatly that they have created their own hybrid cultures. One well-known example of this is India’s Bollywood film industry. Combining traditional Indian music and dance with American-style filmmaking, Bollywood studios release around 700 major films each year, three times the rate of the major Hollywood studios. India’s largest film industry mixes melodrama with musical interludes, lip-synced by actors but sung by pop stars. These pop songs are disseminated well before a movie’s release, both to build up hype and to enter multiple media markets. Although similar marketing tactics have been employed in the United States, Bollywood seems to have mastered the art of cross-media integration. The music and dance numbers are essentially cinematic forms of music videos, both promoting the soundtrack and adding variety to the film. The numbers also feature many different Indian national languages and a hybrid of Western dance music and Indian classical singing, a certain departure from conventional Western media.Richard Corliss, “Hooray for Bollywood!” Time, September 16, 1996, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985129,00.html.

While cultural imperialism might cause resentment in many parts of the world, the idea that local cultures are helpless under the crushing power of American cultural imposition is clearly too simplistic to hold water. Instead, local cultures seem to adopt American-style media models, changing their methods to fit the corporate structures rather than just the aesthetics of U.S. media. These two economic and cultural aspects are clearly intertwined, but the idea of a foreign power unilaterally crushing a native culture does not seem to be entirely true.

Minority Exclusion and Stereotypes

In the fall of 1999, when the major television networks released their schedules for the upcoming programming season, a startling trend became clear. Of the 26 newly released television programs, none depicted an African American in a leading role, and even the secondary roles on these shows included almost no racial minorities. In response to this ommission, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), an advocacy group for Hispanic Americans, organized protests and boycotts. Pressured—and embarrassed—into action, the executives from the major networks made a fast dash to add racial minorities to their prime-time shows, not only among actors, but also among producers, writers, and directors. Four of the networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox—added a vice president of diversity position to help oversee the networks’ progress toward creating more diverse programming.Leonard M. Baynes, “White Out: The Absence and Stereotyping of People of Color by the Broadcast Networks in Prime Time Entertainment Programming,” Arizona Law Review 45 (2003): 293.

Despite these changes and greater public attention regarding diversity issues, minority underrepresentation is still an issue in all areas of mass media. In fact, the trend in recent years has been regressive. In a recent study, the NAACP reported that the number of minority actors on network television has actually decreased, from 333 during the 2002–2003 season to 307 four years later.WWAY, “NAACP Not Pleased With the Diversity on Television,” January 12, 2009, http://www.wwaytv3.com/naacp_not_pleased_diversity_television/01/2009. Racial minorities are often absent, peripheral, or take on stereotyped roles in film, television, print media, advertising, and even in video games. Additionally, according to a 2002 study by the University of California, Los Angeles, the problem is not only a visible one, but also one that extends behind the scenes. The study found that minorities are even more underrepresented in creative and decision-making positions than they are on screen.Media Awareness Network, “Ethnic and Visible Minorities in Entertainment Media,” 2010, http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/ethnics_and_minorities/minorities_entertainment.cfm. This lack of representation among producers, writers, and directors often directly affects the way minorities are portrayed in film and television, leading to racial stereotypes.

Though advocacy groups like the NCLR and the NAACP have often been at the forefront of protests against minority stereotypes in the media, experts are quick to point out that the issue is one everyone should be concerned about. As media ethicist Leonard M. Baynes argues, “Since we live in a relatively segregated country…broadcast television and its images and representations are very important because television can be the common meeting ground for all Americans.”Leonard M. Baynes, “White Out: The Absence and Stereotyping of People of Color by the Broadcast Networks in Prime Time Entertainment Programming,” Arizona Law Review 45 (2003): 293. There are clear correlations between mass media portrayals of minority groups and public perceptions. In 1999, after hundreds of complaints by African Americans that they were unable to get taxis to pick them up, the city of New York launched a crackdown, threatening to revoke the licenses of cab drivers who refused to stop for African American customers. When interviewed by reporters, many cab drivers blamed their actions on fears they would be robbed or asked to drive to dangerous neighborhoods.Sherri Burr, “Television and Societal Effects: An Analysis of Media Images of African-Americans in Historical Context,” Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 4 (2001): 159.

Racial stereotypes are not only an issue in entertainment media; they also find their way into news reporting, which is a form of storytelling. Journalists, editors, and reporters are still predominately white. According to a 2000 survey, only 11.6 percent of newsroom staff in the United States were racial and ethnic minorities.Media Awareness Network, “Ethnic and Visible Minorities in the News,” 2010, http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/ethnics_and_minorities/minorities_news.cfm. The situation has not improved dramatically during the past decade. According to a 2008 newsroom census released by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the percentage of minority journalists working at daily newspapers was a scant 13.52 percent.National Association of Hispanic Journalists, “NAHJ Disturbed by Figures That Mask Decline in Newsroom Diversity,” news release, 2010, http://www.nahj.org/nahjnews/articles/2008/April/ASNE.shtml. Because of this underrepresentation behind the scenes, the news media is led by those whose perspective is already privileged, who create the narratives about those without privilege. In the news media, racial minorities are often cast in the role of villains or troublemakers, which in turn shapes public perceptions about these groups. Media critics Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki point out that images of African Americans on welfare, African American violence, and urban crime in African American communities “facilitate the construction of menacing imagery.”Clifford G. Christians, “Communication Ethics,” in Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, ed. Carl Mitchum (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), 1:366. Similarly, a study by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists found that only 1 percent of the evening news stories aired by the three major U.S. television networks cover Latinos or Latino issues, and that when Latinos are featured, they are portrayed negatively 80 percent of the time.Media Awareness Network, “Ethnic and Visible Minorities in the News.” Still others have criticized journalists and reporters for a tendency toward reductive presentations of complex issues involving minorities, such as the religious and racial tensions fueled by the September 11 attacks. By reducing these conflicts to “opposing framesExplaining an issue as a two-sided struggle for the sake of fast and easy audience comprehension.”—that is, by oversimplifying them as two-sided struggles so that they can be quickly and easily understood—the news media helped create a greater sense of separation between Islamic Americans and the dominant culture after September 11, 2001.Ginny Whitehouse, “Why Diversity Is an Ethical Issue,” The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, ed. Lee Wilkins and Clifford G. Christians (New York: Routledge, 2009), 101.

Since the late 1970s, the major professional journalism organizations in the United States—Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), Newspaper Association of America (NAA), American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ), Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), and others—have included greater ethnic diversity as a primary goal or ethic. However, progress has been slow. ASNE has set 2025 as a target date to have minority representation in newsrooms match U.S. demographics.Ginny Whitehouse, “Why Diversity Is an Ethical Issue,” The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, ed. Lee Wilkins and Clifford G. Christians (New York: Routledge, 2009), 102.

Because the programming about, by, and for ethnic minorities in the mainstream media is disproportionately low, many turn to niche publications and channels such as BET, Univision, Telemundo, Essence, Jet, and others for sources of information and entertainment. In fact, 45 percent of ethnic-minority adults prefer these niche media sources to mainstream television, radio programs, and newspapers.Ginny Whitehouse, “Why Diversity Is an Ethical Issue,” The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, ed. Lee Wilkins and Clifford G. Christians (New York: Routledge, 2009), 103. These sources cover stories about racial minorities that are generally ignored by the mainstream press and offer ethnic-minority perspectives on more widely covered issues in the news.Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Ethnic,” in The State of the News Media 2010, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/ethnic_summary_essay.php. Entertainment channels like BET (a 24-hour cable television station that offers music videos, dramas featuring predominately black casts, and other original programming created by African Americans) provide the diverse programming that mainstream television networks often drop.Rachel Zellars, “Black Entertainment Television (BET),” in Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., ed. Colin A. Palmer (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006.) 1:259. Print sources like Vista, a bilingual magazine targeting U.S. Hispanics, and Vivid, the most widely circulated African American periodical, appeal to ethnic minority groups because they are controlled and created by individuals within these groups. Though some criticize ethnic niche media, claiming that they erode common ground or, in some instances, perpetuate stereotypes, the popularity of these media has only grown in recent years and will likely continue in the absence of more diverse perspectives in mainstream media sources.Can Tran, “TV Network Reviews: Black Entertainment Television (BET),” Helium, http://www.helium.com/items/884989-tv-network-reviews-black-entertainment-television-bet; Joe Flint, “No Black-and-White Answer for the Lack of Diversity on Television,” Company Town (blog), Los Angeles Times, June 11, 2010, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/06/diversity-television.html.

Femininity in Mass Media

In the ABC sitcom The Donna Reed Show (1958–1966), actress Donna Reed plays a stay-at-home mother who fills her days with housework, cooking for her husband and children, decorating, and participating in community organizations, all while wearing pearls, heels, and stylish dresses. Such a traditional portrayal of femininity no doubt sounds dated to modern audiences, but stereotyped gender roles continue to thrive in the mass media. Women are still often represented as subordinate to their male counterparts—emotional, noncompetitive, domestic, and sweet natured. In contrast to these types, other women are represented as unattractively masculine, crazy, or cruel. In television dramas and sitcoms, women continue to fill traditional roles such as mothers, nurses, secretaries, and housewives. By contrast, men in film and television are less likely to be shown in the home, and male characters are generally characterized by dominance, aggression, action, physical strength, and ambition.Daniel Chandler, “Television and Gender Roles” http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/TF33120/gendertv.html#E. In the mainstream news media, men are predominately featured as authorities on specialized issues like business, politics, and economics, while women are more likely to report on stories about natural disasters or domestic violence—coverage that does not require expertise.Media Awareness Network, “Media Coverage of Women and Women’s Issues,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_working.cfm. In sports programming, men are the authoritative figures in the broadcast booth while women are “sideline reporters.“

Not only is the white male perspective still presented as the standard, authoritative one, but also the media itself often comes to embody the male gaze. Media commentator Nancy Hass notes that “shows that don’t focus on men have to feature the sort of women that guys might watch.”Media Awareness Network, “The Economics of Gender Stereotyping,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_economics.cfm. Feminist critics have long been concerned by the way women in film, television, and print media are defined by their sexuality. Few female role models exist in the media who are valued primarily for qualities like intelligence or leadership. Inundated by images that conform to unrealistic beauty standards, women come to believe at an early age that their value depends on their physical attractiveness. According to one Newsweek article, eating disorders in girls are now routinely being diagnosed at younger ages, sometimes as early as 8 or 9. The models who appear in magazines and print advertising are unrealistically skinny (23 percent thinner than the average woman), and their photographs are further enhanced to hide flaws and blemishes. Meanwhile, the majority of women appearing on television are under the age of 30, and many older actresses, facing the pressure to embody the youthful ideal, undergo surgical enhancements to appear younger.Jennifer L. Derenne and Eugene V. Beresin, “Body Image, Media, and Eating Disorders,” Academic Psychiatry 30 (2006), http://ap.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/30/3/257. One recent example is television news host Greta Van Susteren, a respected legal analyst who moved from CNN to Fox in 2002. At the debut of her show, On the Record, Van Susteren, sitting behind a table that allowed viewers to see her short skirt, had undergone not only a hair and wardrobe makeover, but also surgical enhancement to make her appear younger and more attractive.Media Awareness Network, “Media Coverage of Women and Women’s Issues,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_working.cfm. However, these enhancements are not restricted to the “over 30” crowd. Indeed, younger stars, such as Ashley Tisdale (High School Musical), singer Ashlee Simpson, and reality star Heidi Montag, have all availed themselves of plastic surgery.

In addition to the prevalence of gender stereotypes, the ratio of men to women in the mass media, in and behind the scenes, is also disproportionate. Surprisingly, though women slightly outnumber men in the general population, over two-thirds of television sitcoms feature men in the starring role.Media Awareness Network, “The Economics of Gender Stereotyping,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_economics.cfm. Among writers, producers, directors, and editors, the number of women lags far behind. In Hollywood, for instance, only 17 percent of behind-the-scenes creative talent is represented by women. Communications researcher Martha Lauzen argues that “when women have more powerful roles in the making of a movie or television show, we know that we also get more powerful female characters on-screen, women who are more real and more multi-dimensional.”Media Awareness Network, “Women Working in the Media,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_working.cfm.

Present News Stories That Inform and Serve the Needs of Citizens

If the basis for the principles of ethical news reporting is giving citizens the information they need to function in a democratic society, then that information must be presented accurately. Journalists should be careful to verify the facts before they report them. As the Committee of Concerned Journalists asserts, “Accuracy is the foundation upon which everything else is built—context, interpretation, comment, criticism, analysis and debate,” so reliable news sources are essential if citizens are to have a clear understanding of the society in which they live.Committee of Concerned Journalists, “Statement of Shared Purpose,” Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles. Furthermore, although news organizations have a professional responsibility toward advertisers and shareholders, their commitment is always to citizens first. This means that journalists must report the facts truthfully and without omission, even if they are not in the best interest of advertisers, shareholders, or friends.

Present Issues Fairly

Reporting issues fairly requires not only factual accuracy, but also lack of favoritism toward any organization, political group, ideology, or other agenda. The Society of Professional Journalists stipulates that journalists should refuse gifts and favors and avoid political involvement or public office if these things compromise journalistic integrity.Society of Professional Journalists, “SPJ Code of Ethics,” http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp. Additionally, journalists should avoid inflating stories for sensation and be as transparent as possible about their sources of information so that the public can investigate the issues further on their own.Committee of Concerned Journalists, “Statement of Shared Purpose,” Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles.

All sides of an issue should be presented in a news story. Of course, all journalists have a perspective from which they write, but a clear distinction should be made between news reports and editorial content.American Society of News Editors, “ASNE’s Statement of Principles,” August 2009, http://asne.org/article_view/articleid/325/asnes-statement-of-principles.aspx.

Present Stories in a Way That Addresses Their Complexity

Many issues in the news are layered and highly complex. Developing a thorough understanding of issues requires dedication and a sometimes lengthy investigation, and, especially in a world where rapid reporting is the norm, there can be a temptation to gloss over the finer points of an issue for the sake of efficiency. Additionally, most consumers of news, increasingly busy and overwhelmed by the amount of information available, want stories that can be quickly digested and easily comprehended. However, as the Committee of Concerned Journalists points out, the media must balance what readers want with what they need but cannot anticipate.Committee of Concerned Journalists, “Statement of Shared Purpose,” Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles. Oversimplifying issues, whether for the sake of a quick story or to satisfy public tastes, becomes a violation of the vital information premise.Society of Professional Journalists, “SPJ Code of Ethics,” http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp.

Present Diverse Perspectives

When discussing what he considers to be one of the key issues in professional journalism, media ethicist Jeremy Iggers points out that because democracy means the widest possible participation of citizens in public life, diversity in journalism is of fundamental importance.Jeremy Iggers, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 138. Not only should newsroom staff represent a diversity of gender and races, but journalists should also speak for all groups in society—“not just those with attractive demographics,” as the Committee for Concerned Journalists puts it. Journalists should represent the underrepresented because ignoring citizens is a form of disenfranchisement.Committee of Concerned Journalists, “Statement of Shared Purpose,” Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles.

Monitor Government and Corporations

When the framers of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press, one of the things they had in mind was the ability of the news media to serve as a watchdog over those in positions of power.Committee of Concerned Journalists, “Statement of Shared Purpose,” Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles. It is the duty of the press to ensure that business is conducted in the open and that government actions are public. One famous example of the media fulfilling its watchdog role was The Washington Post’s investigation of the 1972 Watergate scandal. During Richard Nixon’s presidency, journalists at the Post uncovered information linking government agencies and officials to the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex as part of an attempt to sabotage the Democratic campaign and guarantee Nixon’s reelection.Richard M. Flanagan and Louis W. Koenig, “Watergate,” in Dictionary of American History, ed. Stanley I. Kutler, 3rd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003), 8:425. Media coverage of the scandal increased publicity and ultimately put pressure on the government that led to an investigation and the prosecution of many who were involved.“The Government and Watergate,” in American Decades, ed. Judith S. Baughman and others (Detroit: Gale, 2001), vol. 8. In the past decade, the media has uncovered incriminating information about various Senators and Congressmen, resulting in charges of corruption, tax evasion, conspiracy, and fraud.

Copyright Infringement

CopyrightA form of protection provided by U.S. law, under which the creator of an original artistic or intellectual work is automatically granted certain rights, including the right to distribute, copy, and modify the work. is a form of protection provided by U.S. law, under which the creator of an original artistic or intellectual work is automatically granted certain rights, including the right to distribute, copy, and modify the work.U.S. Copyright Office, “Copyright Basics,” http://www.copyright.gov/. If someone rents a movie from Netflix, for example, and watches it with his friends, he hasn’t violated any copyright laws because Netflix has paid for a license to loan the movie to its customers. However, if the same person rents a movie and burns himself a copy to watch later, he has violated copyright law because he has not paid for nor obtained the film creators’ permission to copy the movie. Copyright law applies to most books, songs, movies, art, essays, and other pieces of creative work. However, after a certain length of time (70 to 120 years depending on the publication circumstances), creative and intellectual works enter the public domain; that is, they are free to be used and copied without permission.

Some works are in the public domain because the creator has chosen to make them available to anyone without requiring permission. However, most works are in the public domain because their copyright has expired; in the United States, anything published before 1923 is automatically in the public domain. Additionally, there have been changes to U.S. copyright law over the years that caused some works to enter the public domain earlier. Before 1964, for instance, any published work had to have its copyright renewed during the 28th year after its publication. If no renewal was filed, the copyright was lost. shows significant changes to U.S. copyright law since 1790.Nolo Press, “Chapter 8: The Public Domain,” Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources, 2007, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter8/index.html.

While it is illegal to violate the rights granted by copyright law, the copyright holder’s rights are not unlimited. One of the significant limitations is the policy of “fair use,” under which the public is entitled to freely use copyrighted information for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, or parody.U.S. Copyright Office, “Fair Use,” May 2009, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html. If a critic were writing a book review for a magazine, for instance, according to fair use, she would be allowed to summarize and quote from the book she wanted to review, whether or not the author of the book agreed to this use. According to the U.S. government, there are four issues to consider when determining fair use:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use on the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted workU.S. Copyright Office, “Fair Use,” May 2009, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html.

The distinction between what is considered fair and what constitutes copyright infringement is not always clearly defined. For one thing, there are no guidelines that specify a number of words, lines, or notes that can be taken without permission. provides some examples of distinctions between fair use and copyright infringement.

Plagiarism

Sometimes plagiarism becomes confused with copyright violation. However, the two words are not synonymous; while there can be some overlap between them, not every instance of plagiarism involves copyright violation, and not every instance of copyright violation is an act of plagiarism. For one thing, while copyright violation can involve a wide range of acts, plagiarismUsing someone else’s information, writing, or speech without properly documenting or citing the source. is defined more narrowly as using someone else’s information, writing, or speech without properly documenting or citing the source. In other words, plagiarism involves representing another person’s work as one’s own. This can happen in any field—for example, in the music industry. In 1990, Vanilla Ice sampled riffs from David Bowie’s Under Pressure for his hit song, Ice Ice Baby, without licensing or crediting Bowie’s work. Hip hop music, which has a long tradition of “sampling” music, riffs, lyrics, and more from other songs, often raises questions of copyright infringement.Copyright Website, “David Bowie, Queen and Vanilla Ice,” http://www.benedict.com/Audio/Vanilla/Vanilla.aspx.

As the U.S. Copyright Office points out, it is possible to cite a copyrighted source of information without obtaining permission to reproduce that information.U.S. Copyright Office, “Fair Use,” May 2009, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html. In such a case, the user has violated copyright law even though she has not plagiarized the material. Similarly, a student writing a paper could copy sections of a document that is in the public domain without properly citing his sources, in which case he would not have broken any copyright laws. However, representing the information as his own work would be an instance of plagiarism.

Plagiarism, a perennially serious problem at academic institutions, has recently become even more prevalent. The ease of copying and pasting online content into a word-processing document can make it highly tempting for students to plagiarize material for research projects and critical papers. Additionally, a number of online “paper mills” contain archives where students can download papers for free or, in some cases, purchase them.Andy Denhart, “The Web’s Plagiarism Police,” Salon, June 14, 1999, http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/1999/06/14/plagiarism. Sloppy work habits can lead students to inadvertently plagiarize. In 2003, The New York Times surveyed students at 23 college campuses and reported that 38 percent of students admitted to having committed copy-and-paste plagiarism within the previous year.Michelle De Leon, “Internet Plagiarism on the Rise in Colleges,” Lehigh University Brown and White, November 12, 2007, http://media.www.thebrownandwhite.com/media/storage/paper1233/news/2007/11/12/News/Internet.Plagiarism.On.The.Rise.In.Colleges-3094622.shtml.

To combat the rise in plagiarism, many schools and universities now subscribe to services that allow instructors to check students’ work for plagiarized material. Plagiarism.org, for instance, offers an analytics tool that compares student writing against a database that includes work from online paper mills, academic databases, documents available through major search engines, and other student papers submitted to Plagiarism.org.Andy Denhart, “The Web’s Plagiarism Police,” Salon, June 14, 1999, http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/1999/06/14/plagiarism. According to many researchers, part of the issue may be that students don’t understand what constitutes plagiarism. Some students, for instance, claim they think information available online is in the public domain.Nicole J. Auer and Ellen M. Krupar, “Mouse Click Plagiarism: The Role of Technology in Plagiarism and the Librarian’s Role in Combating It,” Library Trends, Winter 2001, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_3_49/ai_75278304/. Figure 14.12 offers suggestions for ways to avoid plagiarism in your own work.

While plagiarism is an issue of concern in academia, it occurs in print media as well. Writers, whether through carelessness or laziness, may lift content from existing materials without properly citing or reinterpreting them. In an academic setting, plagiarism may lead to consequences as severe as failure or even expulsion from an institution. However, outside of academia the consequences may be even more damaging. Writers have lost publishing contracts, permanently damaged their reputations, and even ruined their careers over instances of plagiarism. For example, the late George Harrison, of the Beatles, was successfully sued by Ronald Mack for copyright infringement of his song “He’s So Fine.”Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976). It was determined by the court that Harrison unconsciously plagiarized the musical essence of Mack’s song for his composition “My Sweet Lord.”

You should now have an understanding of the key issues in media ethics, particularly as they relate to privacy rights, plagiarism, and copyright laws. Please ensure you understand the following listed key concepts.

Federal Trade Commission

The first stirrings of the FTC date from 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt created the Bureau of Corporations to investigate the practices of increasingly larger American businesses. In time, authorities determined that an agency with more sweeping powers was necessary. Founded on September 26, 1914, the FTCThe government agency charged with overseeing interstate business and trade practices in the United States. came into being when President Woodrow Wilson signed the FTC Act into law, creating an agency designed to “prevent unfair methods of competition in commerce.”Federal Trade Commission, “About the Federal Trade Commission,” http://ftc.gov/ftc/about.shtm. From the beginning, the FTC absorbed the work and staff of the Bureau of Corporations, operating in a similar manner, but with additional regulatory authorization. In the words of the FTC,

Like the Bureau of Corporations, the FTC could conduct investigations, gather information, and publish reports. The early Commission reported on export trade, resale price maintenance, and other general issues, as well as meat packing and other specific industries. Unlike the Bureau, though, the Commission could … challenge “unfair methods of competition” under Section 5 of the FTC Act, and it could enforce … more specific prohibitions against certain price discriminations, vertical arrangements, interlocking directorships, and stock acquisitions.“A Brief History of the Federal Trade Commission,” program notes, Federal Trade Commission 90th Anniversary Symposium, 6.

Although its primary focus was on the prevention of anticompetitive business practices, in its early years, the FTC also provided oversight on wartime economic practices. During World War I, for example, President Wilson frequently turned to the FTC for advice on exports and trading with foreign nations, resulting in the Trading with the Enemy Act, which restricted trade with countries in conflict with the United States.

Federal Radio Commission

First established with the passage of the Radio Act of 1927, the FRC was intended to “bring order to the chaotic situation that developed as a result of the breakdown of earlier wireless acts passed during the formative years of wireless radio communication.”Fritz Messere, “The Federal Radio Commission Archives,” http://www.oswego.edu/~messere/FRCpage.html. The FRC comprised five employees who were authorized to grant and deny broadcasting licenses and assign frequency ranges and power levels to each radio station.

In its early years, the FRC struggled to find its role and responsibility in regulating the radio airwaves. With no clear breakdown of what could or could not be aired, nearly everything was allowed to play. As you learned in , the FRC lasted only until 1934, when it was engulfed by the FCC.

Federal Communications Commission

Since its creation by the Communications Act in 1934, the FCCThe government agency charged with overseeing interstate communications in the United States. has been “charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable.”Federal Communications Commission, “About the FCC,” http://www.fcc.gov/aboutus.html. Part of the New Deal—President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Great Depression–era suite of federal programs and agencies—the commission worked to establish “a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service.”Museum of Broadcast Communications, “Federal Communications Commission,” http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=federalcommu.

The responsibilities of the FCC are broad, and throughout its long history the agency has enforced several laws that regulate media. A selection of these laws include the 1941 National TV Ownership Rule, which states that a broadcaster cannot own television stations that reach more than 35 percent of the nation’s homes; the 1970 Radio/TV Cross-Ownership Restriction, which prohibits a broadcaster from owning a radio station and a TV station in the same market; and the 1975 Newspaper/Broadcast Cross-Ownership Prohibition, which discourages ownership of a newspaper and a television station in the same market.“Media Regulation Timeline,” NOW With Bill Moyers, PBS, January 30, 2004, http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/mediatimeline.html. All of these acts and more have undergone changes in the modern media marketplace.

The Structure and Purposes of the FCC

The FCC contains three major divisions: broadcast, telegraph, and telephone. Within these branches, subdivisions allow the agency to more efficiently carry out its tasks. Presently, the FCC houses seven operating bureaus and 10 staff offices. Although the bureaus and offices have varying specialties, the bureaus’ general responsibilities include “processing applications for licenses and other filings; analyzing complaints; conducting investigations; developing and implementing regulatory programs; and taking part in hearings.”Federal Communications Commission, “About the FCC,” http://www.fcc.gov/aboutus.html. Four key bureaus are the Media Bureau, the Wireline Competition Bureau, the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, and the International Bureau.

The Media Bureau oversees licensing and regulation of broadcasting services. Specifically, the Media Bureau “develops, recommends and administers the policy and licensing programs relating to electronic media, including cable television, broadcast television, and radio in the United States and its territories.”Federal Communications Commission, “Media Bureau,” http://www.fcc.gov/mb/. Because it aids the FCC in its decisions to grant or withhold licenses from broadcast stations, the Media Bureau plays a particularly important role within the organization. Such decisions are based on the “commission’s own evaluation of whether the station has served in the public interest,” and come primarily from the Media Bureau’s recommendations.Museum of Broadcast Communications, “Federal Communications Commission.” The Media Bureau has been central to rulings on children’s programming and mandatory closed captioning.

The Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) is primarily responsible for “rules and policies concerning telephone companies that provide interstate—and, under certain circumstances, intrastate—telecommunications services to the public through the use of wire-based transmission facilities (i.e. corded/cordless telephones).”Federal Communications Commission, “About the FCC,” http://www.fcc.gov/aboutus.html. Despite the increasing market for wireless-based communications in the United States, the WCB maintains its large presence in the FCC by “ensuring choice, opportunity, and fairness in the development of wireline telecommunications services and markets.”Federal Communications Commission, “Wireline Competition Bureau,” http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/. In addition to this primary goal, the bureau’s objectives include “developing deregulatory initiatives; promoting economically efficient investment in wireline telecommunications services; and fostering economic growth.”Federal Communications Commission, “Wireline Competition Bureau,” http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/. The WCB recently ruled against Comcast regarding blocked online content to the public, causing many to question the amount of authority that the government has over the public and big businesses.

Another prominent bureau within the FCC is the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB). The rough counterpart of the WCB, this bureau oversees mobile phones, pagers, and two-way radios, handling “all FCC domestic wireless telecommunications programs and policies, except those involving public safety, satellite communications or broadcasting, including licensing, enforcement, and regulatory functions.”Federal Communications Commission, “About the WTB,” http://wireless.fcc.gov/index.htm?job=about. The WTB balances the expansion and limitation of wireless networks, registers antenna and broadband use, and manages the radio frequencies for airplane, ship, and land communication. As U.S. wireless communication continues to grow, this bureau seems likely to continue to increase in both scope and importance.

Finally, the International Bureau is responsible for representing the FCC in all satellite and international matters. A larger organization, the International Bureau’s goal is to “connect the globe for the good of consumers through prompt authorizations, innovative spectrum management and responsible global leadership.”Federal Communications Commission, “International Bureau,” http://www.fcc.gov/ib/. In an effort to avoid international interference, the International Bureau coordinates with partners around the globe regarding frequency allocation and orbital assignments. It also concerns itself with foreign investment in the United States, ruling that outside governments, individuals, or corporations cannot own more than 20 percent of stock in a U.S. broadcast, telephone, or radio company.

The Structure and Purposes of the FTC

Although the FCC provides most of the nation’s media regulations, the FTC also has a hand in the media industry. As previously discussed, the FTC primarily dedicates itself to eliminating unfair business practices; however, in the course of those duties it has limited contact with media outlets.

One example of the FTC’s media regulatory responsibility is the National Do Not Call Registry. In 2004, the agency created this registry to prevent most telemarketing phone calls, exempting such groups as nonprofit charities and businesses with which a consumer has an existing relationship. Although originally intended for landline phones, the Do Not Call Registry allows individuals to register wireless telephones along with traditional wire-based numbers.

Hays Code

Although audiences responded eagerly to the new medium of film, some naysayers believed that Hollywood films and their associated hedonistic culture was a negative moral influence. As you read in , this changed during the 1930s with the implementation of the Hays Code. Formally termed the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, the code is popularly known by the name of its author, Will Hays, the chairman of the industry’s self-regulatory Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), which was founded in 1922 to “police all in-house productions.”“Violence,” Film Reference, http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Romantic-Comedy-Yugoslavia/Violence-BEGINNINGS.html. Created to forestall what was perceived to be looming governmental control over the industry, the Hays Code was, essentially, Hollywood self-censorship. The code displayed the motion picture industry’s commitment to the public, stating the following:

Motion picture producers recognize the high trust and confidence which have been placed in them by the people of the world and which have made motion pictures a universal form of entertainment…. Hence, though regarding motion pictures primarily as entertainment without any explicit purposes of teaching or propaganda, they know that the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking.“The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code),” ArtsReformation, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html.

Among other requirements, the Hays Code enacted strict guidelines on the portrayal of violence. Crimes such as murder, theft, robbery, safecracking, and “dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc.” could not be presented in detail.“The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code),” ArtsReformation, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html. The code also addressed the portrayals of sex, saying that “the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing.”“The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code),” ArtsReformation, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html.

As television grew in popularity during the mid-1900s, the strict code placed on the film industry spread to other forms of visual media. Many early sitcoms, for example, showed married couples sleeping in separate twin beds to avoid suggesting sexual relations.

By the end of the 1940s, the MPPDA had begun to relax the rigid regulations of the Hays Code. Propelled by the changing moral standards of the 1950s and 1960s, this led to a gradual reintroduction of violence and sex into mass media.

Ratings Systems

As filmmakers began pushing the boundaries of acceptable visual content, the Hollywood studio industry scrambled to create a system to ensure appropriate audiences for films. In 1968, the successor of the MPDDA, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), established the familiar film ratings system to help alert potential audiences to the type of content they could expect from a production.

The RIAA versus Piracy

Widespread piracy problems arose during the late 1990s with the popularization of technology allowing peer-to-peer (P2P) music sharing. Suddenly, software such as Napster, Scour, Aimster, AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, Grokster, Kazaa, iMesh, and LimeWire popped up on computers everywhere, allowing access to free music around the world—and fueling online piracy. However, in 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) put the laws established by the DMCA into practice and began a campaign to stop music piracy. In response to the growing number of users, the organization announced that it had been gathering evidence against users sharing music on P2P networks. Rather than go after the software engineers, “the RIAA investigators targeted ‘uploaders’—individuals who were allowing others to copy music files from their ‘shared’ folders.”U.S. Copyright Office, “What Does Copyright Protect?” http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html#what_protect.

This data collection led to the RIAA filing more than 250 lawsuits against individuals in what has been called “an unprecedented legal campaign against its own customers.”Electronic Frontier Foundation, “RIAA v. The People,” http://www.eff.org/riaa-v-people. Among the first of these lawsuits was one against a 12-year-old girl who had to pay $2,000 and publicly apologize to settle her case. Since then, the recording industry has filed, settled, or threatened legal actions against over 28,000 individuals.Electronic Frontier Foundation, “RIAA v. The People,” http://www.eff.org/riaa-v-people. Many college students have been targeted. Recently, the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay found itself under attack for allowing users to search for pirated copies of material. This case mirrors the case of Viacom versus YouTube, because the prosecution argued that The Pirate Bay was responsible for the material its users posted and downloaded. These lawsuits raise the question of whether websites are responsible for the actions of their users, an issue that looks to be central to future Internet legislation.Mike Masnick, “Pirate Bay Loses a Lawsuit; Entertainment Industry Loses an Opportunity,” Techdirt, April 17, 2009, http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090417/0129274535.shtml.

TOS Agreements

All software and most Internet sites have a terms of serviceLegally binding rules that an individual must adhere to in order to use an online service or software program. agreement to which its users must comply. Terms of service (TOS) are legally binding rules that an individual must adhere to in order to use a particular piece of software or service. iTunes, for instance, makes users agree to use their downloadable material for noncommercial use only and states that Apple is not responsible for lost or corrupted files. Anyone who has installed a new piece of software or logged on to social networking sites has agreed to a TOS. Entrance into these sites or use of a program typically requires a user to read through legal guidelines and then click a box agreeing to abide by the stated rules. You likely have done so numerous times.

Deterred by the length and legal jargon of the standard TOS, however, many people skip to the end and simply accept the terms without reading them carefully. iTunes, for instance, has a clause that states the following:

You may not use or otherwise export or re-export the Licensed Application [iTunes] except as authorized by United States law … the Licensed Application may not be exported or re-exported … into any U.S.-embargoed countries … You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.Apple, “Terms and Conditions,” http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html.

While not all Terms of Service are as extensive, an individual’s breach of any TOS may result in suspension, restriction, or cancellation of account privileges, depending on the severity of the offense. As individuals become increasingly reliant on Internet services such as email, calendars, and social networks, the potential for disruption is enormous.

The Case of Megan Meier

In 2008, a compelling court case arose regarding TOS violation. Lori Drew, a 49-year-old woman, was accused of using a fake MySpace account to convince 13-year-old Megan Meier to commit suicide. How did it come about? After Drew’s daughter had a confrontation with Meier, Drew created an account pretending to be a teenage boy. At first she used the persona to flirt with Meier and uncover information about the teenager’s social life and relationship to her daughter. Later, when Drew decided she had enough information, she broke off her friendship, telling Meier that the world would be better off without her. Later that day, a distraught Megan Meier hanged herself.Jennifer Steinhauer, “Verdict in MySpace Suicide Case,” New York Times, November 26, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27myspace.html. After Lori Drew’s identity was revealed, Meier’s shocked parents filed charges against her. Despite the tragic events, whether Drew had actually committed a crime remained questionable. Eventually, prosecutors decided the following:

Since there were no laws that applied in Missouri, the state where this tragedy occurred, [Drew] will face trial in California (the home of MySpace) where she will be charged with—of all things—TOS violations. Creating a false identity goes against MySpace’s terms of service and … as a result she will be facing 1 count of conspiracy and 3 counts of accessing a computer without authorization.Steve Spalding, “Lori Drew Facing Trial for TOS Violation,” How to Split an Atom, November 21, 2008, http://howtosplitanatom.com/the-news/lori-drew-facing-trial-for-tos-violation/.

The case is complicated and the charge unprecedented. As one author writes, “This raises the questions as to how much weight do online ‘contracts’ hold.”Steve Spalding, “Lori Drew Facing Trial for TOS Violation,” How to Split an Atom, November 21, 2008, http://howtosplitanatom.com/the-news/lori-drew-facing-trial-for-tos-violation/.

Prosecutors charged Drew under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), although that law is designed primarily to reduce hacking into computer systems. In August 2009, a jury found Drew guilty of “misdemeanor counts of unauthorized access,” but commented that “the CFAA was not devised as a vehicle for criminalizing simple contractual violations on the Internet.”Ryan Paul, “Judge: TOS Violations Not a Crime in Teen Suicide Case,” Ars Technica (blog), August 31, 2009, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/judge-says-tos-violations-arent-a-crime-acquits-lori-drew.ars. Although many believe that prosecutors pushed the charge too far, the Drew case brought TOS agreements to the attention of the public, shedding light on the complicated laws associated with Internet use.

Crimes on the Internet

Although cases such as Drew’s have brought about unexpected challenges, other online cases have had less ambiguous results. One newly clarified aspect of online law involves the use of the Internet to commit a crime. Regardless of the supposed anonymity of online use, law enforcement agencies and courts can requisition Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of suspected lawbreakers and trace their computers to discover their identities. This practice has brought many individuals to trial for criminal offenses committed over the Internet.

Traditional Websites

Several existing political websites proved beneficial to the Obama campaign. Founded in 1998, the liberal website MoveOn.org has long used its popularity and supporter base to mobilize citizens to vote, lobby, or donate funds to Democratic campaigns. With more than 4 million members, MoveOn.org plays a noticeable role in U.S. politics and serves as inspiration for other like-minded digital efforts.

The Obama campaign gave a nod to the success of such sites by building a significant web presence. Websites such as MyBarackObama.com formed the foundation of these online efforts. However, the success of the Obama digital campaign came from its use of online media in all its forms. The campaign turned not only to traditional websites but also to social networking sites, email outreach, text messages, and viral videos.

Social Networking

More and more, digital democracy demands that its users rely on these alternative forms of Internet outreach. Social networking site Facebook was the hub of many digital outreach efforts during the 2008 campaign. As of 2010, Barack Obama’s official Facebook page boasts more than 9 million fans, and the Obama administration uses the page to send messages about the current political climate.

Individuals not part of the official campaign also established Facebook pages supporting the candidate. Mamas for Obama emerged just prior to the election, as did Women for Obama and the Michelle Obama Fan Club. The groups range in size, but all speak to a new wave of digital democracy. Other political candidates, including 2008 Republican presidential contender John McCain, have also turned to Facebook, albeit in less comprehensive ways.

Email Outreach

The Obama campaign also relied on email. In 2009, an article was published titled “The Story Behind Obama’s Digital Campaign” discussing the success of Obama’s use of the Internet. According to the article, 13.5 million people signed up for updates on Obama’s progress via the MyBarackObama.com website. The campaign regularly sent out emails to reach its audience.

Emails were short—never longer than 300 words—and never anonymous, there was always a consistency of voice and tone. Obama and other key figures in the campaign also contributed emails to be sent—“Michelle wrote her own emails … and more people opened those than her husband’s”—giving the campaign a personal touch and authenticity, rather than the impression of being simply churned out by the PR machine.Eliza Williams, “The Story Behind Obama’s Digital Campaign,” Creative Review, July 1, 2009, http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/june/the-story-behind-obamas-digital-campaign.

A combination of message and financial appeal, the emails were successful not only in reaching target audiences but also in earning valuable campaign dollars.

Two billion emails were then sent out, although … this email content was carefully managed, with individuals targeted with different “tracks” depending on their circumstances and whether they had already donated to the campaign…. By the end of the campaign the website had mobilized over 3 million people to contribute over $500 million online.Eliza Williams, “The Story Behind Obama’s Digital Campaign,” Creative Review, July 1, 2009, http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/june/the-story-behind-obamas-digital-campaign.

Text Messaging

Additionally, Obama used text messaging to reach out to his supporters. During the campaign, supporters could sign up to receive text messages, and attendees at rallies and other events were asked to send text messages to friends or potential supporters to encourage them to participate in Obama’s campaign. Members of MyBarackObama.com were the first to discover his running mate selection via text message.BarackObama.com, “Be the First to Know,” Organizing for America, http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/firsttoknow. This tool proved helpful and demonstrated the Obama campaign’s commitment to fully relying on the digital world.

E-Democracy

Perhaps even more impressive than the campaign’s commitment to digital democracy were the e-democracy efforts of Obama’s supporters. Websites such as Barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com, a gently mocking site “listing the many examples of Mr. Obama’s magical compassion. (‘Barack Obama carries a picture of you in his wallet’; ‘Barack Obama thought you could use some chocolate’),”Noam Cohen, “The Wiki-Way to the Nomination,” New York Times, June 8, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/weekinreview/08cohen.html. emerged, but viral videos offered even stronger examples of Obama’s grassroots campaign.

One example of a supporter-created video was “Barack Paper Scissors,” an interactive game inspired by rock-paper-scissors. Posted on YouTube, the video logged some 600,000 views. The success of videos such as “Barack Paper Scissors” did not go unnoticed by the Obama campaign. The viral video “Yes We Can,” in which Barack Obama’s words were set to music by will.i.am (of the Black Eyed Peas), has been viewed more than 20 million times online. Capitalizing on the popularity of the clip, the campaign brought it from YouTube to its main website, thus generating even more views and greater exposure for its message.

Radio

As discussed in , radio was the first medium through which up-to-the-minute breaking news could be broadcast, with its popularization during the 1920s. On November 2, 1920, KDKA in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became the first station to broadcast election results from the Harding-Cox presidential race, “becoming a pioneer in a brand new technology.”“History of the Radio,” http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/history_of_the_radio. Suddenly, information that would previously have been available only later in the newspapers was transmitted directly into American living rooms. The public responded positively, wanting to be more involved in U.S. politics.

As radio technology developed, “Americans demanded participation in the political and cultural debates shaping their democratic republic.”Henry Jenkins, “Contacting the Past: Early Radio and the Digital Revolution,” MIT Communications Forum, http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/jenkins_cp.html. Radio provided a way to hold these debates in a public forum; it also provided a venue for politicians to speak directly to the public, a phenomenon that had not been possible on a large scale prior to the invention of the radio. This dynamic changed politics. Suddenly, candidates and elected officials had to be able to effectively communicate their messages to a large audience. “Radio brought politicians into people’s homes, and many politicians went to learn effective public-speaking for radio broadcasts.”“Radio’s Emergence,” http://library.thinkquest.org/27629/themes/media/md20s.html.

Television

Today, television remains Americans’ chief source of political news, a relationship that dates back almost to the very beginning of the medium. Political candidates began using television commercials to speak directly to the public as early as 1952. These “living room candidates,” as they are often called, understood the power of the television screen and the importance of reaching viewers at home. In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first candidate to harness television’s popularity. Eisenhower stepped onto the television screen “when Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves convinced [him] that short ads played during such popular television programs as I Love Lucy would reach more voters than any other form of advertising. This innovation had a permanent effect on the way presidential campaigns are run.”Museum of the Moving Image, The Living Room Candidate, http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/.

Online News and Politics

Finally, the Internet has become an increasingly important force in how Americans receive political information. Websites such as the Huffington Post, Daily Beast, and the Drudge Report are known for breaking news stories and political commentary. Additionally, political groups regularly use the Internet to organize supporters and influence political issues. Online petitions are available via the Internet, and individuals can use online resources to donate to political causes or connect with like-minded people.

Media and government have had a long and complicated history. Each influences the other, through regulations and news cycles. As technology develops, the relationship between media and politics will likely become even more intermeshed. The hope is that the U.S. public will benefit from such developments, and both media and the government will seek out opportunities to involve the public in their decisions.

Electronic Games and Entertainment

First popularized in the 1970s with Atari’s simple table-tennis simulator Pong, video games have come a long way over the past four decades. Early home game consoles could play only one game, a limitation solved by the development of interchangeable game cartridges. The rise of the personal computer in the 1980s enabled developers to create games with more complex story lines and to allow players to interact with each other via the computer. In the mid-1980s, online role-playing games developed, allowing multiple users to play at the same time. A dramatic increase in Internet use helped to popularize online games during the 1990s and 2000s, both on personal computers and via Internet-enabled home console systems such as the Microsoft Xbox and the Sony PlayStation. The Internet has added a social aspect to video gaming that has bridged the generation gap and opened up a whole new audience for video game companies. Senior citizens commonly gather in retirement communities to play Nintendo’s Wii bowling and tennis games using a motion-sensitive controller, while young professionals and college students get together to play in virtual bands on games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. No longer associated with an isolated subculture, contemporary video games are bringing friends and families together via increasingly advanced gaming technology.

The Internet and Social Media

It is almost impossible to overstate the influence the Internet has had on media over the past two decades. Initially conceived as an attack-proof military network in the 1960s, the Internet has since become an integral part of daily life. With the development of the World Wide Web in the 1980s and the introduction of commercial browsers in the 1990s, users gained the ability to transmit pictures, sound, and video over the Internet. Companies quickly began to capitalize on the new technology, launching web browsers, offering free web-based email accounts, and providing web directories and search engines. Internet usage grew rapidly, from 50 percent of American adults in 2000 to 75 percent of American adults in 2008.Pew Research Center, Internet User Profiles Reloaded, January 5, 2010, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1454/demographic-profiles-internet-broadband-cell-phone-wireless-users. Now that most of the industrialized world is online, the way we receive our news, do business, conduct research, contact friends and relatives, apply for jobs, and even watch television has changed completely. To provide just one example, many jobs can now be performed entirely from home without the need to travel to a central office. Meetings can be conducted via videoconference, written communication can take place via email, and employees can access company data via a server or file transfer protocol (FTP) site. You very likely have had the opportunity to take an online college class.

In addition to increasing the speed with which we can access information and the volume of information at our fingertips, the Internet has added a whole new democratic dimension to communication. Becoming the author of a printed book may take many years of frustrated effort, but becoming a publisher of online material requires little more than the click of a button. Thanks to social media such as blogs, social networking sites, wikis, and video-sharing websites, anyone can contribute ideas on the web. Social media has many advantages, including the instantaneous distribution of news, a variety of different perspectives on a single event, and the ability to communicate with people all over the globe. Although some industry analysts have long predicted that the Internet will render print media obsolete, mass-media executives believe newspapers will evolve with the times. Just as the radio industry had to rethink its commercial strategy during the rise of television, newspaper professionals will need to rethink their methods of content delivery during the age of the Internet.

New Media versus Traditional Media

New technologies have developed so quickly that executives in traditional media companies often cannot retain control over their content. For example, as we saw, when music-sharing website Napster began enabling users to exchange free music files over the Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing cost the music industry a fortune in lost CD sales. Rather than capitalize on the new technology, music industry executives sued Napster, ultimately shutting it down, but never quite managing to stamp out online music piracy. Even with legal digital music sales through online vendors such as Apple’s iTunes Store, the music industry is still trying to determine how to make a large enough profit to stay in business.

The publishing industry has also suffered from the effects of new technology (although newspaper readership has been in decline since the introduction of television and radio). When newspapers began developing online versions in response to competition from cable television, they found themselves up against a new form of journalism: amateur blogging. Initially dismissed as unreliable and biased, blogs such as Daily Kos and The Huffington Post have gained credibility and large readerships over the past decade, forcing traditional journalists to blog and tweet in order to keep pace (which allows less time to check that sources are reliable or add in-depth analysis to a story). Traditional newspapers are also losing out to news aggregators such as Google News, which profit from providing links to journalists’ stories at major newspapers without offering financial compensation to either the journalists or the news organizations. Many newspapers have adapted to the Internet out of necessity, fighting falling circulation figures and slumping advertising sales by offering websites, blogs, and podcasts and producing news stories in video form. Those that had the foresight to adapt to the new technology are breathing a sigh of relief; a 2010 Pew Research Center report found that more Americans receive their news via the Internet than from newspapers or radio sources, and that the Internet is the third most popular news source behind national and local television news (see ).Pew Research Center, “The New News Landscape: Rise of the Internet,” March 1, 2010, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1508/internet-cell-phone-users-news-social-experience?src=prc-latest&proj=peoplepress.

New media have three major advantages over traditional media. First, it is immediate, enabling consumers to find out the latest news, weather report, or stock prices at the touch of a button. Digital music can be downloaded instantly, movies can be ordered via cable or satellite on-demand services, and books can be read on e-readers. In an increasingly fast-paced world, there is little need to wait for anything. The second advantage is cost. Most online content is free, from blogs and social networking sites to news and entertainment sources. Whether readers are willing to pay for content once they are used to receiving it for free is something that the The New York Times set to find out in 2011, when it introduces a metered fee model for its online paper. Finally, new media is able to reach the most remote parts of the globe. For example, if a student is looking for information about day-to-day life in Iran, there is a high probability that a personal web page about living in that country exists somewhere on the Internet. Around three-fourths of Americans, half of Europeans, and just over one-fourth of the world’s population overall have Internet access.Internet World Stats, “Internet Usage Statistics,” http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. This widespread reach makes the Internet an ideal target for advertisers, who can communicate with their desired niche audiences via tracking devices such as profile information on social networking sites.