UCI History of Digital Culture Rethinking Media Change Questions

I’m working on a history question and need guidance to help me learn.

1. What are the 2 or 3 points you think are most valuable from this week’s readings? What about for this week’s video clips and documentaries?

Here is a template for how to approach answering this question each week: In [name of reading],

states that [main point] which is important because [why].

For this question, each main point should be expressed in no more than 280 characters (tweet length!).

2. Choose one point from this week’s lectures, readings, or media, and connect it back to one of the key course questions that feels most relevant to you right now, and explain the connection you are making as best you can. It could be something that seems most important, or something that is new to you – it’s up to you how to take this question on.

Again, here are our DIGC 160 3 Guiding Questions:
– How do we understand something as a “new” technology?
– How can we analyze the ways that members of a culture use technology as a locus for evolving or conflicting cultural practices and social change?
– And, how does culture affect our understanding of a technology and how we use it?

Don’t include your own questions yet – that’s the next question!

3. Thinking back on the readings and media for this week, what questions do you have? What needs more explanations, more examples, or more detail? If you have no questions, try out giving an example of your own on one of this week’s concepts, and connect your example to one of this week’s topics or main points. Aim for 1-3 questions or comments.

For each question or comment you include, you have a maximum count of 280 characters (yes, consider these each tweets)

4. Connection ideas from this week’s readings, lectures, and/or media to topics of your own interest (aim for 1-2, but some weeks you might have more).

You should pick specific examples, concepts, or terms, and connect them up to your own interests, project, or goals. During week 1-3, the field of what you can choose and how you use it is wide open – during weeks 4-7, this is the place to connect up what you read to your own capstone project. This question is deliberately left open – there may be only one point that really stands out for you, but there also might be a few. Take on no more than three things.

For this question, for each idea you discuss, present it in tweet format, with a maximum of 280 characters. (hint: you can talk about multiple ideas – each one is its own tweet)

In their introduction to their 2003 book, Rethinking Media Change, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins note that “the emergence of new media sets in motion a complicated, unpredictable process in which established and infant systems may co-exist for an extended period or in which older media may develop new functions and find new audiences as the emerging technology begins to occupy the cultural space of its ancestors.” (Thorburn and Jenkins, 2003: 2) So, traditional storytelling practices that began as oral traditions transformed with the advent of writing, and the invention of the printing press – they changed and evolved, but they did not disappear. Theater has reinvented itself, novels have reinvented themselves (multiple times), radio reinvented itself after TV displaced it in its entertainment and news-reporting role. The examples here are pretty limitless. Recording technology has shifted and evolved as the tools have shifted and evolved, but the practice of creating a record of sound has evolved over the last hundred and fifty plus years. This episode you are listening to right now is evidence of the changes in these practices.

I want to start today with an invention that is such an everyday part of our lives that we’ve lost sight of its importance. We’ll talk about what it is, look at some of the practices it helped transform, and some of the media cultures it helped to shape. The device I’m talking about the wireless TV remote control. You might or might not know that this unassuming device was invented at the Zenith Corporation after World War II, by engineer Eugene Polley and physicist Robert Adler. The impetus for this invention was Zenith’s late founder – Commander Eugene F. McDonald Jr.- ‘s belief that “TV viewers would not tolerate commercials” (I can’t say it any better than this), and he was convinced that commercial TV would not survive without commercials. So his goal was for a wireless remote control that would mute the sound of commercials. (About Zenith: Corporate History – Remote Control – History of the TV Remote Control)

The Zenith Corporation, following up on Commander McDonald’s beliefs, released a model in 1950 known as the “Lazy Bones”; a wired remote that was not practical enough for commercial success. Around 1955, Adler teamed up with Polley who was working on a photocell-based approach for a wireless model that was similarly not practical, being too light sensitive to be useful that was being called the “Flashomatic”. Adler added the element of ultrasonic waves to produce a convenient and reliable remote control system, The Zenith Space Command, released to the public in 1956. This model dominated the consumer market for the next 25 years, which is why Adler and Polley are considered the inventors of the TV remote control.

Before we laud – or chastise? – both Dr. Adler and Mr. Polley for our contemporary sedentary lifestyle, consider that wireless technologies even in the 1950s were not entirely new. Like other inventions we’ve discussed in this course, there was a technological ecosystem the TV remote developed in – in this case going back into the late 19th century. Nikola Tesla unveiled the first wireless remote control in 1898 at Madison Square Garden – what he called a “teleautomaton” – to control a miniature boat by radio waves. He’d repurposed a telegraph key box originally designed to send Morse code signals to shift electrical contacts on the boat, which allowed the operator to control its motion.

Why don’t we know more about this? Tesla’s remote controlled boats were a flop, financially. He’d developed them for the U.S. Navy – who thought the technology was too flimsy to be used under the conditions of war, but the concept did catch on among his contemporaries, and remote controls were developed for other types of equipment. A couple of examples: Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres-Quevedo used wireless telegraph transmitters to control – a tricycle, an engine-powered boat, and finally submarine torpedoes. In World War I, the German navy used remotely controlled boats loaded with explosives to attack ships – the first instance of a military force directing armaments from a distance. During World War II, both German and American armed militaries experimented with and deployed guided missiles and torpedoes using the same basic technology. And it was in the 1930s and 1940s that remote controls began to show up in consumer electronics, like the garage door opener, and model airplanes.

I could spend time talking about the further developments of the TV remote, which we use in various guises to run many of the consumer electronic and computer devices of the current day, but that would not serve our current goal. All I will say at this stage is that our present day incarnation of how the remote control is, literally, continuing to change our lives is something you probably have somewhere within your line of site at this very minute as it is with mine – your smart phone.

I’m not going to spend a lot more time specifically on the TV remote – we could spend the rest of the course discussing the digital descendants of the remote control, and how this tool has affected the very ways that we think and see the world around us. However, I do want to touch on three related issues.

First, The TV remote is connected very directly to a social issue that it has obvious ramifications across the past 60 plus years where it has been part of our society. That is, the metaphor of the “coach potato,” and the related, more serious connections to physical and mental health of all members of society. Studies in the 1960s showed that children were watching up to 50 hours of television per week – parents were using it as a de facto babysitting device, and there were many concerns, some of which were grounded in fact, some in fears, that passively sitting with media was detrimental to children’s health and growth.

Second, the remote control was invented on the basis of the belief that the days of commercial television were limited. While it is certainly true that commercial television has evolved into a very different kind of programming than it was in the 1950s, the reality is that adapting was a strategy that has – to a great extent – so far – worked. Colonel MacDonald was, we know, spot on that pay television models were the future, but we can also point to models where pay television – in our current era, streaming and cable television – often include commercials as a tier of programming content delivery.

Finally, those advertisements that so annoyed the President of the Zenith Corporation have evolved with the medium. There have been many social and cultural issues raised along the way, some of which have been legislated in a range of forms, and some of which have been addressed by the creation of alternate media resources, like community free access television, and public television, notably (in the US) through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and its best-known television resource, PBS. Other Western countries, like Canada and the UK, have nationalized a channel (in Canada the CBC – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and in the UK the BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation), with missions to educate and entertain, and they use dedicated networks that carry out these missions. Both the BBC and the CBC were funded by the government in both countries and are funded through national appropriations through their governments. Media in the US has historically been developed and funded from private resources, and the use of national funds to support media resources has perennially carried philosophical support or opposition by the two primary US political parties since the creation of the CPB in 1967, which, like the CBC and the BBC, was founded by an act of Congress, and was designed to help develop the US version of public broadcasting through National Public Radio, better known through its acronym NPR, and the Public Broadcasting System, better known as PBS. Similarly, the CPB is funded by national appropriations. The mission of the CPB, however, is to support local public radio and television stations, and only a small part of its funding goes to PBS (about 6%).

To close this episode, I want to remind you to think about any new technology as taking place within a constellation of others. Newness helps innovative people think of other new ideas, and new inventions – as we have seen across history, tend to take place in clusters, thus creating yet another instance where many changes are happening more or less at once. The pace of change is never a simple thing.

Elements of this episode are drawn from:

Chandler, Nathan. “What is the history of the remote control?” HowStuffWorks.com. 3/3/2011. https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/repurposed-inventions/history-of-remote-control.htm (Links to an external site.) 4 December 2020

Farhi, Paul. “The Inventor Who Deserves a Sitting Ovation” The Washington Post 2/17/2007. Accessed 11/30/2007 from https://web.archive.org/web/20180817031653/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021602102.html (Links to an external site.)

Zenith. About Zenith: Corporate History – Remote Control: “Five Decades of Channel Surfing: History of the TV Remote Control” Accessed 11/30/2020 from https://web.archive.org/web/20080116212531/http://www.zenith.com/sub_about/about_remote.html