Lecture 2 Notes How We Talk to Each Other: Mass Culture in Canad

—  “Europeans fight against time, Americans fight against distance.”  --John Keegan, historian and journalist

—  Our first big national – even pre-national – projects were geared to making it easier to communicate and travel.

—  Railways were important

—  But telegraph lines were just as important

Mass media

—  Newspapers started mainly to get official news out and as a cure for homesickness

—  They also provided news people could use: shipping schedules, crop prices, notices

—  Every town had at least one, usually more

—  Religious groups, trades, ethnic groups had their own papers

—  But eventually, big media, requiring lots of money to get started, began to dominate and create a mass culture.

—  In many ways, early journalists were like modern bloggers

—  They were small operators, independent and vulnerable

—  People were more literate because of the new public school system, and had some leisure time

—  Though, much more than it is today, that free time was spent with other people

—  By the middle of the 1800s, big city newspapers became news factories, using heavy equipment like rotary presses and moving their offices into skyscrapers

—  … with floors of journalists, major business offices, ad agencies, big department store advertisers

Radio

— 

Radio networks made gigantic stars of the people who made music, performed in radio comedies, drama, music shows. It was the first mass media broadcast into every home, and it made staying home at night the norm for North American and European families.

Radio was not the same as the radio we know now, which is pretty much all news or phone-in shows. Radio carried everything, from music to drama shows, across North America on four large US networks and in Canada on the CBC.

·                     Television

           

             TV was shown at the 1938 and 1939 CNE and wad demonstrated in the window of the Ogilvie       department store in Montreal.

·                          In the first months of 1939, Canada had its first “tech stock” bubble but TV was delayed for years because of the Second World War

·                        1949: Federal government announces TV will be a mix of private and public broadcasters, a mix of the British model  (total government control) and the US free market system.

·                          The CBC would not license private broadcasters and refused to broadcast TV until 1952

·                           There were 146,000 TVs in Canada in 1952.

·                           Four years later, 2.5 million homes had them

·                          For years, choice of TV shows was so limited that, essentially, everyone watched the same shows, no matter what the demographics

·                         More than half of all the men, women and children in America watched the series finale of M*A*S*H* on Feb. 28, 1983

·                          Canada licensed its first pay TV channels, all for movies…

·                          Then, in the 1990s, came sports and music channels

·                           Canada licensed its first pay TV channels, all for movies…

·                          Then, in the 1990s, came sports and music channels

—                               The Internet became available, in very limited ways in the early 1990s

—                                The problem was in the hardware

—                                 300 and 1200 baud modems, inability to store data, poor graphics cards

—                               By 2001, we had something like the Internet we know today except only on computers, not on phones, with no social media as we know it now.

What the Internet has Done (So far)

—                                 Destroyed the monopolies of the big media companies

    —  Smashed “massed culture” as it was known in the 1900s

—                                  Added to the demographic split

—                               Provided new opportunities for learning while at the same time allowing people to line in echo chambers.

—                                Radically changed politics

—                                Gave people the opportunity to be filmmakers and publishers

—                                 Changed the way things are bought and sold

—                                  Changed the way we use leisure time and interact with each other

—                                  Changed, or undermined, privacy.