◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Organizer of Shanghai Federation of Social Sciences
There are academic ideas EXPLORATION AND FREE VIEWS
Understanding the Power of Media – Revisiting Media and History
Huang Dan| Professor of Digital Communication Research Center of Zhejiang University and Researcher of Information and Communication Research Center of Fudan University
This article was published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 1, 2022
Unless noted, the pictures in the text are from the Internet
One
In Li Boyuan's "A Small History of Civilization", there is such a story: In the late Qing Dynasty, the policy of scientific expeditions changed, in addition to poetry, but also added current affairs, palm history, heavenly calculations, public opinion and other contents, in order to adapt to this change, there are three sons of the Jia family in the countryside of Wujiang, who were instructed to start contacting Shanghai newspapers to make up for new knowledge. "The three brothers have never seen anything before, and they can know about accidents outside, and they can also use them for recreation, and they spend two or three hours in the newspaper all day and night." Their eyes opened, and the action began, they took out their private money to entrust people to buy back a fire oil foreign lamp in the foreign goods store, and as soon as it lit up like daylight, the flickering fire of the oil lamp looked pitiful. Since then, the three brothers have been more attentive to the newspaper, and when they see new equipment from abroad, they are entrusted to buy them, regardless of whether they are suitable for use. Only this is still not thirsty, but they are more eager to go to Shanghai to see the world, because from the newspapers, there are still running water, electric lamps and other rare things, which cannot be compared with fire oil and foreign lamps. After repeated plots, the three brothers secretly rented a boat without their mother, and secretly got on the boat in the middle of the night and ran to Shanghai.
If this is a historical fact, according to the existing research ideas, what will we pay attention to? Perhaps in the countryside of Wujiang at that time, how many newspapers could already be seen, what kind of newspapers they were, and through what channels they were disseminated; or perhaps it was who the local readers were, what they mainly read, and what effect the newspapers had on them; it is also possible to examine which foreign goods entered the Wujiang area at that time, how they flowed in, and what kind of families bought foreign goods; of course, from such examples, we can also analyze what role newspapers played in the process of radiating the influence of Shanghai to the surrounding areas, and so on. The value of some of these studies touches on newspapers and their influences at different levels. However, all of these studies add up to the feeling that they still don't hit the true destiny of the story. For example, why read the newspaper to let people "know about accidents outside"? Why can newspapers be a guide to buying foreign goods? How can the newspaper 'Shanghai' be rightly equated with the actual Shanghai? Where does this inducing power of newspapers come from? All in all, none of this would have happened without newspapers, so what is a newspaper?
Unfortunately, in our study no one really asked what a newspaper was, but rather treated it as a self-evident object. This not only makes newspapers common sense, but also makes it difficult to grasp the content of newspapers and their roles (such as how they differ from books) that researchers usually value. This so-called study of newspaper history is not worthy of the name, and in fact there is no "newspaper" newspaper research. Historian Darnton has made a similar statement, saying that researchers have always hoped to open a new window into the French Revolution by examining the world of printing, but they never intended to understand how this major instrument of communication contributed to the first great modern revolution. "Historians generally regard the printed word as a record of what happened, not as a factor", and it was the press that helped shape the events it recorded, and it can be said that without the printed press, it would have been impossible to conquer the Bastille and to overthrow the old monarchy.
This phenomenon in newspapers and historical research is by no means an exclusive problem in historical research, and the situation of "media blindness" is widespread in both social sciences and humanities. Some of these researchers have different paths in the study of the composition, history and influence of the media, but they are similar in focusing on the content, role and dissemination of knowledge and their composition, while ignoring or even ignoring the media itself. Merowitz is puzzled by this: "Although the study of media content has important social significance, it is surprising that people rarely ask other types of questions about media. In fact, many studies of the effects of the medium ignore the study of the media itself." This gives rise to the interesting phenomenon that "the content and control of television are studied in exactly the same way as the content and control of newspapers, plays, films, and novels, and they are themselves treated as neutral transmission systems", and their differences have no meaning in between; and a comparison with the study of the effects of the Industrial Revolution reveals a huge gap between the two, in which no one would claim that "the only important thing in his research is the goods produced by new machines", on the contrary, What enters the vision of the researchers of the industrial revolution is the impact of the industrial revolution as a new mode of production on many variables, such as the balance of urban and rural life, the division of labor, the family structure, the degree of social cohesion, the concept of time and space, the composition of classes, and the speed of social change. This is instructive, but if we also shift our perspective and see the media (the press) as a new way of communication that changes space-time and social relations in itself, rather than as an empty bottle, will our research— such as the study of the story of the WujiangJia brothers mentioned above—just revolve around its contents?
The press is a medium, and no one will dispute it; but why it must be a medium, and what the medium really is, presumably not many people can answer. How the medium is understood is always closely related to the way it is viewed. When the medium is regarded as a whiteboard for content, a transparent "glass jar", it is impossible to think of anything other than to focus on the "delicious meat" of the "media content" and regard the "items produced by the new machine"—the content transmitted by the medium—as the only important thing. Not to mention that this "instrumental" view of the medium has been increasingly questioned, that is, from the perspective of our own media experience (such as the use of mobile phones) today, this concept is completely inappropriate. This and the other should stimulate us to re-understand the medium by reflecting on the media view in existing media and historical research. Re-understanding must be premised on changing the imagination, and it may not be possible to do it if you want to get it, and it is impossible to do it if you can't think of it. In McLuhan's words, it is to "understand the power of the medium in an appropriate way." Starting with what the medium is, it is particularly important to re-establish a perspective on the medium for discussing the medium and history.
Li Boyuan's "A Small History of Civilization"
Two
Since the medium is a foreign word, its original meaning does not seem to have been seriously explored. The English media, derived from the Latin medium, means "middle". Although Raymond Williams sorted out the three meanings according to the passage of time in "Keywords", he also pointed out that "intermediary" or "intermediary" is a relatively old and universal meaning. Debray said that "media" does not refer to the media or medium, but to the behavior of the medium, which is the intermediate between the production of symbols and the production of events. The "medium" as Zilinsky understands it is to provide space for action for attempts to combine what is divided. These understandings all seem to be related to this etymology.
The word "medium" in English has a singular and plural distinction, that is, "medium" and "media", and the complexity arises from this. It is generally believed that the complex number is a natural set of singular numbers, but in the "medium", the two cannot completely overlap. The plural "media" has been used more often since the mid-19th century, but its widespread use is related to the rise of broadcasting and newspapers. In this context, "media" often means "mass media." This is quite different from "medium", "medium" mainly emphasizes the material characteristics of the medium, with the meaning of "element", "environment" or "carrier in the middle position", simply put, referring to a medium, is a unique and decisive substance, focusing on its technical meaning, which is even more important than the content of speech and the things written. It is for this reason that whether printing and broadcasting as "media" are equal to the meaning of "medium" raises questions, and what stands out is not their "materiality", but the social aspect, subject to other purposes. To put it bluntly, in the eyes of some people, "media" is no longer the original "medium" that focuses on natural media, but a social institution, although both have the meaning of being in the middle.
The introduction of communication science in the mainland in the 1980s originated from the study of mass communication in the United States, and the term "mass media" was also introduced, which influenced the relevant disciplines of humanities and social sciences, and historiography was no exception. The "media" in the mouth and eyes of researchers actually refers to the mass media, that is, "media". The so-called history of the press, the history of television, and the history of radio are obviously based on this recognition, and thus extended to other aspects, such as the history of films, books, telegraphs, telephones, and so on. In this way, the medium seems to need not be determined, because it is already a physical object that is obviously there--everyone can see things, and as long as these objects are used as research objects, they are engaged in media research.
For each specific study, naming such an object does not seem to be a big problem, and it has always been the case in the field of media and historical studies. However, if you look into it a little, you will find that things are not so simple. Newspapers, radio, and television are very different, and their production, transmission, presentation, and reception methods are different, why are they all called media, and what is their basis? Not only that, but each of them also contains many levels and paths of research. The "Story of the Jia Brothers" mentioned at the beginning of the article can be completely integrated into the context of social history, economic history, the history of Sino-Western exchanges, and the history of Shanghai city, rather than the history of newspapers and periodicals, although it is caused by newspapers. From the perspective of printing history, the history of newspapers and periodicals is the history of the adoption, application and reform of printing, which has nothing to do with the history of newspapers and periodicals in the usual sense, such as Su Jing's "Cast to Substitute Engraving". Television studies are even more complex, with literature, art, iconography, cultural criticism, and audiovisual technology all having room to play: they either focus on texts and institutions, or focus on their performances, or focus on shooting techniques, and so on. The visual culture research that has emerged in recent years, in the context of art history and image research, takes visuality as the core perspective, and not only includes art, images, advertisements, soap operas, etc. into the scope of research, but also exhausts the fields of viewing behavior, viewing process, viewing method and other issues. So, are they all media studies, which of them are media studies and which are not? What can be called a "medium", what kind of research can be identified as a media (or newspaper) study, is there a uniform standard in this, or does it depend on the individual interests of the researcher? What is its particularity? When we think of the medium, the instinctive reaction is the newspaper spread out in our hands, the TELEVISION set that sits around with our families, the radio that flutters with pleasant sounds, and the screen in the dark, our understanding has lost the meaning of "middle" or "media" - that is, the "appropriate way" to understand the media academically. So it's crucial to remember the following sentence: Understanding the medium doesn't just mean (or primarily) "understanding individual forms of media—electricity, the car, the typewriter, the cloth—but to think about it from the point of view of the medium."
Three
The "media perspective" means that the medium is not only an object and an object, but also a site for examining society, people and even the world. This "angle", or perspective, is the "center" or "middle" position of the medium, which, according to Michel and Hansen, is "adjustment", and "adjustment" is the "mediality" common to all media. The reason why newspapers, radio, and television are "media" lies in their common "media" - the "regulatory mechanism" in the middle position, and the more intimate expression is "transitive".
It is clearer that the "media" as we know it contains "medium", but not just a heap of "medium". It contains different "mediums"—media, i.e., the characteristics of a single medium's unique material or symbolic element, which in this case may be said to be the plural form of "medium"; however, it extracts and contains the mechanism and role of "media" ("regulation"), which is indispensable to all single mediums, which is necessary to occur in the "middle position". Such two meanings constitute a collective singular noun "media". From this, I thought of the interpretation of "media" in the "Explanation of Words": "Media" is "conspiring with each other, conspiring with the two surnames also", which refers to such a kind of middle-of-the-road circle. It's no wonder that Debray sees the medium as a third party that fosters a relationship between the two. The importance of the medium is "bridge-building", that is, to make different factors intersect and "conceive" each other. The medium is not just "in the middle", it also acts on both that are connected by the intermediate term. It wants to create a model in an irreversible process that transcends all attempts and produces a special whole. The media has "media" and "intermediary", which is the interaction and interaction of "media-media", and is a kind of "transfer". Under its trigger and coordination, various relationships are transformed into each other because of the connection, and new forms or aspects are formed because of the transformation. The medium thus becomes "leading us to the thing that reaches out to us because it is related to us", "let us enter into what is relevant to us or to subpoena us". The medium is not a tool, the tool is only focused on efficiency and effectiveness, the medium has the role of opening up reality, opening up our relationship with the world and the different possibilities. Without a medium, it is like without a bridge. Bridges are not only connections, but also handovers that lead us to the other shore, and in the process of access, the surrounding scenery and various relationships can converge and unfold. Therefore, where there is a medium, there is a happening, there is an event, there is a change, there is a new progress. Wu JiangJia's three sons ran to Shanghai at night, just to make a witness for this.
Just as materiality depends on concrete matter and its forms, the technical characteristics of individual media differ, bringing about a wide variety of mediative (transitive) ways and their patterns: "In the society of colloquial culture, many people speak at the same time; in the world of written culture, one person speaks at a time, at least in people's expectations." Media events, live television, made the world a competition ground or a grand theater, creating new scenes and even laying the foundation for Neil Bozeman's feared "entertainment to death" and "childhood disappearance." The technology of reproduction has deprived art of its charm, but it has also given the public the opportunity to contact the artworks that can only be worshipped in the viewing of its displays. Public opinion is the most commonly used term in the study of newspaper history, but I am afraid that not many researchers know that "public opinion" in the modern political and sociological sense was only after the emergence of printed newspapers. Newspapers are like a platform for "public conversation", a pen activates millions of tongues, and the opinions of scattered places are concentrated and fused, thus creating a large, abstract and independent community of newspaper opinions, which is named "public opinion". Without newspapers, people's conversations wouldn't have an impact on anyone's mind. Thus, "public opinion" and so-called nationalism (imaginary community), internationalism, are all related to the coordination of this "public conversation" (handover turnaround) of newspapers. Proceeding from this, the study of newspapers and public opinion should not be based on content and text to prove the effect, but should cut into the "transitive" behavior of newspapers and periodicals, pay attention to the operation and mode of "public conversation", and reveal the formation of content and text and its consequences from such logic. Looking back at the press and history in this way, such as the well-known "Shi Ji Bao" and the Penghu Reform Law, the "Su Bao" and the Paiman Revolution, the "New Youth" and the New Culture Movement, and the debate between the "Minbao" and the "Xinmin CongBao", I am afraid that we will have a new understanding and discover a new scenery.
Since the characteristics of the media are different, our research should reveal the different "regulation" or "transfer" conditions and results caused by the characteristics of different media from their common "media properties". At the same time, the media and the media are not insulated, they are also in the intersection of each other, intersection, there will be encounters, collisions, transfers, competition, separation, can be described as cutting and chaos: newspapers, speeches, slogan leaflets promote each other, newspapers, meetings, letters and interpersonal exchanges of mutual conditions, schools, publishing houses and newspapers reciprocal exchanges, etc., forming a "media circle" with its own characteristics. The logic of circulation is the logic of the medium, you grasp me, I grasp you, and the behavior associated with the media is a combination of things, a specific shape. The medium is like a "living vortex of power", stirring up everything related to it, and then constantly spitting out, it is a new formation. Alexander Des Forge found a similar phenomenon in the "Shanghai Narrative" from the late Qing Dynasty to the early Republic of China: serial fiction and other media production and its products such as travel guides, newspapers, magazines, picture collections, radio, film, photography, slides, etc., intertwined with a cross-text, cross-genre, cross-media, and ever-expanding visual and text field, jointly pointing to the characteristics and meaning of Shanghai, in different ways, expanding people's multiple perceptions and experiences , thus providing different entrances, frameworks and models for "what is Shanghai". Therefore, he specially borrowed Debray's concept and called it "mediasphere", and thus formed the basis of the entire analysis to reveal the complex relationship and appearance of the intergenetic complementarity of cultural production between media, and it was in this media ecology that the "Shanghai" and the understanding of Shanghai at that time were generated, constituting a "mediasphere Shanghai". Compared with this, the source of perception of the three sons of Wujiang Jia is still somewhat single and flat. Dai Naidi's experimentation and exploration have opened up new imaginations for the study of media and history—combing, sorting, and confirming content that cares about the text but does not stick to the content. Only when the medium can be regarded as singular— it is not a superposition of a single media form, but in fact greater than the superposition of a single media form, that the "medium" of media research has a certain degree of autonomy, and media research can excavate its own space. Thus, moving from content to media, from different media to mediumlith, can give media and historical research a new pair of glasses, which McLuhan puts it, with "an appropriate way."
Four
Following this line of thinking, the medium is a concept, a theoretical window that examines the medium and history. The study of media and history cannot and will not only be fixed on the evolutionary history of a certain medium, the evolutionary history of different media (which is exactly what media archaeology wants to deconstruct), the history of social use and function of the media, etc.; let alone supplement and prove some historical people and things with the media content; but take the media as a basic condition and element of social composition, as an "extension of man", to study how its production, operation and change affect the history of man and society and its culture.
In fact, the entire existence of mankind and its history are based on and rely on the "media domain". We have light to see, sound to hear, language symbols to communicate, and money to greatly facilitate transactions. These different media open up a differentiated range for us, specify a definite "Gestalt" for us in our feelings, cognitions and behaviors, and give us different political, scientific, economic, and artistic operating spaces and a certain range of cultural authenticity. Without these media, there would be no people, no social reality; in the same way, different media have different biases, and naturally different societies, cultures, and even epistemology will arise. This is exactly what Inis said, "The strength of a new medium is the birth of a new civilization." A description of "Notre Dame de Paris" is vividly portrayed for this: the silent Auxiliary Bishop Claude, accompanied by a long sigh, points to Notre Dame with his left hand, and points to the open book on the table with his right hand, and his eyes stay on the book for a moment before turning to the church and saying, "Alas! This one is going to wipe out that one. The big ones can be defeated by the small ones, and the buildings can be destroyed by the book! Hugo then commented: "This is the fear of the monks in the face of the new agent printing, the vertigo and panic of the people standing in the temple in front of the great prints of Gutenberg." "Doesn't this reflect the anxiety and unease caused by the social and cultural upheaval caused by media change?" The printing press became "siege hammers that leveled churches and castles". This hugo feels should be the focus of media and historical research, and it is also the place where the value of its research can be best demonstrated, if we can use "media" as a perspective.
Regarding what is a medium, what is not a medium, whether the medium is a tool or an "intermediary", this is not natural, let alone a demarcation from the ontological sense, it is precisely determined by the researcher's own vision, and determines what angle to cut into the study of media and history. In this regard, Kramer pointed out quite insightfully: "The difference between the instrumental and media perspectives, between the technology as a tool and the technology as a media, cannot be misunderstood as an ontological distinction, as if we could use it to classify the world of technological artifacts, either into a group of tools or a group of media." In fact, these are two perspectives at work, albeit of varying importance. If the medium is regarded as a technological tool, it is out of a spiritual and technological vision, and the role of the medium is to enhance or replace the human body and the organs of sensation, activity and thinking, it is an apparatus for improving the efficiency of labor; conversely, if technology is understood as a medium, it is a device that we use to produce the artificial world, which opens up new ways of our experience and practice, without which the world is inaccessible to us. So, isn't that clear? In the past media and historical research, it is basically fixed on "spiritual craftsmanship" to observe the medium (such as newspapers, broadcasts, etc.), and the media that is illuminated from it is naturally a "tool", a tool for newspaper operators to achieve a certain purpose. On the contrary, some research that studies technology and does not call itself media research may be based on the perspective of media, showing us the change and creation of technology to the world.
In my opinion, Wolfgang Schifferbsch's Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century is such a representative work. The construction and extension of the railway recreates time and space; the author shows in an all-round way from the aspects of train speed, journey landscape, carriage setting and separation, journey experience, station site selection and urban architecture, and even the psychopathology caused by the railway; it is a means of transportation and transportation, and people and places change with its movement, showing an unprecedented new look. If the medium is always through the process of using its material properties, "combined with the human senses and the rate of human understanding, always adjusting the human experience in a given time and space", to achieve the interconstruction of man, environment and technology, then Wolfgang Schifferbüsch's "railway" fully reflects this.
Another example that cannot be ignored is Lian Lingling's "Building a Consumer Paradise: Department Stores and Modern Shanghai Urban Culture". In the previous fixed cognition, no one thought that the "department store" was a medium, nor could it be classified into the research context of media and history, but in this book, the author openly shows that she is using McLuhan's media theory as the framework for research, and looking at the past with such a vision, the department store is a central axis of communication, and around its many sentient beings and objects together weave modern consumerist scenes and relationships. As a result, department stores have become the meeting place of different races, groups and classes in modern Shanghai; a display window for a variety of goods and different consumption behaviors; and a hidden competition of material power and symbolic power in the light and in the dark, mixing the atmosphere of shopping and entertainment integration. In the author's description, the department store is like a huge roulette wheel, involved in the flow of people, exporting new goods and consumption patterns; stringing up the surrounding roads, and exerting its own influence on the surrounding space. It is from the perspective of the medium and its regulation (although in my opinion, its use is not yet rounded enough) that the author reveals that the department store company constitutes a unique aspect of Shanghai modernity in the interactive inter-construction of things, people and environment.
It can be seen that when researchers take their eyes off the entity (physical object) of the medium and establish the perspective of the media, this not only makes the media have its own theoretical basis, but also greatly expands the imagination of academic research. When what is a medium and what is not a medium is no longer a judgment of the object, but is closely related to the researcher's vision of how to view the medium, the study of media and history can break free from the shackles of object history and set its sights on the wider world.
Through such a new vision, the study of media and history has its own particularity, its own specific appearance and spirit, and more importantly, its meaning and value will also be redefined. Because, as Galen said, since man is not inherently self-sufficient and must depend on external conditions, technology thus becomes the most important component of the essence of man himself, and even forms a man-made nature like man himself. Even according to Don Eid, there is never a man who is detached from the "original" of technology, who must have coexisted and co-evolved with technology, and that survival without technology is only an abstract possibility, unless it is closed and placed in an isolated, protected and solid paradise, like a protected animal in captivity. In this regard, the "intertwined interchange" between people and technology embodied in the media is the fundamental relationship between human survival and the universal situation that exists at all times in the process of human evolution and evolution. Such a "union" of technology and man is not who enters whom, nor who decides whom, but a relationship in which technology and man cannot be detached; the relationship between technology and man can be created, maintained, transformed, and destroyed in concrete and specific practice, but it cannot be separated or separated. The medium is the human condition. Thus, the medium essentially points to and points to an ontological situation of humanity—the constructive externalization of the medium-dependent behavior and invention. In this sense, as a medium of angles, it becomes a lens for the deepest archaeological excavation of human life forms - we are through the medium, to spy on the survival of human beings; the positioning of media and historical research is the study of the fundamental relationship between man, the study of the irreducible role played by "regulation" in human history. Debray said, "From the source, the origin of media science should be anthropology", and we can also say that the history of media is also the history of mankind. When the medium becomes an angle, the power of the medium is unleashed. Such media and historical research will also play a special role, occupying its own unique position: it can cross various disciplines and penetrate through various specialized histories, so as to "occupy a more central position in human history."
There is academic thought There is thoughtful scholarship
Focus on China
Uphold a humanistic stance
A platform for humanities and social science scholars
Welcome to "Explore and Argue" Together