Not with a Bang but a Trickle

Not with a Bang but a Trickle

The history of mass communication has inevitably become intertwined with the history of technology at large. When learning the history our lessons usually start with the advent of a new invention. Lessons have started with the metal moveable type printing press, the phonograph, and the camera. On the surface, the picture some lectures paint is that history has hinged on critical individuals and that broader social phenomenon have been propagated by the "great men" of history. This posit is based on discussions from multiple classes, but the idea came back me because of the discussions about music and sound recording technologies. 

I have multiple problems with the aforementioned implications of some lectures. When our class learned about music, it all started with Thomas Edison. We learned about his phonograph, and Berliner's gramophone and then all of modern musical history as if these late 19th century inventions kickstarted an immediate revolution in the way humans interact with music. It is true that today's world of music wouldn't have been possible without recording technologies first brought to the world by Edison and Berliner. But it sure would have still been possible without the inventors themselves.  Every inventor, discoverer and scientist has had to build on what came before him or her. If the Wizard of Menloe Park hadn't gotten the first patent for a phonograph, someone else would have soon done so. But our learnings in class make it seem that recording technology depended on Edison, not that it depended on every last person that came before him. 

In class we made a T-chart comparing music and how people interacted with it before and after 1877 or 1887, I don't remember which date but it was made. The chart helped support this idea that everything changed that one year. In reality, the transition from the old ways of music to the new was not abrupt, but gradual. While recording technology did exist in the late 19th century, it did not drastically alter the way in which people interacted with music immediately. It had to be slowly made affordable to the wider public and practical for everyday use. It had to be refined so sounds recorded were clearer and more durable than those first Edison recordings. New revolutionary technologies have been being invented for hundreds of years now, but the real work is slow. Sure, if you google "when was the first computer made" google will tell you 1936. But it would be a mistake if future people studying computers made a T-chart listing differences in life before and after 1936, putting things like "search engines allow easy access to information", or "communication between people worldwide" in the column for after 1936. Computers has to be refined, downsized, programmed, added to and downsized again for decades before they were practical for use as we use them today. Early computers were calculators the size of entire rooms, they couldn't display images or communicate with each other like they can today. No breakthrough discovery took computers from Turing machines that cracked the enigma code to affordable, often pocket-sized computing beasts with more computing power than the computers that sent us to the moon.
Likewise, it is vastly oversimplifying to say that life changed when the first phonographs and gramaphones were created.

Nobody in our class thinks that the people of the late 1800s immediately had Spotify and iTunes. Still, I think focusing on one breakthrough like the Gutenberg printing press or Edison's phonograph to start a lesson is misleading. Behind every Edison there is a Tesla, and before every Gutenberg there was a Bi Sheng. After every Edison there are countless Berliners and other entrepreneurs that improve the technology they inherit. Our lessons put lots of emphasis on a few great figures. But the world seldom moves forward in great leaps or bounds made by great figures, but in small steps made by many, often anonymous or forgotten.