The Life and Death of Mass Media Natan Dotan Submitted in Partial
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The Life and Death of Mass Media Natan Dotan Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2013 Natan Dotan All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Life and Death of Mass Media Natan Dotan There is a paradox in our understanding of the media today. Popular accounts often proclaim that mass media is dead while newspapers routinely report that new Hollywood box-office records have been smashed. In this dissertation I aim to resolve this paradox and to determine whether or not mass media is in fact in terminal decline. I propose two new concepts – the principle of cheap publicity and the mass media tendency – and I use a computer simulation to demonstrate that these provide a parsimonious explanation of the paradoxical structure of today’s dominant media. This leads me to the conclusion that mass media is not in terminal decline; rather, there has been a shift in the social locus of mass media. Throughout most of the American 20th century, massification played a central role in the guiding logic of media firms. Beginning in the 1970s though, these firms began adopting strategies of audience segmentation. In the decades since this rupture mass media has lived on as the emergent outcome of audience behavior rather than as an innate characteristic of media technologies or institutions. I discuss the implications of this finding for the structure of the contemporary American public sphere and for the experience of publicity today. Table of Contents 1. The New Public Sphere ……………………………………………………………………… 1 Data, Methods, and Organization (10); Emergence and Complexity (12); Hermeneutics (16); The Importance of the American Media (17); 2. Media and the Public Sphere ……………………………………………………………… 19 Functions of Mediated Publicity (24); Community-making (24); Reality-Making (28); Meaning-Making (30); The Mass Media Tendency (35); 3. Aggregation and Fragmentation ………………………………………………………… 37 Theories of Mass Media and Mass Society (42); Functionalist Theories (42); Psychological Theories (47); Marxist Critiques (49); A Framework (56); Can Mass Society Be Progressive? (72); The Contradictions of Mass Publicity (76); 4. Mass Media Institutions …………………………………………………………………….. 79 4.1 What is Mass Media? ………………………………………………………………….. 80 4.2 Telegraph News: The rise of monopoly networks ………………………... 90 4.3 Radio Broadcasting: The first modern mass medium …………………… 98 4.4 The Movies ………………………………………………………………………………… 113 4.5 Television ………………………………………………………………………………….. 124 Roots of Fragmentation (138); 4.6 Rupture ……………………………………………………………………………………... 141 Segmentation as strategy (146); New Segments (153); 5. The Mass Media Today: Empirics ……………………………………………………….. 160 5.1 The Death of Mass Media ……………………………………………………………. 160 i Free music, Napster and the RIAA (167); Targeted Content and Hyper- Segmentation (173); A Splintering Nation? (175); 5.2 The Life of Mass Media ………………………………………………………………. 178 Mass Media Tendencies in New Media (182); 6. The Structure of the Media Today ……………………………………………………… 192 The Simulation (194); Findings (198); 7. The Contemporary Public Sphere ………………………………………………………. 206 The Mass Media Tendency (206); Cheap Publicity (208); Famous Friends and the Class Size Paradox (215); Lost Potential or New Hope? (217); A Personal Note: The Progressive Blockbuster or Why I am Optimistic (230); Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 233 Appendices …………………………………………………………………………………………... 256 A1. Personality, Publicity, and the City …………………........................................ 257 A2. Complexity, Contradictions, and the Dominant Mode of Social Coordination……………………………………………………………………. 272 A3. Varieties of Structural Influence on the Media …………………………….. 280 Culture (280); Political Ideology (283); Economic Policy (283); A4. Methodological Differences in Analyzing History ………………………… 286 A5. The Succession of Media …………………………………………………………….. 289 A6. Changing Meaning of Mass Media ……………………………………………….. 301 A7. Overview of Mass Media Industries …………………………………………….. 302 ii List of Figures Newspaper Articles Mentioning Mass Media (1951-1960) …………………………… 81 Newspaper Articles Mentioning Mass Media (1946-2010) …………………………… 81 Growth rates of mass media industries (2007-2012) …………………………………… 162 Movie Tickets Sold in US & Broadband Penetration (1980-2012) ………………… 166 First Run Gross of Top 200 Movies (1965-2012) …………………………………………. 167 Total US Music Shipments (1982-2011) ……………………………………………………… 170 Album Sales v. Concerts Performed (1995-2004) ………………………………………… 172 #1 Movie as percent of Total Domestic Box Office (1980-2012) …………………… 179 #1 Movie Domestic Gross v. Average Domestic Gross (1980-2012) ……………… 180 Ticket Sales for Movie With Biggest Opening Weekend (1980-2012) …………… 181 Increasing Mass Media Tendency ………………………………………………………………... 198 Effects of varying importance of recommender similarity v. message popularity ……………………………………………………………………… 199 Effects of varying number of unique choices in media universe (a) ………………. 201 Effects of varying number of unique choices in media universe (b) ………………. 202 Effects of varying number of connections between media consumers (a) ……... 203 Effects of varying number of connections between media consumers (b) ……... 203 Succession of Recorded Music Formats ……………………………………………………….. 290 Box 1: Painting and Photography ………………………………………………………………... 292 How to Assess Disruptive Technologies ………………………………………………………. 296 iii Acknowledgments In my last semester at college I took a sociology course on a friend’s recommendation. I was thrilled by the facility and creativity with which the professor understood the workings of our world. I can’t imagine what I’ve done to deserve nearly a decade’s worth of her indulgence and generosity, but without Saskia Sassen’s involvement this dissertation would not have happened. Over the course of the past year the members of my dissertation committee have all been instrumental in keeping me on track. Peter Bearman went way above and beyond the call of duty; his patient reading of unpolished drafts was an undeserved gift. The erudite Shamus Khan provided invaluable support in the form of references and comments, but also in the form of music recommendations and a sense of humor. Yinon Cohen served as an invaluable sounding board. Richard Sennett’s insights were like his writing – deeply perceptive and always delightful. I owe my family a depth of gratitude that could only be cheapened by being reduced to words, so here I’ll just thank them for the mundane. Thanks to Emmet for keeping me company at the office and sharing many lousy take-out meals. Thanks to Eliana for putting New York into perspective for me. Thanks to my mother for feeding me. And thanks to my father. Had he not wanted a doctor in the family I wouldn’t have done this. And I’m glad that I did. iv CHAPTER 1 THE NEW PUBLIC SPHERE At some point in the 20th century we, the public, became a mass public. We had been a public by virtue of our participation in the public sphere – that sphere of social life where things were said and done in view of anyone who wanted to watch – but we became a mass public when we started to share the public sphere with others. A central factor in our massification as a public was the proliferation of mass media. But by the start of the new millennium the mass media that dominated the 20th century had undergone a series of radical changes. And just as the rise of mass media reshaped public life early in the last century, the newest media have radically reshaped the structure of public life today. According to one set of popular narratives the media that dominate the present represent the latest stage in a decline of mass media that has been taking place since the 1970s. According to this account the mass character that defined mid-20th century media fell victim to a wave of technological innovations that caused large-scale audience fragmentation. Whereas a large majority of mid-century television audiences simultaneously watched the most popular TV shows, today’s audiences have become scattered across hundreds of channels. Whereas the dominant daily newspapers of mid-century offered millions of readers a homogeneous sampling of world events, today’s readers are scattering across a nearly unlimited menu of online news sources. And, the story goes, as the large- scale, homogeneous media that dominated mid-century American society began to 1 break apart American society began losing its mass character. I call this the death-of- mass-media narrative. According to another dominant narrative though, these same new media technologies are strengthening the media’s mass character by promoting audience engagement. Although the Internet offers seemingly-unlimited varieties of entertainment it also allows movie studios to deepen their engagement with blockbuster audiences, which reliably show up to watch the latest summer movies. Although new platforms for content delivery threaten to compete with television, mega-audiences continue to tune-in to national broadcasts like the Super-Bowl, often using new technologies to enhance their television-watching. According to this account new technologies have a complex and evolving relationship to traditional media, which nonetheless retain their mass character. I call this the life-of-mass- media narrative. Both of these narratives find empirical support in recent trends. While some measures indicate that mass media is thriving others indicate a clear decline. This has left