What Kurlansky's 'Technological Fallacy' Means for Media, Snyder & Us
These events pull a thread through four subjects to form a distinct arc of democratic history, and point to a question that can be met by the next innovation of bundled digital, mechanical and behavioral tech. The subjects: I) author Mark Kurlansky; II) Robert Short Jr. and WRDS 102.1FM; III) Tim Snyder's 'Variegated' lecture; and IV) the year 2006, begin to shape this untapped opportunity.
I. Kurlansky's 'Technological Fallacy'
Lewis Lapham asked author Mark Kurlansky on a podcast (transcript and podcast link here) why he began his latest book "Paper: Paging Through History" with a prologue to what he calls the "technological fallacy":
Kurlansky: That's because I kind of went through kind of an evolution working on this book. It's my 20th book. I don't think I've ever written a book where I've so changed my thinking as I did on this book…Stories have a beginning, middle and an end, and history is hard to write, Kurlansky says, because it doesn't end. Kurlansky had been excited for paper's demise because it served him the subject of his next book.
I also came to realize particularly when talking to people in the computer field, that paper wasn't dying out at all. I mean I also learned this from my own field, in publishing. …
Kurlansky: And they [ebooks] just got to a certain level and they leveled off. Because people like to read books some people like to read some books in hardbook and some books in electronic and ... I came to understand. I started thinking about history and it's really very unusual for a new invention to appear and kill off something else. That rarely happens. It usually just creates an alternative. Now it may over a thousand years go in that direction, but, hell, the candle business is a multi-billion dollar business.New tech doesn't die off, but it's inspired deregulation and consolidation. Which makes sense. Except the older, still relevant tech, was tied to laws allowing the public to appeal the FCC when a broadcast licensee was not serving its public service obligations. What constitutes "public service obligations" is less clear to us "digital natives" because few have asserted their right to appeal since the year the bots were born, 2007, when the iPhone debuted. When a firehose of newsbits and identities displaced all history in our brain.
Lapham: Yeah.
Kurlansky: And uh. Remember when television was going to be the end of radio?
Lapham: I do. It's not.
Kurlansky: Yeah. And vinyl record sales are going up and up.
Lapham: Yeah.
Kurlansky: And the technology creates another alternative way of doing things but it does not wipe out the old way. Parchment, which was a predecessor to paper, is still used.
Lapham: You make the point that technology follows the need of the society. It's not something that comes out of nowhere. and shifts society in a new direction.
Kurlansky: Yeah this is what in the book I call the "technological fallacy." A "technological fallacy" is the idea that technology changes society. It just doesn't work that way. Society changes for all sorts of cultural economic all kinds of reasons. And as it changes it calls up technology to service those changes. Which is why inventions rarely appear in isolation. I mean when Gutenberg was working on the moveable type printing press so were a bunch of other people. A whole bunch of other people were working on telephones when Alexander Graham Bell was. Lots of lightbulb people besides Thomas Edison....
But this site's record-keeper insists we review another milestone. Not last December, when the FCC rolled back Net Neutrality. Not last November, when the FCC lifted TV ownership caps, and approved JSA Joint Sales Agreements, positioning Sinclair or another singular corporation to embark on a nationwide merger-consolidation shopping spree. And not last October, when a divided FCC eliminated the 78-year-old main studio rule. Our resident historian urges we look at 1996.
II. Robert Short Jr. and WDRS 102.1FM
Short knew the application process would be hard, and expensive. The application process lasted six years, cost $100,000 in legal fees, plus engineering studies, research, consulting, and FCC filing fees. But in 1995 he built WRDS 102.1 FM and went on the air. He started with syndicated programming at first then hired local DJs, produced civic affairs segments, interviews, basketball ticket call-in contests, a Syracuse "Unity Day" and played audience-appropriate music. His ratings showed WDRS to be the most popular station with the 18-34 listener demographic in many time slots.
When the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed into law, the “playing field changed right beneath our feet” Short told author Klinenberg.
Short testified to a senate committee in 2003. On the c-span footage Short tells the senate a large company named Clear Channel bought seven stations in his market the first year, and converted a country music station to urban music "which allowed profanity" to compete with his station, that did not. And he told them Clear Channel at the time owned Katz media, one of only two national radio advertising brokers that could control national advertiser buys in the Syracuse market.
“I was competing against some big companies before, but it was relatively fair battle because they couldn’t monopolize the whole advertising pie,“ Klinenberg quotes Short as saying.
Clear Channel brought their operating costs to "unbelievably low" levels, "because they moved their stations together, turned them into juke boxes with voice-tracking technology and syndicated programs — which they also owned! — and they had one general manager oversee the whole group."
The media giant Clear Channel before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 owned a maximum of 40 stations. After the 1996 act it owned and operated 1,240 stations. It also owned billboards talent booking agencies and theaters in the area.
Short didn't give up easily but honoring obligations to his investors he eventually sold his station to Galaxy Corporation.
Klinenberg's book includes a passage with now-stunning quotes from Short that were natural in that ancient time of 2003:
Radio Corporation converted WRDS-FM into WZUN-FM, switched from the urban format to light rock, and when that failed, experimented with two other styles of programming. Clear Channel took advantage of changes in WZUN’s format to convert one of its own stations to the urban contemporary style. It played similar music to WRDS, Short said, but the conglomerate’s approach to station management was completely different.In 2003 Short testified alongside local station owners, corporate executives and even musician Don Henly at a senate hearing about anti-competitive business practices and media ownership that is still archived on C-span.
“They don’t line up special programs to get the kids into basketball games. They don’t have anyone going into the schools. They do zero community work. They don’t give our community a voice. They don’t want us to have a voice. They just want us so they can sell ads.”
III. Tim Snyder's "Variegated" Lecture
Yale historian Tim Snyder publishes periodic lectures to YouTube audiences and one (transcript and video link here) distinguished "variegated" media:
...The Russian attack on the US took place primarily through the media. And it gives us a chance to ask what has actually happened to our media in the last decade.
In fact even the fact that I’m using the word media, and you’re all nodding your head media media we’re thinking we use the word media … that itself reveals the basic problem.
Because what has happened we’ve shifted from being a country where there were lots of regional and local newspapers which provided you know an imperfect but nevertheless a shaded a variegated a specific view of daily life of people. We’ve shifted from that to something else. We’ve shifted to this place where there is one media. And we’re for it or against it. Or whatever.
I mean something very specific here. A decade ago, the US still had a great deal more local press than it did now. In the late 2000s the local press began to suffer. After the financial crisis of 2008, roughly 40 newspaper men and women were laid off every day. On average. In 2009. By 2010, the industry had basically cratered. Now why does this matter so much? Why does it matter that there is not a local newspaper here or a regional newspaper there?
It means that people shift from thinking of “journalism” as something done by people who they know. Because they see them at the city council meeting or they see them at the PTA or whatever. People shift from that idea that journalism as about life. To another idea. Which is that there’s not really journalism. There’s just the media. There’s just television. There are the networks. And what do the networks cover? This is important.
Networks cover international news. They cover what happens on the coasts. They cover DC. They cover NY. They cover LA. If you’re in Oklahoma, and you’re watching one of the networks your face appears pretty much only when there is a natural disaster. Now that’s a slight exaggeration but it gets at an important truth.
When you clear away the local news, what you’re doing is you’re opening the way for the fake news. Because if journalism starts to become the media it starts to become something distant and abstract something not about you, you’re only one step away from beginning to believe the things that really aren’t true. Right? If news becomes distant, then the next step is the news becomes fake.
Now why does this have to do with Russia? Because amazingly the same thing happened in Russia just a few years before. There is also not local news in Russia. There is also not regional news in Russia. The way Russian news works is everything is huddled around a few television stations. And the television stations give Russians all across that massive country an idea of who the enemies and the friends are. An idea of what the conspiracies are supposed to be.
We’re not there yet. But it's striking how getting rid of the local news makes us just a little bit more like Russia than perhaps we think we are. Which brings us to the problem of television in itself. ...
Snyder published that lecture nearly a year ago. Yesterday a reporter tweeted an account of either a kid just being a kid or evidence of a future trend. If a local radio station reported news, played music and raffled sports tickets he'd called to win once, would he have done this:
Depressing sight at Trump rally in Nashville: adorable young boy, probly about my son's age, pointing iPhone at me & other reporters & snapping pix while screaming "FAKE NEWS!" A child who will grow up believing a free & fair press is the enemy, a bad thing, to be mocked & hated
— Julie Davis (@juliehdavis) May 30, 2018
IV. The Year 2006
The book Fighting for Air includes a chapter "Fighting for Air" describing media activists visiting Capitol Hill to appeal the FCC against further deregulation. It reads like like an alien tale to us "digital natives" and the last major account of this happening is this book, published one year after 2006.
A recent study on media consumption habits quote poll participants as saying "news finds me."
Is appealing to media companies to meet their "public service obligations" in exchange for a broadcast spectrum license a practice of the past, and what does this mean for Democracy?
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This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
