In the early twenty-first century there is perhaps no more burdened a concept than media. In part, this reflects the technological upheavals that have rendered mediated communication a more or less constant presence in everyday life. It also reflects the enormous influence afforded those messages, and the devices behind them, in contemporary discourse. Above all, though, it reflects the extent to which, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the present, the term media was invested with layer upon layer of meaning. The result is a dual definition in which media refers to the formal, or technical, conduits that enable communication and to the organizations and industries through which certain communicative activities—in particular, the production and circulation of news and entertainment—are orchestrated in their most technologically advanced states.
Sometimes, these uses of the term are relatively discrete. Formally, the artist may work in the medium of acrylic, but neither the artist nor the paint manufacturers who supply the artist are what we have in mind when we talk, institutionally, about the media. More often though, and certainly outside the realm of specialists, media’s dual formal and institutional meanings overlap. In a kind of nesting-doll fashion, the film, the studio, the movie business, the symbol-construing economic sector to which Hollywood belongs, and the broad swath of public culture that that corner of the economy accounts for are all media. The same rippling pattern holds true for the news story, the sitcom, the TV commercial, the video game, and the status update. In this regard, each generation of *“new media,” among other things, has generally meant more things count as media. This expansion has come at the expense of terms that once parsed messages and their makers into neater categories. Phrases like “the press,” “show business,” and even “the web” might remain useful, but to use them in everyday speech is to risk dating oneself.
Alongside this narrowing of terminology, media’s growing definitional scope has muddled the line demarcating it from concepts that, though related, remain fairly autonomous. Information may be the most complicated of these. In the one sense, mediated information can refer to the enormously diverse variety of messages that deal with factual content, or at least appear to. The news, in its myriad forms, would be the foremost example, but nonfictional media could include everything from a documentary to an emoji. Beyond this subset, information has also come to refer in a much broader sense to the encoded version of all mediated messages. A pop song may not have been produced with much intent of informing the listener, but when transformed into the ones and zeros of an MP3, it becomes information. Finally, information, in the media context, also includes the data that communication institutions create about their activities, products, and audiences. Much of this information comes in forms, such as patents and earnings statements, that are generic to the bureaucratized workings of corporate capitalism. A substantial portion, however, is fairly distinctive to institutional media, which has been something of a breeding ground for new modes of public inquiry. Public opinion polling, audience studies, market research, and database profiling were all developed or greatly advanced within the framework of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mass media.
From antiquity to the *early modern era, media and its root terms referred to the physically situated environment or the middle ground connecting one entity to another. For Newton and his students, this in-between was a carrier of everything from light to gravity. Remnants of this earlier, elemental usage still color our speech today—sometimes I listen to music over the air and sometimes I stream it—but by the nineteenth-century a medium increasingly meant the instruments and institutions that linked humans, and their thoughts, across time and space. In concert with these changes, information was redefined as well. Where it once referred to the process of becoming informed, information came to mean what one was informed about. Generally, this brought to mind paper-based documentation. Information, in this new sense, had a catchall quality, describing references to reality in the aggregate—the figures on a ledger sheet, the goods listed on a bill of lading, the stories published in a newspaper, the writing on a census form. Media were constituent elements of this larger body. They were paper instruments, such as the printed forms and ledgers crafted for use in information compilation efforts, as well as formats and *genres that printers, merchants, scholars, clerics, administrators, and others who worked with paper had developed over the course of centuries.
But also, the term was increasingly applied to electrically, mechanically, and chemically engineered channels, in particular telegraphy and photography, through which information was conveyed and retained in mysterious new ways. Entering public consciousness in the same era as the Spiritualist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, the technical medium and the clairvoyant medium, or celestial telegraph as the clairvoyant was sometimes called, commonly enacted what seemed to be a magical interconnect across time and space. As the boundaries between the supernatural and scientific became less porous in the late-nineteenth century, it was increasingly the technical qualities, and the aura of industrial progress they carried, that made a medium a medium.
Nowhere were these trends more evident than in the publishing offices of the mass-circulation daily newspapers. Printed periodicals had been part of the Western social landscape since the sixteenth century, yet it was only in the nineteenth century that the size, scope, and reach of these publications exploded as never before. Between 1850 and 1900, daily newspaper circulation increased by roughly twentyfold. At the same time, city papers grew longer, doubling from four pages to eight, then again to sixteen. Mammoth Sunday editions sprawled across more than one hundred pages. Not surprisingly, many readers struggled to keep pace. A half century before Claude Shannon crafted his elegant equations of information and entropy, a writer for Harper’s Weekly could describe the newspaper press as “infinity on parade.”
Given the ephemerality of daily papers and the volume of news they put into circulation, information had a spectral quality—it was both out there and not. Mindful of this, a growing number of libraries and private archives dedicated space and labor in the late nineteenth century to preserving periodicals for later reference. The press clipping bureaus that sprouted up in the same era had a more timely solution: industrialize the reading process. Collecting hundreds of periodicals from across their home regions, hiring dozens of women to scan them for keywords, and sharing their clips with partners elsewhere, the clipping bureaus treated the media landscape writ large as one contiguous field of information to be mined each day for usable scraps of data: reviews for the artist, evidence for the scholar, leads for the salesman. Yet newspapers supplied more than just *facts, accounts, and reports. They furnished informational guidance, such as how to conduct oneself on a date or in a department store, that helped readers navigate the environs of modern life.
For their part, *publishers relished their image as purveyors of modernity, turning their buildings into the great technological hubs of their times. But if the newspaper was the archetypal informational medium of fin de siècle modernity, the synonymy of print media and information was already hard to reconcile. After all, much of what appeared in the paper arrived at the publisher’s office as blips of electricity transmitted by wire services like the Associated Press, Reuters, and Wolff. Although ordinary readers’ direct contact with the telegraph was minimal, especially in the United States, they knew full well that the wires draped above city streets and disappearing into the horizon coursed with information. As early as the Civil War, crowds began gathering outside to catch word of the latest telegraph dispatches. In the decades ahead, many publishers encouraged such crowds, developing public display technologies that incorporated chalkboards, magic lanterns, and other visual media.
Such scenes, which created a spectacle out of the convergent and industrialized nature of new communication technologies, rendered it perfectly clear that there was a subset of an emerging corporate order that dealt in the business of mass-produced messages. Though there was still no singular term to describe them in aggregate, the contours of a media, or interconnected set of technologies and institutions that seemed to be reshaping social experience, were abundantly clear in the traits Progressive intellectuals ascribed to modern communication. “Expressiveness, or the range of ideas and feeling it is competent to carry,” the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley enumerated in 1909. “Permanence of record, the overcoming of time. Swiftness, or the overcoming of space. Diffusion, or access to all classes.” Cooley, like many others before and since, was attentive to media’s spatiotemporal contortions. But he also noticed something else: its ubiquity. Everyday life was not only being rescaled by media; it was becoming saturated with it as well.
Of Cooley’s four characteristics, two in particular—documentation and diffusion—would prove particularly useful toward understanding how media, as a cohort of interrelated forms and technologies, took shape in relation to similar constructs like information and communication. In the case of the former, media could be understood as storage devices. They were things that preserved information across time. Traditionally, this implied some combination of script, type, ink, and page. After the mid-nineteenth century, these base ingredients were no longer necessary. With the advent and advancement of photography, information could be captured on polished plates or panes of glass through processes that were more photochemical than linguistic in nature. Indeed, the photograph, widely interpreted as a visual fact, placed imagery on par with language. “To see is to know,” boasted the leading stereograph-card manufacturer Underwood and Underwood.
Sound recording, introduced in the 1870s, added a new wrinkle by essentially disassociating inscription from the human senses. The eye could decipher a photographic negative or a film reel’s celluloid frame, but the grooves etched into a shellac canister were neither audible nor readable without the required playback device. Mediated information, at least in its most technologically current forms, would only become more illegible over the course of the twentieth century as sounds, images, and text migrated onto the airwaves, magnetic tapes, and microchips. If in the nineteenth century media was a constituent element of information, information was now a constituent element of media—the ones and zeros that provided a kind of universal building block for mediated sight and sound in general.
Diffusion would prove equally important to twentieth-century conceptions of media. What counted in this case, however, was the publicness of a message, not its documentation. Thus a long-distance phone call and a network radio bulletin were categorically different forms of communication, even though both traversed the same wires. The former was interpersonal communication. The latter was a broadcast medium. This equation of media and diffusion was made explicit in the term mass communication, which came into vogue after the 1920s to describe messages that were centrally produced and widely disseminated. Forms and genres that shared these cardinal traits, whether they be the photo-essays of a Life or Picture Post or the variety programs aired by an NBC or BBC, were media. Although this one-to-many characterization would prove frustrating to new media scholars in the early twenty-first century, it was exceedingly useful to midcentury theorists eager to understand how large corporations and states shaped, bent, and distorted the information landscape.
After World War II, cybernetics and information theory gave the media concept a distinctly kinetic quality. Paper-based information had been anything but static—often circulating in unpredictable ways. But information moved differently for these theorists. Instead of perambulating, it ricocheted, looped, and unfurled, moving continuously rather than intermittently. Furthermore, the mathematical origins of both fields gave information a quantifiable character. And, of course, what could be counted could be valued, argued the prophets of an emerging information economy. Pushing for as capacious a definition of *copyright as possible, media conglomerates found a receptive audience among Western policy makers who saw their nations’ knowledge sectors as the cure to a dwindling industrial base. The result was a series of legislative measures, such as the US Copyright Act of 1976, that collapsed the legal distinctions between media, information, and intellectual property. Stretched to encompass everything from gene sequences to Gene Simmons, information was much like the “manufactures” of the nineteenth century: a teleological framework for grouping together the many activities of those “knowledge” businesses—software firms, biotech labs, media conglomerates, and others—that seemed to be pushing modernity forward. As unrelated as these industries may have appeared to the layperson then, they no longer appear so discrete in a smart phone age when simply watching “television” might well require some act of biometric authentication and an update to one’s operating system.
The passage from analog to *digital has meant that media more readily produce information about their own use. In today’s media environment, that data exhaust can be every bit as valuable as the content itself, if not more so. In collecting this audience information, *internet platforms have followed the lead of the publishers and broadcasters before them, who began positioning themselves as experts on audiences, markets, and publics in the early twentieth century. Collectively, these surveillance initiatives have made media into not only vessels of information, but tools for generating knowledge about the thoughts, tastes, and behaviors of those who use them.
In part this owes to the logistics of long-distance communication. Messages need somewhere to go. That destination could be somewhere as placeless as the ether. Usually, though, media operations have needed something more specific: a name and place of residence, a particular terminal, or an IP address. This basic locational data provided something of a peg on which other pieces of information could be hung; gradually, a more detailed picture of the individual behind that address could take shape. Mass publishers were quick to recognize that these profiles had value independent of their own fulfillment operations. As early as the 1870s, mail-order magazine firms developed a thriving trade in the names and addresses of subscribers. Standard practice was to sell bundles of letters, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands, to one another. The purchaser would then add names and addresses harvested from those letters to its mailing lists and use these in future marketing campaigns. Like any other commodity, these names were graded for desirability and worth, taking such factors as freshness, gender, and class into account. In the meantime, a similar trade took shape among the mailing-list brokers that sprang from the directory-publishing field. Fed by clipping bureaus, automobile registries, and hundreds of other sources, the list houses were, in turn, an important source of names and supplementary data that mass publishers incorporated into their subscription drives. The onomasticians, or name specialists, behind these projects were the forerunners of today’s number crunchers, whose facility with massive data sets is nearly as sought after on Madison Avenue as it is in Silicon Valley. Aided by the internet’s basic two-way architecture, a host of tracking technologies, and a contemporary culture of public divulgence, firms like Alphabet (Google) and Facebook have built information dossiers on their users rivaled only by the consumer credit-rating bureaus.
Efforts to profile audiences as individuals were paralleled by efforts to describe them in aggregate. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, US media organizations built research arms and participated in cross-disciplinary projects that brought the social sciences to bear on the reading, listening, and viewing public. After spending much of its first decade crafting mammoth studies of various industries, the market research division at the Curtis Publishing Company turned its gaze toward the audience in the 1920s. To learn more about readers of the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal, Curtis researchers carried out surveys, interviews, and even censuses of their household trash in hopes of yielding a composite picture of middle-class buying habits. Curtis’s activities were widely emulated in the decades ahead, laying the groundwork for the psychographic profiles and lifestyle typologies into which consumers were slotted in the late twentieth century.
As mass publishers were honing the tools, techniques, and genres of market research, social scientists were developing the first large-scale academic studies of media audiences. Payne Fund researchers in the sociology and psychology departments at Ohio State University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Iowa used everything from electrodes to interviews to analyze children’s emotional response to motion pictures. Endowed by a mass-culture-wary philanthropist, the studies offered a prototype for foundation-funded media research.
Nowhere was this cross-fertilization of industry and academic research more apparent than the US broadcast industry of the 1930s and 1940s. Funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the Office of Radio Research (ORR) was established in 1937 by the social-psychologists Hadley Cantril, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Frank Stanton at Princeton University. There, and later at Columbia, the ORR took a big-tent approach to audience research, employing surveys, in-depth interviews, polygraph readings, and textual analysis. For Lazarsfeld, the ORR offered a means of advancing his work on class stratification and his methodological experiments with statistical analysis. For Stanton, who headed up the research department at CBS and later served as the network’s president, ORR research added nuance to the methodologically woeful audience ratings furnished by the telephone surveyors of the era. Those ratings would soon get their own methodological upgrade at the hands of A. C. Nielsen, which teamed with the Census Bureau in the 1940s to create a statistically representative sample of US households. Ratings and shares facilitated the truck and barter in audiences by providing broadcasters and advertisers a standard of exchange: a numerical score representing the volume of households tuned into a program. Along with similar measures, including the best-seller lists, record charts, and box-office tallies, ratings also functioned as feedback mechanisms, informing the common sense at networks, publishing houses, labels, and studios as to what “works” with audiences.
Almost unique among industry standards, media metrics have taken on a public life, providing a ready, if imperfect, snapshot of popular tastes and sentiments. Today’s digital platforms even incorporate them into their user interface, showing the number of times a video has been viewed or a song streamed. Against such baselines, individuals have been able to evaluate their own preferences and sense of self-distinction. Here, media metrics have much in common with public opinion polling, which shared the same deep links to the broader world of institutional inquiry. Before establishing his American Institute of Public Opinion, for instance, George Gallup had earned a doctorate in psychology, honed a namesake method of studying reading habits, and headed up an advertising agency research department. In the same years Gallup’s polls became a mainstay of news reporting, he and his contemporary Elmo Roper built up lucrative consultancies in market research. As evidenced by such activities, there was never a clean line separating the commercial, academic, editorial, and political strands of audience research within and around media.
Richard K. Popp
See also cameras; cybernetics/feedback; data; databases; files; newspapers; platforms; printed visuals; public sphere; social media; surveilling; telecommunications