Excavating Concepts of Broadcasting

Abstract

This article demonstrates a method of cultural–historical analysis in which digital archives of magazines and newspapers play a central role. It addresses the formation of broadcasting as a particular complex of social relationships and, further, that can be addressed by investigating changes in the concept of broadcasting itself. Primary sources include digital archives of newspapers and magazines, supplemented by appropriate additional primary and secondary sources. The key question is how a late-1700s agricultural conception of broadcasting as the hand-spreading of seeds in a field emerged in the 1920s radio era and beyond as the indiscriminate electronic distribution of messages. The study documents a gradual, sedimented, radically historical process of mystification and naturalization, in which broadcasting is transmogrified from a human practice of agriculture (an intrinsically human activity) into the electromagnetic basis of modern media systems (a phenomenon of nature and thus by definition outside human control and beyond question or change). The article concludes with reflections about the research process described here, as well as about the value more generally of critical commentary regarding historical methods.

Keywords:

• broadcasting
• culture
• history
• mass media

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James F. Hamilton

James F. Hamilton Department of Entertainment and Media Studies, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA. E-mail: [email protected].