Media History

RÉSUMÉ
Le présent article décrit une série de tentatives – toutes échouées – par la Société Radio-Canada (SRC) et la Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) de produire des émissions de nouvelles traduites. Sur un premier plan, il examine les raisons pour lesquelles la traduction journalistique paraît à des moments de crise comme un outil pour résoudre certaines questions identitaires au Canada, ainsi que les raisons pour lesquelles l’idée de produire des émissions de nouvelles traduites n’est pas réalisée. Sur un deuxième plan, il considère un dilemme méthodologique et épistémologique auquel les historiens doivent faire face : que faire quand les documents qu’ils cherchent ne sont pas conservés parce que les journalistes conçoivent la traduction d’une manière différente ? Cet article recommande que les historiens se tournent vers des « para-archives », ou des collections créées et conservées par des organismes non-journalistiques, qui contiennent des descriptions des documents qui n’existent plus. Ces para-archives peuvent fournir de quoi créer des récits plausibles au sujet des intérêts contradictoires qui militent contre la production d’émissions de nouvelles traduites. Elles peuvent aussi rendre plus claire la manière dont les historiens produisent les catégories qu’ils emploient pour définir leur objet d’étude.

ABSTRACT
This article describes a series of failed attempts by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Société Radio Canada to present translated news. On one level, it is concerned with the impulse that prompts people during moments of crisis to suggest translated news as a solution to a problems related to Canadian identity and the reasons their suggestions to translate news programs are not acted upon. On a deeper level, it is concerned with a methodological and epistemological problem facing translation historians: what happens when the relevant documents are not preserved because journalists’ notions of translation differ from those of historians? It recommends that historians turn to “para-archives,” or collections created and preserved by non-news organizations, that contain descriptions of the documents journalists have not kept. These para-archives can provide evidence for the creation of plausible narratives about the competing interests shaping decisions not to produce translated news. They can also reveal how historians actively produce the categories they use to define their object of study.

When we—that is, Pavitra and Debashree—sat down to articulate our understanding of a decolonial and feminist media studies, we knew that we were entering a conversation that had long been underway. Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century ousted powerful and globe-spanning modern empires. Postcolonial and decolonial theories helped us understand the epistemic violence that made the material extraction of colonialism possible. They cautioned us that colonialism looked different in different parts of the world, used different weapons, and had different avatars in the present.
As many of the authors in this issue observe, the work of decolonization does not end at a definite historical milestone, and calls to decolonize become defanged when they are appropriated by the very institutions we seek to challenge. The struggle against the colonization of our minds and bodies and lands is ongoing. The task of the feminist media scholar, then, is to enter the struggle midstream and try to make sense of the different currents that make up the turbulence.

Die Spätblüte der preußisch-deutschen Monarchie unter Wilhelm II. und der Durchbruch der Massenmedien fielen in Deutschland zeitlich zusammen. Erstmals untersucht das Buch von Martin Kohlrausch, was diese Konstellation für die Ausbildung der politischen Medienberichterstattung, mehr aber noch für die wilhelminische Monarchie bedeutete.
Indem diese Studie die Zäsur von 1918 überschreitet, vermag sie vielschichtige, bisher kaum beachtete Verbindungen zwischen der gescheiterten wilhelminischen "Medienmonarchie" und den ubiquitären Führerkonzepten, die lange vor 1918 aufkamen, herauszuarbeiten. Dies geschieht auf Grundlage eines breiten, bisher nicht erschlossenen Quellenspektrums, insbesondere von über 1000 systematisch erschlossenen Zeitungsartikeln und einem umfangreichen Sample politischer Pamphlete.

Numerosi prodotti di importazione arricchiscono sempre più spesso l’offerta dei media italiani, tv compresa: in questo modo, nel nostro Paese approdano contenuti che non sono pensati e realizzati appositamente per il pubblico nazionale, ma che, una volta trasferiti e adattati, mutano – almeno in parte – la loro forma. In ambito televisivo, un caso particolarmente interessante è quello della situation comedy americana: un genere centrale nella tv statunitense, ma che in Italia è insieme molto diffuso nei palinsesti e spesso frainteso, complesso da tradurre e talvolta ricostruito – o persino stravolto –, disprezzato ma visto (e rivisto) da intere generazioni di spettatori. Questo volume pone le basi teoriche per uno stu dio dei processi di ‘mediazione’, solo apparentemente banali, che intercorrono nel passaggio di un prodotto mediale da un Paese all’altro: l’appropriazione nazionale (o ‘italianizzazione’), la traduzione, l’adattamento, la distribuzione. E poi applica queste basi a un’approfondita analisi delle vicende italiane della sitcom americana, e di alcuni suoi titoli in particolare (Seinfeld, Friends, Will & Grace, How I Met Your Mother), da tre punti di vista: la ricostruzione della sto ria del genere nel nostro Paese; la rassegna delle variazioni e modifiche traduttive che il prodotto televisivo si trova necessariamente ad affrontare; infine, il racconto della sua filiera produttiva e distributiva, delle routine traduttive e dei professionisti coinvolti. Per capire cosa cambia nella sitcom quando passa dagli Stati Uniti all’Italia, e perché.

1924 kam Greta Garbo aus Stockholm nach Berlin, um in dem Großfilm der Trianon, DIE ODALISKE VON SMOLNY unter der Regie von Mauritz Stiller mitzuwirken. Kaum weniger spektakulär als der Plot dieses Films war der Skandal, der sich um die Produktion des schwedischen Stars drehte und Garbos deutsche Karriere vorzeitig beendete. Bilder vom Norden erzählt die Geschichte der spannungsvollen Beziehung zweier Filmnationen, die Weltgeltung beanspruchten und mehr als einmal miteinander in Konflikt gerieten.

In diesem Buch wird erstmals der Stellenwert der audiovisuellen Medien für die Herstellung und Popularisierung von Wissen aufgezeigt. Der historische Rahmen der Studie erstreckt sich dabei von den kinematographischen Bewegungsstudien in Psychiatrie und Physiologie Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Einsatz von Video in den sozialpsychologischen Experimenten der 1970er Jahre. Mit dem Gebrauch von Bewegtbildern zu Zwecken der Kontrolle, Aufzeichnung und Demonstration veränderte sich die gesamte Experimentalkultur der Wissenschaft. Vor dem Hintergrund flexibler medienkultureller Kontexte transformiert sich das Labor zusehends in ein Filmstudio des Wissens, in welchem die Versuchsanordnung am Storyboard entworfen, die epistemischen Gegenstände in Szene gesetzt und die Probanden gecastet werden.

This article claims that the emergence of television in the 1950s must be interpreted as a conservative media revolution. It aims at revisiting some of the popular narratives about the emergence of television as a revolutionary moment in media history and questions the newness of television in the European mass media ensemble. Focusing on a set of privileged sites of negotiation where the tensions between the conservative and modernising agencies of the medium became most visible or explicit, the article emphasizes the ambiguous and contested nature of television as a new medium. Finally, the author pleas for an integral approach to media history that studies the intermedial relationships and interdependencies between television and other mass media.

In this article, I counter persistent claims of big data revolutionising managerial decision-making, by tracing the technological and cultural origins of data-based management in the United States back to the 1970s and 1980s using historical source materials from the trade magazine Datamation. I argue that innovations in database technology within this period – database management systems and the relational database model – shaped and reinforced a data-based mindset. This mindset, I demonstrate, is manifested in four interlinked concepts of data: data as asset, data as raw, data as reality, and data as relatable. These concepts, I argue, provide a basis for current associations of big data with ideological values of objectivity and truthfulness. The article contributes to a growing body of work in media and communication studies that deconstructs the ideological discourses facilitating big data's unquestioned integration in the business world.

Ce dossier étudie le rôle du traitement médiatique de l’attentat d’Oklahoma City en 1995 dans la construction sociale de la terreur. Méthode : Les sources historiques sont analysées par une méthode interprétative inspirée des approches ethnographiques. Résultats : L’analyse des sources montre que la définition de la terreur dépend d’une « expérience » de la violence à la grammaire historiquement constituée. La catégorie « terroriste » n’est cependant pas directement utilisée. Elle dépend d’hypothèses fournies par l’Etat et relayée par les médias dans une tentative de rationalisation de l’expérience de la violence. Conclusion : Le « terroriste » est une catégorie d’Etat dont il faut se méfier, d’autant plus qu’elle ne retranscrit pas toujours ce que conçoivent les acteurs. De plus, elle brouille les frontières entre les catégories des « sens communs » et celles du langage sociologique.

The book Dějiny českých médií 20. století (A History of Czech Media of the 20th Century) focuses on the development of print, radio and television as well as transformations in the press agency ČTK (Czech News Agency), media legislature, censorship practice and the journalism profession starting from the period when the Czech lands were part of Czechoslovakia (over the years 1918–1992).

Fake news is hardly new in journalism, and a sense of historical perspective
is clarifying. A thumbnail history in Columbia Journalism Review pointed to some superficial similarities in hoaxing over the ages “in editorial motive or public gullibility, not to mention the blurred lines between deliberate and accidental flimflam.” It cautions that “the great fake news panic of 2016” is an overreaction to “macro-level trends” that do not indicate real, significant changes in the media. But before agreeing to shrug off the significance of the 2016 spate of hoaxing, it is worth reviewing the history more carefully.

This book chapter historicizes the notion of telepresence, a term coined in 1986. After defining the different forms of telepresence, it shows that, much before computers and virtual reality, old technologies such as correspondence and painting have been used to provide a sense of social telepresence (being with) or spatial telepresence (being there, far away). It suggests a research program for this specific narrative of media history

Daniel Bellingradt: Review of Jan Löhdefink: Zeiten des Teufels. Teufelsvorstellungen und Geschichtszeit in frühreformatorischen Flugschriften (1520-1526), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2016, in: sehepunkte 17 (2017), Nr. 1 [15.01.2017], URL: http://www.sehepunkte.de
/2017/01/29391.html

Corporate consulting, a one-time seemingly marvelous mixture of bare-knuckle rationalization, esoterica, and visionary futurism, is invariably deployed when business structures threaten to lose their equilibrium. What it actually means to be consulted, the part played by media in consulting, and how the branch of corporate consulting became a system of knowledge with such a socially important role is the object of this book. For the first time, it explores the ways in which the latest media technology, avant-garde aesthetics, economic pressures, and holistic philosophy together constituted the form of consulting dominant today, and which consequences arise from this. Thus it follows the work of early corporate consultants like Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and H. L. Gantt, while analyzing and describing their visual consulting models. The book develops a new, innovative, interdisciplinary approach, situated between media and business history, media archeology, and social theory, and thereby charts the genesis of modern consulting knowledge. It reveals that corporate consulting must be conceptualized in close relation to the visual culture that prevailed during this time, one which drew from nineteenth-century visualization methods and, more particularly, the new medium of film. Consulting is a cultural technique that is markedly characterized by media processes, in which the boundaries of economic logic and legitimacy emerge, and which, at the same time, considerably shapes and stabilizes this modus operandi up to the present day.

During the past decades, the assassination attempt has been treated from different disciplines. Nevertheless, the mediatization of the assassination attempt or its treatment in images and audiovisual media has been widely neglected. Starting from a triptych applicable to 19th century tyrannicides and articulated by the assassination performance, the perpetrator’s arrest and, finally, his punishment, we aim at verifying to what extent this model fits into 20th-century assassination attempts. For this reason, three key assassinations will be considered. First, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, perpetrated by Serbian nationalists, and which would lead to WWI. Second, the failed attempt on 20 July 1944 against Adolf Hitler in the Wolfsschanze; a plot in which many high rank officers of the Wehrmacht were involved. As third example, we will focus on John F. Kennedy’s assassination in
Dallas, on 22 November 1963, reputed to Lee H. Oswald.

From 1995 to the present day the number of Internet users has increased from 16 million to 3.7 billion. What are the reasons for such an extraordinary success? This book reconstructs the origins of the Internet from the period following the Second World War to the dissemination of the World Wide Web. It not only considers the technological innovations but also explores the cultural, social and political contexts in which the net developed.
The authors interpret the evolution of the “network of networks” as a process in which, at each stage, the solutions devised by its creators were the most functional to their needs and the most suitable to the times in which they operated. Despite its military origins, it was the users themselves who built the net: a community of researchers, for the most part academics, whose goal was the advancement of knowledge. As a result, and particularly with the advent of email at the beginning of the 1970s, the web was endowed with user-oriented features that continue to characterise it today.

What is new about the WikiLeaks phenomenon and why is it important? Is WikiLeaks a form of journalism? What were the effects of WikiLeaks’ revelations? How has WikiLeaks impacted the future of the internet? Charlie Beckett and James Ball pose these and other questions in their new book.
WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012). WikiLeaks was managed by a small team of pro-transparency hackers, including the Australian Julian Assange and a few German members of the so-called Chaos Computer Club (18). As Beckett and Ball point out, WikiLeaks founders pioneered in the development of information security, setting up hidden open-source encryption standards. “These enable WikiLeaks and its sources to hold and disseminate information unreadable by anyone else in the world, including security services” (20). In chapter two, the authors describe three of WikiLeaks’ biggest “scoops” in 2010: the Afghan war logs (including the “Collateral Murder” video), the Iraq war logs, and the American Embassy cable releases. In chapter three Beckett and Ball point out that WikiLeaks’ disclosures – in jeopardizing lives and endangering sensitive diplomatic operations – might “create a freedom-of-expression backlash,” thus helping pro-government, security-minded individuals who advocate limiting the openness of the internet. This book by Beckett and Ball – one of the first to analyze WikiLeaks with respect to the evolution of contemporary journalism – would be an excellent text to assign in courses on journalism.

Leif Kramp untersucht erstmals umfassend die Gedächtnisrelevanz des Massenmediums Fernsehen sowie den archivischen und musealen Umgang mit der Fernsehgeschichte. Anknüpfend an die interdisziplinären Zweige der Gedächtnisforschung analysiert der erste Band die Bedeutung des Fernsehens seit Beginn des regelmäßigen Programmbetriebs in Deutschland und Nordamerika unter gedächtnistheoretischer Perspektive. Damit legt dieser Band den Grund für eine differenzierte Bewertung des Fernsehens als Medium des Erinnerns und Vergessens. Auf Basis einer breiten empirischen Erhebung bei zahlreichen Institutionen in Deutschland, Kanada und den USA befasst sich der zweite Band mit dem Status Quo und den Perspektiven der Verwaltung und Nutzung von Überlieferungen aus der Fernsehgeschichte. Kramp analysiert die maßgeblichen Problemstellungen, mit denen sich Museen und Archive konfrontiert sehen: von Fragen der Auswahl, Bewahrung und Zugänglichkeit von Fernsehüberlieferungen bis hin zu ihrer Präsentation und dem Medienwandel, und diskutiert Strategien für die Arbeit von Fernsehmuseen im digitalen Medienzeitalter.

This article draws upon the author's experience teaching first-year college students to theorize the interrelationships between popular culture, media technologies and cultural practice. The course confronts key habitual beliefs about technology, then develops a critical pedagogy for their examination that draws upon popular-culture discussions of technologies, actual as well as imagined. By engaging with popular culture, the connections between devices, enabling knowledge about uses and the development of dominant uses become clearer and concrete, thus assisting the emergence of a critical understanding of technologies in society.

How did early twentieth-century university scholars and museum curators perceive the buildings of peasant society? How did they rebuild them into museum cottages according to contemporary scholarly and museum ideas? In 1913, the philosopher, museum curator and elementary-school inspector Theodor Hellman established the open-air museum Murberget in Härnösand. Prior to his involvement in the open-air museum, he had been very active in the Swedish adult-education movement. For instance, he founded ‘Norrländska studenters folkbildningsförening’ (The Adult Education Society of North Swedish Students) in Uppsala in 1905. He also organised the country’s first local-heritage course for elementary-school teachers in Härnösand in 1907. The same year, 1907, he defended his licentiate dissertation in philosophy at the Uppsala University: ‘Platons kunskapslära’ (Plato’s Theory of Knowledge). ‘Föreningen för norrländsk hembygdsforskning’ (The Society for North Swedish Local Heritage Research), which he founded in 1909, was a development and institutionalisation of the courses in local-heritage education (hembygdsundervisning) and local-heritage research (hembygdsforskning). As to his curatorial work, Hellman divided the open-air museum Murberget into eight culture units, which, according to him, mirrored the people’s character and expressed the North Swedish culture: the Village (Byn), the Chalet (Fäbodvallen), the Fishing Village (Fiskeläget), the Church Site (Kyrkplatsen), the Parsonage (Prästgården), the Iron Works (Järnbruket), the Cityscape (Stadsbilden), and the Lapp Village (Lappbyn). In the present study, I investigate two of the culture units from a history-of-museum point of view: the Chalet and the Church Site. The Chalet was laid out and built with historical houses in 1915–1917, and supplemented in 1930. It represents a typological collection of six types of cooking houses (kokhus) as well as some cattle sheds, all from the province of Ångermanland. The development of the Church Site began in 1913. It comprises the Murberget Church, the Ullånger Bell Tower, two copied medieval lychgates, and a small church town with wooden houses. Built in-situ between 1925 and 1929 as a ‘Protestant medieval’ church for the 1930s North Sweden, the Murberget Church was planned and erected in accordance with contemporary museum ideals, namely the division into study collections (the church attic) and display collections (the nave and chancel).

This paper argues that there was no national press in the 19th century, as we understand the term ‘national’ today (the category was not used by contemporaries). Some London publications such as radical unstamped newspapers, popular Sunday papers, the Illustrated London News and The Times could be described as national – however, they had an incomplete geographical reach, were read by small minorities and only carried news of certain areas of the country. In contrast, if we consider the provincial press as one system rather than a collection of isolated publications, it was a national press. There are good reasons for treating it as a system – that is how advertisers, publishers and journalists saw it; it functioned as a system, with personnel, content, business and editorial innovations moving freely around a national network of local papers. Further, local matter (editorial and advertising) usually constituted a minority of the content of the local press - these newspapers carried considerable Parliamentary and foreign news, plus stories from across the British Isles (gathered directly or indirectly from other local papers) and national advertisements. Syndicated fiction, features, leader columns and London letters, press agency material, pre-printed ‘insides', chains of local papers and non-resident editors all cast doubt on the notion of ‘local’ papers. The historiography of 19th-century newspapers acknowledges all these matters, alongside the far greater numbers of provincial papers; yet the implications have not been pursued: that the local press as a system was more integrated into the everyday lives of individuals and communities than metropolitan publications, and that its wider circulation and greater relevance to readers meant that it probably had more influence than the London press. It therefore deserves much more study.

This chapter examines the meaning of and nostalgic yearning for transistor radios in the lyrics of popular songs. Popular music provides a treasure of lyrics that deal explicitly with the transistor radio as a cultural phenomenon – a neglected
topic in scholarly work on the history of radio so far. From Chuck Berry’s “Oh Baby Doll” to Buck Owens’ “Made in
Japan,” the Beach Boys’ “Magic Transistor Radio” to Kraftwerk’s “Transistor,” a broad range of popular music genres reflects the transistor radio’s deep cultural impact in youth culture and popular entertainment. In analyzing both contemporary lyrical reflections and nostalgic echoes of the transistor radio in popular music, this chapter provides an unorthodox take on the rich and fascinating sound souvenirs of a technology that blazed the trail of mobile electronic devices.

This chapter discusses research on the policies, laws, and subsidies that create and shape the organizational
structures and practices that form the basis of the news media. The research reviewed treats news media
institutions as political actors and makes assumptions about journalism’s importance in a democratic society.
Although this line of research, with its emphasis on political economic and normative questions, often has been
marginalized in American mass communication scholarship, the authors explain its ongoing importance,
particularly in relation to the journalism crisis, and, suggest future directions.