Communication in History by Peter Urquhart & Paul Heyer

Author:Peter Urquhart & Paul Heyer [Urquhart, Peter & Heyer, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138729476
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-09-03T07:00:00+00:00

Berliner’s uncertain futurology offered a rich brew of potential media systems for the gramophone. While mass production was certainly an idea that seemed—and, indeed, proved to be—promising, it appeared alongside the idea of the local gramophone office, where people could go to make their own recordings. The gramophone office, essentially envisioned as a local, for-rent recording studio, suggests a system where home listening would mix original creations with mass-produced entertainment. Berliner’s gramophone office nicely hybridizes Victorian domesticity with the new culture of “going out,” to use David Nasaw’s phrase.8

The appearance of the term broadcast as an adverb is also interesting here since we have since come to think of the mass production of recordings and broadcasting as two different things. Berliner’s use of the term was probably closer to the agricultural sense of the word than to the sense that we would now associate with radio or television. Yet it suggests an interesting connection among the possibilities of dissemination that our current conventions of use do not emphasize. Berliner’s broadcast indicated the dispersal of sound events over time and space. When we refer to radio or telephone broadcasting, we think only of dispersal over space. We can read into Berliner’s usage, then, a sense of the plasticity of the sound event over time and space so central to modern sound culture. This potential for dissemination was perhaps the most salient quality of new sound technologies as they were being shaped into media.9 This is one possible explanation for the relatively fluid boundaries among the point-to-point, broadcast, and archival functions in the minds of late-nineteenth-century inventors, promoters, and users.

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