Republic on the Wire by John McMurria

Author:John McMurria [McMurria, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Performing Arts, Television, History & Criticism, Political Science, Public Policy, Science & Technology Policy, Social Science, Media Studies, Technology & Engineering, Telecommunications
ISBN: 9780813585291
Google: Y50HkAEACAAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T04:25:29+00:00

5

Blue Skies, Black Cultures

In a special issue of the politically left-leaning weekly newsmagazine The Nation dated May 18, 1970, freelance writer Ralph Lee Smith wrote a twenty-four-page exposé on the revolutionary potential for cable television to “influence every aspect of private and community life.” “As cable systems are installed in major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas,” he wrote, “the stage is being set for a communications revolution—a revolution that some experts call ‘The Wired Nation.’” The revolutionary cable wire “will provide newspapers, mail service, banking and shopping facilities, data from libraries and other storage centers, school curricula and other forms of information too numerous to specify.” The cable will “cater to specialized community, minority, and individual needs and tastes,” energize “electoral politics,” and “perform functions of special importance” in “depressed areas and ghetto neighborhoods” that otherwise “live in anonymous invisibility until they are torn by riot.”1

Yet, Smith worried that “despite the importance and imminence of this new force in society, its possibilities and problems are almost unknown to the public” or to “local, state, or national legislators.” The people with better foresight, he wrote, were the economists, engineers, and social scientists who in the past three years had initiated research on cable television at think-tanks including the RAND Corporation, industry organizations such as the Industrial Electronics Division of the Electronic Industries Association, and special task forces including one ordered by President Lyndon Johnson. Standing in the way of the Wired Nation, Smith believed, was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which restricted the growth of cable television in large cities, and Congress, which refused to act due to “the power of the broadcast lobby.” “The way forward now,” Smith recommended, was to establish a “Presidential commission on the Wired Nation” that “should conduct extensive consultations with economists, the business community, communications technicians, and social scientists” to develop “a plan for creating a national broad-band communications system in the United States during the 1970s.”2 Winning the National Magazine Award for Public Service and later published in extended form as a paperback book in 1972, Smith’s article and book gave national recognition and a brand identity to this “Blue Skies” enthusiasm for wiring the nation.3

Cable television histories have represented this Blue Skies period as a significant moment when “public interest” priorities took over commercial profit motives in cable television development. Though overly utopic and technologically deterministic, according to these histories, Blue Skies visions identified an important role for government, non-profit foundations, and other public institutions to develop cable as a new technology for social benefit.4 I agree that this period is a significant moment in cable television history; however, I believe the significance of this period lies in accounting for how civil rights activists challenged Blue Skies assumptions about cable television’s potential to resolve the urban crisis in the wake of the race rebellions of the late 1960s.5 While social scientists, engineers, and non-profit foundations identified Black isolation and alienation as a significant cause of the violent protests and believed cable television could

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