The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet

By Randall Patnode

The Synchronized Society traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteenth-century industrialists, political thinkers, and social reformers to tame an unruly society by controlling how people used their time. The idea manifested itself in the form of the broadcast schedule, a managed flow of information and entertainment that required audiences to be in a particular place – usually the home – at a particular time and helped to create “water cooler” moments, as audiences reflected on their shared media texts. Audiences began disconnecting from the broadcast schedule at the end of the twentieth century, but promoters of social media and television services still kept audiences under control, replacing the schedule with surveillance of media use. Author Randall Patnode offers compelling new insights into the intermingled roles of broadcasting and industrial/post-industrial work and how Americans spend their time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978820111

Book preview

Cover: The Synchronized Society, Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet edited by Randall Patnode

The Synchronized Society

The Synchronized Society

Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet

RANDALL PATNODE

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey

London and Oxford, UK

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Patnode, Randall, author.

Title: The synchronized society: time and control from broadcasting to the Internet / Randall Patnode.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022025283 | ISBN 9781978820098 (paperback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978820104 (hardcover; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978820111 (epub) | ISBN 9781978820135 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Television viewers—United States—History—20th century. | Television broadcasting—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. | Internet—Social aspects—United States—History.

Classification: LCC HE8700.66.U6 P37 2023 | DDC 384.55/4430973—dc23/eng/20220622

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025283

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by Randall Patnode

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

1 The Bizarre Model of Broadcasting

2 The Evolution of Time Consciousness

3 Roots of the Synchronized Society

4 The Rationalization of Radio

5 The Synchronized Society

6 Learning to Love the Clock

7 Television and Latter-Day Synchrony

8 The Decline of Synchrony

9 The Arrhythmic Society

10 From Clock to Click

11 Moving Ahead While Looking Backward

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

The Synchronized Society

1

The Bizarre Model of Broadcasting

For its sixtieth-anniversary issue in 2013, TV Guide asked some of television’s movers and shakers to reflect on where television had been and where it was going. In particular, the magazine asked Matthew Weiner, creator of the acclaimed AMC drama Mad Men, what he thought was missing from television. His reply had little to do with content: The communal experience of everyone watching something at the same time and the conversation the day after.¹ Weiner, born in 1965, grew up at the end of a period in which massive numbers of people were not only watching the same event or program but watching it at the same time. In 1969, 530 million people around the world camped out in front of their TVs to watch Neil Armstrong crawl out of the lunar landing module to plant an American flag on the moon. In 1977, another 130 million people gathered around their televisions over eight consecutive evenings to watch ABC’s broadcast of Alex Haley’s Roots, a miniseries about the experience of Black slaves and their ancestors in America. In 1983, CBS aired the final episode of M*A*S*H, a black comedy about war (ostensibly in Korea in the 1950s but more resonant of Vietnam in the 1960s), attracting an audience of 106 million viewers, a record for a single television episode that stood for twenty-seven years.² The following morning, it would have been easy to strike up a conversation with a neighbor or co-worker with the simple question, "Did you see M*A*S*H last night?" because so many people had.

Weiner is hardly alone in noting how broadcasting infiltrated our lives and reoriented our sense of time and community. Broadcasting not only gave us common fodder for water-cooler conversations but came to regulate our days. Media scholar Amelie Hastie recalls that broadcast television was a means for both passing time and managing time. "I certainly told time by television: whether via Saturday morning cartoons, weekday afternoon game shows like Match Game ’75, or the Tuesday night fare of The Muppet Show, Happy Days, and Laverne and Shirley. By high school, it was daytime soaps … which told me not just what time it was … but also what day it was."³ For Microsoft founder and baby boomer Bill Gates, it was a different set of programs, but the experience was the same. When I was a kid, he writes in The Road Ahead, "The Ed Sullivan Show came on at eight o’clock on Sunday nights. Most Americans with television sets tried to be at home to watch it because that might be the only time and place to see the Beatles, Elvis Presley, the Temptations, or that guy who could spin ten plates simultaneously on the noses of ten dogs.… Not being at home on Sunday at eight meant that you also missed out on the Monday morning talk about Sunday night’s show."⁴

Television’s ability to amass the huge same show, same time audiences it did in the 1970s and 1980s has diminished markedly. A top-rated show in 2022 might attract an audience of 20 million, a half or a third of that of a top-rated program in the 1980s. Exceptions would be live broadcast programs—Super Bowls and Academy Awards ceremonies—events that in one way or another occupy the time of a quarter or more of the U.S. population. Although only a few hours in duration, they bring together tens of millions of Americans—together not so much in space, as special events once did, as in time. Even if you have only a half-dozen revelers at your Super Bowl party noshing on wings and chili and beer, you are vaguely aware of tens of thousands of other similar gatherings around the country, all of them organized around the decision of the National Football League and one of the major television networks to begin the game at a particular moment.

These shared mediated experiences of geographically dispersed populations often lead to conclusions about how media help to shape a national consciousness. Notable in this regard is Benedict Anderson, who has argued that the rise of shared print media and common language allowed disconnected populations to imagine that they were part of a larger whole: a nation. This, he argues, led to the development of a deep, horizontal comradeship, the sort of which allows individuals to sacrifice their lives for their country.⁵ Similar thinking about what Anderson called the imagined community has been adopted by broadcast historians, such as Michele Hilmes, who maintains that radio, more than any other agency, possessed the power not only to assert actively the unifying power of simultaneous experience but to communicate meanings about the nature of that unifying experience.⁶ Instead of being defined merely by geographic boundaries, a nation could be tied together by narratives and representations that rehearse and justify the structures of order underlying national identity.⁷ In places such as Great Britain, the government took control of broadcasting early on and saw itself as the curator of national culture. Even in the United States, where broadcasting was organized as a private commercial affair, the radio networks credited the system they created with ubiquitous and penetrating characteristics sufficient to anneal a nation.⁸

Yet the narrative of nationalism in American broadcasting remains stubbornly complex. The broadcast networks that made such extraordinary claims about their reach and power did so as much out of self-interest as out of a vision of national unity. Most of them were trying to sell advertisers on the extent and predictability of their audiences as well as deliver their product in the most efficient way. If a shared sense of community emerged in the process, then the broadcasters could (and did) take credit for that too. Further, the narrative of nationalism is sometimes received as a primary narrative for broadcasting, owing in part to the fact that the histories of the national radio networks are better preserved than those of local stations. In actuality, radio’s storytellers were multiple and their perspectives varied, some of which aligned with a declared national purpose and others, less so.⁹ Additionally, program sources and dissemination practices for early broadcasting varied considerably more than the narrative of nationalism allows.¹⁰ Finally, the desire for a national experience, sought through the development of national print magazines, nationally known performers, and explorations by early radio amateurs to tune in distant signals, preceded the formal broadcast networks.¹¹

The Synchronized Society takes a more conservative approach to this question of unity, focusing less on shared culture and more on how the centralized broadcast networks came to unify the nation in time. While messages were the stated products of the broadcast system, these were open to interpretation and notoriously difficult to pin down. The unstated products were the schedule and, eventually, the collection and use of audience data, and while these, too, were open to negotiation, I argue that they constitute unifying, but also more limited, aspects of the system. Writing about television in the 1970s, Raymond Williams maintained that the planned management of temporal sequences, which he called flow, was the defining characteristic of broadcasting.¹² Flow went beyond particular programs to incorporate the advertisements, teasers, and other content to create one continuous viewer experience, the goal of which was to make it difficult to change channels or switch off the television. This, he said, was the true mechanism by which broadcasting operated and is what people mean when they say they are watching television as opposed to watching a particular program.¹³ The management of flow was a conscious though generally undeclared strategy by broadcasters to keep viewers tuned in, but as we will see, the broadcasters’ success at organizing the audience by way of the schedule and flow was limited by how much the audience cooperated.¹⁴

Merely assembling the mass broadcast audience is an extraordinary feat when you think about it—first, because of the large scale of the undertaking, and second, because it is hard to imagine that we would willingly cede control of our time, one of our most precious possessions, to the interests of anonymous remote corporations. But through the end of the twentieth century, most of us did to some degree, often every day and often for large chunks of the day.¹⁵ The oddity of this situation may be fully understood only in retrospect. Nicholas Negroponte, in his 1995 futuristic meditation Being Digital, reflected on how normal it had become for us to accept external temporal authority. We are constantly interrupted or forced into being punctual for things that truly do not merit such immediacy or promptness, he writes. We are forced into regular rhythms, not because we finished eating at 8:59 P.M., but because the TV program is about to start in one minute. Our great-grandchildren will understand our going to the theater at a given hour to benefit from the collective presence of human actors, but they will not understand the synchronous experiencing of television signals in the privacy of our home—until they look at the bizarre economic model behind it.¹⁶

This book attempts to account for that bizarre model and its origins. This is less a story about technology than about its uses. Radio and television devices rely on semiconductors and the electromagnetic spectrum, but broadcasting—as in the attempt to communicate with large remote audiences at the same time—is a matter of managerial technique.¹⁷ The logic that gives us the managerial broadcasting system comes from the late nineteenth century. It was a disorderly period in the United States, as society grappled with an influx of immigrants, the growth of cities, and the industrialization of labor. The period also exhibited a chaotic range of views emerging around simultaneous experience, writes Stephen Kern, brought on in part by the introduction of new technologies, including the locomotive, the telegraph, and the telephone. Life was both speeding up and fragmenting, and people became more aware of the difference between public and private time. In a rapidly modernizing world marked by centralized economies, urban populations, and bureaucratic organization, many saw a unified approach to time as necessary to maintain order, which meant sacrificing individual freedom for the coordination of the whole.¹⁸

Radio broadcasting eventually became a reflection of this new time consciousness, one in which people were invited to relinquish their control over localized experience for a shared, synchronized, nationalized, and commercialized experience. Many in the audience initially found this arrangement odd and disconcerting, yet the experience proved popular enough and durable enough that by the 1930s, when radio was in three-quarters of American households and turned on an average of four hours a day, no single leisure activity could occupy time in the way that radio did.¹⁹ Some of the reasons for this were that radio was perceived as free (once the receiver was paid for); radio was received in the home, whereas other forms of diversion were often received in morally suspect locations (such as movie theaters and dance halls); and movies, theater performances, and public speeches were discrete activities with fixed durations, meaning audience members synchronized for a time, then went their separate ways. Radio, because it was available continuously through most of the day and evening, provided the opportunity for industrialized authority to extend the synchronous experience by creating what broadcast historian Paddy Scannell identifies as a seamless, always available, daily service that could be counted on and used without much thought.²⁰

Anxiety and Grief

Given that broadcasting arrived at a time when books, newspapers, and magazines were the dominant media form and individuals had control over when and where they consumed their media, it was met with some skepticism. Fictional stories in newspapers and popular magazines of the time emphasized the anxiety-inducing qualities of the new medium that tracked with many of the challenges that faced the nervous generation following World War I.²¹ Matters of identity, corporeality, authenticity, and decontextualized experience creep into these stories in which radio is as much a cause of distress as it is a comfort.²² Media historian Catherine Covert argues that for many listeners, the radio experience produced a contradictory sense of loss or bereavement. Even those who had never experienced the active give-and-take of two-way amateur wireless had a sense that the operation of a receiving device meant listening, not transmitting; consuming, not creating.²³ A significant part of the loss, Covert argues, was a sense of linear time. Early radio, with its penchant for brief entertainments often supplied by volunteers, came at you as a barrage of fragments—a song, a lecture, a poetry recital. With print, one had the opportunity to focus on a single item, despite the surrounding profusion of ads and articles. With radio, Covert writes, Priority and rate of attention, reprise, and scanning, all had passed to others’ control.²⁴ So had the timing of the communications. Before American radio developed its precise, prearranged, industrialized temporal rhythm in the form of the schedule, listeners struggled to manage their expectations amid the often chaotic profusion of content.²⁵

Another distressing issue with the medium was its ability to transcend the visual and thus the customary authority of seeing is believing. As radio historian Michele Hilmes observes, [On the radio,] adults played the roles of children and animals, two-hundred-pound women played romantic ingénues, and ninety-pound men played superheroes; whites frequently impersonated blacks … and one of America’s most popular entertainers was a wooden dummy.²⁶ Beyond that, radio’s content could cause its own problems. Popular forms, such as jazz music and daytime soap operas, as well as the undisciplined content of individual broadcasters and small local stations threatened to undermine radio’s high culture image. In the view of some, then, radio would have to control not only its audience but its producers. As Hilmes argues, the radio networks, organized in the latter half of the 1920s, exercised a centralized cultural function that worked to blunt some of the chaos created by renegade local broadcasters.²⁷

The synchronized society born of broadcasting was relatively short-lived. Almost as soon as broad synchronization became available, people began looking for rationales and means to dismantle it. In the 1930s, local radio stations, networks, and advertisers began adopting asynchronous recording technology to better control their content and profits through time management. At the same time, critics began to voice serious doubts about the ways in which bureaucratic organizations seemed to be manipulating the masses, and audiences grew restless with formulaic broadcast content.²⁸ This tension continued into the television era, but not until the 1970s did audiences acquire sufficient power to challenge the management of their time. Abetted by new technologies that catered to a more asynchronous experience, such as the videocassette recorder, audiences began disconnecting from the synchronized broadcast clock and substituting media that allowed them to control scheduling, sequence, and flow. As with the arrival of broadcasting in the 1920s, a shift in temporal consciousness preceded technological development. If a desire for temporal control on behalf of the organization begat the synchronized society, the desire to retake control of time on behalf of the audience was central in bringing about the asynchronous digital society.

Into the twenty-first century, the struggle over control continued to dominate media development. As audiences asserted their desire to consume content when they wanted, old-school broadcasters found themselves scrambling to maintain control. However, broadcasters realized that time was no longer on their side, as it had been throughout most of the twentieth century; as a result, they and other new media providers shifted their attention to other mechanisms of order and prediction. In the environment of algorithms and Big Data, the audience remained the object of control, but it was managed through the mouse click rather than the clock. Companies such as Google and Facebook attempted to organize a new, temporally liberated audience by tracking its every move through cyberspace, one mouse click or screen tap at a time.

Rationalization and the Iron Cage

Underlying many of the control mechanisms applied during the chaotic 1800s and into the 1900s is the concept of rationalization. Rationalization, identified by German sociologist Max Weber in the early twentieth century as a key condition of modernity, was a response to a growing mass society and increasing industrialization.²⁹ Weber sought to account for the conditions that made capitalism possible. He found his answer in the traditions of sixteenth-century Calvinists, who redefined the relationship between work and piety. Whereas the accumulation of wealth was once thought to interfere with spiritual attainment, Calvinist doctrine positively linked the two, such that attaining wealth was no longer perilous to the soul but rather a means to a spiritual end. According to economic historian R. H. Tawney, Capitalism was the social counterpart of Calvinist theology.³⁰

In this new Protestant ethic, the qualities that demonstrated one’s election for heaven—diligence, thrift, sobriety, prudence—were also the traits of a good capitalist. The Calvinist faithful could never be certain they were destined for heaven, but they believed that doing good works could be a sign of election. In time, Calvinists came to see the accumulation of wealth not only as another sign of election but as duty. Consequently, the personal attributes of discipline and planning—traits that promoted the accumulation of wealth—became prominent in Calvinist thinking. Discipline was about being effective. It operated from above, in a coercive or normative manner, writes Jennifer Karns Alexander, such as through laws or military commands, in which it was designed to increase the likelihood that regulations or orders were followed. It also operated from below, through social behavior, to reinforce order, security, and safety.³¹ Planning was about the appropriate use of resources to direct change. By the nineteenth century, these two features would come together under the rubric of efficiency, an attribute wholly under human control, not that of the Deity.³²

Like Karl Marx, Weber saw the economic order as central to the rise of modern society, but while Marx focused on class struggle, Weber saw the issue in terms of bureaucratic rationality, a condition that shaped society at almost every level. Rationalization describes an economic system based not on custom or tradition, but on the deliberate and systematic adjustment of economic means to the attainment of the objective pecuniary profit.³³ Rationalization entails reducing human activity to matters of efficiency and calculation and the deployment of bureaucracy, standardization, and centralization as techniques for creating a more orderly society. While bureaucracy is beneficial to industry, it also transforms the individual, as Weber put it, into a petty routine creature lacking in heroism, human spontaneity, and inventiveness.³⁴ Bureaucratic methods removed the individual from consideration and encouraged uniformity and impersonal decision-making through abstract rules and regulations. Weber called this condition the iron cage because it constrained individual freedom and agency.³⁵

Rationalization as a tool of social organization departed from the subjective ad hoc values common to small close-knit societies and replaced them with objective universal values in the form of rules, codes, and laws. In the economic system, the rules that came to be emphasized were those that supported the interests of those with the most money. Objective measures of human activity, writes historian James Beniger, reduced the amount of information that needed to be processed and increased the degree of managerial control. By means of rationalization, therefore, it is possible to maintain large-scale, complex social systems that would be overwhelmed by a rising tide of information they could not process were it necessary to govern by the particularistic considerations of family and kin that characterize preindustrial societies.³⁶

Although bureaucratic rationalization has been around since ancient times, it became particularly relevant to the field of communication in the nineteenth century during the industrial revolution.³⁷ Historian James Carey argues that the telegraph, in wide use by the 1860s, eliminated the relationship between the communication of information and physical space. In its earliest uses as a tool for executing trades, the telegraph contributed to the organization of essentially impersonal relations by coordinating the activities of anonymous buyers and sellers into commodity markets. Further, the telegraph allowed news, indeed forced news, to be treated like a commodity: something that could be transported, measured, reduced, and timed.³⁸ The same could be done with human labor. As industrialists discovered, managing unruly masses of laborers through force and intimidation was a short-term solution at best and a disaster at worst. More effective were subtle forms of manipulation that tamed antagonized laborers by stripping them of autonomy and self-fulfilling work. Couched in terms of rules or scientific laws, these forms of manipulation made it difficult for workers to identify their oppressors or even the fact that they were being oppressed. The job would get done with greater speed and efficiency, but the workers were reduced to mere wage earners. As sociologist George Ritzer has argued, the rational economic system imposes masterless slavery on workers; they are oppressed by the system, not by individuals. They work in a world stripped of human values.³⁹ Alienated from the production process, they would eventually seek fulfillment elsewhere—in the consumer society.

In time, bureaucracies that pursue rationalization often devolve into irrationality, fostering inefficiency through excessive adherence to rules and needless paperwork. But bureaucracies are also remarkably resilient because they are taken to be objective and neutral. As we shall see, beginning in the late nineteenth century, rationalization techniques arrived in many forms, from the assembly line techniques of Henry Ford to progressive reform and corporate liberalism, but the most critical of them was the adoption of time discipline.

Audience as Labor

In order to enjoy broadcasting in the early twentieth century, listeners had to relinquish control of time. While this concession was initially modest and haphazard, radio grew into its more formal and rationalized identity with the development of individual programs and schedules. Audiences interested in taking in these offerings were required to place themselves in front of the radio speaker at a particular hour and remain there for a specified duration if they wanted the entire bargain. During that time, they were also exposed to a series of sales messages, with the product vendors paying the broadcasters for the right to take the time of the audience in order to produce sales. When we allow others to control our free time so that they may make money, that constitutes a form of labor. This idea was advanced in the 1980s by Dallas Smythe, a onetime analyst for the Federal Communications Commission and later an academic, who argued that audiences for media (including asynchronous print) were essentially a commodity that was sold to advertisers: The work which audience members perform for the advertiser to whom they have been sold is learning to buy goods and to spend their income accordingly.… In short, they work to create the demand for advertised goods which is the purpose of monopoly-capitalist advertisers. Audience members may resist, but the advertiser’s expectations are realized sufficiently that the results perpetuate the system of demand management.⁴⁰

By the 1930s, radio extended the demand-management system into a highly rationalized temporal environment. Not only were audiences called to engage with advertised goods, but synchronous broadcasters controlled those engagements through the scheduling and duration of programs more completely than any newspaper or magazine publisher could. By occupying discrete chunks of time, synchronous broadcasters could effectively preempt competing activities.

Of course, all forms of communication involved time to some degree, as every message required the recipient to devote some time to the process of decoding. However, the scheduling, duration, and flow of that time differed between synchronous and asynchronous media. Readers of the asynchronous newspaper could peruse it at their leisure, on their own time. Asynchronous media consumers were in control of most of the temporal conditions surrounding the communication process. Synchronous radio listeners, by contrast, had to attend to messages on the broadcaster’s or advertiser’s time. In a real sense, synchronous radio listeners were not at leisure; they had to adjust their finite use of time to the plans of the broadcaster or forgo the experience. Synchronization, then, writes Sebastian de Grazia, involves a loss of freedom of action.⁴¹

Listeners must work for their information or entertainment, not in terms of physical or mental exertion but in consigning leisure time to the broadcaster. The flexibility or leisure that is taken from listeners is converted into a time commodity by the broadcaster, which in turn is sold to advertisers. Advertisers and broadcasters work to further rationalize the process by segmenting audiences into groups with specific characteristics. Certain audiences are put to work on behalf of certain advertisers (expensive automobiles, watches, beer) in the same way that traditional capital enterprises assigned workers to highly specified tasks in the practice of division of labor. The goals of such practices are greater efficiency and predictability. Well-off audience members are assigned to the work of luxury items because they are more likely to buy expensive products and have the means to do so.⁴²

In advertising-based broadcasting, the primary commodity being exchanged is time, with local stations and networks selling blocks of time in units of fifteen, thirty, or sixty seconds to advertisers. But whose time is it? While advertisers might regard this time as theirs, since they paid the broadcaster for it, ultimately it is the individual audience member’s time. The station or network acts only as a go-between, aggregating and organizing the time in the most profitable manner. Audiences must be compensated for the appropriation of their time (otherwise, they would not participate), so the stations provide them with entertainment, or what Smythe calls the free lunch.⁴³

The notion of audience activity as labor is understandably counterintuitive and controversial.⁴⁴ After all, the act of assembling an automobile on behalf of a manufacturer or processing paperwork on behalf of a bureaucratic organization—typical forms of labor—seems distinctly different from watching television. The former might involve distinctive use of motor or mental skills, while the latter seems largely passive and emphasizes consumption rather than production. Additionally, the former pays a tangible wage, while the latter seems to offer none. Finally, much of the audience does not see its activity as work but rather as enjoyment. However, the history of work over the last century demonstrates how labor to an increasing degree has been separated from the actual work and reduced to a matter of time.⁴⁵ Workers speak of putting in their time, waiting for the moment when they can clock out, and working overtime. In the deskilled labor marketplace, the difference between one worker and another is often undetectable, and that is intentional. Following the lead of Henry Ford, industrial organizations have designed much of their operations around training, such that almost anyone can be taught to perform a particular job. In the logic of mass production, it matters little who is doing the job, only that the work gets done by someone. The worker is essentially an interchangeable commodity performing a particular function over time, which is also a commodity.⁴⁶

What, then, of the worker’s leisure time? Smythe argues that all non-sleeping time of most of the population is work time, and most of this time is sold to advertisers.⁴⁷ Audience members do not offer their time to advertisers directly but rather indirectly, through the owners of the media system—that is, the broadcast networks.⁴⁸ What the advertisers are buying through the networks are large chunks of listeners and viewers who will pay attention in predictable numbers at particular times.⁴⁹ The large numbers are important in the advertising environment, as they minimize the risk that comes from the inevitable portion of the audience that does not pay attention or falls outside the range of prediction. Because of the risk (especially in the age of time shifting), broadcasters have come to see the audience not merely as consumers making choices but as contract laborers with quasi-legal obligations. As one broadcaster audaciously put it, Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the [advertising] spots.⁵⁰

A Second Job

A final element in the creation of the synchronized society has to do with the point of all that audience labor, which is, in Smythe’s terms, for audience members to create and interact with dialogues about consumable products and integrate those products into their daily lives—in a word, consumption. Largely stripped of meaningful labor by the rationalized workplace, workers needed to find other means of satisfaction. Leisure time—a term that was invented to distinguish time not spent in the traditional notion of work—became a more legitimate pursuit.⁵¹ Leisure time found a mate in the production surpluses created by the adoption of efficiency techniques and mechanization. Manufacturers of everything from clothing to soap needed consumers to absorb the output of their machines. Thus, the alienated workforce turned to a second job—that of dedicated consumers.

This new dynamic came with a group of consumption managers who took on the job of creating a cultural apparatus aimed at defusing and neutralizing potential unrest.⁵² These were mostly advertising professionals who extended the art of the sales pitch beyond a good product at a good price by appealing to people’s fears, desires, and other unconscious motivations. Following on their heels was another group of industrial managers—at Westinghouse, AT&T, RCA, and other organizations—who designed the commercial broadcasting system and further enhanced this mechanism of social control.⁵³

While the history of advertising and the consumer society will be left to others, what should be noted here is that the industrial managers were redirecting people’s time from the traditional pursuit of leisure to the work of consumption. Just how much intention and awareness there was on the part of corporate leaders in this transformation is subject to debate. However, as broadcast historian Thomas Streeter concludes, Consumerism eventually became available to managers and consumers alike as a way of imagining the relations between corporations and the rest of society. The public was a body of potential consumers, and the public interest lay in the cultivation of a consumer society.⁵⁴ The system that controlled both the consumption messages and the temporal conditions under which the public would engage those messages proved to be quite powerful, although not invincible.

The Book’s Plan

What follows is an account of broadcasting less as a message delivery system and more as a time manager. This is primarily a history of how we got to now, so the emphasis is more on the past century, when broadcasting reached its peak, than the present one. While up close the media system appears to be dynamic in terms of technology and content, the wider view, in this argument, reveals more continuity in the objectives of the commercialized system than change, with a consistent emphasis on the use of media to exercise control over subject populations. This book primarily leverages the historical record to account for the origins of the idea of broadcasting and its implementation. It focuses more on those who were responsible for creating the system and the system’s critics than the users, the audience. While the idea of the active audience, one that is choosing and making meaning from content, is well demonstrated in the literature, this book focuses on the taken-for-granted bargain that came with the content: If you wanted it, you had to make yourself available at a time that was under the control of the broadcasters.

Chapter 2 briefly explores the ways in which Westerners began to construct their world according to