Secret 4 is a little different than the oft-repeated slogan, “Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.” Instead, it says that media face the same issues over and over again as technologies change and new people come into the business.
The fight between today’s recording companies and file sharers has its roots in the battle between music publishers and the distributors of player piano rolls in the early 1900s. The player piano was one of the first technologies for reproducing musical performances. Piano roll publishers would buy a single copy of a piece of sheet music and hire a skilled pianist to have his or her performance recorded as a series of holes punched in a paper roll. That roll (and the performance) could then be reproduced and sold to anyone who owned a player piano without further payment to the music’s original publisher.
Then, in 1984, Sony successfully defended itself against a lawsuit from Universal Studios by arguing that it had a right to sell VCRs to the public because there were legitimate, legal uses for the technology. Universal had protested the sales because the video recorders could be used to duplicate its movies. Before long, the studios quit trying to ban the VCR and started selling videocassettes of movies directly to consumers at reasonable prices. All of a sudden, the studios had a major new source of revenue.
This can also be seen with the repeated fears of new media technologies emerging over the years. In the 1930s, there was fear that watching movies, especially gangster pictures, would lead to precocious sexual behavior, delinquency, lower standards and ideals, and poor physical and emotional health. The 1940s brought concern about how people would react to radio programs, particularly soap operas. Comic books came under attack in the 1950s. The notion that comic books were dangerous was popularized by a book titled Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham. Wertham also testified before Congress that violent and explicit comic books were a cause of teenage delinquency and sexual behavior. The industry responded to the criticism by forming the Comics Code Authority and ceasing publication of popular crime and horror comics such as Tales From the Crypt and Weird Science.
The 1980s and 1990s saw controversies over offensive rap and rock lyrics. These controversies reflected widespread concern about bad language and hidden messages in songs. In 2009, pop star Britney Spears had a not-so-hidden allusion to the “F word” in her song “If U Seek Amy.” If you speak the title aloud, it sounds like you are spelling out F, U, . . . well, you get the picture. Critics were, of course, shocked and dismayed at this example of a pop star lowering public taste.
Of course, Spears didn’t really create her naughty little lyric on her own. Aside from a host of rock and blues singers who have used similar lines, Slate writer Jesse Sheidlower notes that James Joyce used the same basic line in Ulysses, when he has a group of women sing:
If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.
A careful reading of the third line will let you find a second hidden obscenity as well.
Numerous media critics and scholars have argued that television and movies present a distorted view of the world, making it look like a much more violent and dangerous place than it is. More recently, mobile devices have been blamed for a range of social ills, from car accidents caused by distracted drivers to promiscuity caused by sexually explicit mobile phone text and photo messages.
Why has there been such long-running, repeated concern about the possible effects of the media? Media sociologist Charles R. Wright says that people want to be able to solve social ills, and it is easier to believe that poverty, crime, and drug abuse are caused by media coverage than to acknowledge that their causes are complex and not fully understood.
Writing in 1948, sociologists Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld identified four major aspects of public concern about the media:
- Concern that because the media are everywhere, they might be able to control and manipulate people. This is a large part of the legacy of fear.
- Fear that those in power will use the media to reinforce the existing social structure and discourage social criticism. When critics express concern about who owns and runs the media, this is what they are worried about.
- The belief that mass entertainment is a waste of time that detracts from more useful activities.
When your mother told you to turn off the television set and go outside, this was her concern!
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