Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [26]
Networks, of course, are not new; before the Internet and World Wide Web, there were ship, train, automobile, postal, telegraph and telephone networks. All networks, however, are not the same. The distinctive characteristics of the networks that are important for reforming higher education today come into sharp relief when they are compared to network television, which began appearing in the 1950s. Although the first regular television station was established in 1940 and both CBS and NBC started commercial transmission in 1941, networks equipped for coast-to-coast broadcasts were not established until 1951. The history of television, like that of the Internet decades later, is inseparable from its use by the military. During World War II, the refinement of the cathode-ray tube, cameras, transmitters and receivers used in radar, oscillators and other devices led to a marked improvement in the quality of television. When these technological advances were made available for commercial use after the war, affordable TV sets quickly became widely available. With the emergence of national networks in the early 1950s, businesses had a new venue for mass advertising. As images and information began to circulate around the world faster than ever before, distance collapsed and boundaries slipped away. The impact of this development was not merely economic but also social, political and cultural.
And yet, for all its novelty, TV shares more with the industrial past than the networked future. From its earliest stages, network television has functioned as an extension of the mechanical means of reproduction typical of industrial and consumer capitalism. Nationwide advertising vastly expanded mass markets and led to growing standardization of products manufactured and consumed. While promising to give customers unprecedented choice, advertisers actually offered them a limited range of options. National and international marketing campaigns did not completely erase regional and personal differences, but the increasing uniformity of products and purchasing habits created greater social homogenization throughout the 1950s.
The uniformity of transmission tends to create a uniformity of response. Television is a broadcast medium that deploys a one-to-many distribution system. Like students passively listening to lectures in a classroom, people stare at screens and blankly absorb what is dished out to them. You can’t talk back to TV; the only possible response is to either switch channels or turn it off. In addition to this limitation, television does not allow viewers in different locations to communicate about what they are watching in real time. Rather than connecting people, TV isolates the individual viewer in front of the separate set. Though recording devices for TV programs eventually were developed, the quality and ease of reproduction, storage and transmission are severely limited.
These old centralized broadcast networks differ from new decentralized networks in many ways that are important for how media and information are produced, communicated and consumed. To understand the implications of these differences for higher education, it is necessary to consider several additional characteristics of the new network infrastructure.
First, today’s networks use digital rather than analog technology. While the details of analog and digital technologies need not concern us here, several aspects of the differences between them are important for understanding their respective limitations and capabilities for education. In traditional analog media like telephones and VCR tapes (and television for much of its history), the signal is continuous and cannot