#3560 Created 02/12/2014 Updated 04/28/2016
Media, Knowledge and Power Raymond Williams edited by Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Peter Braham
why communications matter?
we are at once seeing and being shown.
But an increasing number of sporting events -- in golf and boxing most evidently--have from the beginning been arranged as subjects for television.
(dd consumer demand driving production which demands content of a type and nature)
a very high proposition of what is there to be seen was put there to bed seen, an it is only when we consider communications as production, ... that we can all understand its whole range. 12
it is also the relations between such independently occurring events and specially arranged events. for it is not only in sports that events are arranges primarily so that they can be reported. politics...commerce... \ paid advertisements, or commercials, are not a significantly large element of most newspapers, and most broadcasting services.
(dd was advertising the first sector whose content was created because of consumer demand?) Thus we can become so used to descriptions of modern communications in terms of political or commercial propaganda or manipulation that we can fail to notice some equally widespread and perhaps equally significant cultural processes of an apparently different kind. The case of drama is an exceptionally strong example... it is only comparatively recently that it has become an everyday event...
Such a phenomenon can be interpreted , quite correctly, as an instance of an expanding culture.
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..we have to recognize the need for a kind of inquiry which does not simply begin from existing categories, but which is capable of examining the categories themselves.
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communications systems ... take their place, as we read their real history, alongside other major forms of social organization and production. ... as many cases of the systems and the technologies becoming major elements in the nature and development of social orders as a whole. ... there is a deliberately close link between the material character of the new processes and the social and cultural questions.
...when we look at any of these human actions, we can hardly fail to notice that ... communication...is indeed in many cases their necessary condition. 17
the full history of communications is indispensable to an understanding of either its contemporary or its recurrent problems, and that this history needs to be active, an account not only of what has been done but also of what is not being doe and, in way that we hope to decide, is about to be done.
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