In this process also more number of communication skill in civilization.I heard a commentator remark on the fact that people seem more interested in Tiger Woods’ marital problems than in the conference on Global Warming held in Copenhagen. In my opinion, this observation speaks to the nature of our current society and culture as we move through an historical epoch dominated by television and film entertainment which I call the “Fourth Civilization”.
If you accept that a society dominated by television can be a “civilization” which like Toynbee’s rises and falls, you may want to look for particular events that mark the delineation between one situation and another. World history as a whole is the sum of many individual acts. Which acts marked turning points in the history of humanity viewed as a succession of civilizations?
My focus will be upon recent history. There was a transition between the Third and the Fourth civilizations during the 20th century. In the 21st century, we seem to be moving from the Fourth to an as yet incompletely developed Fifth Civilization. Certain events illustrate the transition from one state to another and may, in fact, have caused it to happen.
invention of the department store
The Third Civilization is the type of culture that one would associate with Victorian England. It is a print-based culture in a society dominated by commerce and secular education. One of its distinctive characteristics was the appearance of large retail establishments that relied on newspaper advertising to draw customers and sell products.
The consumer market has been a part of human culture since prehistoric times. During the Middle Ages local vendors peddled their wares at religious fairs held at particular times during the year. It was the custom in such markets for the buyers and sellers of products to haggle over price. In the early 19th century, the markets went indoors in “general stores” that sold a variety of products or in specialized shops that sold hardware, drapery, clothing, and other products. These retailers sometimes sent people to the streets with handbills advertising the merchandise in stock. Traditional practices of the market place remained.
In 1852, a French merchant named Aristide Boucicaut opened the world’s first department store, Bon Marche, in Paris. Unlike stores where customers haggled with store clerks to obtain a better price, this store had a fixed price for every item. The retailer limited himself to a profit margin of twenty percent yet allowed customers who were dissatisfied with their purchase to return the merchandise for full credit. Parisian women took to the new system. Visitors to the 1867 World Exhibition in Paris were exposed to it and took the concept back with them to their own countries. Soon there were department stores everywhere, replacing the specialty shops.
This was one of the pivotal events in the history of the Third Civilization. Merchants no longer made their money by charging high prices. The trick instead was to increase profits through the volume of merchandise sold. Department stores such as Bon Marche created attractive window displays to lure people into the store. They offered promotional “sales” with temporarily reduced prices. Above all, they advertised their products in mass-circulation newspapers. People reading those newspapers for news content could not help but notice the retailers’ advertisements on the same page. The newspaper publishers derived revenue both from paid subscriptions and commercial advertising.
Commercial advertising comes with the low-cost entertainment.
This arrangement became a fixture of the third and succeeding civilizations. The commercial market was married to communications media such as newspapers, radio, and television. Basically, people who were drawn into the medium through an interest in news or entertainment content, were involuntarily exposed to commercial messages. The sellers of consumer products paid the proprietor of the medium - e.g. a printed newspaper - a certain sum of money to fill a certain space with their messages according to a schedule of advertising rates. Readers who had no prior interest in such messages would see them nevertheless. If the features and prices seemed attractive, a certain percentage of readers would seek to buy the advertised products. The increased sales volume of those products would make it worthwhile for sellers to spend money on advertising.
The scheme was perfected in the era of print media. Then, in the 20th century, it was transferred to electronic media starting with radio. This, too, relates to a specific event. Almost by accident, radio broadcasters promoted commercial products on the air.
One might say that radio broadcasting began in 1920 when a ham radio operator in Pittsburgh named Frank Conrad began sending baseball scores and recorded music to his fellow operators. A local music store provided free records to Conrad in exchange for being mentioned in the broadcasts. When a Pittsburgh department store ran a newspaper ad offering to sell radio receivers, a vice president of Westinghouse saw a business opportunity in manufacturing this product.
To stimulate product demand, Westinghouse set up the world’s first commercial radio station with call letters KDKA. Its first broadcast on November 2, 1920 reported the returns for that year’s presidential election. Radio Corporation of America, another company formed to market radio receivers, organized the first radio network, National Broadcasting Company, in 1926.
The pioneering entrepreneurs of the radio industry first thought they could make their money by manufacturing and selling radio equipment. They came to realize that greater profit lay in selling air time during their radio broadcasts. Instead of space in a newspaper, the commercial messages were measured in broadcast time that was inserted in the programming. The basic arrangement was the same as for newspapers. People tuned into the radio broadcasts to enjoy music, learn baseball scores, or whatever; but they were obliged also to listen to the commercial messages that interrupted the programming. It was understood that the price of free radio entertainment was to endure those commercial messages.
When television came along, commercial advertising accompanied the new medium. The arrangement was the same as for radio. People watched the television programs for personal enjoyment. Unwanted commercial messages abruptly intruded on the spectacle at certain times. While some tried to escape the commercials by going to the bathroom or excluding them through TiVo, most television spectators have become inured to commercial exposure as the price of free viewing of the programs actually desired.
The era of radio and television programming represents what I call the Fourth Civilization. This is also known as the age of mass entertainment. Now, however, we are moving into a fifth epoch of world history brought on by computer technology. Here individuals can navigate the “world wide web”, or the Internet, looking for particular sites of interest. Anyone, individual or group, can create a web site at a relatively low cost. Only web-creation software and an internet connection are required. Therefore, tens of millions of web sites are available around the world, all immediately accessible by typing the name of the site into a browser.
How does this type of communication affect the advertising model? One notes, first, that the volume of traffic to a site is relatively small when compared with radio or television broadcasts. It is not worth the seller of a product’s time to craft an advertisement when, say, only 200 or 300 people a day look at the web site. The percentage of persons who buy products from watching ads is quite small. You need much larger numbers of viewers to generate a response that advertisers consider worthwhile.
The Internet seems to have been created to give away the content for free. From an economic standpoint, the challenge has been to monetize the traffic. As proprietor of a fairly well-travelled website, worldhistorysite.com, I have not yet found the right formula for recouping my investment. I created this website ten years ago for the purpose of selling books. The site, worldhistorysite.com is built on the concepts expressed in my paperback book, “Five Epochs of Civilization”, which sells for $18.95 per copy at retail. In all these years, I have managed only to sell a few copies on line. The monthly cost of maintaining the site exceeds that amount.
One of the web’s most successful businesses, Amazon.com, lost millions of dollars in its first years of operation even while the price of its stock soared. I once heard the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, joke that his site ought to be renamed Amazon.org, “org” being the suffix used for nonprofit organizations. In time, this company did become profitable. It sells books and other products directly to consumers through orders placed on the Internet.
The economic giant of the Internet, however, is a company incorporated in 1998: Google. Its initial public offering of stock was in 2004. Google operates the world’s leading search engine. Such a mechanism allows it to sell advertisements targeted more precisely to the viewer’s field of interest. For example, a visitor to worldhistorysite.com/communication.html, a page summarizing the history of communication technology, will see advertisements in the right-hand margin for “Dale Carnegie’s free tips” or for “Venga Intra-office paging”, billed as the “most powerful office communicator software”.
Presumably, people interested in my view of civilizations based on communication technology might be interested in purchasing those products listed on the side. At least, the website narrows the scope of interest so that, unlike mass-media ads, the advertiser is not paying to reach uninterested viewers.
And so a common theme runs through the communication process in the last three civilizations. The content or programming found in the medium attracts an audience. Once the audience is assembled, the sellers of commercial products find it worthwhile to advertise in a space provided alongside the main message. The viewers (or listeners) may not want to see (or hear) that commercial message; it is thrust upon them involuntarily as the price of free or low-cost programming. The arrangement smacks of deception from the audience member’s point of view. Yet, commercial advertising delivered in this fashion drives the sale of many products.
The persons and events that first connected newspapers with commercial advertisements are unknown to me. This, however, was a critical development in the history of newspapers since 80% of their revenues derives from advertising and only 20% from paid subscriptions. We see more clearly the dissolution of this bond as Craigslist.com and other such sites provide free classified ads. Many large newspapers in the United States have filed for bankruptcy with the loss of advertising revenue.
The story of Frank Conrad and his deal with a music store in Pittsburgh to take free records in exchange for being mentioned in the broadcasts helps explain how radio commercials were introduced. It is believed that the first television commercial appeared on July 1, 1941, when the Bulova watch company paid $4 for a ten-second spot on New York station WNBT before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. At first, companies selling products “sponsored” television shows and received advertising time on those programs. Later, the television networks sold blocks of time to commercial advertisers on various programs. Today, a thirty-second ad aired during the Superbowl can cost several million dollars.
Google began selling text-based ads associated with keywords in 2000 after it had attracted a certain base of followers. This model of advertising was pioneered by Goto.com in February 1998. Prospective advertisers bid what they would pay for each click on a link to their website. Soon bids were ranging up to one dollar per click. Interestingly, a firm called Open Text had offered a similar service two years earlier but users of search engines objected to the Internet commercialization. By the time that Google became dominant, their concerns were forgotten.
I would argue that such events are more important in the history of civilizations than the more conspicuous ones associated with famous military leaders or heads of state. They illustrate the creative process that molds a communications-based society and culture. Behind all such developments lie particular decisions made by particular individuals. The story of world history ought not to ignore them.
The particular performance (and the performer) becomes culturally more important than the composition.
Now I would like to approach the subject of change from another angle. The discussion is based on materials in a book by Elijah Wald, “How the Beatles destroyed rock ‘n roll”, or, rather, its review in the Financial Times. This book identifies a particular moment in history when the world of popular music changed. The year was 1966. The Beatles exemplified the change taking place in the culture.
How this change relates to civilization will shortly be explained. I maintain each civilization has its own type of hero. In Civilization I, it was the great king and military leader: a person like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, sometimes worshipped as a god. In Civilization II, it was the philosopher or prophet, especially the founder of a world religion. In Civilization III, it was the creative artist, which includes poets, novelists, playwrights, and other writers, as well as painters, sculptors, architects, and, of course, composers of classical music.
In Civilization IV, on the other hand, the performers of music and drama took precedence over the creator of a musical score or dramatic script. Movie stars became celebrities while screenwriters were largely ignored. The reason for this shift in popularity was that a new type of communications medium had taken hold in the culture. The technology of motion pictures made it possible to record and disseminate the individual voices and visual appearances of those performing in the films. The sensory impact of the performers’ personalities was so powerful that audiences paid attention to this aspect more than to qualities in the script.
Before the age of motion pictures, dramatic productions were performed live on stage. There were stars of the theater such as Edwin Booth, the great Shakespearean actor (and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin), but the production itself received primary attention. William Shakespeare, the world-renowned writer, was the hero of this culture rather than the performer in Shakespearean plays. This was still a print-based culture. Words were what was preserved and broadly disseminated, not sensory images. Cultural excellence was thought to reside in the particular words chosen by a renowned writer. Such creations required intellect (sometimes called “creative genius”) while good performers were merely clever.
how the music industry changed
In looking at the transition between the Third and Fourth civilizations, one can see how one set of ideals replaced another. The ideals of excellent composition were replaced by those of excellent performance. Elijah Wald’s book documents the change in a particular decision made by the Beatles in 1966. This event alone did not cause a shift in values but serves to illustrate it. “When the Beatles quit touring in 1966,” the reviewer suggests, “it was less a revolutionary act than an acknowledgment the world had changed.”
We can start with an observation of this anonymous reviewer: “My father, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906, had a terrific memory for the hits of his youth, and I grew up hearing ‘The Sheik of Araby’, “When Frances dances with me’, ‘Yes! We have no bananas”, over and over. I would sometimes ask, ‘Who sang that song?’, a normal question for any pop listener born after 1950. But it made no sense to him. Everybody sang those songs; that was what a hit was. Record dealers assumed the average customer would be happy with any decent performance of a hit - just as casual buyers of classical music still shop primarily on the basis of the composition and composer. Such thinking remained common up to the rock ‘n roll era.”
That era began, in the early 1950s, with a song-oriented presentation of hit music. On television, it was known as “Your Hit Parade”. In-house performers would sing the tunes topping the charts. Dance music dominated non-media performances.
Yes, bands such as Glenn Miller’s and Duke Ellington were famous, but, the reviewer notes, “most dance orchestras were local groups, playing a mix of old favourites and current hits for ballroom crowds. And since the tunes they played were available in roughly the same arrangements on records by Ellington and Guy Lombardo, there was no reason to preserve the version performed by a local orchestra in Northfield, Minnesota ... Like customers in dance clubs today the young couples jitterbugging to ‘One Jump’ in Northfield expected to hear the current dance mix. And the fact that they were hearing count Basie’ hit played by locals rather than by Basis himself did not bother them.”
Attitudes started to change as albums replaced hit singles recorded on 45 r.p.m. disks. “Rather than being at the mercy of radio programmers, listeners could put on a stack of LPs and create a personal sonic environment opening a new market for ‘mood music’, Broadway and film scores, classical orchestras, and instrumental jazz ... Teenagers were falling in love with particular performances, which meant it was becoming increasingly common for a record to be a hit, rather than just being a recording of a hit .... if we ask a DJ to play ‘Maybelline’, we expect not only to hear it performed by Chuck Berry but to hear the specific recording that was a hit for him in 1955.”
The Beatles began as a touring group that performed a medley of songs. Their records “captured the same energetic sounds they presented on stage ... from Dick Dale and the Deltones in the beachside ballrooms of southern California to the Beatles on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, they churned out loud, rhythmically powerful music four to eight hours a night, seven nights a week.”
However, pop music was moving in the direction of music recorded in studios, which allowed more options. “Synthesizers, drum machines and digital editing” created a wider range of sounds. A pioneer of this new music was the head of Columbia Records, Mitch Miller, who recruited singers for music he liked, much as film studios recruit actors to play the parts in scripts. Under Miller’s guidance, “unexpected sounds and styles began to infiltrate the hit parade ... studios became creative centers rather than simply places to record.”
The critical moment came, Wald suggests, when the Beatles began focusing most of their energies and attention on creating music in studios rather than performing it live. Finally, in 1966, they stopped touring altogether. It was then “widely viewed not as a retirement but as an artistic advance.” Studio recordings could capture the sensory nuances of music as never before.
Today, studio recordings are the main product of pop-music performers. “By the time the Beatles appeared at Budokan (in Japan) they were the roadshow for their records, and if they didn’t match the sounds of those records, that can reasonably be considered a flaw. As the dominance of records became increasingly obvious, later pop stars would learn to avoid such flaws. Watching Michael Jackson’s spectacular performance of ‘Billie Jean’ at the 1983 Motown 25th anniversary concert, it is impossible to tell whether he was singing the song or lip-synching.”
Video games featuring musicians likewise are calibrated to the studio recording rather than that of the live performance. “The Beatles: Rock Band” game is an example. Here is work of the Fourth Civilization in a rather late stage. Individualized computer-centric creations are around the corner.
a final comparison
In the meanwhile, as I write these words, the Global Climate Change conference in Copenhagen is coming to an end. The world’s political leaders are gathered to consider steps to avert what could be a civilization-changing development. A rift is evident between representatives of the northern and southern nations. Some say that the science is by no means conclusive. Young men and women representing “civil society” are being arrested in the streets by Danish police. Dysfunctionality rules the civilized world.
All this, however, is too Civilization III. What most people want to know is what really happened when Woods’ car smashed into a fire hydrant near his home in the wee hours of the morning? Have any more girl friends come forward to claim a relationship with Woods? How will Tigers’ admitted infidelities affect his many endorsement contracts? The billion-dollar performer in the sport of golf is the latest in a series of entertainment celebrities who have fallen from grace. Television audiences hunger for photos of the reclusive Woods and any information about him that might slake their salacious curiosities.
One might as well admit the obvious: We’re many years into the Fourth Civilization. Public values are different today.
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