The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  A convincing and refreshing perspective on all of this has recently been outlined by Sam Popkin. Popkin argues that political actors compete to best respond to media change, while media actors compete to best respond to political change. But he goes a step further. The practices of media and political actors become so interpenetrated, and the alliances between them so strong, that the disruptions caused by the emergence of newer media affect the status and power of both media and political elites. In other words, it is not that newer media technologies simply become new and different tools that existing media elites can use to more effectively hold politicians to account, nor is it the case that newer media technologies simply provide existing political elites with new opportunities to outsmart media (Popkin, 2006: 336). Instead, existing media and political elites both have much to lose from the emergence of newer media. Both must (and generally do) adapt, or see their power decline, and occasionally newer media technologies may create new elites.

  This book therefore begins from a more expansive idea of media logic. It seeks to understand the interactions that determine the construction of media content but also how these interactions take place across and between different older and newer media. Competing media logics can emerge that disrupt the dominant media logics that were previously established. Today, does media logic still derive from the mass broadcast media that so decisively shaped political communication during the second half of the twentieth century? Altheide and Snow argued that over time publics become familiar with media logic and expect to see its characteristic formats applied across all content, including politics. But in the early twenty-first century the media system is a much more fluid and contested place. The range of sources of information has expanded in ways that were unimaginable in the era of broadcast dominance. Audience familiarity is still an important aspect of media logic, but disruptive media logics may now come from online networks that seek to shape representations of political life according to their own interests and values, using digital communication tools that previous generations could not access. This creates alternative and competing sources of authenticity and audience familiarity, outside of those that were dominant in the era of mass broadcasting.

  Given the panoply of newer ways in which politics can now be communicated, it therefore makes sense to move away from Altheide and Snow’s idea of an all-encompassing, hegemonic media logic driven by the values of commercialism and entertainment. Instead, today we can conceive of politics and society as being shaped by more complex interactions between competing and overlapping media logics, some of which may have little or no basis in, or are antagonistic toward, commercialism. Indeed, given the longstanding traditions of public service provision in the United States and Britain, which commit broadcasters to the creation of public affairs content, together with what we are now discovering about how audiences learn about politics from “nonpolitical” entertainment formats, perhaps the original media logic approach was overstated, even during the heyday of broadcast media.

  It also makes sense to move away from the idea of a relatively passive mass audience whose frames and perceptions are heavily shaped by a dominant media logic, and toward a model that foregrounds not only the increasingly diverse sources of audience frames and perceptions, but also the growing ability of some, though not all, activist “audience” members to play direct and concrete instrumental roles in the production of media content through their occasionally decisive interventions. It makes better sense, then, to use the plural, media logics; or what Dahlgren terms “an ensemble of simultaneously operative media logics” (Dahlgren, 2009: 54).

  As this book shows, in politics, older and newer media have what we might term, borrowing from the hybrid regime theories I discussed earlier in this chapter, their own “internal” reserved domains of practice that actors seek to defend and protect. At the same time, however, the boundaries between older and newer media are always porous, as the disruptions caused by the emergence of newer media are gradually working their way through the institutions of the previously dominant print and broadcast media system. Importantly, the hybrid media system constantly requires judgments and interventions about which medium is most appropriate for communicating a political event or process. How political and media actors shape and are shaped by older and newer media logics, and the extent to which they mobilize, traverse, and integrate these logics to exercise power, is what this book is about.

  The Hybrid Media System as an Analytical Approach

  A final word about the design of this study. In this book, I situate the analysis in the context of Britain and the United States. Not only is this for pragmatic reasons—these are the countries which I find most compelling to study and which have provided the main focus of my previous research—it is also because these are historically important liberal democracies. As such, the trends and patterns in these countries ought to be of interest and significance for those concerned with political communication more generally. However, in this book I do not seek to make any claims about the media systems of countries other than Britain and the United States.

  In addition, I have chosen not to organize this research according to the traditional model of cross-country comparison. That there are important differences between how political communication has been and continues to be conducted in Britain and the United States is undeniable and there are many valuable ways these differences may be studied. For this book, however, I considered it more important to begin from the inevitably contested but defensible premise that Britain and the United States share sufficient basic similarities, such that it is possible and desirable to develop ideas that speak to some enduring concerns of readers in both countries.

  My aim with this book, then, is to present the hybrid media system as a general analytical approach, and to do so in a way that remains rooted in empirical examples drawn from the two countries upon which I focus. None of this is to say that the idea of the hybrid media system will not travel. It might be used to explore other liberal democratic systems as well as authoritarian or semi-authoritarian systems. Indeed, any context in which it is important to try to make sense of political communication by exploring the interactions between older and newer media logics will hopefully benefit from the approach.

  2

  All Media Systems Have Been Hybrid

  New technologies is a historically relative term.

  —Carolyn Marvin1

  Mediation without remediation seems to be impossible.

  —Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin2

  The “content” of any medium is always another medium.

  —Marshall McLuhan3

  All older media were once newer and all newer media eventually get older. But older media of any consequence are rarely entirely displaced by newer media. Even telegraph messages and cassette tapes, for example, haunt the present, sharing with newer media the affordances of representation and transmission, though their performance of these roles is no longer socially sanctioned except by small groups of hobbyists. Things are complicated by the continuing evolution of newer media, as once new forms will continue to accrete and hybridize newer affordances, a good example being the extraordinary metamorphosis of the mobile phone into a multifunction computing device during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  As a successful newer medium starts to age, its physical characteristics as well as the social norms that surround it start to become less visible. What was once awkward and contested becomes habitual and settled. The focus begins to shift away from the physical apparatus—the “technology”—and the initial generation of social conventions around a medium’s use. In time, the febrile attention to the “work” performed by a medium gives way to more leisurely attention to the events undergoing representation and we tend to lose sight of what makes a medium so significant. And yet the technological facets and initially-established social norms of a medium never entirely fade but continue to shape patterns of use and the sense of what a specifi
c medium is and of how it differs from other media.

  As Carolyn Marvin has argued, the history of newer media is “less the evolution of technical efficiencies in communication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not, and who has authority and may be believed” (1988: 4). To revisit the ideas of Bruno Latour, whom I discussed in the previous chapter, this process involves hybrid networks consisting of social and technological entities whose constant interactions are generative of power and agency. Lisa Gitelman’s historically-informed definition of media is also particularly instructive here. In her view, media are best seen as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation.” Throughout history, then, a medium has tended to be “a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus” (2006: 7). Newer media technologies accrete newer media publics, but those publics are best seen as the hybrid, partly amalgamated combinations of groups, organizations, and social norms and practices that were previously associated with older media. Groups come to see certain media both as tools and as domains in which they expect to exercise their power, through mechanisms such as professional expertise, control over resources, and mastery over media genres and organizational routines. Newer media partially reconfigure social, economic, political, spatial, and temporal relationships among existing media elites, political elites, and publics. They do this by providing different normative contexts and terms of engagement for the interactions among these groups.

  This book begins from the perspective that any medium is best understood in terms of its position in a system of interdependent relationships with other media. All media systems are, to greater or lesser extents, and for greater or lesser periods, hybrid media systems, but this hybridity is too often overlooked. I therefore take inspiration from Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, who, in their classic history of media argue that “it is necessary to look at the media as a whole, to view all the different means of communication as interdependent, treating them as a package, a repertoire, a system … To think in terms of a media system means emphasizing the division of labour between the different means of communication available…. ” (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 19). A fruitful way to identify who exercises power in political communication involves focusing on the evolving interrelationships among older and newer media logics.

  Media and “Newness”

  Newer media have always been presented as improvements upon their predecessors, in terms of their ability to convey what media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have termed “immediacy”: the sense of presenting a transparent window on the “real.” For example, early printers, most notably Gutenberg, made use of the conventions of the handwritten manuscript, but improved the handling of ink to enhance the legibility of texts. Early photographers were inspired to improve on the perspective-drawing functions of the camera lucida. Photographs were seen as more immediate than paintings, television more immediate than cinema.

  But each new medium’s claim to superiority constantly brings it into competition and conflict with older media, with the result that how newer media differ from older media becomes much more obvious and visible. Bolter and Grusin argue that this creates a second important aspect of media emergence, which they term “hypermediacy.” Hypermediacy refers to how newer media are often less about transparency and immediacy than they are about the “remediation” and hybridization of other media forms. Examples from history are as diverse as photomontage, ornate baroque cabinets, medieval manuscripts, and eighteenth-century iconotext prints featuring characters communicating through comic-style speech bubbles. But the internet and digital media, with their multiplicity of visual genres and interfaces, and their simultaneous recombinations of text, image, audio, and video, are extreme forms of hypermediacy in action.

  The “newness” of a newer medium comes, then, not from technological novelty in itself, but from the ways in which newer media “refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999: 15). If we look at media this way, we start to notice that the blurred boundaries between media and their uses are just as important as the neat distinctions that supposedly separate them. There are continuous, strategic, and often surprising processes of hybridization at play. Lady Eastlake, wife of Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, the first president of the Royal Photographic Society, captured the significance of photography in suitably hybrid terms in the mid-nineteenth century. It was, she said, neither “the province of art nor description, but … a new form of communication between man and man—neither letter, message, nor picture—which now happily fills the space between them” (quoted in Briggs & Burke, 2009: 162). Early radio systems of the 1920s were often described as “radio telephones.” Charles Jenkins called his first mechanical television of the late 1920s “radiovision” (Wu, 2010: 38, 142). Early cinema drew heavily upon photography, the novel, the theater, and even the genres of circus and magic trick shows. Music halls and fairgrounds were where films were first displayed; jugglers and acrobats appeared on the bill at Louis Lumière’s 1896 film exhibition at the Empire Music Hall in London’s Leicester Square. George Méliès, another influential early filmmaker, started out as an illusionist (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 164). Only later, in the 1910s, did dedicated cinemas emerge. But the traces of theater lingered into the middle of the century, as live pianists and organists continued to appear on the bill in the new “dream palace” cinemas. Early television was used exclusively for live transmission and it drew upon the traditions of late-nineteenth-century electric light shows, vaudeville theater, and radio serials (which likewise drew upon nineteenth century novels, which likewise were serialized in periodicals) (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 2). As British cinema, radio, and television flourished from the 1920s to the 1960s, so too, unexpectedly, did print, due to the growth and improvement of mass education and the reduced costs of producing and distributing printed paper. In 1920, around half of British adults read a daily paper. By 1947, that figure had reached 83 percent (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 223). Even in the United States, where television had reached 90 percent of homes by 1959, it was not until the early 1970s that television began to overtake newspapers as the public’s main source of news (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011: 61). Television’s undoubted dominance as a medium came surprisingly late.

  What count as new media at any given time are therefore best seen as hybrids of newer and older media. Roger Fidler, who predicted the emergence of tablet computing when working as an adviser to news organization Knight-Ridder in the early 1990s, termed this “mediamorphosis”: “a continuum of transformations and adaptations … brought about by the complex interplay of perceived needs, competitive and political pressures, and social and technological innovations” (Fidler, 1997: 16, 23). As media emerge, they simply throw the ongoing hybridization of older and newer into sharper relief. While the evolution of media has most often been presented as a linear history in which one medium replaces another, only to be replaced by another, and then another that better jells with societal demand (see for example Levinson, 1998), this linearity does not adequately capture the messiness, complexity, and long duration of the transitions. Older media practices can renew themselves in response to the new. Technologies may possess socially useful affordances that enable their persistence. It is often noted that as television diffused in the United States during the 1950s, cinema attendance declined massively, halving in less than a decade (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 212). But despite the threat from television, radio, with the help of the new electronic transistor, underwent a significant period of adaptation and expansion. Stations proliferate
d and advertising revenues increased, with the result that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to restrict the granting of fresh radio licenses in 1962 (Briggs & Burke, 2009: 209). It became apparent that radio’s affordances were different from those of television, cinema, and newspapers. Like television, radio was a monitorial, real-time medium, but listening to radio was a more intimate and individual experience than viewing, and it was cheaper to produce content for the radio than for television. It helped that American commercial radio interests lobbied the FCC in the 1940s in order to defend their medium’s position, but there was also widespread skepticism about television’s superiority over radio when it came to reaching a mass audience. More recently, and as I show in greater detail in subsequent chapters, in response to the development of digital media practices, broadcast media and newspapers have undergone decisive periods of adaptation and coevolution in order to maintain their legitimacy and preeminence in representing and shaping publics.

  Power and the Negotiated Emergence of Newer Media

  If media are best seen throughout history as bundles of cultural, social, economic, and political practices, these practices are shaped by competitive yet interdependent processes of hybridization involving multiple actors operating in and across diverse -settings. At stake during the emergence of media are negotiated relationships of power, authority, and prestige among groups of actors associated with particular media forms. This book explores these processes at work in recent years, but although hybridization in media systems occurs in different ways, at different paces, and at different times, it is not a new phenomenon. There are precedents, and these provide some interesting pointers for understanding the present.