Page 31 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

1 CARBON, CAPITALISM, COMMUNICATION 13

requires concerted action on corporate and state uses of media networks
and machines alongside action on personal consumption.
The second phase in the consolidation of capitalism, from 1900 to
1950, saw a new complex of communication facilities become firmly
embedded in everyday life. On the one hand, cinema established itself as
the preeminent form of popular leisure, facilitating the collective con-
sumption of resources and energy. On the other hand, a new array of
media goods, gramophones, telephones, radios and Kodak cameras pro-
moted domestic and personalised consumption, multiplying both the
volume of communication goods in circulation and the demands they
made on resources and energy.
These innovations in media played a double role in the consolidation of
capitalism. They significantly increased the range of commodities and
services that could be sold to consumers and, in the case of radio in the US
and other countries that rejected non-commercial, public service forms of
organisation, provided an extended platform for advertising that promoted
other consumer goods and reinforced a mode of address that hailed lis-
teners as consumers rather than citizens.
The second major phase in the development of capitalism, from 1945 to
1973 saw television replace cinema as the primary focus of popular medi-
ated leisure and increasing mobility of access to both radio, with the
invention of transistors, and recorded music, with the expansion of por-
table record players and later cassette tape machines. As a consequence,
alongside collective cinema-going and shared television viewing around a
single domestic installation, individualised consumption proliferated,
expanding the demand for both materials and energy and creating
increased problems of waste.
The years since 1973 have seen both mobility and individualisation
rapidly increase with the arrival of the internet as a mass popular utility and
the migration of access from desk-top computers to tablets and smart
phones. At the same time, the space available to advertising has increased
very significantly. The arrival of commercial cable, satellite and terrestrial
television channels broke the monopolies previously commanded by public
broadcasting organizations in China, India and across Europe, while the
business models developed by the major internet companies depend on
harvesting users’ personal data for analysis and resale to advertisers wanting
to target their appeals more accurately, and providing platforms for the
development of new forms of promotion utilizing the web’s interactivity to
link appeals to consumerism even more securely to self-images.