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102 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
accounts of media dominated all of the different schools, from conservative
‘effects’ analysis to radical Marxist accounts of ideology.
The value of the second media age thesis is that it makes the study of
broadcast as a medium all the more distinct. On the other hand, what is
obfuscated by the second media age argument is the fact that this distinc-
tion cannot be so easily periodized. But, inevitably, attempts are made to
do this by claiming that New Media are signalling the demise of old
media, or at least changing the way in which the old media are related to.
Indeed television and the Internet are most commonly posited as offering
the sharpest contrast by which this periodization can be established. In
this scenario, all media are reduced to two standout forms. Either the
Internet is seen to overtake television, or it has changed the culture of
television. In the latter case, for example, Bruce Owen, in The Internet
Challenge to Television (1999), argues that television is beginning to change
at the same pace as computer networks. Television viewers, he claims,
now accept the far higher level of freneticness which is commonplace in
nearly every rapid-cycle television advertisement we watch.
But some have attempted such temporalization without taking
on a second media age position. In his essay ‘What Was Broadcasting?’,
David Marc (2000) argues that, in the US context, ‘[t]he Broadcast Era,
a period roughly stretching from the establishment of network radio in
the 1920s to the achievement of 50 percent cable penetration in the
1980s, becomes more historically distinct every time another half dozen
channels are added to the cable mix’ (631). Marc’s argument is that with
the introduction of cable television in the USA, the niching of broadcast
leads to its de-massification, and the collapse of its transdemographic
possibilities, which will consign it to a ‘biblical era of mass communica-
tions’ in which great events and famous people will have become
entombed (631).
Marc’s argument, based solely on the US experience, that ‘mass
broadcast’ constitutes large publics and pluralized forms of broadcast
constitute multiple public spheres is significant from the point of view of
reinforcing the argument that broadcast is a constitutive medium.
Regardless of how large or ‘transdemographic’ it is, broadcast constitutes
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audiences within particular fields. The changes in television broadcast-
ing by the mid-1980s in the USA were indeed significant to the recon-
figuration and distribution of audiences, but did not in themselves cause
any major rethinking of what broadcast, as a communicative form,
actually is.
What is significant in the period of the inception of the Internet,
therefore, is the sudden return of interest in medium theory as a legitimate
perspective in media studies (see Chapter 2). From the early 1990s onwards,
when the Internet began its exponential growth, the theoretical necessity
of analysing the social implications of communication mediums had
become paramount, if not unavoidable.