Abstract
If your program is like mine, you find yourself trying to cover more and more material in a relatively inflexible number of hours. So you probably will appreciate this effort by Jim Cullen to provide a concise, readable overview of media history.
The book presents chapters on print, theater, movies, radio, television, sound recording, and the Internet. Each chapter includes a general historical essay, a closer look at one or more specific genres and examples, and a section suggesting further reading. Befitting its theme of brevity, the writing is straightforward and clear, sometimes directly addressed to students. The book feels more like an ongoing conversation than a traditional tome of weighty historical fact.
Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York and has written several previous books. Here, he makes some decisions that may influence how this new one gets used.
First, he explicitly deals broadly with the realm of “popular culture rather than of mass culture,” and he deals far more with entertainment than with news. In his unit on print, for example, his end-of-chapter cases focus on the horror genre and the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. This will likely give the book appeal more for broad media programs than those stressing news and journalism.
Second, the book is almost totally without source citations or references. For example, he mentions as fact the story of William Randolph Hearst’s “you furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” direction, without citation or any sense that this is considered historically dubious.
Students will take relatively few names and dates from this book, but they will encounter some interesting and thoughtful ideas. Early on, Cullen observes that “history is certainly not the same thing as destiny,” and he raises good points about how and why our society makes its turning-point cultural choices. He works nicely through the difference between “intensive” and “extensive” reading. The radio chapter delves richly into how that medium brought together the interests of both privileged and marginalized Americans, and the television section deals seriously with the portrayals of African Americans and women.
Still, the breezy style takes its toll. There are small errors: He refers to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as Stanford undergraduates when they actually were grad students. And there is a whopper: a reference to legendary CBS anchor “Howard” Cronkite.
As may seem obvious, conciseness is both the strength and the weakness of the book. If you need a very quick, very general tour of the media, it offers some advantages. If you are looking for depth and scholarly underpinning, it will probably disappoint.
Overall, it feels a lot like a series of somewhat extended encyclopedia articles, with the commensurate pluses and minuses. In fact, the book ends on a rather odd paragraph, in which the author calls Wikipedia “a valuable resource in the writing of this book” and lauds it as a “quintessential expression of the Internet’s democratic culture.” That’s true enough, but it might raise authority questions among potential adopters.