From the motor-car to television: cultural-historical arguments on the meaning of mobility for communication

In order both to understand the underlying dynamics of media technology rather than simply its everyday appearance and to make generalizations which rest upon more than a mere snapshot or vague assumptions about technological development, it is necessary to combine cultural-historical analysis with an empirical investigation of media markets and their uses in everyday life. Where the media tend to be in the foreground of the analysis, however, the result is that the general dynamics of development get reduced to descriptions of media history in which one innovation follows another: from book via radio and television to video and so on. Even where the empirical material is less concerned with the media themselves and more with social communication and people's lives, it can only be used for the purposes of forecasting against a background of cultural history. This still leaves considerable theoretical ambiguities, since the development of communication technology has produced its own theoretical accounts which are unaware of cultural-historical questions. If historical questions are posed, then they are posed in media terms, as in the history of television (for example, see Bruch, 1967). The reason for this is that the media constitute a 'section' of communication technology which is directly experienced and which thus seems to be the most important aspect of communication. Everyday interpretations of communication technology since the development of the telegraph, as well as most theoretical accounts, have been based on sender-receiver models. Lasswell's famous formulation of 'Who says what through which channel to what effect' (Lasswell et al., 1952), and similar cybernetic formulations by Shannon and Weaver (1949), use the sender-receiver model of com