The 20th century is marked by the rise of mass media, which join the press with more inclusive forms of communication. Cinema established itself in France, then radio invented by the Italian Marconi, and later TV, synthesized these two inventions and dominated the second half of the century. In 1895 The Lumière brothers patented the Cinématographe, a machine capable of sequencing photographs to make an animated effect. With this new technology they recorded ten films, which they screened in front of a paying audience in Paris that same year. The reaction of the audience was emblematic: faced with an advancing train, the spectators became frightened and fled. This emotional reaction indicates two typical properties of cinema: realism, derived from the photography from which it comes, and the ability to deceive, which was immediately exploited by the first expert in special effects: Georges Méliès. Thus, if on the one hand from cinema we can derive television, and news broadcasts, which still report what is really happening in the world, on the other hand a form of storytelling, well defined as “fiction,” is born that does not have the representation of the real as its goal. Artificial intelligence is on the side of special effects, and in fact it is a synthetic media, which is not derived from filming reality. Mass media are not really cognitive technologies, rather they are media. However, as the most classic massmediologist of the 20th century, Marshall Mc Luhan, teaches, “the medium is the message” because it is the medium-not the content-that shapes the dimensions and forms of human society. After exploding for three thousand years with piecemeal and purely mechanical technological means, the Western world has now entered an implosion phase: electricity has reduced the globe to little more than a village. Rapid acceleration has reestablished a tribal pattern of intense involvement, with the advent of radio and TV.
Cinema, as a nonverbal form of experience, is, like photography, a form of statement without syntax. Film audiences, like book readers, accept the sequence itself as a rational fact. Because it derives from the written script, however, cinema is immersed in a bookish culture. Only an alphabetic and abstract culture learns to keep its eyes fixed, as one must do to read the printed page. The writer, as the author of the inspirational screenplays or novels, knows that he can achieve a depth that cinema cannot match.
Instead, radio is a tribal drum, touching everyone intimately and personally and shrinking the world to the size of a village with its attendant gossip, rumors and personal attacks. But the different areas of this radio world are separated by languages. In Hitler’s Germany, radio managed to revive archaic remnants and ancient memories, becoming a powerful tool in the service of dictatorship and nationalism. Semantically, radio can be described as an extension of the central nervous system to which only human speech can be juxtaposed. Long-literate regions that automatically eroded their oral traditions found themselves having to rediscover them to cope with the electric age.
In general, media result in an amplification of the senses: radio is an extension of hearing, photography of sight. But according to Mc Luhan, TV is primarily an extension of touch, implying an intensity of reciprocal actions among all the senses. While phonetic writing separates and fragments the senses to express semantic complexities with the sharp detachment of abstraction, other ideographic writings and visual media preserve a rich orchestration of the senses.
The TV image, by arousing a passionate desire for deep involvement in the viewer’s experience, creates an obsession with pleasure and physical well-being, which results in the pursuit of entertainment. TV cannot be a background: it engages and absorbs us.
Major television events involve the entire population in a ritual process.
Exposed to TV, the child views the world in a way that is antithetical to literacy.
None of the mass media of the 20th century, however, brought about a profound cognitive revolution, and in fact despite their significant political and economic impact, film and TV have remained outside of schools and universities, where textbook literacy still dominates. Only in some countries have radio and TV been adopted for sporadic cases of rural and remote area teaching.
But modern man thanks to TV has extended his perception to the inner world, and shares it with the whole of humanity, creating global empathy. Faced with the first step on the moon, or the fall of the twin towers, broadcast live worldwide via satellite, man becomes a global citizen.
Italiano