Full download test bank at ebookmeta.

com

Television 2 0 Viewer and Fan Engagement with

Digital TV Bury

For dowload this book click LINK or Button below

https://ebookmeta.com/product/television-2-0-
viewer-and-fan-engagement-with-digital-tv-bury/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWLOAD EBOOK

Download More ebooks from https://ebookmeta.com

More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Television and the Embodied Viewer Affect and Meaning

in the Digital Age 1st Edition Marsha F. Cassidy

https://ebookmeta.com/product/television-and-the-embodied-viewer-
affect-and-meaning-in-the-digital-age-1st-edition-marsha-f-
cassidy/

TV Outside the Box Trailblazing in the Digital

Television Revolution 1st Edition Neil Landau

https://ebookmeta.com/product/tv-outside-the-box-trailblazing-in-
the-digital-television-revolution-1st-edition-neil-landau/

The Art and Craft of TV Directing Conversations with

Episodic Television Directors 1st Edition Jim Hemphill

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-art-and-craft-of-tv-directing-
conversations-with-episodic-television-directors-1st-edition-jim-
hemphill/

Digital Fandom 2 0 2nd Edition Paul Booth

https://ebookmeta.com/product/digital-fandom-2-0-2nd-edition-
paul-booth/
Media and Class TV Film and Digital Culture 1st Edition
June Deery (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/media-and-class-tv-film-and-
digital-culture-1st-edition-june-deery-editor/

The TV Showrunner s Roadmap Creating Great Television

in an on Demand World 2nd Edition Neil Landau

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-tv-showrunner-s-roadmap-
creating-great-television-in-an-on-demand-world-2nd-edition-neil-
landau/

The TV Showrunner s Roadmap Creating Great Television

in an On Demand World 2nd Edition Neil Landau

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-tv-showrunner-s-roadmap-
creating-great-television-in-an-on-demand-world-2nd-edition-neil-
landau-2/

Transmedia Marketing From Film and TV to Games and

Digital Media 1st Edition Anne Zeiser

https://ebookmeta.com/product/transmedia-marketing-from-film-and-
tv-to-games-and-digital-media-1st-edition-anne-zeiser/

A A Complete Guide to Television Field and Digital

Producing 1st Edition Cruikshank

https://ebookmeta.com/product/a-a-complete-guide-to-television-
field-and-digital-producing-1st-edition-cruikshank/
Television 2.0 sets out to document and interrogate shifting “Despite its pervasiveness in our mediated lives, ‘tele-
patterns of engagement with digital television. Television vision’ as a digital entity is a fraught term. In Television 102
content has not only been decoupled from the broad- 2.0, Rhiannon Bury unites television studies, audience
cast schedule through the use of digital video recorders research, fan studies, and new media analysis to uncover
(DVRs) but from broadcasting itself through streaming new and exciting ways to understand that-which-used-
platforms such as Netflix, Vimeo and YouTube as well as to-be-a-box. Pushing past common assumptions about
downloading platforms such as iTunes and The Pirate Bay. the death of television, Bury re-engages television schol-
Moreover, television content has been decoupled from the arship through fan interviews, qualitative and quantita-
television screen itself as a result of digital convergence and tive methods, historical methods, and empirical research.
divergence, leading to the proliferation of computer and In Television 2.0, Bury rereads today’s television as a
mobile screens. Television 2.0 is the first book to provide reassemblage of content, fandom, and participation—
an in-depth empirical investigation into these technological a social technology in the digital age. A must-read!”
affordances and the implications for viewing and fan partic- Paul Booth, author of Digital Fandom 2.0,
ipation. It provides a historical overview of television’s cen- Playing Fans and Time on TV
tral role as a broadcast medium in the household as well as
its linkages to participatory culture. Drawing on survey and “The ‘2.0’ label may have become a buzzword, but
interview data, Television 2.0 offers critical insights into the Television 2.0 skillfully puts streaming/downloading
ways in which the meanings and uses of contemporary tele- hype to the test. Rhiannon Bury draws brilliantly on
vision are shaped not just by digitalization but by domestic original empirical data to show how television today
relations as well as one’s affective relationship to particular remains crucially framed by both domestic and affective
television texts. Finally it rethinks what it means to be a relations. ... Television 2.0 is provocative and compelling,
participatory fan, and examines the ways in which estab- well evidenced and astutely argued; I am already a
lished practices such as information seeking and community devoted fan of this book.”
making are altered and new practices are created through Matt Hills, author of Fan Cultures and co-director
the use of social media. Television 2.0 will be of interest to of the Centre for Participatory Culture, Viewer and Fan Engagement with Digital TV
anyone teaching or studying media and communications. University of Hudderfield
Bury

Rhiannon Bury is Associate Professor

ea son
of Women’s and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, N ew S
Canada. She has published numerous articles in the areas
of gender, internet, technology and fan studies. Her first
Front cover design by
WWW.PETERLANG.COM

book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online,

PETER LANG
Barnabas Wornoff

was published by Peter Lang in 2005.

n on Bury
R h i a n
Television 2.0 sets out to document and interrogate shifting “Despite its pervasiveness in our mediated lives, ‘tele-
patterns of engagement with digital television. Television vision’ as a digital entity is a fraught term. In Television
content has not only been decoupled from the broad- 2.0, Rhiannon Bury unites television studies, audience
cast schedule through the use of digital video recorders research, fan studies, and new media analysis to uncover
(DVRs) but from broadcasting itself through streaming new and exciting ways to understand that-which-used-
platforms such as Netflix, Vimeo and YouTube as well as to-be-a-box. Pushing past common assumptions about
downloading platforms such as iTunes and The Pirate Bay. the death of television, Bury re-engages television schol-
Moreover, television content has been decoupled from the arship through fan interviews, qualitative and quantita-
television screen itself as a result of digital convergence and tive methods, historical methods, and empirical research.
divergence, leading to the proliferation of computer and In Television 2.0, Bury rereads today’s television as a
mobile screens. Television 2.0 is the first book to provide reassemblage of content, fandom, and participation—
an in-depth empirical investigation into these technological a social technology in the digital age. A must-read!”
affordances and the implications for viewing and fan partic- Paul Booth, author of Digital Fandom 2.0,
ipation. It provides a historical overview of television’s cen- Playing Fans and Time on TV
tral role as a broadcast medium in the household as well as
its linkages to participatory culture. Drawing on survey and “The ‘2.0’ label may have become a buzzword, but
interview data, Television 2.0 offers critical insights into the Television 2.0 skillfully puts streaming/downloading
ways in which the meanings and uses of contemporary tele- hype to the test. Rhiannon Bury draws brilliantly on
vision are shaped not just by digitalization but by domestic original empirical data to show how television today
relations as well as one’s affective relationship to particular remains crucially framed by both domestic and affective
television texts. Finally it rethinks what it means to be a relations. ... Television 2.0 is provocative and compelling,
participatory fan, and examines the ways in which estab- well evidenced and astutely argued; I am already a
lished practices such as information seeking and community devoted fan of this book.”
making are altered and new practices are created through Matt Hills, author of Fan Cultures and co-director
the use of social media. Television 2.0 will be of interest to of the Centre for Participatory Culture, t with Digital TV
anyone teaching or studying media and communications. University of Hudderfield

Rhiannon Bury is Associate Professor

eason
of Women’s and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, New S
Canada. She has published numerous articles in the areas
of gender, internet, technology and fan studies. Her first
Front cover design by
WWW.PETERLANG.COM

book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online,

Barnabas Wornoff

was published by Peter Lang in 2005.

L

n on Bury
R h i a n
 Advance Praise for Television 2.0
“The ‘2.0’ label may have become a buzzword, but Television 2.0 skillfully puts
streaming/downloading hype to the test. Rhiannon Bury draws brilliantly on original empirical
data to show how television today remains crucially framed by both domestic and affective
relations. Hybridising Deleuzian theory with classic TV studies’ work from the likes of Roger
Silverstone and James Lull, Television 2.0 explores the fascinating assemblages and
reassemblages of contemporary TV. And Bury makes a vital intervention into debates around
fandom and participatory culture by introducing the notion of a ‘participatory continuum.’
Television 2.0 is provocative and compelling, well evidenced and astutely argued; I am already
a devoted fan of this book.”

Matt Hills, author of Fan Cultures and co-director of the

Centre for Participatory Culture, University of Huddersfield
Television 2.0
 Steve Jones
General Editor

Vol. 102

The Digital Formations series is part of the Peter Lang Media and Communication list.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG
New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin
Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw
 Rhiannon Bury

Television 2.0

Viewer and Fan Engagement

with Digital TV

PETER LANG
New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin
Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bury, Rhiannon, author.
Title: Television 2.0: viewer and fan engagement with digital TV / Rhiannon Bury.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2017.
Series: Digital formations, vol. 102 | ISSN 1526-3169
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019806 | ISBN 978-1-4331-5313-6 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-3852-2 (paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4331-3870-6 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-4331-3871-3 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-3872-0 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Television viewers—Social aspects.
Television programs—Social aspects. | Digital television—Social aspects.
Television broadcasting—Technological innovations.
Online social networks—Social aspects. | Fans (Persons)—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC PN1992.55 B87 2017 | DDC 302.23/45—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019806
DOI 10.3726/978-1-4331-3870-6

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2017 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
 table of contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Assembling Television: From the Radio to the Internet 15
Chapter 2. Household Assemblers: Patterns of Multiscreen
and Multimodal Viewing 37
Chapter 3. Television 2.0 and Everyday Life 55
Chapter 4. Affect and the Television Text 73
Chapter 5. Fandom 2.0: Six Degrees of Participation 91
Conclusion: Rhizomatic for the People 111

Appendix: Television 2.0 Survey Questions 119

References 125
Index 135
 acknowledgments

I began conceptualizing a research project on “Television 2.0” in 2010 after

attending two conferences the previous year on the future of TV—Unthinking
Television: Visual Cultures Beyond the Console (George Mason University)
and The Ends of Television (University of Amsterdam). The scale of the study
was only possible because of the generous research incentive grant awarded to
me by Athabasca University. I cannot thank Henry Jenkins enough for offering
his support for the project by tweeting the link to the survey and interviewing
me about the project on his blog. His generosity enabled me to recruit a larger
and more international pool of respondents than would have been possible
through my own networks. I would also like to thank the organizers and attend-
ees of the 2010 Flow Conference in Austin, Texas, for taking and/or helping
me to promote the survey. The survey and interview data took ten months
to collect with the invaluable assistance of three research assistants: Clayton
Clemons, who expertly set up and maintained the survey on the university
website and exported the raw data into Excel and SPSS; Melanie Cook, who
deftly managed the project, most importantly by arranging and keeping track
of the interviews; and Fiona MacGregor, who interviewed participants and did
some of the data coding in NVivo. Thank you all! I owe a debt of gratitude to
Johnson Li, whose expertise in inferential statistical analysis was invaluable,
viii television 2.0

and for coauthoring the journal article published in New Media & Society in
2015 based on this analysis. The people who deserve the most thanks are of
course the research participants: the 671 survey respondents who took the time
to complete a detailed six-section survey and the 72 interviewees who spent
an additional one to three hours on the phone or Skype with Fiona or myself. I
would like to single out Kevin Barnhurst, who passed away too young in 2016,
for his contributions as a participant and as a scholar.
The road to the completion of this book was a longer one than expected.
I wish to thank Mary Savigar at Peter Lang, who approached me about writ-
ing a second monograph for the press, and convinced me that I had a book
somewhere in all the data. I also appreciated her patience as I missed one
contract deadline after another. A shout out to Kathryn Harrison, Sophie
Appel and Janell Harris for their help in finalizing and preparing the manu-
script for publication as well as to Steve Jones for his constructive feedback
on the manuscript. I also want to offer many thanks to Barney Wornoff for
kindly offering to apply his creative talents to the design of Television’s 2.0’s
fabulous cover.
I am appreciative of the feedback, including that from Lucy Bennett,
Paul Booth, Melissa Click, Alice Marwick, and Suzanne Scott on the con-
ference papers, journal articles, and book chapters based on the research
project that inform this book. Some of the statistics included in Chapters 1
and 2 also appear in “Is it Live or is it Timeshifted, Streamed or Down-
loaded? Watching Television in the Era of Multiple Screens” (New Media &
Society). Versions of the discussion on piracy in Chapter 4 and some of the
ideas on fan practices in relation to social media in Chapter 5 appear in
“Television Viewing and Fan Practice in an Era of Multiple Screens” (The
Sage Handbook of Social Media). The idea of the participatory continuum
and the discussion on the practices of information seeking and interpreta-
tion appear in a similar form in “‘We’re not There.’ Fans, Fan Studies and
the Participatory Continuum” (The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom).
Finally the practice of community making raised in Chapter 5 is discussed
more extensively in “Technology, Fandom and Community in the Second
Media Age” (Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New
Media Technologies).
Without the unflagging support of Lee Easton, who spent many an
hour on the phone serving as a sounding board as I worked and reworked
Television 2.0’s central themes and chapters, I never could have completed
this book. Thank you dear friend. I also wish to thank those friends and
 acknowledgments ix

colleagues who lent an ear when the going got tough and kept me going:
Alison Chant, Jenny Foreman, Manijeh Mannani, Karen Nelson (riding
coach extraordinaire), Meenal Shrivastava, Lorna Stefanick, and Karen
Wall. Finally, I extend my love and gratitude to my mother Nancy Bury for
always being there for me, and my husband Luis Marmelo, who did all the
grocery shopping and cooked every dinner without complaint in that final
two-month sprint toward the finish line.
 introduction

Sorry I can’t come out tonight, I have a date with Netflix and a few bags of Doritos.
—Esther the Wonder Pig (Jenkins & Walter, 2015 September 18)

Pigs may not yet be able to fly but if the Facebook account for the celebrity
porcine is any indication, they are joining the increasing numbers of those
who are redefining what it means to watch TV. In recent years, television
content has been decoupled not only from the broadcast schedule through the
use of digital video recorders but from broadcasting itself through streaming
and downloading platforms. Moreover, television content has been decou-
pled from the television screen itself, the same Web 2.0 technologies enabling
viewing on computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. In the early 2000s,
television scholars such as Lynn Spigel began to consider the implications for
television as a “medium in transition”:

If TV refers to the technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and

practices of looking that were associated with the medium in its classical public ser-
vice and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of
television—the phase that comes after “TV.” (Spigel, 2004, p. 2)

Much of the literature on the changes to television to date has focused

on the changes to those industry formations as they relate to production
2 television 2.0

and distribution as well as the efforts by regulatory bodies to respond to such

changes (see Bennett, 2008; Bennett & Strange, 2011; Holt & Sanson, 2014;
Lotz, 2009, 2014). Empirical study of shifting viewing practices, however, has
been left largely to audience measurement and marketing research firms (the
Nielsen Company being the juggernaut), government agencies, and indepen-
dent scholarly organizations such as the Pew Research Center (US). I began
the research on which this book is based to bridge the gap not simply between
the academy and the television industry but also between fields of study,
namely television studies, new media/internet studies, reception studies, and
fan studies. At its broadest, this book critically examines what it means to be
both a television viewer and a media fan in what Mark Poster (1995) refers
to as the second media age. In the following pages, I will discuss the central
concepts and themes that provide an analytical framework, describe the Tele-
vision 2.0 research project, and outline the rest of the chapters.

Television as Assemblage
Until the 1970s, television was generally conceptualized as a form of mass
communication or a mass medium, the origins of which date back to theories
of mass society that emerged in the early twentieth century:

Alongside crowds, publics, and social movements, masses are distinguished by their
large size, anonymous nature, loose organization, and infrequent interaction. As
such, the concept of a mass connotes a group ripe for manipulation and control.
(Buechler, 2013)

Concerns about fascist and communist propaganda during the interwar period
led to the development of a direct effects model of mass communication,
described by Elihu Katz as follows:

There were the mass media, on one hand, sending forth their message, and the atom-
ized mass of individuals, on the other, directly and immediately responding—and
nothing in between. (cited in Lubken, 2008, p. 23)

In the same period, Marxist theorists, most famously those associated with the
Frankfurt School, were engaged in vigorous critiques of popular culture and
the cultural industries that produced it. After taking on film and radio, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno turned their attention to television in the
early 1940s, before its widespread adoption:
 introduction 3

Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, delayed only for so long as the inter-
ested parties cannot agree. Such a synthesis, with its unlimited possibilities, promises
to intensify the impoverishment of the aesthetic material so radically that the iden-
tity of all industrial cultural, still scantily disguised today, will triumph openly tomor-
row in a mocking fulfillment of Wagner’s dream of the total art work. (2002, p. 97)

Adorno would continue to express grave concern about the “nefarious” effects
of television and advocate for a behaviorist approach to better understand
the “socio-psychological stimuli of televised material” (1954, p. 213). He was
particularly concerned about the ways in which overt and hidden messages
operated in tandem to “channelize audience reaction” (p. 222). Although he
admitted that it is difficult to “corroborate by exact data,” he nonetheless stated
that “majority of television shows today aim at producing or at least reproduc-
ing the very smugness, intellectual passivity, and gullibility that seem to fit
in with totalitarian creeds even if the explicit surface message of the shows
may be antitotalitarian” (p. 222). While later iterations of these critiques and
approaches were more nuanced, Raymond Williams (1975) argues that the
analytic of mass communication serves to rationalize a focus on effects.1
Williams was one of the first scholars to untether television from its mass
media traditions and define and analyze it foremost as a “technology of social
communication” which was “preceded by and continues to overlap with other
forms of social communication within social groups and specific institutions”
(p. 21). Roger Silverstone pushes the analysis further:

Seeing technology as a system involves, above all, seeing technology as both a

material and social phenomenon. Relations between objects and artifacts; relations
between people and institutions; the power of the state and politics of organizations;
the embeddedness of the systemic relations of technology in a constantly vulnerable
environment of social, political and economic structures: all of these elements define
a framework from which new technologies emerge, old technologies are discarded,
and from which all technologies are produced and consumed. (1994, p. 84)

Silverstone defines television as a tele-technological system that is distinguished

from other communications technologies by its articulation into the house-
hold, as both an object and as a broadcast medium. While of course televi-
sion can be viewed in a number of public and private spaces (see McCarthy,
2001), the home is the primary site of reception in Western societies. The
purchase of TV sets and, more recently, computers and mobile devices, along
with the devices and services associated with delivery (e.g., cable) ties users
into relations of consumption. At the same time users cannot be reduced to
4 television 2.0

passive consumers; rather, they actively integrate these televisual technolo-

gies into the various spaces of the household for individual and collective
use. “Through the structure and contents of its programming,” Silverstone
contends, television as a broadcast medium “draws members of the household
into a world of public and shared meanings as well as providing some of the
raw material for the forging of their own private, domestic culture” (p. 83).
Silverstone recognizes that the household is a site of struggle over the
production of meaning, a site in which “the certainties of domination become
the uncertainties of resistance” (p. 79). John Fiske makes a similar point: “In
going out to cinema, we tend to submit to its terms, to become subject to its
discourse, but television comes to us, enters our cultural space, and becomes
subject to our discourses” (1987, p. 74). The television text is polysemic,
argues Fiske, “a potential of unequal meanings, some of which are preferred
more, or proffered more strongly, than others” (p. 65). As such it “offers
provocative spaces within which the viewer can use her or his already devel-
oped competencies” (p. 95). This understanding of signification is at the heart
of the “reception turn” in media and communication studies and casts into
sharp relief the limitations of the transmission model of mass communication.
Although the negotiation of meaning between text and viewer will not be
analyzed specifically in this book, it is understood to be the process that under-
pins all engagement with television texts and the practices they engender.
Engagement with television, however, is not just about the fashioning of
a private domestic culture; it also can involve the fashioning of a participa-
tory fan culture, or fandom. Henry Jenkins (1992) was one of the first schol-
ars to distinguish between bystanders (casual viewers) and fans. Based on his
research with fans of series such as Star Trek, Beauty and the Beast, and Twin
Peaks, he argues that fan engagement is “a process, a movement from the
initial reception of a broadcast toward the gradual elaboration of the episodes
and their remaking in alternative terms” (p. 53). He challenges the common
perception of fans as obsessive and incapable of critical judgment due to their
intense emotional connection to a series, writer, actor, etc. Fans, he argues,
are textual poachers who do not passively accept the meanings offered by con-
tent producers. Instead they engage in a range of interpretative and creative
practices, including discussing the series with other fans; attending fan con-
ventions; producing fan fiction, art, music, and video; and engaging in fan
activism. Jenkins laid the groundwork for the development of the field of fan
studies, the result of which was a divergence from reception studies and its
central focus on television as a domestic medium.
 introduction 5

To capture the complexities of viewer engagement with television texts

in today’s era of multiple screens, content sharing, and social networking, it
is imperative to recognize that such engagement is shaped by both domestic
and affective relations. Engaging with television as a member of a household
is bound up with the everyday (Lull, 1990; Silverstone, 1994), that is, the
routines of work and leisure of all members of the household. The modes of
reception, from background/distracted viewing to attentive and focused view-
ing, will depend on how television is “inserted” into particular moments of
one’s domestic routine (Fiske, 1987, p. 146). While one may not always care
about what is on TV just as long as it is on, one is also unlikely to attentively
view the same programming week after week without some kind of emotional
investment or pay off. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ notion of the pleasure of
the text, Fiske argues that television texts afford many pleasures to viewers
because of their polysemic construction, which enable viewers to match the
discourses circulating in the text with their own subjectivities. This notion,
however, falls short of explaining the emotional attachment of fans to spe-
cific texts. Larry Grossberg’s (1992) conceptualization of affect is useful in this
regard. Distinguishing it from both meaning and pleasure while not reducing
it to the level of the personal or purely subjective, he defines it as a feel-
ing or sensibility that gives “‘color,’ ‘tone,’ or ‘texture’” to the experiences of
everyday life (p. 585). Affect is what determines the strength of investment in
the meanings and pleasures of particular genres and texts. This affective rela-
tionship to the television text creates the conditions for committed, fannish
viewing. I take a similar position to that of Jenkins (1992) in that I do not
consider viewing in itself to be a form of participation; rather, it underpins all
participatory fan practices and creates potential linkages between domestic
culture and participatory culture.
In light of the above discussion, I find it more fruitful to refer to television
as a tele-technological assemblage rather than a system. Postmodern theorists
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use the term to emphasize the instability
and temporality that underlie the “holding together of heterogeneous ele-
ments” as well as processes of “becoming and unbecoming, combining and
recombining” (1987, p. 323). This concept is useful to social science research-
ers because it addresses the problem of heterogeneity while “preserving some
concept of the structural” (Marcus and Saka, 2006, p. 102). The process of
assemblage is not linear but more akin to that of a biological rhizome, extend-
ing in ways that are not always intended or predictable or containable. Thus
through fan engagement, television’s meanings can be extended beyond
6 television 2.0

the site of reception into the spaces of participatory culture. I would add that
coherence, or lack thereof, across the nodes of the assemblage is uneven. The
highest degree of stability is located in the institutions that comprise the tele-
vision industry—the production companies, the networks, and the national
regulatory bodies. Conversely, the lowest degree of stability is located at the
sites of reception and participation, where meanings, pleasures, and affective
relations are made and remade.
In light of the above, I argue that television is not simply a medium in
transition as Spigel (2004) suggested; rather, its institutions, texts, and view-
ing and participatory practices are in the process of reassemblage, more specif-
ically as a result of hybridization with the internet. Poster was one of the first
scholars to pinpoint the role of information and communication technologies
(ICTs) in starting such a process:

With the incipient introduction of the information “superhighway” and the integra-
tion of satellite technology with television, computers and telephone, an alternative
to the broadcast model, with its severe technical constraints, will very likely enable
a system of multiple producers/distributors/consumers, an entirely new configuration
of communication relations in which the boundaries between those terms collapse.
A second age of mass media is on the horizon. (1995, p. 2)

From the vantage of the present it is clear that these boundaries have yet to
collapse; that said, I will argue that television–internet hybridity challenges
the linearity and centralization of the first media age. As Lisa Parks puts it,
“the historical practices associated with over-the-air, cable and satellite tele-
vision have been combined with computer technologies to reconfigure the
meanings and practices of television” (2004, p. 134). The title of my research
project and this book, Television 2.0, was chosen to emphasize the contin-
ued legibility of television but also its hybridity. Web 2.0 was coined by Tim
O’Reilly in 2004 to envision a new approach to dotcom commerce that relied
on direct consumer collaboration and engagement. Although it has been
taken up broadly, reduced to an empty buzzword in many contexts, it remains a
useful label with which to describe a cluster of technologies and platforms that
are distinct from previous internet technologies. According to Henry Jenkins,
Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (2013), “the mechanisms of Web 2.0 provide
the preconditions for spreadable media” (p. 49). They define spreadability as
“the continuous process of repurposing and recirculating” of mass content by
individuals and, communities (p. 27). They make a similar argument to that
of Poster about internet technologies, namely that spreadability breaks down
“the perceived divides between production and consumption” (p. 27). They
 introduction 7

contrast it to both the traditional media industry notion of “stickiness” and

the new media notion of user-produced content, or produsage (Bruns, 2006).
Instead they talk about “user-circulated content,” a description which recog­
nizes the continued significance of mass media content but recognizes the
role of streaming and downloading platforms in spreading content outside
the national broadcasting context of established global flows. It is these same
mechanisms that have enabled the development of social networking sites
such as Facebook and Twitter. Collectively known as social media, these plat-
forms provide new possibilities of fan participation and engagement.

Researching Television 2.0

The TV 2.0 research project was designed to fill a gap in the literature by pro-
viding a theoretically informed, empirical study of television’s reassemblage in
relation to reception and participatory practices. It is primarily a qualitative
study with a quantitative component. To collect the data I used an online
survey questionnaire and telephone/ Skype interviews. The questionnaire was
created using LimeSurvey open-source software and hosted on the Athabasca
University server. The survey was divided into six sections of predominately
closed questions: Section A asked for demographic information, the results of
which are presented below. Sections B, C, and D asked a series of questions
about the viewing of television programming on television, computer, and
mobile screens, respectively. Section E asked about genres of programming
(e.g., drama, comedy, news, and sports) in relation to the platforms used to
watch them (broadcast, internet, and DVD).2 Section F was the longest sec-
tion and was designed to collect data on fan practices and involvement in
participatory culture. Although one can be a fan of a range of genres, the
questions focused on television’s dominant form, the serial narrative (Fiske,
1987), as this is the form around which participatory culture has formed. The
section began with an exclusion question that asked the respondents to define
themselves as fans. Those who did not engage in at least one of the practices
listed below the question were taken to the end of the survey.
The survey was piloted in June 2010 and went live in September 2010
during the biennial Flow television studies conference, held at the University
of Austin, Texas. Purposive and snowball sampling were used to identify a rea-
sonably diverse English-speaking (first or second language) television-viewing
population in general and a television-fan population in particular. Individuals
and online communities with scholarly, professional, and/or personal interests
8 television 2.0

in television, media studies, and/or fandom were invited to take the survey
via email, listservs, and social media (Facebook and Twitter) and encouraged
to pass on the link to and information about the survey to their personal and
professional networks. Thus the population was not expected to be represen-
tative of a global television-viewing population.
The survey closed in April 2011 with a total of 998 surveys attempted and
671 completed. Just over forty percent of the respondents agreed to be con-
tacted for an interview. Of those 281, 110 reconfirmed their interest in tak-
ing part. The interviews began in April 2011. The first fifty participants were
selected in the order in which they responded; purposive sampling was used
after a review of the demographic data to select the final set of participants
to ensure a more diverse sample. A preliminary review of the data suggested
that saturation had been reached at seventy, already a large data set given the
resources of the project. A total of seventy-two semi-structured interviews
were completed by September 2011, ranging from thirty minutes to two and a
half hours. The questions were customized for each participant based on their
survey responses. For those who indicated involvement in participatory cul-
ture, a topical life history was built. Sandra Kirby, Lorraine Greaves and Col-
leen Reid describe such a history as “similar to a life history except that only
one part of a person’s experience is described” (2006, p. 160). Follow-up email
exchanges with select participants for clarifications and additional detail were
completed as required.
SPSS software was used to analyze the survey data. I worked with a statisti-
cal consultant, Johnson Li, to produce descriptive and inferential analyses. In
terms of the latter, we ran regression analysis to predict increases or decreases
with “live” viewing in relation to newer viewing modes such as time-shifted,
online, and mobile. We also ran an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to assess
if any subgroup differences existed among demographic variables of gender,
age, and region of residence. QSR NVivo software was used to code the inter-
view data and aid in the qualitative analysis. Quotations from the participants
are presented at length in Chapters 2–5 in recognition of the value of thick,
descriptive data (Geertz, 1973). As Monica Gallant points out, “the value
in stories about particular people in a specific context is especially useful …
where the body of published research is limited” (2008, p. 247). As a feminist
scholar, I argue that it is also important for the “voices” of the participants to
be heard and be recognized as coproducers of knowledge (Kirby, Greaves, &
Reid, 2006). A number of participants were also media scholars and/or fans
with long histories of involvement in fandom. For example, I learned a great
 introduction 9

deal about the broadcast contexts outside of Canada and the United States
through the interviews. Giving voice does not in itself equalize power rela-
tions in the research context; neither does it offer unmediated accounts of
experience. This book, like any publication based on qualitative research, is
“overinvested in second-hand memories” to quote Deborah Britzman (1995,
p. 153). Experiences are reconstructed by the participants themselves and
then by the researcher, who codes, selects, and organizes them into a coherent
text. To protect confidentiality, the interview participants are identified in the
following chapters by a name of their choosing. A few chose to use their social
media or fandom identities. In cases where more than one participant chose
the same first name, a last initial has been added.

Demographic Snapshot

Although most of us talk about “television” without any qualifying prefix such as
“Australian” or “American,” the fact is that, especially since the digital revolution
and notwithstanding processes of globalization, “television” involves such varying
forms, platforms and content in its different national and regional locations that it is
increasingly implausible for one set of experiences to be representative.
— Graeme Turner (2011, p. 32)

Following Turner, I have tried to “dehomogenize” television by fore-

grounding not only national and regional variations of viewing but age and
gender variations as well. Starting with gender, 445 of the survey respon-
dents identified as female (66.3 percent), 217 as male (32.3 percent),
and 9 (1.3 percent) reported their gender as non-binary. Three-quarters
of the interview participants were female (fifty-three compared to nine-
teen males). The age of the survey respondents ranged from eighteen
(the minimum age to take part in the survey) to seventy-five, with a
mean of 34.6. The age variable was recoded into age groups, with just
over seventy percent of the respondents under the age of forty: 39.5 per-
cent (n = 265) were in the eighteen to twenty-nine cohort; 30.7 percent
(n = 206) were in the thirty to thirty-nine cohort; 16.4 percent (n = 110)
were in the forty to forty-nine cohort; 10.4 percent (n = 70) were in the fifty
to fifty-nine cohort; and three percent (n = 20) were sixty or older. The inter-
view participants were slightly older with just under two-thirds below forty:
twenty-four (eighteen to twenty-nine), twenty-two (thirty to thirty-nine),
eighteen (forty to forty-nine), six (fifty to fifty-nine), and two (sixty plus).
10 television 2.0

As for country of residence, the survey gave the respondents three

choices: Canada (my country of residence) (n = 120); United States (n =
268); or “Other,” which required them to provide the name of the country.
As expected, those residing in North America (57.8 percent) made up the
majority, but the sample was more international than I had anticipated: thir-
ty-one other countries were represented. The United Kingdom (n = 81; 12.8
percent) was also coded as an individual country because of the number of
respondents. The remaining countries were recoded into seven regions mod-
eled on those used by television scholars. Only two of these regions, how-
ever, had enough respondents to produce reliable regression and ANOVA
results: Europe (n = 135) and Australia/New Zealand (n = 27). Africa, Asia,
South America, South Asia, and Western Asia were recoded as missing values
for the reason that there is no common broadcast model or model of service
provision across these regions to justify combining them as a single category
of “other regions.” As for the interview participants, just under half resided
in the United States (thirty-three), twelve in Canada, eleven in the United
Kingdom, six in Europe (Belgium, Germany, Norway, Netherlands (two), and
Serbia), three in Australia, two in New Zealand, and one each in Argentina,
Brazil, India, Israel, and Malawi.
Finally, the survey included an optional question in which respondents
could self-identify as to their race and/or ethnicity. A review of the completed
responses indicated that less than one percent could be coded in a category
other than white. I recognize not being able to critically analyze issues of
race, reception, and fannish participation is a limitation to this study; at the
same time, I want to acknowledge whiteness as a subject location of unearned
privilege (Frankenberg, 1993; McIntosh, 1993).

The Rest of the Book

The major themes explored in Television 2.0 are organized into five chapters,
listed and described below.

Chapter 1: Assembling Television: From the Radio to the Internet

This chapter details the processes of assemblage, reassemblage, and hybridiza-

tion of television, with particular attention paid to viewing and participatory
practices. It begins with a discussion of radio and the formation of the public
and commercial national broadcast models in the early twentieth century,
 introduction 11

the period during which radio became a domestic technology. It then exam-
ines television’s takeover of the radio assemblage and its technological and
social transition from the classic network era to the multichannel universe.
The last section of the chapter examines the process of digitalization in terms
of convergence and divergence, which led to the creation of internet protocol
TV (IPTV). Rather than the latter replacing broadcast TV (BTV), IPTV and
BTV coexist as separate but overlapping household intra-assemblages.

Chapter 2: Household Assemblers: Patterns of Multiscreen

and Multimodal Viewing

In this chapter, I look more closely at household engagement with the BTV
and IPTV intra-assemblages. The first section draws on the TV 2.0 survey
data to trace out the broader patterns of screen and device use as well as
modes of viewing—live viewing, time-shifting, and online viewing afforded
by streaming and downloading technologies. The data clearly indicate an
almost ubiquitous engagement with both intra-assemblages, although there
are statistically significant differences across the demographic variables. Based
on a fine-grained analysis of the interview data, I argue that viewers can be
divided into three categories: those who have strong investments in the BTV
assemblage, those who have strong investments in the IPTV assemblage, and
those who have no allegiance to either, engaging regularly with both as hybrid
TV (HTV) assemblers. A number of data samples are provided to capture the
nuances of this engagement within and across these categories.

Chapter 3: Television 2.0 and Everyday Life

Drawing primarily on the literature that conceptualizes television as a domes-

tic technology, this chapter examines both the environmental and social uses
of television as a part of everyday life (Lull, 1990). The first half of the chap-
ter will focus on environmental uses, specifically, on background and/or dis-
tracted viewing. It also looks at the ways in which television is integrated into
daily routines as a leisure activity and as a form of relaxation. The second half
focuses on viewing as a social activity with other members of the household
as well as with friends, even if not together in the same room. Based on the
analysis of the interview data, I argue that multiscreen and multimodal view-
ing have altered but not fundamentally changed television’s imbrication with
domestic relations.
12 television 2.0

Chapter 4: Affect and the Television Text

This chapter first takes a closer look at committed fannish viewing and the
affective relationships that are formed around the series of which one is a
fan. The survey results demonstrate that the vast majority of viewers are also
fans. The interview data allow for a more fine-grained analysis of the ways
in which affective intensities are related to investments in particular genres
and bourgeois aesthetics, investments that may wax and wane over time. I
argue that affective intensity can also determine the choice of viewing mode:
fans antici­pating new episodes will either watch the original broadcast live
or download an unauthorized copy depending on which mode gives them the
most timely access. I will also discuss the technologies used to discover and
catch up with new series, even those no longer in production. Repeat and
marathon (“binge”) viewing as well as the practice of DVD collecting are also
discussed.

Chapter 5: Fandom 2.0: Six Degrees of Participation

In this final chapter, I discuss four clusters of online fan practices; I have placed
these on a participatory continuum, with those requiring the least amount of
involvement with fan communities and culture at one end and those requir-
ing the most at the other. I begin with information seeking and then examine
collective reaction/interpretation through “lurking” or occasional posting on
online forums. Next I turn to community making, which Jenkins (1992) has
argued is at the heart of participatory culture. Finally I discuss the production
of creative works (fan fiction and fan videos), a practice closely bound up
with membership in online communities. I also pay particular attention to
the role of social media in altering these established practices and in creating
new ones. I conclude that platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
disturb the boundaries between viewing, information seeking, interactivity,
and community.

Notes
1. One exception was the uses and gratifications approach. At its broadest, it “asks not what
the media do to people, but what people do with the media” (Katz, cited in Lull, 1990,
p. 29).
2. Close analysis of Section E revealed that the findings were too general to provide useful
insights toward a better understanding of changing patterns of reception.
 introduction 13

References
Adorno, T. W. (1954). How to look at television. Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, 8(3),
213–235.
Bennett, J. (2008). Television studies goes digital. Cinema Journal, 47(3), 158–165.
Bennett, J., & Strange, N. (Eds.). (2011). Television as digital media. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Britzman, D. (1995). Beyond innocent readings: Educational ethnography as a crisis of repre-
sentation. In W. Pink & G. Noblit (Eds.), Continuity and contradiction: The futures of the
sociology of education (pp. 133–156). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Bruns, A. (2006). Towards produsage: Futures for user-led content production. In F. Sudweeks,
H. Hrachovec & C. Ess (Eds.), Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology
(pp. 275–284). Tartu, Estonia.
Buechler, S. M. (2013). Mass society theory. In D. A. Snow, D. della Porta, B. Klandermans,
& D. McAdam (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of social and political movements.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Mas-
sumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. New York: Methuen.
Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gallant, M. (2008). Using an ethnographic case study approach to identify socio-cultural dis-
course: A feminist post-structural view. Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Mid-
dle Eastern issues, 1(4), 244–254.
Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In: The interpre-
tation of cultures: Selected essays (pp. 3–30). New York: Basic Books.
Grossberg, L. (1992). Is there a fan in the house?: The affective sensibility of fandom. In L. A.
Lewis (Ed.), The adoring audience: Fan culture and popular media (pp. 581–590). London;
New York: Routledge.
Holt, J., & Sanson, K. (Eds.). (2014). Connected viewing: Selling, streaming, & sharing in the
digital era. New York: Routledge.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). The culture industry: Entertainment as mass decep-
tion (E. Jephcott, Trans.). In G. S. Noerr (Ed.), Dialetic of enlightenment: Philosophical frag-
ments (pp. 94–136). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans & participatory culture. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating value and meaning in a
networked culture. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, S., & Walter, D. (2015). Esther the Wonder Pig. Facebook status update. Retrieved
from https://www.facebook.com/estherthewonderpig/
Kirby, S. L., Greaves, L., & Reid, C. (2006). Experience research social change: Methods beyond the
mainstream (2nd ed.). Toronto: Broadview Press.
Lotz, A. (2009). What is U.S. television now? The Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, 625(September), 49–59. doi: 10.1177/0002716209338366
14 television 2.0

Lotz, A. (2014). The television will be revolutionized (2nd ed.). New York: New York University
Press.
Lubken, D. (2008). Remembering the straw man: The travels and adventures of hypodermic. In
D. W. Park & J. Pooley (Eds.), The history of media and communication research: Contested
memories (pp. 19–42). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Lull, J. (1990). Inside family viewing: Ethnographic research on television’s audiences. New York:
Routledge.
Marcus, G. E., & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 100–109.
McCarthy, A. (2001). Ambient television: Visual culture and public space. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
McIntosh, P. (1993). White privilege and male privilege. In A. Minas (Ed.), Gender basics:
Feminist perspectives on women and men (pp. 30–38). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Parks, L. (2004). Flexible microcasting: Gender, generation and television-internet conver-
gence. In L. Spigel & J. Olsson (Eds.), Television after TV: Essays on a medium in transition
(pp. 133–156). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Poster, M. (1995). The second media age. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Silverstone, R. (1994). Television and everyday life. New York: Routledge.
Spigel, L. (2004). Introduction. In L. Spigel & J. Olsson (Eds.), Television after TV: Essays on a
medium in transition (pp. 1–34). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Turner, G. (2011). Convergence and divergence: The international experience of digital tele-
vision. In J. Bennett & N. Strange (Eds.), Television as digital media (pp. 31–51). Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Williams, R. (1975). Television: Technology and cultural form. New York: Schocken Books.
 ·1·
assembling television
From the Radio to the Internet

Borrowing from Raymond Williams, a tele-technological assemblage takes

form through a process in which “scattered technological devices” become
“an applied technology and then a social technology” (1975, p. 24). Although
such devices did come together to create a viable visual broadcasting tech-
nology, television skipped a number of steps, instead taking over the existing
assemblage of radio. I begin with a discussion of the domestication of radio,
and then trace out the assemblage and reassemblage of analog and digital tele-
vision, with attention paid to linkages to participatory culture. I argue that the
process of digitalization is not linear; rather broadcast TV (BTV) and internet
protocol TV (IPTV) have become overlapping household intra-assemblages.
This chapter is not intended to provide a comprehensive history; rather, it
pays attention to technological and industry developments as they inform
reception and participatory practices in the US and UK contexts, contexts
which are representative of the commercial and public models of broadcasting
in Western democracies.

Radio Days
Radio or “the wireless,” as it was first known, has its roots in late nineteenth-
century wireless telegraphy and telephony, and was the domain of hobbyists
16 television 2.0

and ham operators until the early 1920s. By then it had coalesced into the
familiar model described by Williams as “centralized transmission” and “pri-
vatized reception” (1975, p. 30). Unlike cinema for which distribution was
controlled by the content producers, sound broadcasting was developed with-
out any specific content (Ibid.). “Listening in” to broadcasts of music, lectures,
and sermons, produced by anyone who had access to and could operate the
equipment, quickly captured the public imagination (Carlat, 1998). “Nothing
was fixed,” notes Susan Douglas in reference to the American context:

Not the frequencies of stations …, not the method of financial support, not govern-
ment regulations, and not the design or domestic location of the radio itself. There
were no networks—known in the late 1920s as the chains—and there was very little
advertising on the air. Department stores, newspapers, the manufacturers of radio
equipment, colleges and universities, labor unions, socialists, and ham operators all
joined the rush to start stations. (1999, p. 56)

Driven by economic and political imperatives, production was soon

concentrated and controlled by the state and/or large corporations depending
on the national context. In the Western European countries, including the
United Kingdom, production and transmission costs were either financed
wholly or in part by the state. In the United Kingdom, for example, commercial
broadcasting was started by Marconi Wireless in 1920 but banned two years
later. The British Broadcasting Company, a consortium of manufacturers, was
set up by the government to both sell wireless sets and produce programming
that was to be funded through royalties from both sales of sets and a set
licensing fee, which was established in 1923. By the end of the year, 200,000
licenses had been issued (Press Association, 2005). In 1926, after a government
review, the Company was dissolved and overhauled to become the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a fully public broadcasting service. Jostein
Gripsud makes the case that the agricultural origin of the term broadcasting—
“the sowing of seeds in as wide (half circles) as possible”—served as “an
optimistic, modernist metaphor” that fit with the vision of John Reith, the
first Director-General of the BBC, to provide programming that educated,
informed, and entertained its citizens (2004, p. 211). In contrast, commercial
radio dominated in the United States and in Canada. As early as 1916, David
Sarnoff, who later became Chairman of the Radio Corporation of America
(RCA), told senior executives at Marconi that enormous profits would be
generated if the radio moved out from basements and garages, the domain of
hobbyists, and into the living rooms of American families as a central source
 assembling television 17

of news and entertainment (Matelski, 1995). In 1919, after negotiations

with the US military and in cooperation with Westinghouse Electric and
American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), General Electric bought out
several wireless manufacturers, including the well-known American Marconi
Company, and created RCA. This acquisition gave RCA a monopoly on
the retail and marketing of radio sets in America. Although RCA was not
involved in broadcasting at that time, other big corporations owned radio
stations: the first station to be granted a commercial broadcast license in
1920 was owned by Westinghouse. The first ad was run in 1922 on one of
AT&T’s stations (Douglas, 1999). These early stations were set up primarily
as a means to sell more sets; advertising revenue was secondary, a way to pay
for the programming needed to attract more consumers and listeners. Dozens
of other stations opened over the course of two years in major American and
Canadian cities. In 1926, RCA purchased a core group of stations or “chains”
from AT&T and formed the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC).
This expansion was followed by regulation in the form of the Federal Radio
Commission in 1927 (becoming the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) in 1934). The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was bought and
consolidated by William Paley in 1928 with sixteen affiliates. It had forty-
seven a year later (Bergreen, 1980).
According to Silverstone, a technology becomes domesticated when
“technological artefacts and delivery systems” are appropriated, controlled,
and rendered “more or less invisible within the daily routines of daily life”
(1994, p. 98). Before radio could be fully domesticated, thus generating
the kinds of profits envisioned by Sarnoff, the tuning technology had to be
improved. By the early 1920s, the crystal sets that required individual headsets
had been replaced with vacuum tubes which enabled amplification sufficient
to project the sound to fill an entire room (Carlat, 1998). In the United States,
sales of sets jumped from 60 million in 1922 to 358 million in 1924 (Matelski,
1995). Even so, the set still required an operator, not just a listener. In fitting
with normative domestic relations, the operator was assumed to be the male
head of the household. As reported in an issue of Radio World, tuning required
“systematic, scientific manipulation of variable conditions. … The man who
just turns the dial in a childish and unknowing fashion waiting for the ‘magic
box’ to spring a ‘hocus pocus’ trick is … cutting himself off from a lot of
entertainment” (cited in Carlat, 1998, p. 123). In order to be integrated into
household routines for all members of the family, particularly those of women,
manufacturers had to effectively “feminize” radio. Mohawk Electric came up
18 television 2.0

with a single-tuning set in 1925 and by 1928, it had become the industry stan-
dard (Ibid.). Moreover, the set itself was feminized—the more expensive mod-
els were consoles that also functioned as furnishing.1 In 1930, the US Census
included a question on radio ownership, finding that thirty-nine percent of
households had a set. By 1940, seventy-three percent of all American house-
holds had a radio (US Census Bureau, 1999). In the United Kingdom, 12 million
licenses have been issued by 1930. By 1939, three-quarters of all British house-
holds had a set license (Tomlinson, 1990).
The domestication of the radio was furthered with the establishment of a
regular programming day that was between twelve and eighteen hours long.
According to a 1938 FCC survey, over half the programming was devoted to
music, both live and recorded, with the rest divided evenly among talk, news,
variety, and drama (Sterling & Kittross, 2002). The latter category included
so-called “prestige” drama anthologies and plays as well as serials and series
(Ibid.). Although the serial has precedent in popular genres of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century fiction, which included detective fiction and westerns
(Williams, 1975), it was one of the first forms of entertainment programming
produced specifically for radio rather than adapted from vaudeville or theatrical
performances. It challenged the programming convention at the time that
storylines needed to be resolved by the end of the episode (Matelski, 1995).
The serial’s history is also intertwined with that of audience measurement.
The first US audience survey for radio was conducted by Archibald Crossley
and his company in the late 1920s, using another domestic technology—the
telephone (Webster & Phalen, 2009). His company went out of business but
audience measurement was taken up by none other than Arthur C. Nielsen
in 1936 (Ibid.). One of the first American serials was Amos ‘n’ Andy. Within
a year of its debut in 1928, it was a huge hit and at the peak of its thirty-
two-year run, it had an audience of 40 million, one-third of the American
population (Nachman, 1998).2 Michelle Hilmes (1993) argues the series
directly influenced the future development of both soaps, which debuted
in 1935, and situation comedies (sitcoms). Its popularity also initiated the
familiar network practice of the repeat broadcast to ensure east and west coast
listeners could hear the program at a convenient time.
In the postwar period, the evening schedule of the American networks
was dominated by popular series. Crime thrillers and sitcoms, in particular,
made up the largest segment, while the ten am to five pm time slots were
dominated by soaps (Sterling & Kittross, 2002). In contrast, the BBC sched-
ules were almost devoid of popular content until 1946 when the Corporation
 assembling television 19

finally began to offer a “Light Programme” of music, serials, and episodic series
to complement its prestige productions (Bouckley, 2016). This was a move
made in part to compete with Radio Luxembourg, which set out to capture a
British audience interested in less highbrow fare, programming that included
imported US serials and series (208 Radio Luxembourg, 2001).
Given the focus on effects by early communications scholars, we know
very little about reception and participatory practices from the days of radio.
There are a few anecdotes, however, that suggest that Amos ‘n’ Andy was
“appointment/must-hear” radio at the height of its popularity. According to
Marilyn Matelski, when daylight savings time was adopted, “factories changed
their hours so employees could get home in time for the show” (1995, p. 9).
Similarly Gerald Nachman claims that President Coolidge “refused to be dis-
turbed” during the broadcast and that “water flow dropped dramatically … and
phone lines went still every night at 7” (1998, p. 273). Moreover, Amos ‘n’
Andy inspired what might well be the first instance of media fan activism: NBC
received 18,000 letters threatening to boycott Pepsodent, the show’s sponsor, if
Amo’s wife Ruby was “killed off” (Nachman, 1998). Whether these anecdotes
are true or not does not matter: there can be no doubt that these committed
listeners and letter writers were fans, even if they were only represented as part
of a mass audience.

A Set with a View

According to Williams (1975), the transmission of still and moving images
was being pursued in Britain, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and the
United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. However, it was
not until the late 1920s that functional systems were developed by public and
private corporations such as AT&T (in its Bell Laboratories), RCA, the BBC,
and Marconi-EMI (UK). The BBC began the first television service in 1936.
In the United States, among the first commercial stations on the air were those
owned by NBC and CBS (ABC followed in 1948). By 1948 almost seventy
companies were manufacturing TV sets in the United States, with the market
dominated by RCA, DuMont, and Philco (Boddy, 1990). To promote sales,
the BBC and the US networks directed radio’s financial and creative resources
into producing and broadcasting television programming, both adapting and
creating original content. Given the much higher production costs, it is not
surprising that these networks were interested in selling not only to national
advertisers but to international markets. According to William Marling
20 television 2.0

(2006), CBS set up the first subsidiary for foreign distribution and by 1958 had
made over $4 million from sales of Lassie. By 1961, the network was selling
1500 thirty-minute episodes to fifty-five countries (Ibid.).
Because visual broadcasting was developed within the existing sound
broadcasting model, the TV set arrived in the living room already domesti-
cated. In 1950, less than ten percent of American households owned a televi-
sion, compared to ninety-one percent who owned a radio (US Census Bureau,
1999). Five years later, the ownership had jumped to sixty-three percent (Ibid.).
There can be no question that the postwar economic boom and consumer
affluence were adoption drivers. Just as he had predicted the commercial suc-
cess of radio, Sarnoff foresaw that postwar America’s new automobile suburbs
would be a good fit for TV (Spigel, 1992). A 1953 Harper’s article describes
the suburban landscape as one of “endless picket fences of telephone poles and
television aerials” (cited in Spigel, 1992). Spigel argues that the homes were

strung together like Christmas tree lights on a tract with one central switch. And
that central switch was the growing communications complex through which people
could keep their distance from the world buy at the same time imagine their domestic
spheres were connected to wider social fabric. (p. 6)

Thus the postwar suburban home needs to be understood as a sphere of increas-

ingly privatized consumption and leisure, although as Spigel points out, it was
also a site of unpaid labor for wives and mothers. By 1960, television had dis-
placed the radio from the living room with eighty-five percent of American
households owning a television set (US Census Bureau, 1999).3
Television’s takeover of the assemblage, particularly in the North Ameri-
can context, would not be complete until it had overcome technical limitations
in relation to transmission. Unlike radio frequencies, those used by television
require direct line of sight, thus necessitating the need for each home to have
an aerial antenna for reception. Over-the-air (OTA) delivery systems work
best in densely populated, geographically flat areas: in the United Kingdom,
for example, eighty-one percent of households could receive OTA TV by
1951 (Branston & Stafford, 2010). Engineers knew that this limitation could
be overcome through the use of coaxial cable, originally invented to improve
telegraph transmission. The first transmission of an experimental broadcast
via coaxial cable took place in Germany in 1936 for the Berlin Olympics
(Early Television Museum, 2017). The first coaxial cable in the United States
was laid between New York and Philadelphia in 1937 and within five years
consisted of an 800 mile circuit (Ibid.). CATV or community antenna TV was
 assembling television 21

first used in the United States and Canada in terrains where OTA reception
was very poor. Large community antennas were set up and coaxial cable then
connected individual homes to the antenna (Morrison, 2014). In 1952, there
were seventy cable systems in the United States servicing 14,000 subscribers
(CCTA, 2016). Ten years later, entrepreneurs and then large corporations
saw the potential of the technology to capture and deliver a wide range of
broadcast signals far beyond the local broadcast range, and began to offer mul-
tichannel packages for higher fees (CCTA, 2016).

The Analog Era

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, television’s programming and broad-
cast schedule consolidated into what is now understood as the classic network
era (Lotz, 2009). Williams (1975) notes that while Western, crime, and med-
ical dramas were already popular on radio and in print, television took these
genres to new heights of popularity. American series, including the prime time
serials such as Dallas and Dynasty, continued to dominate the global televi-
sion trade, with the bulk going to seven countries: Australia, Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom (Barker, 1999). By the 1990s,
almost half of all imported programming in Western Europe came from the
United States (Ibid.).4 Outside of prime time, local affiliates and the indepen-
dent stations bought syndicated programming to fill in “fringe” slots in the
mornings and afternoons as well as on weekend afternoons. Derek Kompare
describes syndication as “the primary mode of non-network distribution of
television content,” both first-run and rerun (2009, p. 57). Syndicated televi-
sion is “almost nobody’s favorite form”—“just-see” as opposed to “must-see”
TV (p. 55)—yet it plays an equally important role as network television does
in the creation of broadcast flow. Williams (1975) was the first scholar to
recognize and characterize the programming day as such. What appears to be
programming made up of discrete units marked by interruption, whether by
commercial breaks, news updates, and/or public service announcements, has
its own internal organization and coherence. This flow is what distinguishes
the experience of watching television from watching a film in the cinema or
reading a book. Fiske further develops the concept, describing the televisual
flow as “discontinuous, interrupted, and segmented” (1987, p. 105). He also
recognizes the unevenness of flow across broadcast models. The most discrete
and coherent programming flow was found in the former Eastern bloc coun-
tries, followed by those of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and
22 television 2.0

the Western European countries, and most segmented found in the United
States and Canada (Ibid.).
The television assemblage established its first linkages with participatory
culture at this time as well. Fan clubs devoted to popular music and movie
stars date back at least to the 1930s (Theberge, 2005). The first fan conven-
tion, devoted to science fiction, was held in 1936 (Bacon-Smith, 1992). Early
television fandoms formed around Star Trek: The Original Series (US) and
Doctor Who (UK). The official Star Trek Fan club was set up by the series
creator Gene Roddenberry in 1968 and lasted one year until the series was
cancelled. Fans had engaged in a successful letter-writing campaign to get the
series renewed for a third season but there was to be no fourth. Through syndi-
cation, however, its popularity only increased, with the LA Times describing
its ratings as “enviable” (cited in Pearson, 2011, p. 121). The first Star Trek
fanzine was produced in 1967 (Coppa, 2006), and the first fan convention
was held in New York in 1973 (Bacon-Smith, 1992). Doctor Who, which has
remained in production since its debut in November 1963, also had an official
fan club from this time period, which became the Doctor Who Apprecia-
tion Society in 1976. Doctor Who is also one of the British series that is sold
internationally as part of the “reverse flow” of English-language programming
imported to the United States (Barker, 1999).
Television’s first reassemblage began in the 1970s in the United States when
cable technology in combination with new satellite technology and deregu-
lation enabled Charles Dolan and Gerald Levin to set up Home Box Office
(HBO) out of New York, and Ted Turner to set up the superstation WTBS
in Atlanta. Cable expansion continued rapidly into the next decade, resulting
in what is often referred to as the “multichannel universe” with an increase
from 16 million to 53 million household subscriptions (CCTA, 2016). By the
early 1990s, over ninety-seven of US subscribers had more than thirty channels
(Uricchio, 2004). Demand for more programming in turn led to the creation of
new commercial networks: Fox in 1986, and the WB and UPN in 1995. Roberta
Pearson (2011) contends that it was the success of Star Trek: The Next Genera-
tion that led to the launch of the latter. Many of the new channels became spe-
cialty content channels for niche audiences, beginning with twenty-four-hour
news networks such as CNN, which served to reframe the programming flow as
a continuous cycle (Fiske, 1987). By the early 1990s, direct satellite broadcast
technology had the capacity to provide an alternative delivery system to cable.
As a result, the expansion of the multichannel universe to countries where
cable remained marginal or nonexistent was made possible.
 assembling television 23

TV sets became both larger and smaller and were added to other spaces in
the home such as bedrooms, kitchens, and recreation rooms. It was the addi-
tion of two ancillary devices, however, that was responsible for “a shift away
from the programming-based notion of flow that Williams documented to a
viewer-centered notion” (Uricchio, 2004, p. 168). The first was the remote
control device. The technology dates back to the early days of radio and was a
novelty gadget in relation to television (e.g., Zenith’s Flash-Matic and Space
Command), only becoming ubiquitous in the 1980s with the advent of coded
infrared devices (Ibid.). Enabling the viewer to “channel surf” or “zap” was
not simply a matter of convenience but a necessity in managing the number
of channels on offer (Thomas, 2011). The second ancillary device was the
home videocassette recorder (VCR). The first consumer (albeit short-lived)
Sony Betamax recorders were sold in Japan in 1975, followed a year later by
the JVC VHS recorder (Gibbs, 2015). Sales of VCRs in the United States
exceeded one million units by 1979 (Quigley, 1992). Ten years and 80 mil-
lion units later, almost two-thirds of US households had a VCR (Ibid.). The
percentage was even higher in the United Kingdom in households with chil-
dren under sixteen at almost seventy percent (Ibid.). The practice of viewing
recorded television programming at a time other than that of broadcast has
come to be known as time-shifting, a term that dates back to the Sony Beta-
max US marketing campaign (Greenberg, 2008). As David Gauntlett and
Annette Hill argue, users are able to “harness the technology for the ways in
which it can be deployed to contribute to one’s own life, rather than just using
it in the ways proposed in the instruction manual” (1999, p. 146). The VCR
thus allowed for programming to be slotted into one’s routine rather than
organizing one’s routine around the broadcast schedule.
The home video market that the VCR provided for post-theatrical film
release, however, could not be replicated for television due to technical limita-
tions: the tapes only allowed for two hours of good-quality playback (four and
six hours were possible for home recording but the quality was much lower). A
single episode was therefore too short and an entire series too long to be com-
mercially viable: one solution was a “Best of” set of classic episodes. According
to Kompare (2006), the first such set was The Honeymooners. Memory Alpha,
a Star Trek wiki, states that Paramount Home Video released ten episodes
on a five-tape set in both VHS and Betamax format after the release of the
first Star Trek movie in early 1980. Taken together, both home and commer-
cial recordings served to decouple the television text from the broadcast flow,
turning the ephemeral text into a discrete text and material object.
24 television 2.0

The VCR also enabled several fan practices. First it allowed for the cre-
ation of a personal archive of recordings which in turn allowed fans to rewatch
as many or as few episodes at a time as often as desired. According to Jenkins,
texts “accumulate” meaning through repeat use (1992, p. 51). Moreover, video
tapes could be shared among fans: “the exchange of video tapes has become
a central ritual of fandom, one of the practices helping to bind it together
as a distinctive community” (p. 71). The VCR also enabled the practice of
viewing multiple episodes in a row. Jenkins provides examples of communi-
ties hosting marathon viewings at a local host’s home. As with syndication,
video exchange could lead to discoveries of new fandoms: Jenkins mentions
how he and his wife became fans of the British series Blake 7 through the gift
of the first season on tape. His personal example is also an early illustration
of how fan culture creates a sharing or gift economy (Booth, 2010) outside
national and commercial television markets. Finally home recording tech-
nology enabled the production of fan videos or vidding. According to Coppa
(2006), the first fan video (vid) came out of Star Trek fandom and was made
around 1980 using two VCR decks.5

The Assemblage Goes Digital

Digitalization at its most basic technical level is the translation of informa-
tion into binary digits (zeros and ones). It is most commonly associated with
the ICTs that enabled the formation of the internet and computer-mediated
communication. Participatory fans were among the early internet adopters,
creating cyberspaces in which to interact with other fans (Bury, 2005). SF
[Science Fiction]-LOVERS was one of the earliest listservs dating back to the
ARPANET of the 1970s (Sterling, 1993). GEnie, a rival to CompuServe that
was set up in 1985, had “roundtables” dedicated to various fandoms (Busse
& Hellekson, 2006). According to Nancy Baym (2000), rec.arts.tv.soaps was
one of the oldest newsgroups on Usenet, a pre-internet service set up in 1980.
The digitalization of television, however, did not begin until the mid-1990s.
Unlike an analog signal, the digital signal suffers no degradation and is multi-
plexed, i.e., audio and video are processed together. Moreover, because a digi-
tal signal can be compressed without losing information, even more channels,
both standard definition (SD) and high definition (HD), can be transmitted
on the same frequencies (Morrison, 2014). The result was availability of even
more channels via digital terrestrial television (DTT) delivery systems, not
just via cable and satellite. The CBS affiliate WRAL became the first station
 assembling television 25

to broadcast in HD in 1996 (WRAL, 1996). The first fully digital terrestrial

service, ONdigital, was launched in the United Kingdom in 1998 (ONdigital,
2002). In the early 2000s, most developed countries began to prepare for a full
digital switchover: The Netherlands became the first to complete the switcho-
ver, followed by Germany in 2008, United States in 2009, Australia, Can-
ada, and New Zealand in 2011, and the United Kingdom in 2012. With the
development of the HDTV set, which has adopted the display technologies of
computer monitors, television is no longer the “insufficient medium of visual
broadcasting” as it was characterized by Williams (1975, p. 28).
Digitalization has resulted in convergence, that is, the merging of dis-
crete devices and systems into a singular device or system (Jenkins, 2006).
Upgrades to networks using fiber optic cable, along with regulatory changes in
the US context, allowed cable providers to become internet service providers,
effectively displacing free dial-up services accessed through telephone lines.
Their monopoly on broadband did not last: telecommunications corporations
(“telcos”) also upgraded their networks to provide dedicated subscriber line
(DSL) internet service; today both types of providers offer what the industry
calls a “triple play”: internet, television, and telephone, “all on a single wire
into the home” (CCTA, 2016, emphasis mine). The home itself, however, is
better understood as a site of digital divergence (Thomas, 2011). Upon enter-
ing the home, the cable connects first to an ASL or DSL modem and then to
the TV set, requiring a set-top box to convert the signal from digital to analog
for older TV sets. Although HDTVs are able to receive a signal directly, most
providers require a set-top receiver to access the signals that have been scram-
bled to prevent unauthorized distribution.
As for devices connected to the TV, two digital devices are required to
replicate analog VCR functionality. The first is the digital versatile disc (DVD)
player, the standards for which were established in 1995 (Frankel, 2007). With
compression enabling more episodes of a series to fit onto a single disc, televi-
sion content producers and their broadcasting networks finally became play-
ers in the digital video home market. By 1998, approximately 1.4 million US
homes had a DVD player (Frankel, 2007). By 2016, seventy-seven percent
of American households had at least one (Nielsen Company, 2016a). The
creation of a box set for an entire television season/series began with Fox’s
release of the first season of The X-Files in 2000, thereby linking television for
the first time to “the publishing model of media production and distribution”
(Kompare, 2006, p. 338). Three years later, sales of TV box sets had grown
substantially. Family Guy: Volume One, for example, sold 1.6 million copies,
26 television 2.0

enough for Fox to order more seasons (Frankel, 2007). Kompare (2006) provides
a list of over seventy box sets released on DVD between 2000 and 2003, made
up primarily of American series as well as a few BBC series. DVD box sets,
Kompare argues, “provide the content of television without the ‘noise’ and
limitations of the institution of television” (p. 352). Like VHS tapes, they turn
television texts into discrete objects removed from the broadcast flow. Unlike
home recordings, DVD sets often include “valued added” extras such as deleted
scenes and/or commentary by writers and actors. In short, “they present their
series complete, uncut, organized, pristine, and compact, all qualities sought
by … collectors” (p. 352). Like videotapes, DVDs can also be rented; in 1998
Reed Hastings set up Netflix as a mail-order DVD-rental business to compete
against the video rental stores and chains such as Blockbuster.
The second ancillary device to replace the VCR is the digital video recorder
(DVR), sometimes referred to as a personal video recorder (PVR). The first such
service/device to launch was TiVo in the United States in 1999. Unlike the
VCR, the internal hard drive allows the pausing and playback of live television,
enabling another means by which the broadcast flow is altered. While unpop-
ular with commercial television networks for obvious reasons (TiVo allows the
deletion of ads in their entirety), DVRs were soon embraced by cable compa-
nies and their telco rivals, who began offering their own integrated devices
for an additional fee or free as part of their higher-tier subscription packages.
The percentage of American households with a DVR tripled between 2007
and 2011 (Nielsen Company, 2009) and reached fifty-three percent in 2016
(Nielsen Company, 2016b). Ofcom (2015) reports that sixty-four percent of
UK households had one in 2015. Australia was not far behind at fifty-eight
percent (Think TV, 2016). DVR penetration in Canadian households was
52.1 percent as of 2014 (Television Bureau of Canada, 2014).

The Rise of IPTV

The convergences and divergences discussed earlier were the springboard for
a television-internet hybridization, which led to the development of IPTV. In
the early 2000s, internet protocols became advanced enough to compress and
encode video. Those users with broadband could upload and download files
via peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks or Apple’s iTunes service. Users
could also stream these files from a server using software such as RealPlayer,
Apple’s Quick Time, and Windows Media Player. The first television con-
tent was illegally distributed online by fans using a BitTorrent client in 2003
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 The Constitutional convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was typical
of this situation. Every problem found divergent interests and
63
opinions; every solution was effected by compromise. There was
state jealousy of all central authority; the opposition between large
and small states; that between the industries of the north and the
agriculture of the south; the slave trade, with its complex of moral
and economic problems; the sectionalism of the settled east and the
frontier west; the protection of the property-holding class and the
satisfaction of the radicals with their demand for liberty and equality.
Every one of these conflicts had to be settled if possible, or at least
(as with slavery) brought to a temporary status to avoid sharp
struggle. There were, of course, certain unifying factors. The majority
of the settlers were English, and most of these Protestants. The non-
English speaking elements were very largely of Teutonic blood and
Protestant religion also. There was a common political experience,
and a democratic urge typical of the frontier. Most important of all,
there was an eight-year war fought together against a common
enemy and under the same Commander-in-Chief. The American
government, then, with its new Constitution, was not a simple unity
from the outset. It was rather a highly complex unity, containing
within itself many minor groups, many different viewpoints, and many
integrations of the sub-group for the benefit of the nation as a whole.

2.
An interesting illustration of this, and for our purpose a crucial
one, is in the religious life of the thirteen original states. Before the
Revolution, the states might be divided into four groups as regards
their religious organization: there were congregational
establishments in Massachusetts and Plymouth, New Haven,
Connecticut, and New Hampshire; Church of England
establishments in Virginia and the two Carolinas; four states formerly
under various regimes had had the Church of England forced on
them—Maryland, at first under Catholic rule, but with freedom of
residence for all Christians; New York and New Jersey, which had
been dominated by the Dutch Reformed Church; and Georgia,
founded with almost complete religious liberty. Only three states had
no established church—Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and its offshoot,
Delaware. Of these last, Rhode Island was founded by Roger
Williams in 1636, under the radical, not to say revolutionary principle
of complete separation of church and state, with right of residence
and citizenship for all persons, even including Jews and atheists.
Pennsylvania, chartered in 1681, was founded by William Penn, the
Quaker, with liberty of residence for all “believers in Almighty God”;
but the English government insisted on the condition that all voters
and office holders “shall be such as profess faith in Jesus Christ” and
the Protestant religion. What the new nation had, then, was not
religious liberty, but rather a clash of many different points of view.
64
Massachusetts set up its theocratic state with its chief interest in
the Church; Virginia established its civil state, with the church as a
subject member; while Rhode Island boldly denied the purposes and
premises of both, placing an impassable gulf between the State and
the Church and relegating to the individual conscience and to
voluntary association all concern and action touching the Church and
religious matters.
What, then, should be the upshot of this confusion of religious
groups, with their ancient hatreds and prejudices, ingrown with
history and overlaid with former strife and martyrdom? It was
obviously impossible to make the United States Calvinist or
Episcopal; it was necessary to have some sacrifice of each for the
good of all. But it might have been possible to make the nation
Protestant Christian, as was actually the case with the state of New
Hampshire until 1877. Various minor causes here entered in.
Warfare with England meant some opposition, at least, to the Church
of England. The distance from the actual seat of old-world struggles,
the character of the colonists and their longing for every type of
freedom, helped much. The new theories of the French
Encyclopedists, as adopted by Jefferson, certainly had great
influence. But most important of all was the existence of the many
minor sects, with the few important ones, of which all longed to rule
but none wished to be dominated by any other.
The upshot was religious freedom, the separation of church and
state, according to Article VI, Section 3, of the Federal Constitution:
“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any
office or public trust under the United States.” This clause was
opposed on both sides—by Massachusetts as being too liberal, by
Virginia and Rhode Island as not liberal enough. Virginia had two
years before this overthrown her state church and given complete
freedom of conscience—not toleration—to all her people. The
opposition even to toleration was becoming crystallized in the words
of Thomas Paine: “Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but
the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself
the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.”
So the first amendment to the Constitution, adopted immediately
afterward by motion of the first Congress, and by the required two-
thirds of the states, was: “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
This was tremendously significant of the growing and newly
conscious group mind of the United States of America. It was equally
important for the future of the nation and its unity in days to come.
Religious liberty was not a matter of doctrine in its inception; it was
the product of the birth and development of the group mind of the
nation. It meant the relinquishment of the racial habits, of the state
laws, of the old urge to persecute (common to almost every group,
even those who were themselves refugees from persecution), and
the adoption of a national standard to which every state, every
church and every sect should bring its sacrifice. And if this sacrifice
was not of their own right to live, but only of the right to make others
miserable, it was nevertheless the sacrifice of something so
important that the demand had convulsed France, Germany and
England not many years before. Religious liberty, indeed, however
firmly based on law and political ideals, never became the habit of
thought and action which intolerance had been. A recurrent
phenomenon of American life has been the breaking up into
religious, racial and sectional groups, with a further synthesis of
Americanization, through some common interest to unite them. The
conflict among the many groups prior to the adoption of the
Constitution, and its solution in that document with its Bill of Rights,
has been paralleled at least four times from that period to the
present day.
 3.
These four reactions against the immigrant correspond with the
four peaks of the curve of immigration into the United States, with
two great alterations in the process, corresponding to the Civil War
and the World War.
Up till 1830, immigration into the United States was small in
amount and fairly regular. The first wave stretched from 1831 to
1861, reaching its peak in 1855; its total amounted to four millions of
foreigners, of whom the largest group and the first to come were the
Irish, the second in number and date of arrival the Germans. The
growth of intolerance against these newcomers was shown in the
movement known as Know-Nothingism or the American Party. The
second wave, of similar nationalities, was from 1862 to 1877; the
reply to this appeared in the anti-alien planks in the political
platforms of 1876. The third wave, from 1878 to 1897, was larger
than these earlier ones; it included many Scandinavians and, after
1882, growing numbers of Italians, Russians, and Austro-
Hungarians, the two last being composed in part of persecuted
Jews, in part of impoverished peasants. The Nativist reaction against
this immigrant trend appears rather in the form of religious
opposition, for the American Protective Association of those days
was predominantly anti-Catholic. The fourth wave began in 1898 and
extended until 1914, when the outbreak of the World War in Europe
caused a sudden drop to almost nothing; in its highest years, 1907
and 1913, more than 1,200,000 entered our ports annually; and the
greatest number of these new arrivals came from Italy, Austria-
Hungary and Russia. The reaction against these new immigrants
was under way, but the war interrupted its progress, and the Ku Klux
Klan arrived at its full power only after the war, when new conditions
swayed the group mind of America.
In each of these cases, the height of the movement against the
immigrant came just after the peak of the wave of immigration, at the
time when it had had time to impress itself on the native-born. The
philosophies of these four movements varied according to the
nationality of the immigrants against whom the natives were
protesting, and according to the general philosophy of life in vogue at
the time. The first such movement, the Know-Nothing or American
Party, originated in New York State in 1852 “as a secret organization
65
with passwords, oath, grip and ritual.” Its creed was summed up in
two words: Americanism and Protestantism. Its special target was
the two million Irish who had come into the country; they were poor
laborers, with a low standard of living, ignorant, hereditary enemies
of England, and Catholics into the bargain. No wonder there were
anti-Irish riots in New York, Philadelphia and Boston; that it was
rumored the Pope would soon be dictator of America; or that the
secret anti-alien society was begun. But the course of the movement
was spectacular and brief. It entered national politics, thus both
making bitter enemies for itself and taking off the secrecy which was
its chief source of power. Then came the abolitionist movement, and
the American party was split into northern and southern branches.
Most important of all, the peak of immigration was passed, the Irish
adopted the American standard of living, became a part of
communal life, without any danger of Catholic overthrow of our
cherished institutions—Othello’s occupation was gone, and the
Know-Nothing party disappeared.
The next wave of immigration and the next reaction against it
were minor ones. The immigrants met groups of their own origin
already absorbed into the common life of America, and fitted in with
little difficulty. The attempt in 1876 to prevent the use of public funds
for sectarian schools was itself comparatively slight.
But in between came the tremendous crisis of the Civil War. Here
the opposition was not between native and immigrant, but between
north and south, an industrial society of free laborers against an
agricultural society of castes,—planters, poor whites, and negro
slaves. I shall not go further into this conflict, because it is too
familiar and has comparatively little to do with the particular
application of my viewpoint. But, from our point of view, it is
important to see the place of the first Ku Klux Klan of 1865–71. This
was again a secret organization, adding the feature of disguise, for
the terrifying effect on the negroes whom it was the object of the
Klan to overawe. The Klan was a partisan and sectional
organization, of Southern white men of Confederate sympathies, to
maintain their group supremacy over the newly freed negroes and
the “carpet baggers” from the North. The victors had, as usual,
indulged in oppression over the losers, and the grievance was a very
real one. The Klan was partially successful in its object, but at once
fell into numerous abuses, was used by partisans to vent personal
grudges, fell into the hands of a lawless element, and was formally
disbanded in 1871 by General Nathan B. Forrest, its national
commander or Grand Wizard. Its slogan of “white supremacy” shows
its animus against the negroes and the North, not against the alien.
Some of its partisans claim that the Klan did not disband when it was
formally ordered so to do, but persisted in its underground activity
66
until as late as 1877. However that may be, its character and
purpose are very clear; it was sectional, timely, and for the one aim
of white supremacy. It appealed to its members and frightened its
enemies by its methods of disguise and secrecy, no less than by the
beatings, burnings and other outrages which were carried on either
under its auspices or by the false use of its insignia and methods. Its
defiance of the law imposed by force, and its use of force in reply,
are the vestiges of war psychology; It was the legitimate, if unlovely,
offspring of the Reconstruction. It had no function left when the white
South regained control of the states, but its memory still lingers as
part of the idealization of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.
The third reaction against immigration was primarily anti-Catholic
in trend. This was the A. P. A., or American Protective Association,
another secret society, organized in 1887, which reached its greatest
popularity in 1894 and 1895. At this same period there were several
other societies with the same purpose, notably the National League
for the Protection of American Institutions, which had a number of
extremely prominent men among its members. At this time the so-
called “new immigration” was growing strong, with its large numbers
of Italian and Austrian Catholics, added to those of German and Irish
origin already on the ground. The old fear of political domination by
the Papacy, expressed at the time of the adoption of the first
amendment to the Constitution, and then refuted, was again revived.
There was an orgy of purported “confessions” of nuns and priests;
there was circulated a forged oath of the Knights of Columbus, in
which the members agreed to place the papal authority above their
national allegiance; and a false encyclical of Pope Leo XIII.
Thousands of patriotic Americans believed all this obvious
nonsense, stirred up by the fear of a dominant Church; the A. P. A.
had as many as two million members and threatened to drive out of
public life the twelve million Catholics then in the country, without
regard to their race, nation, service to America, or the number of
generations they had lived in the United States. The mob spirit, once
aroused, crystalized in the breaking of the Northern group mind of
Civil War days into various sub-groups, Catholic, anti-Catholic and
indifferent. But the financial panic of the 1890’s resulted in a sudden
drop in immigration; the older settlers learned English and were
absorbed into the American cultural group; the A. P. A. had no
reason for existence, and again substantial unity was achieved by
the mind of the American people.
In this connection we must give a passing glance to what is still
our single greatest problem of groups, the existence of a ten per
cent. negro minority in the United States. These people were brought
here by force as slaves; as a subject class they were refused
education, though at the same time their own language, religion and
customs were thrown into disrepute and have been largely forgotten.
Though freed from economic slavery, they are still politically a
subject class in our southern states, while in northern and border
states they are gaining a political balance of power. Finally, they rest
everywhere under social disabilities, from the “Jim Crow” cars of the
South to the subtler distaste and ostracisms of the North. The result
is that they are forming complete, self-contained Negro communities
within the larger cities of the North and South alike; that they are
growing increasingly self-conscious as a group; and that the large
number of mulattoes, who in the British and French West Indies
would rank as a third group, between the racial divisions, are here
forced to make common cause with negroes. The negroes are thus a
self-conscious group, though their culture is imitative. The grouping
of the negroes apart is easy, on the whole, because of the gross
external signs, such as skin color and texture of hair, so that the
mass of the whites of the United States regard them definitely as a
different and a lower race. That anthropologists are not so certain of
all this makes little difference, because the group mind is based
rather on old habits of thought than on the understanding of new and
difficult facts. Here seems a problem of a different order, then, than
the racial and religious groupings of the sub-varieties of the white
race, which are constantly being overcome and regrouped in a larger
union of social life. In this study it will be impossible to do more than
point out the existence of this distinct problem, with its similar mental
background to the rest but its immeasurably more terrible
implications.
The fourth wave of immigration was by far the greatest in number
of newcomers, and by far the most variegated in racial and national
composition. It brought a million a year or more for six years during
this period. And its members had 75% of persons from southern and
eastern Europe, while the immigration prior to 1890 had included
only 20% of these races, and had been chiefly the English, Irish,
Germans and Scandinavians. It is no wonder that the race theory
began to be popular in America, under the spectacular leadership of
Lothrop Stoddard and Grant Madison, and that many began to
agitate for a greater or less limitation of the flood of immigration.
Even so sober a student of society as Professor Edward A. Ross of
Wisconsin held that it was wise to assimilate people of different
group mind more slowly than we were doing at the time. He said:
67
There have come among us in the last half century more than
twenty million European immigrants with all manner of mental
background, many of them having tradition which will no more blend
with American traditions than oil will blend with water.
And he proceeded to point out their inexperience with democratic
institutions, their lack of respect for law and for women, their disbelief
in progress. In addition, we need only note that many of these
people were Catholics and Jews; the total number of the former in
the United States in 1923 being estimated at 18,000,000 and of the
latter at 3,600,000. And the Jews were far more conspicuous than
their numbers, on account of their massing in the great cities and
their concentration in certain lines of industry. Thus the ground was
fully prepared for a new anti-alien movement, expressing itself this
time in the form of efforts to restrict immigration. This movement was
under way in 1914, and would probably have followed in the course
of its precursors. But world-shaking events ensued which altered the
course of groups in America as well. The outbreak of the World War
in 1914, the entrance of the United States into the war in 1917,
altered all groups, profoundly affected the American group mind, and
made the relation between the sub-groups and the mind of America
very different from what it had been. The results of this process are
still evident, and it is among them that we can look for anti-Semitism,
together with many other types of intolerance and group opposition.
 CHAPTER V.
THE WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

1.
With the outbreak of the World War in August 1914, the mind of
America suddenly became strikingly distinct from that of Europe.
They were fighting; we were watching. President Wilson appealed to
the United States to be “neutral in fact as in name ... impartial in
thought as well as in action.” The older American stock sympathized,
on the whole, with England, except for the Irish and Germans; the
newer immigrants had different racial and national affinities and
memories, some holding allegiance to their former governments,
some, like the oppressed Russian Jews, being especially bitter
against their former rulers. In this situation, American neutrality was
the result, not of indifference, but of lack of understanding on the part
of many groups in our population and of a stalemate between the
rest.
One definite result certainly was that all these diverse groups of
new and old immigrants began to feel themselves a unity, an
American people. They felt their distinction from the warring nations
overseas, their own interest, their own reaction to the complex
problems at issue. Meanwhile, however, both parties were trying
every means to bring the United States into the war on their own
sides. Germany tried to bring about an embargo on munitions sold to
the Allies and in default of that, to obstruct their shipment by both
peaceful and warlike means. Great Britain, more especially, tried to
influence American public opinion in favor of the Allies and against
Germany. Within, there were pacifists and advocates of
preparedness, both trying to mold opinion. This formation of an
American mind, and the difficulty of determining its future direction,
came to a head in the election of 1916, when the German-Americans
opposed President Wilson, and when Hughes was supported by
Roosevelt, the arch-interventionist. During this period we
experienced the first development of what we have since grown to
know intimately as “propaganda,” a deliberate, elaborate technique
for influencing the mind of the group.
The declaration of war by the United States in April, 1917, unified
the American mind in a manner and to a degree that were almost
inconceivable. Every immigrant group began to pass resolutions
favoring the government; the foreign language newspapers
commenced an intensive propaganda for the prosecution of the war.
Volunteers came from every section of the country and every type of
origin, as many from the children of Germans as from any other
group. The draft law was passed with apparent general approval;
and its enforcement met with surprisingly little difficulty. Huge loans
were made to the Allied governments. Tremendous bond issues
were raised by the American government, with general approval and
the coercion of any minority objectors. The National Council of
Defense, founded in August, 1916, was able in many cases to
overcome the dominant profit-motive of our society in gaining self-
sacrificing patriotism of manufacturers and merchants.
Along with this voluntary and spontaneous unification of the group
mind, came repression and coercion directed to forcing into
agreement any unabsorbed minority groups. The Committee on
Public Information was founded in September, 1917, to exert
propaganda through the sources of public information, to send out
favorable news and opinion, and even through censorship to
suppress material considered dangerous to the general cause. The
censorship exercised by the military forces on war bulletins, war
correspondents and the personal letters of soldiers, was applied less
strictly to the general population. The secret service, greatly
expanded to cope with German spies, began hunting out strikers,
radicals or any others who—in the minds of the detectives or of any
other government officials—might possibly obstruct the war efforts.
Emergency acts gave the President unusual power in these and
other directions.
 This use of force was characteristic, not only of the government,
but of local groups as well. In one place a German sympathizer (real
or supposed) might be made to kiss the flag; in another a strike
leader might be lynched. In Milwaukee, where public opinion was
sensitive on account of the large number of German-Americans, a
quota of Liberty Bonds was assigned arbitrarily to every person, and
he was practically forced to purchase them, irrespective of his ability
to do so, by threats of ostracism, by influence of his creditors, by
every sort of social pressure,—in order that Milwaukee might rank as
a real American community and go “over the top” in every “drive.”
The military language applied to these campaigns was matched by a
growing technique of organization. Professional propagandists
perfected a method of meetings, songs, card-catalogs, and quotas,
by which any cause might be assured of huge sums of money. The
greater propaganda of our government and foreign governments
was matched by the little propaganda of every subgroup, as long as
this was not in conflict with the general purpose.
A striking illustration of this is in the successful drives of the
various war-work agencies, the Red Cross, American Library
Association, Young Men’s Christian Association, Jewish Welfare
Board, Knights of Columbus, and the rest; and especially in their
enormous joint campaign just after the signing of the armistice.
Every American felt that this joint campaign, first, would help the
soldiers and the common cause; and second, indicated by its
inclusiveness the complete unification of America. Along with this
general unification came the similar process in many of the
68
immigrant groups themselves. Professor Miller tells how this was
reflected in the Czecho-Slovak group in America, so that bitter
atheists united with Catholic priests on joint committees for national
freedom in their old home in Europe.

2.
This internal unification was accomplished by a high emotional
tension, a national and personal uncertainty, and a common hate.
The prejudice against the various immigrant groups, arising as a
result of the great wave of immigration, was abated for the moment;
all the little prejudices were summed up in one great hatred of the
common enemy, Germany. This was reflected in avoidance of
everything German in this country as well; German instruction was
withdrawn from many high schools, German music from the opera
houses, German fried potatoes from the restaurants. The term,
“German-American,” formerly in good repute, now became a byword,
and with it every form of “hyphen.” The demand now was for
“hundred per cent.” Americanism.
In the prevailing ignorance of foreign languages and peoples, or
even if this ignorance had not existed in its full measure, the hatred
against the Germans was transferred in part to other groups as well,
even those with most reason to be anti-German or anti-Austrian.
Foreign language newspapers fell under popular suspicion and
official censorship much heavier than that of the English language
periodicals. Some states passed laws, later declared
unconstitutional, forbidding teaching, preaching or public meetings in
languages other than English. Foreign sounding names attracted
suspicion, and were changed in large numbers. Altogether, America
begun to repeat the oppression of subject groups which had caused
permanent resentment and sown the seeds of rebellion in almost
every land in Europe, to create her own Ireland, Alsace-Lorraine or
Poland. Americanization became a synonym for compulsory
adoption of American standards and group habits.
Americanization had had a long, if somewhat unsatisfactory, trial
before the war. It was the attempt, at that time, to bring American
culture to the supposedly uncultured immigrant through settlements,
night schools, and other cultural agencies. The attempt was
satisfactory in a comparatively small proportion of the total immigrant
population; and the earnest workers blamed this fact on the
poorness of their textbooks, the unsuitability of their buildings, or the
weariness of the people after a day of arduous labor. Now, all of
these were undoubtedly true, but a more fundamental cause of the
weakness of Americanization methods lay in the fact that they were
all one-sided; they consisted in attempts to change the immigrant
into an American, rather than attempts to join many groups together
into a composite unity. Even the conference on Americanization
called by the Secretary of the Interior in 1918 passed friendly and
practical resolutions, but still one-sided and consequently superficial.
The few individuals who persisted in their individuality, who
refused to be absorbed in the group purpose, formed no clearly
marked group of themselves. They were the “conscientious
objectors,” who refused any type of activity that might help the
military machine; the “slackers,” who evaded the draft for selfish
reasons; various religious groups, such as the Quakers; a few
economic dissenters, such as the Industrial Workers of the World.
They received, as they must have expected, the violent disapproval
of the group, expressed in terms of mob attack, legal imprisonment,
or at least, extreme social disapproval. They were the unassimilated
residuum of personality in the general unification of the American
group under the pressure of an external foe.

3.
Then came the armistice in November, 1918. As Dr. Drachsler
remarks:
69
The war lasted long enough to make America painfully conscious
of her peculiar problem of nationalism, but was not of long enough
duration to fuse the divergent ethnic elements permanently.
The artificial unity of war-time had no longer a purpose, and began
instantly to dissolve into its component elements. But the high
emotional tone of the war-time remained. Men still hated violently,
but they could no longer release this hatred in battle or in sending
others to battle. The repressive agencies remained in existence and
in excellent running order; groups had learned how to use
propaganda as an instrument; the habit of group pressure on
subgroups and on different and opposing groups had been
strengthened. Most of all, great masses of Americans had a new
group consciousness of America as a group, with the uniformity of
habit, opinion and conduct characteristic of their own subgroup taken
as normal for the whole.
 The first result, then, was that the original subgroups fell apart
and that their opposition was stronger and more open than before
the war. This was due certainly to the heightened emotional tone, not
only of the American mind, but every group mind the world over.
During the war men and nations lived habitually under conditions of
excitement, uncertainty and tension. After the war the same
emotional tone remained to color whatever group ideas might
become associated with its action. So the whites who had drafted
negroes to fight for them resented these same negroes coming
home with the new pride of soldiers, remembering new equality of
treatment they had received from the French. The daughters of the
rich no longer danced with the poor, ignorant farm boys as they had
in every cantonment. Prejudice against the uniform returned, and
girls of certain classes would no longer care to be seen with soldiers
or sailors; as they had when those men were expressing the group
purpose by their very garments. And the hatred of the various
immigrant groups for each other—the hatred of the older American
groups against the immigrant, the Catholic and the Jew, returned
with redoubled force. As the present writer found occasion to note
directly after the close of the war:
70
During the war we felt that prejudice between men of different
groups and different faiths was lessening day by day, that our
common enthusiasm in our common cause had brought Catholics,
Protestants and Jews nearer together on the basis of their ardent
Americanism. Especially we who were at the front felt this in the first
flush of our co-operation, our mutual interest and our mutual
helpfulness.
This disappointment was common to many of us who had allowed
our hopes to run beyond our knowledge.
Another cause of this unusual strength of group hatreds was the
very repression of the war period. Individuals and sub-groups had
sacrificed their prejudices for the common purpose, but they had
done so without pleasure and as a sacrifice. Now they resumed their
group intolerance with redoubled zest due to long repression,
whether that had been voluntary or forced. The “white, gentile,
Protestant American” may have resented fighting on an equality with
the negro, or under the orders of a foreigner—now that resentment
had its vent. Never has group feeling run higher in America than in
this reaction from the sudden, violent and partially artificial unity
during our participation in the World War.
One notable result of this sudden relaxation of unity, this sudden
predominance of the subgroups, appeared in the phenomena of
displacement. Displacement is a common matter among paranoiacs,
where one object is substituted for another with the same meaning
and the same feeling-tone of resentment or of pleasure. It is also a
common characteristic of mobs, which may be called for this and
other reasons, a sort of social paranoiacs; the lynching mob will turn
from its intended victim to hang instead a public official or a
71
bystander who objects even mildly to its program. In this way the
hatreds of war-time were displaced. The hatred for the German was
displaced to the alien as a whole. The hatred and suspicion of
Russia, aroused when that nation drew out of the war, and
intensified when it adopted the radical economic program of the
Bolsheviki and the novel political rule of the Soviets, was displaced
and applied to all economic radicals, whether Russian or American.
Finally, the Jew was identified as a foreigner (even though he might
be American-born and a veteran of the war); and as a radical (even
though he might be an ultra-conservative capitalist). The ancient,
lingering anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism of ages past appeared
again; the Jew was not only a Christ-killer or a boor or a Semite,—for
no accusation was ever entirely dropped—he was also an alien and
a radical, an international banker and an enemy of gentile
civilization.
 CHAPTER VI.
THE KU KLUX KLAN AND OTHER GROUP
REACTIONS
The outstanding phenomenon of the post-war period was the Ku
Klux Klan. Other events which accompanied it were the new laws for
the limitation of immigration and the general suppression of civil
liberties of many kinds. The Klan had something to do with both of
these as cause and as effect. Moreover, all three—Klan, anti-alien
movement, anti-radical movement—were largely anti-Semitic in
sentiment; in addition to which there was a separate movement of
anti-Semitism based on the imported anti-Semitism from Europe.
Therefore in any study of anti-Semitism as a group reaction we must
also study these three group reactions of the post-war period, all of
them partially anti-Semitic, and all of them associated with the same
group-ideas and the same group-will as anti-Semitism itself.

1.
The Ku Klux Klan of the present is not the one of the
Reconstruction period in any sense. It has taken over the name, the
garb and much of the high-sounding ritual. But it has a new motive
and a new psychology. The old Klan was sectional; the new is
national. The old was anti-Northern and anti-negro; the new is anti-
alien, anti-negro, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. The old met a certain
emergency and was then disbanded by compulsion of the Federal
government and the action of its own leaders; the new has expanded
from the character of a fraternal society to that of a nation-wide
propaganda movement, has entered politics, and become one of the
leading political issues of the campaign of 1924. In other words, its
real ancestors are: not the Ku Klux Klan of the south in 1866–71, but
the Know-Nothing Party of the 50’s and the A. P. A. of the 90’s.
 The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915 in Atlanta, Ga., by
William J. Simmons, a former Protestant minister of strong
convictions, intense if narrow intellect, and great interest in the
organization and spreading of fraternal orders. For five years it grew
slowly and inconspicuously, during the period of the war and for two
years thereafter; in June 1920 it had about five thousand members
and was in financial straits. At this juncture it was taken up by Mr.
Edward Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who had had
experience in the new technique of propaganda. Under their skilled
hands the Klan at once grew with astounding rapidity; paid
organizers entered state after state, organized “Klaverns,” and
reaped great profits for themselves and for the heads of the
organization. But the commercial motive, while probably strong in a
few persons, was in no sense important in the actual membership of
the Klan and their acts. “Its official documents indicate that the Klan
originally was a purely fraternal and patriotic organization, one of the
72
hundreds of similar secret societies throughout the country.” The
New York World investigated the Klan in 1921, and a Congressional
investigation followed in October of that year, but both served rather
to advertise than to harm the organization. It spread rapidly
throughout the Union, claiming at one time as many as four million
members, elected senators and governors in a few instances, and in
several became the outstanding issue of state elections, sponsored
or was accused of innumerable acts of mob violence, ranging from
warnings to certain persons to discontinue their bootlegging or
immorality, up to beatings, tar-and-feather parties, and the notorious
Mer Rouge murders of 1922 in Louisiana.
We have already discussed the expansion of propaganda, so that
its enormous utilization by the Klan is quite comprehensible. But
even the constant reiteration of laudable motives and grandiloquent
phrases about Americanism cannot account for this sudden rise to
power; two other elements must be included—group prejudice and
secrecy. The Klan capitalized every prejudice of its group, which was
predominantly a small-town one, of American birth, Protestant
religion, and Anglo-Saxon either in race or in their opinion of their
race. And the Klan met in utter secrecy, did not divulge the names of
its members, paraded the streets in the disguise of robes and
masks, and carried out its deeds of violence in the same awe-
inspiring anonymity.
Clearly, the Klan is typical of the tendencies we have found in the
American mind after the war. It represents a subgroup revolting
against its voluntary sacrifices for the nation during the war. It
represents the anti-alien, anti-Catholic and now also anti-Jewish
sentiment, the reaction against the enormous wave of immigration
just at an end. It includes also the fear and hatred of the negro,
strongest in the old South but spreading to the North with the
northern migration of many negroes during and after the war. On the
Pacific coast the fear of the Japanese immigration enters into the
complex of hatreds. In other words, the Klan is the third wave of
Nativism. It is the great reaction of the subgroup to the intense
sacrifice for the nation during the war.

2.
Various other motives are implicated in this general complex. The
South furnished the original soil of the Klan; its second center was
the middle west, the old home of the A. P. A. It was weakest on the
Atlantic and Pacific coasts (except Oregon) where the various
immigrant groups actually live. It was weak in the heterogeneous
masses of the cities with their aliens, Catholics and Jews; strongest
in the small town, where men may talk of the Papal menace without
actually knowing many Catholics, of the Elders of Zion without
seeing personally more than one or two Jews a year. The attitude of
Nativism, the reaction to the immigration of huge masses of
foreigners, is still strongest where these foreigners themselves are
not in evidence.
This suggests that other motives must enter in, that something
else in the small-town American must have made the Klan
congenial. That something else is monotony, standardization (the
“Main Street” attitude), and the appeal of the Klan to these people
lay largely in its glamor of mystery, secrecy and hidden power. The
rise of fraternal orders is one of the note-worthy movements in
American life; there are now over six hundred of these societies in
the United States, of which four hundred ninety were organized
between 1880 and 1895. Over seven per cent. of our population is
affiliated with these orders, and their greatest strength is precisely in
the small town, where they are a bright spot in the dull social life, and
give a factitious importance to their “nobles” and “exalted rulers,” as
well as to the many who are permitted to enter into their secrets and
73
to parade in their regalia. Professor Mecklin classifies secret
societies in three groups: the beneficial societies, with whom secrecy
is merely protective; the social organizations, devised to give “variety
and interest to our poverty-stricken American life”; and finally, militant
societies with a general program which affects the entire nation, like
the old Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia, and the Fenians. He concludes that
the present Klan, while undoubtedly furnishing for many of its
members the release from monotony, the sense of power, the revolt
against repression, that is characteristic of the second class of
organizations, has also the characteristics of the third type and is
therefore a public problem. As he points out elsewhere in his book,
the disguise of the mask is a further danger, as it may be adopted by
members to persecute non-members in nameless ways, and even
presents an opportunity for non-Klansmen to indulge in violence
practically without fear of detection.
Professor Mecklin’s analysis of Klan psychology in Chapter IV of
his book presents several suggestive points. He says:
74
The strength of the Klan lies in that large, well-meaning, but more
or less ignorant and unthinking middle class, whose inflexible loyalty
has preserved with uncritical fidelity the traditions of the original
American stock.
75
Membership in a vast mysterious Empire means a sort of mystic
glorification of his petty self.
The Klan insists on like-mindedness, in the sense of adopting the
Anglo-Saxon ideals as the norm for America. Finally,
76
The Klan has literally battened upon the irrational fear
psychology that followed on the heels of the war.