(eBook PDF) Media and Communication

in Canada Networks, Culture,

Technology, Audience, Ninth 9th
Edition
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/ebook-pdf-media-and-communication-in-canada-netw
orks-culture-technology-audience-ninth-9th-edition/
Contents at a Glance
PA R T I The Sociocultural Context 1
Chapter 1 Defining the Field 2
Chapter 2 The History of Media: Social and Cultural Forms 29

PA R T II Theoretical Perspectives 59
Chapter 3 Media Content: Studying the Making of Meaning 60
Chapter 4 Perspectives on Media and Audiences 86
Chapter 5 Advertising and Promotional Culture 113
Chapter 6 Communication Technology and Society: Theory and Practice 142

PA R T III The Communication Environment 169

Chapter 7 The Formation of Public Policy 170
Chapter 8 Communication Policy: Sector by Sector 192
Chapter 9 Ownership and the Economics of Media 222
Chapter 10 Journalists as Content Producers 246

PA R T I V An Evolving Communication World 273

Chapter 11 Globalization 274
Chapter 12 Media and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward 298

Glossary 321
References 332
Index 352
Contents
List of Boxes xi
Preface xii
Acknowledgments xv
From the Publisher xvi

PA R T I The Sociocultural Context 1

1 Defining the Field 2 2 The History of Media: Social and
Introduction 3 Cultural Forms 29
Media in an Ever-Changing Introduction 30
Communications Universe 3 Society, Culture, and Media 30
Back to the Future 5 The European Roots of Media and Western
Media and Technology: A Brave New Society 33
World? 8 The Beginnings of the Modern Media: The
Our Approach 10 Newspaper, or “Press” 37
What Is Communication? Some Perspectives on the Media 39
Definitions and Models 11 Media and Canadian Realities: History and
Communication: Mass Audiences, and Structure 45
Mass Communication 13 Media and Canadian Culture 51
Media, Mass Media, and New Media 16 Summary 56
Convergence 18 Key Terms 56
Some Social Roles of Media 20 Related Websites 56
Summary 27 Further Readings 57
Key Terms 27 Study Questions 57
Related Websites 27
Further Readings 28
Study Questions 28

PA R T II Theoretical Perspectives 59
3 Media Content: Studying the Making Agency and Structure: A Key Concern in
of Meaning 60 the Study of Communication 70
Introduction 61 Perspectives on the Study of Content 71
Representation and Signification 61 Summary 84
Intertextuality, Polysemy, and the Key Terms 84
Indeterminacy of Representation 62 Related Websites 85
Communication Theory as Social Theory 65 Further Readings 85
The Encoding/Decoding Model 66 Study Questions 85
 Contents  |  ix

4 Perspectives on Media and Product Placement, Branded Content, and

Audiences 86 Native Advertising 137
Introduction 87 The Power of Advertising 138
Shifting Perspectives on Audience 88 Summary 140
Making Meaning in Context: Culture, Key Terms 140
Media, Audience 91 Related Websites 140
Industry Audience Research 105 Further Readings 141
The Shifting and Vanishing Audience: Study Questions 141
Opportunities and Risks 107
Summary 110 6 Communication Technology and
Key Terms 111 Society: Theory and Practice 142
Related Websites 111 Introduction 143
Further Readings 111 Perspectives on Technology 143
Study Questions 112 Thinking about Technology 147
Technology and Western Society 151
5 Advertising and Promotional Media Convergence 154
Culture 113 The Internet and Digitization 155
Introduction 114 Technological Change: A Cost–Benefit
What is Advertising and Promotional Analysis 159
Culture? 114 Summary 166
Economic and Cultural Impacts 117 Key Terms 167
A Brief History of Advertising 122 Related Websites 167
Commodities, Brands, and Markets 124 Further Readings 167
Market Segmentation 131 Study Questions 168

PA R T III The Communication Environment 169

7 The Formation of Public Policy 170 Further Readings 191
Study Questions 191
Introduction 171
Back to the Future 172 8 Communication Policy: Sector by
The Canadian Public in Public Policy Sector 192
Formation 174 Introduction 193
The Aird Commission, 1929 176 Telecommunications, Broadcasting, and
The Massey–Lévesque Commission, the Internet 196
1949–1951 179 Recorded Music 206
The Fowler Commission, 1956–1957 183 Cinema 208
The Applebaum–Hébert Committee, Publishing 215
1981–1982 184 Postal Service 218
Re-evaluating State Involvement in the Summary 220
Cultural Sphere 187 Key Terms 220
Summary 189 Related Websites 221
Key Terms 190 Further Readings 221
Related Websites 190 Study Questions 221
x  |  Contents
9 Ownership and the Economics of
Media 222
Introduction 223
Particularities of Media Economics 224
Satisfying Needs and Wants 226
Organizing Structures 230
Public Ownership 234
Private Ownership 236
Implications of Private Media
Ownership 239
New Labour Issues 241
Media Democratization 243
Summary 244
Key Terms 245
Related Websites 245
Further Readings 245
Study Questions 245
PA R T I V An Evolving Communication World
11 Globalization 274
Introduction 275
Defining Terms 275
Mass Media as Agents
of Globalization 280
Global Information Trade 283
Theories of Globalization 286
New World Information and
Communication Order (NWICO)
From NWICO to WSIS 290
Changing Notions of Place 291
Summary 295
Key Terms 296
Related Websites 296
Further Readings 296
Study Questions 297
Glossary 321
References 332
Index 352
10 Journalists as Content Producers 246
Introduction 247
News as Content Production 248
Ideals of Journalism 252
Journalism as a Textual Practice 258
Journalism as a Sociocultural
Institution 260
Legal Parameters Governing
Journalism 263
Economics of News Production 264
The Future of Journalism 266
Summary 270
Key Terms 270
Related Websites 271
Further Readings 271
Study Questions 272
273
12 Media and Communication: Looking
Back, Looking Forward 298
Introduction 299
The Shifting Character of Media 299
Communication and Democracy 301
Content and Audiences 303
The Social Dimensions of Media and
Communication 306
289 Issues and Policy Trends 313
Shifting Economic Currents 315
“Free” Market for Cultural Products? 317
Summary 320
Key Terms 320
Related Websites 320
Study Questions 320
List of Boxes
Box 1.1 Canadians Are #1 in Internet Usage on Box 8.1 Telecommunications Act, Section 7 198
the Planet According to the World Atlas 4 Box 8.2 Broadcasting Act, Section 3:
Box 1.2 The Various Ways We Communicate 17 “Broadcasting Policy for Canada” 202
Box 1.3 O Canada: Our Home and Naïve Land 21 Box 8.3 The MAPL System—Defining a
Box 1.4 The Two-Step Flow of Communication 22 Canadian Song 208
Box 1.5 What Is Capitalism? 25 Box 8.4 Copyright, by Sara Bannerman 209
Box 2.1 The Commodity and Communication 38 Box 8.5 The Video-Game Industry in Canada:
Box 2.2 A Dark Side of Canadian History 47 A Snapshot, by Greig de Peuter and
Box 2.3 Economies of Scale 48 Chris J. Young 213
Box 2.4 Broadcasting and Nation-Building 49 Box 9.1 The Canadian Market 227
Box 2.5 The Economics of Media Representation 50 Box 9.2 The Myth of Meritocracy 229
Box 3.1 Media/Culture Binding 69 Box 9.3 The Means of Production 232
Box 3.2 On Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds81 Box 9.4 Public Ownership 234
Box 4.1 The Language of Movies and Television 94 Box 9.5 Precarious Labour, by Errol Salamon 242
Box 4.2 Feminism and Media Studies, Box 10.1 Networked Journalism 249
by Tamara Shepherd 100 Box 10.2 Pushing and Pulling 252
Box 4.3 Fan Studies, by Steve Bailey 104 Box 10.3 Fake News 254
Box 4.4 The Audience Commodity 108 Box 10.4 John Milton’s Areopagitica 255
Box 4.5 Monetizing the Web: Turning the Box 10.5 Freedom of the Press 256
Audience into Media Professionals 109 Box 10.6 Ethnocultural Media, by April Lindgren 260
Box 5.1 Word of Mouth Marketing 116 Box 10.7 The Marriage between Journalism and
Box 5.2 Identity Politics, by Kisha McPherson 121 Marketing266
Box 5.3 Ratings, Analytics, and Click Farms 130 Box 10.8 Journalism without Journalists? 267
Box 5.4 The Internet of Things 133 Box 10.9 Podcasting, by Andrea Hunter 268
Box 5.5 Smart Cities and Surveillance Box 10.10 Will Canadians Pay for Online News? 269
Capitalism139 Box 11.1 Canada’s Changing Profile 277
Box 6.1 Time Bias 145 Box 11.2 Indigenous Media Activity 279
Box 6.2 Space Bias 146 Box 11.3 Second Thoughts about Globalization 281
Box 6.3 Cyborgs 149 Box 11.4 The Digital Divide 292
Box 6.4 Platforms or Walled Gardens?, Box 11.5 The Age of Migration 294
by Fenwick McKelvey 153 Box 12.1 The Media Co-op 301
Box 6.5 Edward Snowden: Hero or Traitor? 163 Box 12.2 Advocating for Change 304
Box 6.6 A Panoptic Society? 164 Box 12.3 National Campus and Community Radio
Box 7.1 Defining Terms: Legislation, Regulation, Association/Association Nationale des
Policy171 Radios Étudiantes et Communautaires
Box 7.2 Charles Dickens 174 (NCRA/ANREC)308
Box 7.3 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 175 Box 12.4 Kondratiev Waves: Tracking
Box 7.4 Major Communication Policy Documents 176 Technological Change 312
Box 7.5 Canadian Radio League 179 Box 12.5 The Radical Fringes of the Long Tail 317
Box 7.6 Deregulation or Reregulation? 189
Preface
G
iven the rapidly changing mediascape,
every revision of this textbook ends up
as a significant overhaul. This time we
have even changed the title. If, as outlined in
Chapter 1, mass communication is still a key ele-
ment of Canadian media digitization, the new
media forms that have accompanied digitization
have restructured the field to the extent that
we thought that it was time to acknowledge the
changes in the name of the book itself. So we
have changed the title from Mass Communication
in Canada to Media and Communication in Canada.
If digitization has altered our communication
habits, redrawn the map of our communications
world, changed how we engage with media, and
shaken to the core the communications indus-
tries themselves, digitization has also had an
impact on every chapter in this book. Think, for
example, of how anachronistic some of our ter-
minology has become. Is it adequate any more
to talk about media consumers, when many
of us are also engaged in some form of media
production, whether that entails posting and
sharing content on social media sites, contrib-
uting reviews of movies and TV shows, sub-
mitting online comments about news stories,
or developing our own podcasts and websites?
When we talk about radio, television, film,
books, magazines, or newspapers, do we mean
the analog version, the online version, or the
mobile version? What does watching TV or lis-
tening to music mean, when these activities can
take place almost anywhere and anytime, using
different devices? What, exactly, are we talking
about? These questions preoccupied us at every
stage of revising and updating this edition of
the book.
This is not to suggest that in this time of tran-
sition everything is new. Certainly, one of the
challenges in revising this textbook is separating
what is fundamentally new and different from
what only appears new. Yes, there are always new
gadgets, new apps, or new services. But which
of these truly alters how we communicate, and
which is simply old wine in a new bottle?
The increase in our access to information is
typically celebrated, but one of the things we
believe to be fundamentally new is the extent
to which we are under constant surveillance,
as both government agencies and corporations
exploit new media technologies to track, store,
analyze, influence, and act upon our communica-
tions and our behaviours. One new development
in this area is the extensive use of social media
networks by foreign states, extremist groups, and
their proxies to intervene in political debates and
otherwise democratic elections.
Working conditions in the media industries
have also changed fundamentally, in both the
private and public sectors; secure and perma-
nent positions are being replaced by precarious
contract work, employers are demanding greater
rights to sell and distribute that work across
numerous platforms and through digital archiv-
ing, and workers are being asked to produce their
work for multiple platforms while at the same
time facing greater competition from the under-
paid labour of freelancers and the free labour of
interns and amateurs.
What is not new is the power that media cor-
porations exert in an increasingly commercial-
ized mediasphere. If there remains considerable
talk about the democratization of communica-
tion thanks to the accessibility of digital media,

corporations continue to consolidate their
power by growing larger, by integrating their
operations across the full range of analog and
digital media, by using their human and capital
resources to produce and distribute content with
high production values, and by employing their
promotional and marketing power to grab the
attention of audiences and advertising markets.
In other words, the tools available to citizens are
also available to corporations, governments, and
other organizations with the resources to fully
exploit these tools.
Another thing that is not new is the way in
which this book focuses on communication in
Canada and adopts a critical perspective. With
the Canadian population being relatively small
and spread thinly across a vast geography bor-
dering the United States, the media in this
country are fundamental to understanding our
friends, neighbours, and fellow citizens, as well
as our place in the world. They are key to visualiz-
ing the unique circumstances that drive our prob-
lems, challenges, and ambitions. In other words,
media sit at the heart of the forces that animate
the Canadian polity. From this perspective, they
are central to the democratic process, revealing
and accommodating difference, and building
common vision and goals. At the same time, Can-
adian governments at all levels draft laws, enforce
regulations, fund institutions, and enact policies
that shape our mediascape in fundamental ways.
This can include prohibitions on things ranging
from hate speech and online bullying to state and
corporate surveillance, and it can include support
instruments for particular media sectors and the
production of certain kinds of content.
For all these reasons, having a Canadian focus,
like the one we take in Media and Communication
in Canada, Ninth Edition, is key to understanding
the place and role of media in Canadian society.
Not only is this edition of Media and Communi-
cation fully updated with new examples, illustra-
tions, and statistics, but it is also loaded with new
content, reflecting both the shifting dimensions
of the field of media and mass communication
and the social and political implications of these
Preface  |  xiii
shifts. Perhaps the biggest single challenge has
been to document and analyze the growing influ-
ence that digitization and new media are having
on our society; while we take digital media for
granted today, they remain relatively new—for
instance, the World Wide Web is only 30 years
old—and they still coexist with analog versions.
This is not to say that technology is the primary
driver of social change, but media are certainly
implicated in the shifting social, political, and
economic dimensions of our society, and under-
standing their role in that regard is a key focus of
this book.
A notable part of this edition’s new content
is a chapter devoted to advertising and promo-
tional culture. Previous editions have discussed
advertising and marketing, of course, but given
the ubiquity of advertising and related forms of
promotional messages carried by the media, we
felt it deserved much more thorough treatment.
Part I, “The Sociocultural Context,” situates
media and mass communication within this lar-
ger context, and revisions in this section largely
focus on how digitization and new media are
implicated in the ways in which our daily lives
and society are being restructured along social,
political, economic, and geographic dimensions.
We have also revised the theoretical elements of
these chapters, more fully integrating them with
the historical context of their development.
In Chapter 1, we provide a broad introduction
to the themes and ideas presented in the book,
defining terms such as communication, mass com-
munication, and convergence. Here, we introduce
key models for understanding the social dimen-
sions of communication, and we consider the
ways in which communication systems are cen-
tral to orienting us within the world.
Chapter 2 takes a historical look at the rela-
tionships between communication, society, and
culture. Terms such as culture, society, capitalism,
and information and communication technology
(ICT) are defined and discussed, and the roles of
media and communication in the political and
cultural dimensions of society are further elab-
orated. We examine different theories of the
xiv  |  Preface
political role of media in this context, and we go
on to consider the ways in which the distinctive
elements of the social, political, and physical
geographies of the Canadian state have nuanced
the form and structure of the Canadian media.
Part II, “Theoretical Perspectives,” surveys
prominent theories pertaining to content, audi-
ences, and media as vehicles for advertising and
promotional culture, and technology.
In Chapter 3, we introduce terms that
describe some basic characteristics of the process
of communication and media content. Working
with a model that describes communication as a
process of encoding and decoding, we introduce
a number of common theoretical and methodo-
logical perspectives used to study media content
and illustrate how these theories relate to the
production of meaning and the larger social prac-
tice of communication.
Chapter 4 addresses the dynamic interaction
between media and audiences, such that audience
members actively and selectively interpret media
content based on frameworks of understanding
they bring to that content. Such a perspective pro-
vides a means for explaining how media, audiences,
and culture interact in a non-deterministic fashion
and, particularly, how audiences engage with media.
Chapter 5 examines how advertising and pro-
motional culture are deeply tied to the workings
of both our economy and our culture, especially
given their ubiquity and their symbiotic relation-
ship with the media.
We have revised Chapter 6 to further empha-
size the point that technology refers not merely
to communications hardware and software, but
as well to ways in which production practices
are organized and, relatedly, to the point that all
technologies are embedded within a social, cul-
tural, political, and economic context.
Our discussion of technology serves as a nice
bridge to Part III, “The Communication Environ-
ment,” where we explore the structured context
within which mass communication in Canada
takes place today.
In Chapter 7, we review the history of cul-
tural policy development in Canada. It has been
updated to provide a better link between the
approaches that characterized policy for most of
the twentieth century and government responses
to the circumstances facing the various com-
munications sectors today. Chapter 8 surveys the
challenges and policy responses across the vari-
ous communication sectors. The ongoing conver-
gence of Canada’s cultural industries is central to
this discussion, as are its impacts on what were
once the separate media silos of telecommunica-
tions, broadcasting, music recording, film, new
media, publishing, and the postal service.
Chapter 9 addresses media ownership and the
economics of mass communication in a period
when new business models are being explored,
changing the game for media organizations,
those who work for them, and audience mem-
bers. In Chapter 10, we bring together a number
of themes in the book by providing a concrete
discussion of journalism as a particular, and sig-
nificantly transformed, means of content pro-
duction. We situate the practice of journalists in
an evolving media environment that brings into
play ideals, laws, settings, storytelling conven-
tions, and economic imperatives.
Part IV, “An Evolving Communications
World,” is the last section of the book. It situ-
ates Canadians’ communications within a global
context. In Chapter 11, we define what globaliz-
ation means and survey a number of theoretical
currents while, at the same time, underscoring
the point that the activities and institutions we
have described throughout the book are not,
and have never been, cut off from the rest of the
world. Chapter 12 provides the conclusions and
includes a concise summary of the ideas and per-
spectives covered in the book, while pointing the
way to future study and directions of growth and
development in the mass communication field.
While the renamed Media and Communication
in Canada continues to evolve from the first edi-
tion published under the title Mass Communica-
tion in Canada in 1987, it also continues to bear
the stamp of the vision and foresight of its ori-
ginal authors, Rowland “Rowly” Lorimer and
Jean McNulty. Their goal of providing a rigorous,

theoretically informed introduction to the field of
communication studies from a Canadian perspec-
tive continues to be the guiding force behind this
book. Canadians’ experience of media is unique,
and we believe it is critical that those studying
the media in Canada understand and appreciate
the particularities of the Canadian mediascape.
Those who have used this book in the past
have no doubt noticed that Rowly’s name has been
replaced by a new author, Natalie Coulter. Rowly
has retired from the School of Communication at
Simon Fraser University and, after serving as the
guiding force through the first eight editions of
what came to be known as “the Lorimer book,” has
entrusted us with continuing, and building upon,
its legacy. Aside from conceiving of the book’s
approach and its initial structure, Rowly was also
a mentor to his co-authors. Mike Gasher had been
an undergraduate student in the Canadian Stud-
ies program that Rowly directed, and Rowly later
supervised Mike’s MA thesis in Simon Fraser’s
communication program. When Mike completed
his PhD in communication studies at Concordia
University in 1999 and joined Concordia’s journal-
ism department as an assistant professor, Rowly
invited him to co-author the fourth edition. David
Skinner was an undergraduate student of Rowly’s
at Simon Fraser and had taught various versions
of Mass Communication in Canada as a lecturer and
later as a professor in the Department of Com-
munication Studies at York University. David
became a co-author as of the sixth edition, pub-
lished in 2008. Mike and David have learned a great
deal from Rowly Lorimer over the years: about all
facets of the Canadian mediascape to be sure, but
also how best to convey that information to stu-
dents, both directly, as an instructor in the class-
room, and through a textbook such as this.
With Rowly’s retirement, Mike and David
invited Natalie Coulter to join the team. Nat-
alie, also a Simon Fraser alum, is an assistant
professor in the Department of Communication
Studies at York University. Her central research
interests include girls’ studies, critical adver-
tising studies, and the media of children and
young people. She is a founding member of the
Preface  |  xv
Association for Research on the Cultures of
Young People, and is completing a SSHRC-funded
research project entitled The Embodied Tween:
Living Girlhood in Global and Digital Spaces. She is
the author of Tweening the Girl: The Crystalliza-
tion of the Tween Market (2014), co-editor of the
special issue, “Locating Tween Girls,” of the jour-
nal Girlhood Studies (2018), and co-editor of the
collection Youth Mediations and Affective Relations
(2018). Natalie has used earlier editions of Mass
Communication in Canada as a textbook numer-
ous times in courses she taught at both the col-
lege and university levels.
Acknowledgments
We—Mike, David, and Natalie—would like to
thank our colleagues who provided the special-
ized box material included with the chapters, as
well as our partners Dianne Arbuckle, Jennefer
Laidley, and Troy Hammond for their constant
support. We appreciate the helpful comments of
both the named and anonymous reviewers of the
text, including
Darren Blakeborough, University of the
Fraser Valley
Andrea Braithwaite, University of Ontario
Institute of Technology
Lisa Broda, University of Saskatchewan
Rita Isola, Capilano University
Sandra Jeppesen, Lakehead University
Ravindra N. Mohabeer, Vancouver Island
University
Wade Nelson, University of Winnipeg
Kathryn Pallister, Red Deer College
Gregory Taylor, University of Calgary
We also thank the editorial, management,
and sales teams at Oxford University Press Can-
ada for their work and continued support of this
book. We are particularly thankful to acquisitions
editor Stephen Kotowych and the editor of the
ninth edition, Lauren Wing, for their efforts in
shepherding us through this revision.
From the Publisher
T
he ninth edition of Media and Communi-
cation in Canada builds on the successful
approach used in the previous editions
that has served instructors and students well.
It gives first-time students a comprehensive,
engaging, and clear introduction to the study of
media and communication, ensuring that they
understand the subject matter in sociological,
political, technological, and economic terms.
The coverage of the topics in the text retains
the best features of the previous edition while
adding new information on current trends and
changes in media:
• New discussion of franchise formats in media
(Chapter 3)
• New analysis of the changing nature of TV
(Chapter 4)
• A brand new chapter on advertising and pro-
motional media (Chapter 5)
• New discussion of the regulation of music
streaming services (Chapter 8)
• Increased content on indigenous media and
reconciliation (Chapters 8, 11)
• New discussion of fake news and the post-
truth era (Chapter 10)
• Increased content on diversity, representa-
tion, and ethnocultural media (Chapter 10)
Thoroughly revised and updated, this authori-
tative guide explores the shifting nature of media
and communication systems by examining trad-
itional and new media, and a wealth of current
media issues and trends. Highlighting historical
and social contexts, theoretical perspectives, and
cutting-edge research and debates, Media and
Communication in Canada will help students think
critically about the place and role of media and
communication in their own lives and in Can-
adian society.
Contributed boxes from Canadian communi-
cation scholars give students an in-depth yet
accessible look into the latest studies, media
issues, and trends in the field:
Box 4.2 “Feminism and Media Studies” by
Tamara Shepherd
Box 4.3 “Fan Studies” by Steve Bailey
Box 5.2 “Identity Politics” by Kisha
McPherson
Box 6.4 “Platforms or Walled Gardens?” by
Fenwick McKelvey
Box 8.4 “Copyright” by Sara Bannerman
Box 8.5 “The Video-Game Industry in Canada:
A Snapshot” by Greig de Peuter and
Chris J. Young
Box 9.5 “Precarious Labour” by Errol
Salamon
Box 10.6 “Ethnocultural Media” by April
Lindgren
Box 10.9 “Podcasting” by Andrea Hunter
 From the Publisher   |  xvii

5
Advertising and Promotional Culture
Advertising is capitalism’s way of saying “I love you” to itself.
—Michael Schudson

A brand new chapter on advertising and

promotional media examines the relation-
ship between advertising and media.

Torontonian / Alamy Stock Photo

Opening Questions
• How are advertising and promotion a cultural
force?
• What theoretical perspectives are used to study
and understand the relationships between
advertising and promotion and the media?
• How is advertising a form of ideology?
• How do advertising and promotion change in 136 | Part II Theoretical Perspectives
digital media?
• What are some of the ways that the media
functions as a system to deliver audiences to
advertisers?

gas33218_ch05_113-141.indd 113 12/14/19 05:49 PM

https://www.instagram.com/p/-m1gpYPssb/.

A contemporary design reflects the digital,

quickly changing world of communication in Fed Ex’s holiday campaign #howtheholidaysarrive enlisted influencers like Julia Engel of the blog Gal Meets Glam to create
content for the campaign.

which we live. Influencers engage in promotional culture

by three means, according to Crystal Abidin’s
research on selfies and Instagrammers. First, they
disseminate content by sharing, liking, retweet-
ing, and pinning, depending on the social media
platform. This requires no action from their fol-
lowers but merely pushes out content. Second,
254 | Part III The Communication Environment
they aggregate by inviting their followers to
respond to a dedicated thread. This includes con-
tests, surveys, or questionnaires, sometimes to
win a prize. This amplifies the original content.
Promotion in digital capitalism relies on people
to become creative labourers who do the work for
little or no compensation. Instead, their creative
work becomes part of the marketing and promo-
tion of brands. For example, a growing form of
advertising production is sourced from audience
members as companies call on audiences to craft
commercials themselves. Frito-Lay, for instance,
has run consumer-produced ads, otherwise
known as user-generated content, on the Super
Bowl broadcast for several years, and companies

10.3
Fake News
The proper functioning of democratic society
depends on a number of institutions providing its
citizens with information that is factual, accurate,
verifiable, trustworthy, and credible: government
(through agencies such as Statistics Canada), the
legal system (courts, police), the education system
(through both research and teaching), the medical
establishment (from doctors to researchers), and
journalism. Factual information forms the basis of
every kind of decision-making process.
If fake news has a long history—think of the
trashy tabloid newspapers and celebrity maga-
zines displayed at supermarket checkouts—it has
become a much more serious problem given the
ease with which social media networks can be
deployed to fabricate or distort news reports and
images.
The erosion of public trust is a serious threat,
as media theorist Roger Silverstone argues: “For
the media to be viable they have to be trusted by
their addressees” (2007: 124). Once that trust is
lost, Silverstone maintains, it is almost impossible
to restore.
And finally, they instigate by encouraging follow- such as Starbucks and General Motors have also
Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have described
ers to generate or recreate content by uploading capitalized on this trend of having consumers/
journalism as a “discipline of verification” as
videos onto websites or feeds (2016). Abidin sug- fans produce digital content. If nothing else, the
opposed to a “discipline of assertion.” They write, gests that followers become “a network of adver- hype around such contests in itself generates
“In the end, the discipline of verification is what torial capillaries by duplicating, amplifying, and an excitement for the brand and strengthens
separates journalism from entertainment, propa- multiplying” the influencer content to their own audience attention to those ads. In Canada, the
ganda, fiction, or art” (2001: 71). circle of friends (2016: 4). What this means is that brand Hotels.com famously had people create and
Methods of verification have taken on renewed it is not simply the influencers themselves but also upload videos of themselves as Captain Obvious,
importance given the increasingly open access their followers whose digital labour is exploited. the brand spokesperson. The winning video was
to media networks, and social media in particu-
lar. The Knight Foundation (Hindman and Barash,
2018) conducted a study of “the fake news eco-
system” in the aftermath of the 2016 US presi-
dential election, which was subjected to numerous
and sophisticated disinformation campaigns. Ana-
gas33218_ch05_113-141.indd 136 12/14/19 05:49 PM
lyzing 10 million tweets from 700,000 Twitter
accounts linked to more than 600 “fake and con-
spiracy news outlets” in a 30-day period in spring
2017, the Knight Foundation concluded that “dis-
information continues to be a substantial problem
postelection.” It tracked 4 million tweets linked to
fake news and conspiracy producers, estimating
that 70 per cent of the sites were automated (3–4).
New boxed content appears throughout
The subsequent Donald Trump presidency in
the United States has been noteworthy in prompt-
to promote further learning.
ing news organizations like the Washington Post
(see Rizzo, 2018) and the New York Times (see Qiu,
2018) to publish regularly the results of fact-check-
ing White House statements. And, of course, news
consumers have greater capacity to do their own
fact-checking (see Silverman, 2007).

A number of scholars have critiqued veracity—of media messages. Third, communica-

this normative definition of journalism as
a democratic practice. Journalism historian
Michael Schudson argues, “There is no doubting
. . . the importance of the press to a democracy.
But the press by itself is not democracy and does
tion does not guarantee harmony or consensus
(Gingras, 2006: 3–4). The media, Gingras argues,
are caught in a conflict between their commer-
cial interests and their political responsibilities;
producing quality information does not ensure
xviii  |  From the Publisher

Aids to Student Learning

Numerous features promoting student
­learning are incorporated throughout the
book. They include the following: 2
Opening Questions help students The History of Media
Social and Cultural Forms
focus their reading at the outset of each
The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore.

chapter by asking the questions that the —American essayist Sam Smith

chapter will explore and answer.

Summary sections review key concepts
and objectives at the end of each chapter.
Lists of Key Terms highlight the
important words in each chapter that stu-
dents might want to explore further.
Related Websites and Further
­Readings offer more resources for stu-
dents who seek to expand their knowledge
EQRoy/Shutterstock

of media and communication. Opening Questions

Study Questions at the end of each • What were the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment? Why are they important to
• How do libertarian theory, the social
responsibility theory of the press, the mass

chapter are a great tool for study and review.

contemporary notions of citizenship and
democracy?
• What were the roles and purposes of
media as they developed in industrial
society?
society thesis, and critical political economy each
conceive of the role(s) of the media in society?
• What are the distinctive characteristics of the
Canadian state that have helped shape its
communication systems?

gas33218_ch02_029-058.indd 29 01/10/20 12:29 PM

84 | Part II Theoretical Perspectives 3 Media Content | 85

sign, p. 61 social theory, p. 65

development of the internet and cheap digital
media production tools, such as cameras and
software (Clements, 2018). Fan fiction also spans
practically all mediums, as it often plays upon
both well-known and obscure works. As noted in
Chapter 1, stories involving popular media prod-
ucts such as Star Wars or Harry Potter have some-
times landed in trouble with copyright law (Kluft,
2016). But, in other instances, copyright owners
have encouraged the efforts. While some see the
genre as lacking originality, as one fan fiction
writer responded to one critic, “I said, ‘Have you
ever played an instrument?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I
play piano’. I said, ‘So, do you compose all your
own music?’” (Novik, in Clements, 2018). Today,
fan fiction is often seen as a creative genre of its
own, and several websites allow tens of thousands
of fans to share, document, and celebrate it.
signified, p. 62
signifier, p. 61
RELATED WEBSITES
Adbusters: www.adbusters.org/
Adbusters describes itself as “an international col-
lective of artists, designers, poets, punks, writers, dir-
ectors, musicians, philosophers, drop outs, and wild
hearts”—an interesting media-based alternative to
dominant cultural ideas and values.
Archive of Our Own: archiveofourown.org/
A self-described “fan-created, fan-run, nonprofit, non-
commercial archive for transformative fanworks, like
fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic.”
structuralism, p. 72
symbol, p. 62
Media Smarts: www.mediasmarts.ca
Media Smarts provides information and insightful analy-
sis of various media issues, including violence in the
media.
Media Education Foundation: www.mediaed.org
This organization specializes in videos about media,
culture, and society.
Semiotics and Advertising: www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/
semiotics_and_ads/
A website on semiotics created by Professor Tom
Streeter of the University of Vermont.

SUMMARY FURTHER READINGS

In this chapter, we have examined the creation and
interpretation of media content, or, as the semioticians
say, the process of signification. We considered the
use of social theory in this context, and how it provides
important insights into how symbols, such as the words
and ideas contained in language, are constructed and
used to interpret the world of objects, events, persons,
and even representations.
The study of representation involves under-
standing the nature of polysemy, intertextuality, and
grounded indeterminate systems. In less-technical
words, it involves understanding how messages are
open to a variety of interpretations, how interpreta-
tions depend on other representations, and how there
is bound to be a finite but unpredictable number of
interpretations of the object, event, or phenomenon
being represented.
KEY TERMS
connotative meaning, p. 63
content analysis, p. 79
decoding, p. 66
denotative meaning, p. 63
discourse analysis, p. 76
encoding, p. 66
fan fiction, p. 83
We examined a number of approaches used to
understand and analyze media content. They included
theoretical perspectives—such as literary criticism; struc-
turalism, semiotics, and post-structuralism; discourse
analysis; and critical political economy—and methodo-
logical orientations, such as content analysis and genre/
media form analysis. We presented media theory as a
way of understanding the assumptions people make
about the relationships between media texts and larger
social relationships and forces, whereas the methods
were seen as a means of differentiating or analyzing
different kinds of content. Each has particular strengths
and draws out various forces playing on content.
Understanding the relationships between media
content and different individuals, social groups, and
larger social forces is key to understanding the role of
communication in our society.
icon, p. 62
index, p. 62
intertextuality, p. 62
polysemic, p. 63
representation, p. 61
rhetoric, p. 64
semiotics, p. 61
Canadian Journal of Communication. The central journal
for communication studies research in Canada.
Hall, Stuart, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon. 2013.
Representation, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage. An
excellent introduction to theories of representation
and meaning.
Krippendorff, Klaus. 2018. Content Analysis: An Introduc-
tion to Its Methodology, 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage. An excellent primer on content analysis.
STUDY QUESTIONS
1. Use the encoding/decoding model to analyze a
popular TV program such as The Simpsons. What
kinds of shared ideas and social values do the
program’s writers draw on to tell the story? Why do
you think the writers picked these to include in the
program? How do the scheduling and structure of
the program reflect the fact that it is a commercial
television show?
2. Perform a semiotic analysis of a magazine adver-
tisement for a product (e.g., automobile, cologne)
or a company. What are the signifiers used in
constructing the ad? What are the signifieds? How
do they work together to construct meaning? How
many different meanings can be taken from the ad?
Media, Culture and Society. This is the pre-eminent Brit-
ish media studies journal, founded in the 1970s by
five young media scholars.
Mosco, Vincent. 2009. The Political Economy of Com-
munication, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. A
good overview of the history and application of the
political economy of communication.
3. How do the different elements of the encod-
ing/decoding model work to enable and
constrain human agency in the process of
communication?
4. Discuss how politics and economics work to
both enable and constrain the Canadian media
system.
5. Undertake a content analysis of a major news
story (the story may be covered over a number of
days in a variety of articles across many publica-
tions). Who are the major sources quoted in the
story? What perspectives/sources appear to have
been left out?

gas33218_ch03_059-085.indd 84 12/14/19 05:46 PM gas33218_ch03_059-085.indd 85 12/14/19 05:46 PM


Instructor and
Student Supplements
Accompanying the Text
Media and Communication in Canada is part of a
comprehensive package of learning and teaching
tools that includes resources for both students and
instructors all available in the Ancillaries Resource
Centre (arc): www.oup.com/he/Gasher9e.
For the Instructor
An instructor’s manual includes overviews of
each chapter, learning objectives, sample lecture
outlines, overviews of key concepts, lists of online
resources, review questions, and suggestions for
student assignments, activities, and debates.
A test bank offers a comprehensive set of
multiple choice, true/false, short-answer, and
From the Publisher   |  xix
discussion questions, with suggested answers,
for every chapter.
PowerPoint slides summarizing key points
from each chapter, and incorporating figures and
tables from the textbook, are available to adopt-
ers of the text.
Instructors should contact their Oxford Uni-
versity Press sales representative for details on
these supplements and for login and password
information.
For the Student
A Student Study Guide offers chapter over-
views, related websites, study questions, and
self-grading quizzes.
To access these useful features, go to www.
oup.com/he/Gasher9e and follow the links!
 I
The Sociocultural Context

Rick Rudnicki/Alamy Stock Photo

1 Defining the Field

2 The History of Media: Social and Cultural Forms
 1
Defining the Field
Without communication, what is there? —Anonymous

izusek/iStockphoto

Opening Questions
• What is communication?
• What are communication media?
• How important are media to our knowledge and
understanding of the world?
• How have shifts in communication media
contributed to changing our understanding
of the world?
• What are some of the larger social roles of
media?

Introduction
Media lie at the heart of our contemporary world.
From cellphones to Facebook, television to blogs,
newspapers to satellites, Twitter to Google,
media and communication systems are central
to our understanding of the world and how we
coordinate our actions within it. In this textbook,
we provide an introduction to the study of media
and communication and their relationships
to larger social institutions and processes. We
examine their history, the ways in which they are
woven into different elements and processes that
form the dimensions of our lives, and various
ways of interpreting how they shape and nuance
our perspectives and experience of the world.
We introduce these themes and ideas in this
chapter, illustrating the shifting nature of com-
munication technology, considering how media
and communication systems are central to the
functioning and operation of our society, and
examining the ways in which they orient us to
the world. We examine traditional media, digital
media, and social media, and we consider the
ways they frame our perspectives. We provide
definitions for terms such as communication
and convergence, and we present two models
of the process of communication. As you work
through the text and our exploration of the
field of communication, these definitions and
models will provide the basis for building a com-
mon understanding of the subjects under study.
Finally, in preparation for developing broader
theoretical perspectives on media as social and
1 Defining the Field   |  3
cultural forms, this chapter goes on to outline
and examine some of the social roles of media
and communication.
Media in an Ever-changing
Communications Universe
Media are central to the ways in which, as indi-
viduals, we come to know and understand the
world. As Isaiah Berlin puts it, they are “part of
the ‘general texture of experience’” (Silverstone,
1999: 2). They are involved in almost all aspects of
our lives—deciding on a career, getting an edu-
cation, thinking about politics and government,
finding the music we listen to, getting a job, pur-
chasing clothes, planning a date, deciding what
to eat and where to buy it, paying bills, and find-
ing a place to live. Media help us decide what we
need and want, why we care, and even who we
are. They frame our focus on the world, draw us
in, and entwine us in an artfully crafted patch-
work of events and circumstances. From deep
ocean trenches to inside volcanoes, and from
local neighbourhoods to the surfaces of the moon
and Mars, media carry us across space. They also
play on how we experience time, providing win-
dows on news and events unfolding currently in
“real” time, as well as how we experience things
that happened hours, days, or even years ago.
Statistics indicate how pervasive media
are in people’s lives. Canadians spend an aver-
age of 26.6 hours per week watching television
and 16.6 hours per week listening to the radio
DOONESBURY © 2010 G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted
with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL
SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.
4  |   Part I The Sociocultural Context

(CRTC, 2017); 90 per cent of Canadians use the
internet, 74 per cent spend 3–4 hours a day
online, and 42 per cent of households have five
or more internet-­connected devices (CIRA, 2018).
But not only are communication media key
to our individual lives, they are also central to
the larger organization and functioning of our
society. Media help bind Canadians together
with common ideas and understandings of
our culture. From maple leaves to hockey
to health care and beyond, they create what
Benedict Anderson (1983) calls an “imagined
­community” and help construct and feed our
­conceptions about ­Canada and what it means to
be ­Canadian. Media are the major means through
which ­governments—­federal, provincial, and
­municipal—communicate with residents and
citizens. (It may surprise you to know that gov-
ernment is the largest single advertiser in this
country!) They are the primary way that busi-

1.1
nesses develop and communicate with ­customers.
Media are also key agents in globalization. They
are the central vehicle for controlling the world
economy and the movement of goods and servi-
Canadians Are #1 in ces around the globe—for example, coordinat-
Internet Usage on the ing centres of production in China with markets
in Canada. And media also introduce people to
Planet According to the different cultures and keep immigrants in touch
World Atlas with the countries from which they moved.
Media also work to generate a global cultural con-
Canadians spend an average of 43.5 hours
online per month, making us the top users of the
sciousness through blanket coverage of political
internet globally. As we discuss in ­Chapter 11, and economic news from around the world, mass
however, what this average masks is how people sports events such as the Olympics and soccer’s
living in urban centres, and those with higher World Cup, and global tragedies such as airline
incomes, have better access to the internet disasters, earthquakes, and hurricanes. They also
than those living in rural areas or those with
help raise our consciousness about our roles in
lower incomes.
impending environmental disasters, like global
warming. In this heavily mediated world, where
Average Hours Spent Online per the implications of one person’s or country’s
Person per Month actions can span the globe, “think globally, act
Country Hours locally” has become the new universal ­mantra,
Canada 43.5 and media are the vehicles through which such
United States 35.3 actions are coordinated.
United Kingdom 32.3 Twenty-five years ago, the internet was
South Korea 27.7 largely the purview of scientists and research-
France 26.6
ers. Today, along with the more traditional
Brazil 25.8
media—such as television broadcasting, film,
newspaper and book publishing, and sound
Germany 24.1
recording (music)—the internet is a key element
Russia 21.8
of our lives. But while some writers argue that
Japan 18.4
new internet-based media are making old media
China 13.5
obsolete, the internet isn’t so much replacing
India 11.9
traditional media industries as it is incorporating
Source: World Atlas, 2017. them and serving as another vehicle for their dis-
tribution. Almost two decades ago, downloading

music from sites such as Napster and Pirate Bay
was thought to spell the death of the music indus-
try; but that industry adapted, and the popular-
ity and revenues of sites like iTunes indicate the
industry is still very much alive. While blogging
and citizen journalism were once seen as displa-
cing newspapers and traditional news sources,
today’s bloggers and people writing about news
on social media develop much of the material
they publish and circulate from those traditional
media. Similarly, as streaming services such as
Netflix and Crave illustrate, television programs
and networks, once seen as being displaced by
internet programming, are finding a new means
of distribution online.
The internet, however, does offer much
more than traditional media. By joining com-
puting power with transmission capacity, digital
media platforms and companies such as Google,
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and
Wikipedia have opened up new ways of seeing
and understanding the world, extended personal
relationships and social networks, and enabled
once-passive consumers of media to become
producers of content. Yochai Benkler (2006: 2)
points out that this new information environ-
ment holds a number of promises “as a dimension
of individual freedom; as a platform for better
democratic participation; as a medium to foster
a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in
an increasingly information-dependent global
economy, as a mechanism to achieve improve-
ments in human development everywhere.” As
we shall see, while such promises are a long way
fyv6561/Shutterstock
By June 2018, there were more than 2.23 billion monthly
Facebook users and 328 million people active on Twitter
monthly.
1 Defining the Field   |  5
from being fulfilled, the struggle to reshape the
institutions and organizations that provide form
and focus to this information environment, and
the media it supports, is ongoing.
Back to the Future
It is easy for us to get caught up in the wave of
digital media and its propensity for expanding
the reach and speed of communication and to
forget the internet is only one of many major
electronic media innovations introduced in the
last two centuries. As digital media ushered
in various forms of social change and, in some
instances, made older media obsolete, they, too,
were seen as revolutionary and world-changing.
The telegraph, the world’s first mode of elec-
tronic communication, was one of the most revo-
lutionary of communication media. As James
Carey (1989: 201) argues, “Perhaps the most
important fact about the telegraph is [that it]
permitted for the first time the effective separa-
tion of communication from transportation.” No
longer did letters and other forms of communi-
cation need to be transported physically by horse
and rider, carrier pigeon, or ship. Instead, mes-
sages could be transported almost “at the speed
of light” across vast distances. This innovation
helped spur other changes, such as standard time
zones and modern markets.
To be sure, the telegraph was a key technology
in shrinking space through time—that is, reducing
the time it took to accomplish particular tasks in
space (see Figure 1.1). With the telegraph, trans-
actions that might have previously taken weeks
or even months to accomplish via mail could
be completed in a few minutes. Rather than
sending a written order by horseback, people
could now transmit a short telegraphic message
between Vancouver and Toronto and confirm
the need for raw materials such as wood or iron
ore to be shipped from the industrial periphery
to factories in Canada’s central core. Similarly,
a telegram between Montreal and Halifax could
initiate sending finished products such as stoves
6  |   Part I The Sociocultural Context

or furniture back out to the distant margins.
Telegraph technology was also helpful in exerting
political control over space. The news of uprisings
and social discontent in distant colonies could be
instantly communicated to central governments,
and troops could be dispatched to quell such dis-
turbances. Just as the internet and social net-
working sites today seem to shrink the distance
between friends and colleagues, the telegraph
shortened the time to accomplish or coordinate
action at a distance, thus making the world seem
smaller.
But the telegraph was not invented in a vac-
uum. From semaphore towers to smoke signals,
it had many predecessors, although due to their
vulnerability to bad weather and other natural
hazards, none were as efficient (see page 7). But
neither the invention of the telegraph nor its
adoption as a major medium of communication
happened overnight. Principles behind the tech-
nology were developed in the early eighteenth
century, and proposals for telegraph systems
were being written by around 1750. While a
number of attempts to establish telegraph lines
began in 1800, it wasn’t until the 1830s that the
first successful telegraphs were established, and
they didn’t become relatively common until the
1850s—a century after the technology was first
conceived.
The development and adoption of the tele-
phone and radio followed a similar track. The idea
of the telephone, for instance, leaned heavily on
earlier inventions, such as the speaking tube. And
patents for a range of electronic means of trans-
mitting voice messages by wire or over the air
were filed years before the telephone and radio
that we know today were actually developed for
widespread commercial use.

1500–1840
1750s Telegraph 1999 MP3 downloads begin

1876 Telephone 1999 BlackBerry first introduced

2000 Napster popularizes

1896 Radio (wireless telegraphy)
free downloading
1907 Radio (voice) 2001 Satellite-based digital
radio begins
1926 Television Best average speed of horse-drawn coaches
and sailing ships was 10 mph
2007 iPhone introduced
1929 Coaxial cable 1850–1930

2004 Facebook founded

1931 Microwave relay
2006 Twitter founded
1957 USSR launches f irst satellite Steam locomotives averaged 65 mph;
steam ships averaged 36 mph 2010 iPad released
1969–74 Internet created 1950s
2010 Instagram founded
1970 VCRs enter market Propeller aircraft
2013 6.8 billion mobile phone
300–400 mph
1960s subscriptions
1991 World Wide Web
Jet passenger aircraft
500–700 mph
2018 2.23 billion monthly
1998 Digital Television Facebook users
Broadcasting begins
2018 3.6 billion internet users

FIGURE 1.1 The Shrinking Globe

With the invention of each of these new media, the world seemingly gets smaller. Whether we are buying or selling goods and
services, keeping in touch with friends and family, or relaxing with film, video, or music, digital media have increasingly helped
make it easier to communicate with others and have thereby made the distances between people and places seem smaller. In
other words, these technologies “shrink space” by reducing the time it takes to coordinate action across distance.
Source: Adapted from David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 241, plate 3.1.

HIP/Art Resource, NY
Modern modes of communication build upon technologies
of the past. The telegraph, for instance, was modelled on
semaphore towers, like this one, which relied upon flags to
communicate messages over distances. Invented in France
in 1792, semaphore towers were a faster and cheaper form
of communication than the mail. The arms on the top of the
tower could be placed at various angles, creating shapes
that were coded as letters or words.
As they began to be used widely, both the
telephone and the radio were seen as inventions
that shrank space. The telephone initially was
marketed as a business tool and used to help
coordinate the sale of goods and services. Like
the telegraph, it was seen as a means of closing
the distance between businesses and their cus-
tomers, as salespeople used the phone to contact
customers, and customers were able to call sup-
pliers to order products. It is worth remembering
that prior to the telephone, people living on the
prairie in Saskatchewan would have to write let-
ters to Eaton’s department store in Toronto to
order everything from clothes to pots and pans
to houses and then wait weeks or even months
1 Defining the Field   |  7
for that order to be processed and delivered. With
the widespread adoption of the telephone, much
of that wait time was eliminated.
Radio, on the other hand—with its propen-
sity for spreading ideas—was envisioned as cre-
ating common perspectives and understanding,
or a common consciousness, between people. In
a speech later that summer about the first Can-
adian national radio broadcast on 1 July 1927, Can-
ada’s sixtieth birthday, Prime Minister Mackenzie
King talked about how the technology brought
the people of Canada together through enabling
them to hear speeches and other business of
government in Ottawa. In doing so, he thought
that people would become more interested and
involved in the affairs of the country. As he said,
On the morning, afternoon and evening of
July 1, all Canada became, for the time being,
a single assemblage, swayed by common emo-
tion, within the sound of a single voice. . . .
Hitherto to most Canadians, Ottawa seemed
far off, a mere name to hundreds of thou-
sands of our people, but henceforth all Can-
adians will stand within the sound of the
carillon and within the speakers of Parlia-
ment Hill. May we not predict that as a result
of this carrying of the living voice through-
out the length and breadth of the Dominion,
there will be aroused more general interest in
public affairs, and an increased devotion of
the individual citizen to the common weal.
(Weir, 1965: 38)
From this point of view, we can see why Ben-
edict Anderson (1983) considers communication
technologies as central in helping create the
“imagined community” of the nation-state.
Through the 1930s and ’40s, radio became
one of the major providers of news and enter-
tainment. In living rooms across the country,
families gathered around the radio after dinner
to listen to radio plays, sporting events, and
news. Whether broadcast from across town or
across the country, radio brought people “closer”
to distant events and circumstances while, at the
8  |   Part I The Sociocultural Context
same time, creating common points of reference
for the population. Strangers meeting at school,
work, on the bus, or at the coffee shop didn’t
seem so strange when it was discovered that they
cheered on the same hockey team, laughed at the
same jokes on the radio, and held similar con-
cerns about the issues and events that gripped
politics at city hall or Parliament in Ottawa.
Just like the telegraph and radio, television
extended and deepened social ties, too. In 1969,
TV showed images of humans’ first footsteps on
the moon, making history in connecting viewers
to points beyond earth. But like all new com-
munication technologies, there was some time
between its invention and widespread adoption,
and while television was first demonstrated in the
mid-1920s, it wasn’t until the 1950s that it began
to elbow radio out of Canadian living rooms.
With the arrival of television, radio was seen
by some as becoming obsolete and without any
real future. With the development of new tech-
nology, however, radio receivers shrank from the
size of large boxes to small packages that could be
installed in the dashboards of cars or stuffed in
jacket pockets. In this guise, radio took on a new
life as one of the first mobile electronic media.
In the process, radio largely moved from the
foreground to the background, as people began
listening to it while performing other activities
like driving from one place to another, working
on the job, or doing chores at home.
Cable television was first introduced in US
cities in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Coaxial
cables carry much more information than regular
copper wire, so they were used to bring multiple
television channels to places where over-the-air
television signals were blocked by buildings or
natural barriers.
By the late 1960s, people began to see the
cable’s carriage capacity as the gateway to a
wide range of new information services similar
to those available over the internet today. These
new visions of a heavily connected way of life
were heralded as the wired city. As we discuss in
later chapters, cable-based interactive television
was at the heart of these plans, and through the
1970s, experiments in building communities
where electronic communication was central to
the fabric of everyday life took place in countries
such as Canada, the United States, Japan, France,
Germany, and Britain (refer also to the Telidon
system on page 20). However, it wasn’t until the
1990s and the widespread use of personal com-
puters, digitized information, and the internet
that the original vision of the wired city actually
began to materialize.
From this brief history, we can see that media
development and changes in communication are
ongoing processes. Each advance in electronic
communication technology was built upon pre-
vious technologies and, in many ways, continued
to enhance the relationships established by the
telegraph. Through helping extend people’s
reach and reducing the amount of time it takes
to accomplish certain tasks and activities across
space—such as ordering a book online rather
than going to a bookstore, taking a course over
the internet instead of commuting to a campus
classroom, or skyping with friends and family in
lieu of travelling distances to see them—media
are said to shrink space through time. As media
have changed, moreover, they have become
increasingly pervasive in our lives, helping to
shape how we see, understand, and act within the
world. Whether the changes media have wrought
in our lives are positive or negative is the subject
of considerable debate.
Media and Technology:
A Brave New World?
Promoters of digital media and communication
technologies often present a particularly optimis-
tic or utopian view of media development. They
claim that communication technology increas-
ingly delivers more choice in information and
entertainment. From news to entertainment
programs, whether via film, music, video games,
or websites like Crave, Netflix, and iTunes, media
offer more and more consumer choice and—as
mobile technologies gain customers—services are

increasingly available from any location. Digital
communication systems also offer an increas-
ingly available and convenient range of consumer
products. From this perspective, access to educa-
tion and government services is said to be better.
And all of one’s needs and desires can be met with
a few clicks on a keyboard, as one can purchase
food, clothes, shelter, pets, and sex online.
But wait, there’s even more! Digital media are
also often portrayed as ushering in truly partici-
patory democracy on a global scale. With all the
information available online, people are said to
be able to inform themselves of the issues that
affect their lives as never before. They can talk
back to the institutions and people who hold
power by telling governments and corporations
what they think about issues and products. They
can produce and circulate information that repre-
sents their point of view. The technology provides
opportunities to vote on many issues. Supposedly,
it offers true democracy where everybody knows
and understands the issues that affect them, and
has the ability to make their views known.
Others, however, are not so sanguine in their
assessment of new media technology. They con-
tend that communication systems designed on
the basis of the profit motive or market princi-
ples primarily serve owners and investors, not
citizens. For instance, because new (and old)
commercial communication enterprises seek rev-
enue from advertisers, they first serve the needs
of those advertisers. Consequently only those
media products that generate profits for adver-
tisers are available. Owners of private media
companies—radio or television stations, news-
paper publishers, internet service providers, or
social media platforms—are in business to make
money for themselves and their shareholders,
not to perform public service. All the better if
they can perform some public service or provide
some public good, but this is not their primary
purpose.
As British media scholar and cultural critic
Raymond Williams once noted, within such a
media system people are free to say anything
they want as long as they can say it profitably.
1 Defining the Field   |  9
Ideas and perspectives that fail to meet the logic
of increasing profits—such as those calling atten-
tion to the drawbacks of consumer lifestyles or
issues affecting the poor and cultural and ethnic
minorities—are sidelined or left out altogether.
Media owners also want to attract the largest
number of audience members or users for the
least amount of money. In Canada, this has par-
ticular consequences. As you may have noticed,
television broadcasters other than the CBC carry
very little Canadian programming other than
sports and news. Why is this? Is it because Can-
adians make bad television? If that were the
case, why are so many American television pro-
grams filmed in Canada? No, as we shall see in
later chapters, the problem isn’t that Canadians
make bad TV. (In fact, American media produ-
cers spend billions of dollars each year making
film and television programs in Canada using
Canadian workers.) Rather it is because, after
recovering most of their costs in American mar-
kets, American programming is sold to Canadian
broadcasters at a fraction of its cost of produc-
tion, and a fraction of the cost of producing or
purchasing Canadian programming. In other
words, American shows dominate Canadian pro-
gramming not because Canadians want or prefer
such media fare, but because media companies
make much more money carrying US program-
ming than Canadian shows.
Privacy is another key issue (see Chapter 6).
In such a heavily mediated world, people are con-
stantly sharing information about themselves.
Whether it’s on social networking sites or blogs,
where we share ideas, pictures, and experien-
ces with our friends and colleagues, or on web
surveys, sign-ups, and applications, companies
and governments are recording or following our
online activities. Our actions and preferences are
constantly being monitored and often accessed
by advertisers, parents, schools, insurance com-
panies, government spy agencies, and police
departments. As a result, some people are find-
ing themselves inundated with commercial spam,
kicked out of school, denied medical insurance,
fired from a job, and even charged with crimes.
10  |   Part I The Sociocultural Context

Access is yet another problem (see Chapters

6 and 8). There is little doubt that media are
becoming the lifeblood of our society and that
access to media is important not only for satis-
fying individual needs and desires, but also for
educational purposes and to exercise one’s rights
as a citizen. But not everyone has access to media
systems. In our cities, large numbers of families
and individuals cannot afford to own the latest
computers or to have internet service. In some
small towns, places in Canada’s North, and rural
areas across the country, even dial-up internet
service is not available, let alone the high-speed

Media Democracy Project

access that many of us take for granted. And in
many developing countries around the world
even phone service is a luxury that many can-
not afford. This digital divide is one of the key
issues facing media policy-makers today.
So, do media serve public purposes or are they
mere profit centres for investors? Is technology
going to help in creating a better, more equitable
world, or is it going to widen the digital divide?
In a larger sense, will the gap between rich and
poor get worse? Ultimately, what are the impli-
cations of the ongoing monumental changes in
communications? Are we collapsing into a totally
commercialized society that cannot differentiate
between the worthwhile and the trivial, or are we
evolving into a more equitable, free, informed,
and just world?
As we shall see, there are no easy answers to
these and other similar questions.
Our Approach
In this book, we approach the study of media
and communications from a critical perspective.
Here, the term critical does not refer to the many
complaints that can be levelled at the media for
being too commercial or making too much vio-
lent material available on television or the inter-
net. Rather, taking a critical perspective means
that we look analytically at the ways media are
implicated in our knowledge and understanding
of the world.
With the motto “Know the Media, Be the Media, Change the
Media,” Media Democracy Day strives to provide us with a
critical perspective on media and the ways they shape and
influence people’s lives.
What role do media play in the construction
of identity and the development of our tastes and
desires? How do they inform our understanding
of the places we live and work? What role do
they have in political processes? Are television
sitcoms, shows promoting celebrities, and other
seemingly innocuous programs simply “enter-
tainment” or do they have other influences or
impacts on our lives? Does it matter who owns
the media? How does advertising influence what
we see in the media? What role do the media
play in the economy? In globalization? In other
words, whose or what interests do media serve
and what role do they play in creating and main-
taining social relationships, particularly rela-
tions of wealth and power? These are the kinds of
questions we address in this book—our aim is to
explore the centrality of media and communica-
tion both in society and in our lives.
But to understand the way media and com-
munication systems are implicated in our lives,
we must first understand what it is we are
investigating.
 1 Defining the Field   |  11

What Is Communication? Some The Shannon–Weaver Model

Definitions and Models
As we start to examine the field of communica-
tion we need to consider what exactly it is that we
are studying. In this section, we define terms and
provide some models for helping to understand
the process of communication.
At a basic level, communication is the act of
making something common between two or
more people. It is something people actually do.
It is a form of social action, in that it implies the
involvement of two or more people in a process
of creating or sending and receiving or inter-
preting a message or idea. This process has been
conceived in several different ways.
of Communication
One of the first models for thinking about the
process of communication was proposed in
1949 by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver,
communication engineers working for Bell Lab-
oratories in the United States. Shannon and
Weaver’s so-called mathematical or transmission
model of communication refers to the basic tech-
nical characteristics of the process of sending and
receiving messages.
In the Shannon–Weaver model, seen in
­Figure 1.2, a person—the encoder or source—­
formulates a message by putting an idea into
words (e.g., “What are you doing?”). The message is
then sent through a particular channel or medium,

SEMANTIC NOISE: INTERFERENCE CAUSED BY LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION

TECHNICAL/PHYSICAL NOISE:
INTERFERENCE WITH FIDELITY

SOURCE MESSAGE 1 CHANNEL MESSAGE 2 RECEIVER

SENDER RECEIVER
Sender originates Encodes into Transmits via Receives Communication is
idea or image with symbols channel: voice, symbols successful when
symbols television, printed idea or image
words, etc. received
corresponds to
sender's idea

FEEDBACK

FIGURE 1.2 Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Model of Communication (1949)

“The Communicative Process,” adapted from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communi­
cation. A similar model based on verbal communication was proposed around the same time by Harold Lasswell: “Who says
what to whom in what channel with what effect?”
Source: The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Copyright 1949/1998 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the author
and the University of Illinois Press.
12  |   Part I The Sociocultural Context

such as email, voice mail, or text message. On the
receiving end, the decoder receives and interprets
the signals and, on the basis of the symbols sent,
formulates meaningful content. The decoder
may then give the encoder feedback by letting
the encoder know that she or he has received the
message. By sending a message back, the decoder
becomes an encoder (e.g., replying, “Studying.”).
Any interference in the transmission of the
intended message (signified by the lightning
bolts in the diagram) is referred to as noise. Noise
may be loud background sounds that make it dif-
ficult for you to hear; a heavy, unfamiliar accent;
static on the telephone line; or a typographical
error in an email or text message.
This model’s strength is its simplicity. It
breaks the process of communication into a few
very basic elements. It works well for engineers
and technicians who speak in terms of the fidel-
ity of messages and transmission technologies
like cellphones and voice over internet protocol
(VOIP). Because the model simplifies the process
of communication so much, it works less well
for researchers, social scientists, and others con-
cerned with the social nature of communication,
as we are here. In fact, except in terms of noise,
it provides no consideration of the larger social
context of communication.
Consequently, critics argue that while this
model helps to identify basic elements of the
complex process of communication, it is much
too simplistic. Communication is a social process,
and the ideas, symbols, and techniques that we
draw on to construct messages are taken from
our larger social experience. Language, culture,
media forms—the elements that form the social
context within which messages are constructed
and interpreted—all work to frame and deter-
mine not only the meaning we make of them
but also the kinds of messages that we create.
For instance, no two languages approach the
world the same way. Each language positions the
speaker in sometimes subtly different ways of
thinking about or being in the world. Similarly,
there are differences in the way one’s age, edu-
cation, gender, race, or ethnicity nuance one’s
experience and understanding of the world. Not
only can these kinds of social variables influence
the way communication takes place, but they can
also determine whether it takes place at all.
The Social Model of Communication
The social nature of communication can be seen
in Figure 1.3. This model emphasizes social and
media-related variables that inform the process
of communication. The larger social environment

ENCODING ENCODED MEDIUM DECODING DECODED

CONTEXT CONTENT CONTEXT CONTENT
SENDER RECEIVER
(encoding) (decoding)
Universe of Selection of actual Choice of medium Universe of Selection of
understanding text, symbols, and (such as a understanding framework for
within which context for telephone within which achieved
sender forms communication conversation) and receiver understanding of
communication (formation of choice of form understands communication
(personal outlook, thoughts and ideas, within medium communication (initial impressions,
situational with nuances and (storytelling, direct (personal outlook, developing
dynamics, culture, taking into account description, situational comprehension,
ideology) audience, script, interrogation, dynamics, culture, final understanding
sound, visuals) degree of ideology) of speaker, content,
engagement) and context)

FIGURE 1.3 A Social Model of Communication


or milieu within which message formulation
takes place is termed the encoding context. At
the other end, the decoding context represents
the ideas and understandings that the decoder
brings to deciphering the encoded message. The
nature of these larger frames of reference is the
subject of theories of meaning generation and
communicative interaction that we will explore
in Chapters 4 and 5. From this perspective, suc-
cessful communication is always contingent on
the sender and receiver sharing some common
idea or notion of the process or subject of com-
munication, particularly in terms of language or
experience.
As John Durham Peters (1999: 14) points out,
“If meanings inhere not in words but in minds
or references to objects, nothing can guarantee
successful transit across the distance between
two minds.” For instance, if provided with the
letters a-p-p-l-e, you would probably conjure the
image of a juicy red (or green) fruit. However,
the letters p-o-m-a would probably not have the
same effect, unless you speak Catalan. So here
we can see that sharing a common language is
an important condition for effective communi-
cation. But even speaking the same language is
no guarantee of common understanding. Words
such as love and happiness, for example, can have
very different meanings for different people.
However, from this perspective, not only is
the process of communication structured by the
social contexts of the sender and the receiver, it
is nuanced by the medium of communication as
well. Putting an idea into words, for instance, is
not the same as painting a picture in an attempt
to communicate the same idea. Nor is a television
newscast item the same as a newspaper write-up
of the same story. Each provides a different kind
of information about the subject of the story.
Similarly, a novel differs from its movie adap-
tation. The medium transforms the message by
encouraging a certain structure in the encoding
process, and further transforms it by making
certain elements predominant for decoding.
Television emphasizes the visual image. Writ-
ing emphasizes linearity and logic. Oral speech
1 Defining the Field   |  13
emphasizes social context, body language, and
inflections of the voice.
The social model sees communication as both
structured by and contingent on some shared
social element or space. From this perspective,
communication is a cultural form, a social prac-
tice intimately woven into a larger set of ideas,
values, and understandings of the world. Exactly
how dependent communication is on the larger
social context within which it takes place is an
issue we take up in every chapter.
Based upon these considerations, we will
define communication as the action of making a
message or idea common to two or more people.
Communication: Mass
Audiences, and Mass
Communication
Traditionally, forms of communication that
address large audiences have been called “mass
communication.” Here the modifier mass tends
to emphasize the meaning “large in scale,” as in
mass audience, mass action, or mass murder—
so, mass communication means “communi-
cation on a large scale.” Mass communication,
however, can carry other meanings.
As we will see in Chapters 2 and 3, one com-
mon usage of the term mass sometimes is based
on the perceived character of audiences for media
as they emerged over time in the context of
industrial society. As a consequence of indus-
trialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, many people in Europe and, to some
extent, in North America were uprooted from
traditional, rural ways of life and moved to live
in towns and cities where factories were located.
This new way of life was fraught with problems.
Removed from a traditional, essentially feudal
and agricultural, way of life and the social val-
ues, customs, and bonds that gave that way of
life form and function, people were viewed by
some analysts in their new industrial context
as a collection “of atomized, isolated individuals
without traditional bonds of locality or kinship”
14  |   Part I The Sociocultural Context
(O’Sullivan et al., 1983: 131). According to these
early social theorists, within this mass society,
the supposed lack of commonly held traditional
social values left these individuals particularly
vulnerable to “(i) totalitarian ideologies and
propaganda; and (ii) influence by the mass media
(largely comprising, in this period, newspapers
and the emergent cinema and radio)” (131).
Until the early twentieth century, this perspec-
tive had a strong impact on the development
of communication theory, hence the term mass
communication sometimes carries with it the idea
that audiences for forms of large-scale communi-
cation are unsophisticated and vulnerable to
manipulation. While, as O’Sullivan et al. go on to
point out, “mass society theory has been refuted
by historical evidence,” this line of thinking still
exists in many circles today.
John Thompson (1995: 24) points out that the
notion of mass as large scale is problematic:
It conjures up the image of a vast audience
comprising many thousands, even millions of
individuals. This may be an accurate image in
the case of some media products, such as the
most popular modern day newspapers, films,
and television programs; but it is hardly an
accurate representation of the circumstance
of most media products, past or present. . . .
The important point about mass communi-
cation is not that a given number of individ-
uals (or a specific portion of the population)
receives the products, but rather products
are available in principle to a plurality of
recipients.
With literally hundreds of television channels
available to the average household, as well as the
many other forms of information and entertain-
ment available over the internet, mass audiences
numbering in the tens of millions for any particu-
lar scheduled program are becoming rare. Despite
the fact that there still are mass audiences for
some media events and programs, such as the
Olympics, soccer’s World Cup, and the Academy
Awards, today’s media fare often targets much
smaller audiences, such as programs on specialty
channels devoted to sports, cooking, documen-
taries, or particular genre movies.
As discussed below, however, it is important
to keep in mind that just because the audiences
viewing some media products may be small does
not mean those programs won’t be seen by much
larger aggregate mass audiences. People usually
watch videos on YouTube, for instance, either
by themselves or with one or two friends. Those
single views, however, often add up to a mass
audience of hundreds of thousands or even mil-
lions of people. Audiences for traditional media
work the same way; for example, viewers might
see a film in many different ways: at a theatre,
on a streaming service, on a video-on-demand
cable channel, downloaded from a website, on
a smartphone or other mobile device, on a spe-
cialty channel, or on a regular television channel.
Although each of these audiences may be rela-
tively small, they often form a large, or mass,
audience in the aggregate.
Mass Communication
In this context, the term mass communication has
been used to describe the communication that
happens by means of large traditional corporate
media, such as mainstream movies, large daily
newspapers, and broadcasting. O’Sullivan and
his colleagues captured that meaning of mass
communication:
Mass communication is the practice and
product of providing leisure entertainment
and information to an unknown audience by
means of corporately financed, industrially
produced, state regulated, high-technology,
privately consumed commodities in the mod-
ern print, screen, audio, and broadcast media.
(O’Sullivan et al., 1983: 131)
This definition was written prior to the
development of the internet, smartphones,
Netflix, Google, Facebook, and blogs, but we, of
course, know that times and technology have
changed.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI

Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

the Newala of to-day does; there was once another Newala in a lovely
valley at the foot of the plateau. I visited it and found scarcely a trace
of houses, only a Christian cemetery, with the graves of several
missionaries and their converts, remaining as a monument of its
former glories. But the surroundings are wonderfully beautiful. A
thick grove of splendid mango-trees closes in the weather-worn
crosses and headstones; behind them, combining the useful and the
agreeable, is a whole plantation of lemon-trees covered with ripe
fruit; not the small African kind, but a much larger and also juicier
imported variety, which drops into the hands of the passing traveller,
without calling for any exertion on his part. Old Newala is now under
the jurisdiction of the native pastor, Daudi, at Chingulungulu, who,
as I am on very friendly terms with him, allows me, as a matter of
course, the use of this lemon-grove during my stay at Newala.
 FEET MUTILATED BY THE RAVAGES OF THE “JIGGER”
(Sarcopsylla penetrans)

The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

some 1,600 feet lower down. The way is not only long and fatiguing,
but the water, when we get it, is thoroughly bad. We are suffering not
only from this, but from the fact that the arrangements at Newala are
nothing short of luxurious. We have a separate kitchen—a hut built
against the boma palisade on the right of the baraza, the interior of
which is not visible from our usual position. Our two cooks were not
long in finding this out, and they consequently do—or rather neglect
to do—what they please. In any case they do not seem to be very
particular about the boiling of our drinking-water—at least I can
attribute to no other cause certain attacks of a dysenteric nature,
from which both Knudsen and I have suffered for some time. If a
man like Omari has to be left unwatched for a moment, he is capable
of anything. Besides this complaint, we are inconvenienced by the
state of our nails, which have become as hard as glass, and crack on
the slightest provocation, and I have the additional infliction of
pimples all over me. As if all this were not enough, we have also, for
the last week been waging war against the jigger, who has found his
Eldorado in the hot sand of the Makonde plateau. Our men are seen
all day long—whenever their chronic colds and the dysentery likewise
raging among them permit—occupied in removing this scourge of
Africa from their feet and trying to prevent the disastrous
consequences of its presence. It is quite common to see natives of
this place with one or two toes missing; many have lost all their toes,
or even the whole front part of the foot, so that a well-formed leg
ends in a shapeless stump. These ravages are caused by the female of
Sarcopsylla penetrans, which bores its way under the skin and there
develops an egg-sac the size of a pea. In all books on the subject, it is
stated that one’s attention is called to the presence of this parasite by
an intolerable itching. This agrees very well with my experience, so
far as the softer parts of the sole, the spaces between and under the
toes, and the side of the foot are concerned, but if the creature
penetrates through the harder parts of the heel or ball of the foot, it
may escape even the most careful search till it has reached maturity.
Then there is no time to be lost, if the horrible ulceration, of which
we see cases by the dozen every day, is to be prevented. It is much
easier, by the way, to discover the insect on the white skin of a
European than on that of a native, on which the dark speck scarcely
shows. The four or five jiggers which, in spite of the fact that I
constantly wore high laced boots, chose my feet to settle in, were
taken out for me by the all-accomplished Knudsen, after which I
thought it advisable to wash out the cavities with corrosive
sublimate. The natives have a different sort of disinfectant—they fill
the hole with scraped roots. In a tiny Makua village on the slope of
the plateau south of Newala, we saw an old woman who had filled all
the spaces under her toe-nails with powdered roots by way of
prophylactic treatment. What will be the result, if any, who can say?
The rest of the many trifling ills which trouble our existence are
really more comic than serious. In the absence of anything else to
smoke, Knudsen and I at last opened a box of cigars procured from
the Indian store-keeper at Lindi, and tried them, with the most
distressing results. Whether they contain opium or some other
narcotic, neither of us can say, but after the tenth puff we were both
“off,” three-quarters stupefied and unspeakably wretched. Slowly we
recovered—and what happened next? Half-an-hour later we were
once more smoking these poisonous concoctions—so insatiable is the
craving for tobacco in the tropics.
Even my present attacks of fever scarcely deserve to be taken
seriously. I have had no less than three here at Newala, all of which
have run their course in an incredibly short time. In the early
afternoon, I am busy with my old natives, asking questions and
making notes. The strong midday coffee has stimulated my spirits to
an extraordinary degree, the brain is active and vigorous, and work
progresses rapidly, while a pleasant warmth pervades the whole
body. Suddenly this gives place to a violent chill, forcing me to put on
my overcoat, though it is only half-past three and the afternoon sun
is at its hottest. Now the brain no longer works with such acuteness
and logical precision; more especially does it fail me in trying to
establish the syntax of the difficult Makua language on which I have
ventured, as if I had not enough to do without it. Under the
circumstances it seems advisable to take my temperature, and I do
so, to save trouble, without leaving my seat, and while going on with
my work. On examination, I find it to be 101·48°. My tutors are
abruptly dismissed and my bed set up in the baraza; a few minutes
later I am in it and treating myself internally with hot water and
lemon-juice.
Three hours later, the thermometer marks nearly 104°, and I make
them carry me back into the tent, bed and all, as I am now perspiring
heavily, and exposure to the cold wind just beginning to blow might
mean a fatal chill. I lie still for a little while, and then find, to my
great relief, that the temperature is not rising, but rather falling. This
is about 7.30 p.m. At 8 p.m. I find, to my unbounded astonishment,
that it has fallen below 98·6°, and I feel perfectly well. I read for an
hour or two, and could very well enjoy a smoke, if I had the
wherewithal—Indian cigars being out of the question.
Having no medical training, I am at a loss to account for this state
of things. It is impossible that these transitory attacks of high fever
should be malarial; it seems more probable that they are due to a
kind of sunstroke. On consulting my note-book, I become more and
more inclined to think this is the case, for these attacks regularly
follow extreme fatigue and long exposure to strong sunshine. They at
least have the advantage of being only short interruptions to my
work, as on the following morning I am always quite fresh and fit.
My treasure of a cook is suffering from an enormous hydrocele which
makes it difficult for him to get up, and Moritz is obliged to keep in
the dark on account of his inflamed eyes. Knudsen’s cook, a raw boy
from somewhere in the bush, knows still less of cooking than Omari;
consequently Nils Knudsen himself has been promoted to the vacant
post. Finding that we had come to the end of our supplies, he began
by sending to Chingulungulu for the four sucking-pigs which we had
bought from Matola and temporarily left in his charge; and when
they came up, neatly packed in a large crate, he callously slaughtered
the biggest of them. The first joint we were thoughtless enough to
entrust for roasting to Knudsen’s mshenzi cook, and it was
consequently uneatable; but we made the rest of the animal into a
jelly which we ate with great relish after weeks of underfeeding,
consuming incredible helpings of it at both midday and evening
meals. The only drawback is a certain want of variety in the tinned
vegetables. Dr. Jäger, to whom the Geographical Commission
entrusted the provisioning of the expeditions—mine as well as his
own—because he had more time on his hands than the rest of us,
seems to have laid in a huge stock of Teltow turnips,[46] an article of
food which is all very well for occasional use, but which quickly palls
when set before one every day; and we seem to have no other tins
left. There is no help for it—we must put up with the turnips; but I
am certain that, once I am home again, I shall not touch them for ten
years to come.
Amid all these minor evils, which, after all, go to make up the
genuine flavour of Africa, there is at least one cheering touch:
Knudsen has, with the dexterity of a skilled mechanic, repaired my 9
× 12 cm. camera, at least so far that I can use it with a little care.
How, in the absence of finger-nails, he was able to accomplish such a
ticklish piece of work, having no tool but a clumsy screw-driver for
taking to pieces and putting together again the complicated
mechanism of the instantaneous shutter, is still a mystery to me; but
he did it successfully. The loss of his finger-nails shows him in a light
contrasting curiously enough with the intelligence evinced by the
above operation; though, after all, it is scarcely surprising after his
ten years’ residence in the bush. One day, at Lindi, he had occasion
to wash a dog, which must have been in need of very thorough
cleansing, for the bottle handed to our friend for the purpose had an
extremely strong smell. Having performed his task in the most
conscientious manner, he perceived with some surprise that the dog
did not appear much the better for it, and was further surprised by
finding his own nails ulcerating away in the course of the next few
days. “How was I to know that carbolic acid has to be diluted?” he
mutters indignantly, from time to time, with a troubled gaze at his
mutilated finger-tips.
 Since we came to Newala we have been making excursions in all
directions through the surrounding country, in accordance with old
habit, and also because the akida Sefu did not get together the tribal
elders from whom I wanted information so speedily as he had
promised. There is, however, no harm done, as, even if seen only
from the outside, the country and people are interesting enough.
The Makonde plateau is like a large rectangular table rounded off
at the corners. Measured from the Indian Ocean to Newala, it is
about seventy-five miles long, and between the Rovuma and the
Lukuledi it averages fifty miles in breadth, so that its superficial area
is about two-thirds of that of the kingdom of Saxony. The surface,
however, is not level, but uniformly inclined from its south-western
edge to the ocean. From the upper edge, on which Newala lies, the
eye ranges for many miles east and north-east, without encountering
any obstacle, over the Makonde bush. It is a green sea, from which
here and there thick clouds of smoke rise, to show that it, too, is
inhabited by men who carry on their tillage like so many other
primitive peoples, by cutting down and burning the bush, and
manuring with the ashes. Even in the radiant light of a tropical day
such a fire is a grand sight.
Much less effective is the impression produced just now by the
great western plain as seen from the edge of the plateau. As often as
time permits, I stroll along this edge, sometimes in one direction,
sometimes in another, in the hope of finding the air clear enough to
let me enjoy the view; but I have always been disappointed.
Wherever one looks, clouds of smoke rise from the burning bush,
and the air is full of smoke and vapour. It is a pity, for under more
favourable circumstances the panorama of the whole country up to
the distant Majeje hills must be truly magnificent. It is of little use
taking photographs now, and an outline sketch gives a very poor idea
of the scenery. In one of these excursions I went out of my way to
make a personal attempt on the Makonde bush. The present edge of
the plateau is the result of a far-reaching process of destruction
through erosion and denudation. The Makonde strata are
everywhere cut into by ravines, which, though short, are hundreds of
yards in depth. In consequence of the loose stratification of these
beds, not only are the walls of these ravines nearly vertical, but their
upper end is closed by an equally steep escarpment, so that the
western edge of the Makonde plateau is hemmed in by a series of
deep, basin-like valleys. In order to get from one side of such a ravine
to the other, I cut my way through the bush with a dozen of my men.
It was a very open part, with more grass than scrub, but even so the
short stretch of less than two hundred yards was very hard work; at
the end of it the men’s calicoes were in rags and they themselves
bleeding from hundreds of scratches, while even our strong khaki
suits had not escaped scatheless.

NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAHUTA

I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
 The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.

MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

 This is the general way of closing a house. The Makonde at Jumbe
Chauro, however, have a much more complicated, solid and original
one. Here, too, the door is as already described, except that there is
only one post on the inside, standing by itself about six inches from
one side of the doorway. Opposite this post is a hole in the wall just
large enough to admit a man’s arm. The door is closed inside by a
large wooden bolt passing through a hole in this post and pressing
with its free end against the door. The other end has three holes into
which fit three pegs running in vertical grooves inside the post. The
door is opened with a wooden key about a foot long, somewhat
curved and sloped off at the butt; the other end has three pegs
corresponding to the holes, in the bolt, so that, when it is thrust
through the hole in the wall and inserted into the rectangular
opening in the post, the pegs can be lifted and the bolt drawn out.[50]

MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY

With no small pride first one householder and then a second

showed me on the spot the action of this greatest invention of the
Makonde Highlands. To both with an admiring exclamation of
“Vizuri sana!” (“Very fine!”). I expressed the wish to take back these
marvels with me to Ulaya, to show the Wazungu what clever fellows
the Makonde are. Scarcely five minutes after my return to camp at
Newala, the two men came up sweating under the weight of two
heavy logs which they laid down at my feet, handing over at the same
time the keys of the fallen fortress. Arguing, logically enough, that if
the key was wanted, the lock would be wanted with it, they had taken
their axes and chopped down the posts—as it never occurred to them
to dig them out of the ground and so bring them intact. Thus I have
two badly damaged specimens, and the owners, instead of praise,
come in for a blowing-up.
The Makua huts in the environs of Newala are especially
miserable; their more than slovenly construction reminds one of the
temporary erections of the Makua at Hatia’s, though the people here
have not been concerned in a war. It must therefore be due to
congenital idleness, or else to the absence of a powerful chief. Even
the baraza at Mlipa’s, a short hour’s walk south-east of Newala,
shares in this general neglect. While public buildings in this country
are usually looked after more or less carefully, this is in evident
danger of being blown over by the first strong easterly gale. The only
attractive object in this whole district is the grave of the late chief
Mlipa. I visited it in the morning, while the sun was still trying with
partial success to break through the rolling mists, and the circular
grove of tall euphorbias, which, with a broken pot, is all that marks
the old king’s resting-place, impressed one with a touch of pathos.
Even my very materially-minded carriers seemed to feel something
of the sort, for instead of their usual ribald songs, they chanted
solemnly, as we marched on through the dense green of the Makonde
bush:—
 “We shall arrive with the great master; we stand in a row and have
no fear about getting our food and our money from the Serkali (the
Government). We are not afraid; we are going along with the great
master, the lion; we are going down to the coast and back.”
With regard to the characteristic features of the various tribes here
on the western edge of the plateau, I can arrive at no other
conclusion than the one already come to in the plain, viz., that it is
impossible for anyone but a trained anthropologist to assign any
given individual at once to his proper tribe. In fact, I think that even
an anthropological specialist, after the most careful examination,
might find it a difficult task to decide. The whole congeries of peoples
collected in the region bounded on the west by the great Central
African rift, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and on the east by the Indian
Ocean, are closely related to each other—some of their languages are
only distinguished from one another as dialects of the same speech,
and no doubt all the tribes present the same shape of skull and
structure of skeleton. Thus, surely, there can be no very striking
differences in outward appearance.
 Even did such exist, I should have no time
to concern myself with them, for day after day,
I have to see or hear, as the case may be—in
any case to grasp and record—an
extraordinary number of ethnographic
phenomena. I am almost disposed to think it
fortunate that some departments of inquiry, at
least, are barred by external circumstances.
Chief among these is the subject of iron-
working. We are apt to think of Africa as a
country where iron ore is everywhere, so to
speak, to be picked up by the roadside, and
where it would be quite surprising if the
inhabitants had not learnt to smelt the
material ready to their hand. In fact, the
knowledge of this art ranges all over the
continent, from the Kabyles in the north to the
Kafirs in the south. Here between the Rovuma
and the Lukuledi the conditions are not so
favourable. According to the statements of the
Makonde, neither ironstone nor any other
form of iron ore is known to them. They have
not therefore advanced to the art of smelting
the metal, but have hitherto bought all their
THE ANCESTRESS OF
THE MAKONDE
iron implements from neighbouring tribes.
Even in the plain the inhabitants are not much
better off. Only one man now living is said to
understand the art of smelting iron. This old fundi lives close to
Huwe, that isolated, steep-sided block of granite which rises out of
the green solitude between Masasi and Chingulungulu, and whose
jagged and splintered top meets the traveller’s eye everywhere. While
still at Masasi I wished to see this man at work, but was told that,
frightened by the rising, he had retired across the Rovuma, though
he would soon return. All subsequent inquiries as to whether the
fundi had come back met with the genuine African answer, “Bado”
(“Not yet”).
 BRAZIER

Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

came across in the bush near Akundonde’s. This man is the favourite
of women, and therefore no doubt of the gods; he welds the glittering
brass rods purchased at the coast into those massive, heavy rings
which, on the wrists and ankles of the local fair ones, continually give
me fresh food for admiration. Like every decent master-craftsman he
had all his tools with him, consisting of a pair of bellows, three
crucibles and a hammer—nothing more, apparently. He was quite
willing to show his skill, and in a twinkling had fixed his bellows on
the ground. They are simply two goat-skins, taken off whole, the four
legs being closed by knots, while the upper opening, intended to
admit the air, is kept stretched by two pieces of wood. At the lower
end of the skin a smaller opening is left into which a wooden tube is
stuck. The fundi has quickly borrowed a heap of wood-embers from
the nearest hut; he then fixes the free ends of the two tubes into an
earthen pipe, and clamps them to the ground by means of a bent
piece of wood. Now he fills one of his small clay crucibles, the dross
on which shows that they have been long in use, with the yellow
material, places it in the midst of the embers, which, at present are
only faintly glimmering, and begins his work. In quick alternation
the smith’s two hands move up and down with the open ends of the
bellows; as he raises his hand he holds the slit wide open, so as to let
the air enter the skin bag unhindered. In pressing it down he closes
the bag, and the air puffs through the bamboo tube and clay pipe into
the fire, which quickly burns up. The smith, however, does not keep
on with this work, but beckons to another man, who relieves him at
the bellows, while he takes some more tools out of a large skin pouch
carried on his back. I look on in wonder as, with a smooth round
stick about the thickness of a finger, he bores a few vertical holes into
the clean sand of the soil. This should not be difficult, yet the man
seems to be taking great pains over it. Then he fastens down to the
ground, with a couple of wooden clamps, a neat little trough made by
splitting a joint of bamboo in half, so that the ends are closed by the
two knots. At last the yellow metal has attained the right consistency,
and the fundi lifts the crucible from the fire by means of two sticks
split at the end to serve as tongs. A short swift turn to the left—a
tilting of the crucible—and the molten brass, hissing and giving forth
clouds of smoke, flows first into the bamboo mould and then into the
holes in the ground.
The technique of this backwoods craftsman may not be very far
advanced, but it cannot be denied that he knows how to obtain an
adequate result by the simplest means. The ladies of highest rank in
this country—that is to say, those who can afford it, wear two kinds
of these massive brass rings, one cylindrical, the other semicircular
in section. The latter are cast in the most ingenious way in the
bamboo mould, the former in the circular hole in the sand. It is quite
a simple matter for the fundi to fit these bars to the limbs of his fair
customers; with a few light strokes of his hammer he bends the
pliable brass round arm or ankle without further inconvenience to
the wearer.
SHAPING THE POT

SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB

CUTTING THE EDGE

 FINISHING THE BOTTOM

LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

BURNING

FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

 LIGHTING THE FARTHER SIDE OF
THE PILE

TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL

NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

Pottery is an art which must always and everywhere excite the
interest of the student, just because it is so intimately connected with
the development of human culture, and because its relics are one of
the principal factors in the reconstruction of our own condition in
prehistoric times. I shall always remember with pleasure the two or
three afternoons at Masasi when Salim Matola’s mother, a slightly-
built, graceful, pleasant-looking woman, explained to me with
touching patience, by means of concrete illustrations, the ceramic art
of her people. The only implements for this primitive process were a
lump of clay in her left hand, and in the right a calabash containing
the following valuables: the fragment of a maize-cob stripped of all
its grains, a smooth, oval pebble, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, a
few chips of gourd-shell, a bamboo splinter about the length of one’s
hand, a small shell, and a bunch of some herb resembling spinach.
 Nothing more. The woman scraped with the
shell a round, shallow hole in the soft, fine
sand of the soil, and, when an active young
girl had filled the calabash with water for her,
she began to knead the clay. As if by magic it
gradually assumed the shape of a rough but
already well-shaped vessel, which only wanted
a little touching up with the instruments
before mentioned. I looked out with the
MAKUA WOMAN closest attention for any indication of the use
MAKING A POT. of the potter’s wheel, in however rudimentary
SHOWS THE a form, but no—hapana (there is none). The
BEGINNINGS OF THE embryo pot stood firmly in its little
POTTER’S WHEEL
depression, and the woman walked round it in
a stooping posture, whether she was removing
small stones or similar foreign bodies with the maize-cob, smoothing
the inner or outer surface with the splinter of bamboo, or later, after
letting it dry for a day, pricking in the ornamentation with a pointed
bit of gourd-shell, or working out the bottom, or cutting the edge
with a sharp bamboo knife, or giving the last touches to the finished
vessel. This occupation of the women is infinitely toilsome, but it is
without doubt an accurate reproduction of the process in use among
our ancestors of the Neolithic and Bronze ages.
There is no doubt that the invention of pottery, an item in human
progress whose importance cannot be over-estimated, is due to
women. Rough, coarse and unfeeling, the men of the horde range
over the countryside. When the united cunning of the hunters has
succeeded in killing the game; not one of them thinks of carrying
home the spoil. A bright fire, kindled by a vigorous wielding of the
drill, is crackling beside them; the animal has been cleaned and cut
up secundum artem, and, after a slight singeing, will soon disappear
under their sharp teeth; no one all this time giving a single thought
to wife or child.
To what shifts, on the other hand, the primitive wife, and still more
the primitive mother, was put! Not even prehistoric stomachs could
endure an unvarying diet of raw food. Something or other suggested
the beneficial effect of hot water on the majority of approved but
indigestible dishes. Perhaps a neighbour had tried holding the hard
roots or tubers over the fire in a calabash filled with water—or maybe
an ostrich-egg-shell, or a hastily improvised vessel of bark. They
became much softer and more palatable than they had previously
been; but, unfortunately, the vessel could not stand the fire and got
charred on the outside. That can be remedied, thought our
ancestress, and plastered a layer of wet clay round a similar vessel.
This is an improvement; the cooking utensil remains uninjured, but
the heat of the fire has shrunk it, so that it is loose in its shell. The
next step is to detach it, so, with a firm grip and a jerk, shell and
kernel are separated, and pottery is invented. Perhaps, however, the
discovery which led to an intelligent use of the burnt-clay shell, was
made in a slightly different way. Ostrich-eggs and calabashes are not
to be found in every part of the world, but everywhere mankind has
arrived at the art of making baskets out of pliant materials, such as
bark, bast, strips of palm-leaf, supple twigs, etc. Our inventor has no
water-tight vessel provided by nature. “Never mind, let us line the
basket with clay.” This answers the purpose, but alas! the basket gets
burnt over the blazing fire, the woman watches the process of
cooking with increasing uneasiness, fearing a leak, but no leak
appears. The food, done to a turn, is eaten with peculiar relish; and
the cooking-vessel is examined, half in curiosity, half in satisfaction
at the result. The plastic clay is now hard as stone, and at the same
time looks exceedingly well, for the neat plaiting of the burnt basket
is traced all over it in a pretty pattern. Thus, simultaneously with
pottery, its ornamentation was invented.
Primitive woman has another claim to respect. It was the man,
roving abroad, who invented the art of producing fire at will, but the
woman, unable to imitate him in this, has been a Vestal from the
earliest times. Nothing gives so much trouble as the keeping alight of
the smouldering brand, and, above all, when all the men are absent
from the camp. Heavy rain-clouds gather, already the first large
drops are falling, the first gusts of the storm rage over the plain. The
little flame, a greater anxiety to the woman than her own children,
flickers unsteadily in the blast. What is to be done? A sudden thought
occurs to her, and in an instant she has constructed a primitive hut
out of strips of bark, to protect the flame against rain and wind.
This, or something very like it, was the way in which the principle
of the house was discovered; and even the most hardened misogynist
cannot fairly refuse a woman the credit of it. The protection of the
hearth-fire from the weather is the germ from which the human
dwelling was evolved. Men had little, if any share, in this forward
step, and that only at a late stage. Even at the present day, the
plastering of the housewall with clay and the manufacture of pottery
are exclusively the women’s business. These are two very significant
survivals. Our European kitchen-garden, too, is originally a woman’s
invention, and the hoe, the primitive instrument of agriculture, is,
characteristically enough, still used in this department. But the
noblest achievement which we owe to the other sex is unquestionably
the art of cookery. Roasting alone—the oldest process—is one for
which men took the hint (a very obvious one) from nature. It must
have been suggested by the scorched carcase of some animal
overtaken by the destructive forest-fires. But boiling—the process of
improving organic substances by the help of water heated to boiling-
point—is a much later discovery. It is so recent that it has not even
yet penetrated to all parts of the world. The Polynesians understand
how to steam food, that is, to cook it, neatly wrapped in leaves, in a
hole in the earth between hot stones, the air being excluded, and
(sometimes) a few drops of water sprinkled on the stones; but they
do not understand boiling.
To come back from this digression, we find that the slender Nyasa
woman has, after once more carefully examining the finished pot,
put it aside in the shade to dry. On the following day she sends me
word by her son, Salim Matola, who is always on hand, that she is
going to do the burning, and, on coming out of my house, I find her
already hard at work. She has spread on the ground a layer of very
dry sticks, about as thick as one’s thumb, has laid the pot (now of a
yellowish-grey colour) on them, and is piling brushwood round it.
My faithful Pesa mbili, the mnyampara, who has been standing by,
most obligingly, with a lighted stick, now hands it to her. Both of
them, blowing steadily, light the pile on the lee side, and, when the
flame begins to catch, on the weather side also. Soon the whole is in a
blaze, but the dry fuel is quickly consumed and the fire dies down, so
that we see the red-hot vessel rising from the ashes. The woman
turns it continually with a long stick, sometimes one way and
sometimes another, so that it may be evenly heated all over. In
twenty minutes she rolls it out of the ash-heap, takes up the bundle
of spinach, which has been lying for two days in a jar of water, and
sprinkles the red-hot clay with it. The places where the drops fall are
marked by black spots on the uniform reddish-brown surface. With a
sigh of relief, and with visible satisfaction, the woman rises to an
erect position; she is standing just in a line between me and the fire,
from which a cloud of smoke is just rising: I press the ball of my
camera, the shutter clicks—the apotheosis is achieved! Like a
priestess, representative of her inventive sex, the graceful woman
stands: at her feet the hearth-fire she has given us beside her the
invention she has devised for us, in the background the home she has
built for us.
At Newala, also, I have had the manufacture of pottery carried on
in my presence. Technically the process is better than that already
described, for here we find the beginnings of the potter’s wheel,
which does not seem to exist in the plains; at least I have seen
nothing of the sort. The artist, a frightfully stupid Makua woman, did
not make a depression in the ground to receive the pot she was about
to shape, but used instead a large potsherd. Otherwise, she went to
work in much the same way as Salim’s mother, except that she saved
herself the trouble of walking round and round her work by squatting
at her ease and letting the pot and potsherd rotate round her; this is
surely the first step towards a machine. But it does not follow that
the pot was improved by the process. It is true that it was beautifully
rounded and presented a very creditable appearance when finished,
but the numerous large and small vessels which I have seen, and, in
part, collected, in the “less advanced” districts, are no less so. We
moderns imagine that instruments of precision are necessary to
produce excellent results. Go to the prehistoric collections of our
museums and look at the pots, urns and bowls of our ancestors in the
dim ages of the past, and you will at once perceive your error.
MAKING LONGITUDINAL CUT IN
BARK

DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG

REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

 BEATING THE BARK

WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

SOFT

MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

To-day, nearly the whole population of German East Africa is
clothed in imported calico. This was not always the case; even now in
some parts of the north dressed skins are still the prevailing wear,
and in the north-western districts—east and north of Lake
Tanganyika—lies a zone where bark-cloth has not yet been
superseded. Probably not many generations have passed since such
bark fabrics and kilts of skins were the only clothing even in the
south. Even to-day, large quantities of this bright-red or drab
material are still to be found; but if we wish to see it, we must look in
the granaries and on the drying stages inside the native huts, where
it serves less ambitious uses as wrappings for those seeds and fruits
which require to be packed with special care. The salt produced at
Masasi, too, is packed for transport to a distance in large sheets of
bark-cloth. Wherever I found it in any degree possible, I studied the
process of making this cloth. The native requisitioned for the
purpose arrived, carrying a log between two and three yards long and
as thick as his thigh, and nothing else except a curiously-shaped
mallet and the usual long, sharp and pointed knife which all men and
boys wear in a belt at their backs without a sheath—horribile dictu!
[51]
Silently he squats down before me, and with two rapid cuts has
drawn a couple of circles round the log some two yards apart, and
slits the bark lengthwise between them with the point of his knife.
With evident care, he then scrapes off the outer rind all round the
log, so that in a quarter of an hour the inner red layer of the bark
shows up brightly-coloured between the two untouched ends. With
some trouble and much caution, he now loosens the bark at one end,
and opens the cylinder. He then stands up, takes hold of the free
edge with both hands, and turning it inside out, slowly but steadily
pulls it off in one piece. Now comes the troublesome work of
scraping all superfluous particles of outer bark from the outside of
the long, narrow piece of material, while the inner side is carefully
scrutinised for defective spots. At last it is ready for beating. Having
signalled to a friend, who immediately places a bowl of water beside
him, the artificer damps his sheet of bark all over, seizes his mallet,
lays one end of the stuff on the smoothest spot of the log, and
hammers away slowly but continuously. “Very simple!” I think to
myself. “Why, I could do that, too!”—but I am forced to change my
opinions a little later on; for the beating is quite an art, if the fabric is
not to be beaten to pieces. To prevent the breaking of the fibres, the
stuff is several times folded across, so as to interpose several
thicknesses between the mallet and the block. At last the required
state is reached, and the fundi seizes the sheet, still folded, by both
ends, and wrings it out, or calls an assistant to take one end while he
holds the other. The cloth produced in this way is not nearly so fine
and uniform in texture as the famous Uganda bark-cloth, but it is
quite soft, and, above all, cheap.
Now, too, I examine the mallet. My craftsman has been using the
simpler but better form of this implement, a conical block of some
hard wood, its base—the striking surface—being scored across and
across with more or less deeply-cut grooves, and the handle stuck
into a hole in the middle. The other and earlier form of mallet is
shaped in the same way, but the head is fastened by an ingenious
network of bark strips into the split bamboo serving as a handle. The
observation so often made, that ancient customs persist longest in
connection with religious ceremonies and in the life of children, here
finds confirmation. As we shall soon see, bark-cloth is still worn
during the unyago,[52] having been prepared with special solemn
ceremonies; and many a mother, if she has no other garment handy,
will still put her little one into a kilt of bark-cloth, which, after all,
looks better, besides being more in keeping with its African
surroundings, than the ridiculous bit of print from Ulaya.
MAKUA WOMEN