This book uses multiple approaches to identify sociological, technological, and aesthetic tensions and incompatibilities between television and rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. The focus is less on television or rock music than on the interaction between the two, concerned primarily with the impact of television policies, attitudes, and practices on what was presented to the TV audience. The role of the music business in relation to television is also examined, revealing patterns that continued to have significant impacts in the decades following the 1950s and remain a factor in generational dynamics today.
Among the aims of this book are:
• to trace the development of rock ‘n’ roll music and a distinct youth culture in the 1950s;
• to describe the aversion that parents and mainstream institutions, including television, expressed towards rock ‘n’ roll, an antipathy that constitutes “rockaphobia”;
• to demonstrate how rockaphobic television programming invigorated a counter-cultural response from the baby boom generation;
• to celebrate the innovative television shows that sprang up across the country before the national edition of American Bandstand created a codified TV genre; and
• to suggest that television’s initial response to rock ‘n’ roll established a pattern of misunderstanding and marginalizing youth culture that persists today.
This analysis is informed by the author’s coming of age in the 1950s, by his experience as a journalist and public relations professional in the music business,←3 | 4→ and by his scholarship in the field of communication, especially the area of study known as media ecology.
Defined in 1970 by Neil Postman as “the study of media as environments” (“Reformed” 161), the concept of media ecology developed from the work of Harold Innis, who posited in 1951 that “the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated” (34). Other scholars who pioneered this approach include Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, James Carey, Susanne Langer, Jacques Ellul, and Alfred Korzybski, although much of their work preceded the adoption of the term “media ecology” by McLuhan and Postman. The media ecology view is perhaps best encapsulated in McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” suggesting that each technology creates its own unique environment quite apart from the content delivered by that technology. Although in the field of media ecology the terms technology and medium are often used interchangeably, Postman offers that “a technology is a physical apparatus [and] a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put” (Amusing 84). When examining the effects of television, it is the medium, not the content or the material object that is foregrounded.
Figure I.1: Neil Postman, one of the fathers of Media Ecology.
Source: The Open Mind. “Neil Postman: Informing Ourselves to Death.” Aired December 12, 1990, on PBS. https://www.pbs.org/video/the-open-mind-neil-postman-informing-ourselves-to-death/←4 | 5→
In a 1995 interview, Postman says that every “new technology is a kind of Faustian Bargain. It always gives us something, but it always takes away something important. That’s true of the alphabet, and the printing press, and telegraph, right up through the computer” (Postman “Cyberspace” video). While Americans readily embrace new technologies as tangible measures of empowerment and progress, Postman argues that technology and mediation also bring unintended consequences and costs. The presentation of rock ‘n’ roll on television may be seen as one piece of evidence to support Postman’s skepticism.
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Videography
Postman,