The Perfect Storm - Part 3

The perfect storm has created a world where media and culture are now indistinguishable from each other. To understand where the media culture will take us in the future requires an understanding of how it all came together.
 
Let’s start with an understanding of the four modern media ages. The First Media Age or The Golden Age of Hollywood started at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was the beginning of mass communication and entertainment as we know it today. New technologies such as radio and film ushered in the age of modernism and served as a melting pot of ideas and philosophies.

Much of America had changed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Most people lived on farms in rural areas isolated from outside influences. As a result, family and the immediate community had the biggest impact on world views, religious beliefs, values and morals. Before The Golden Age of Hollywood, most people rarely traveled more than 20 miles from their homes. All of that changed in the latter part of the 19th Century as people moved from the countryside into cities due to the availability of jobs.

There were new influences to be found around every corner. The First Media Age with its emphasis on technology proved to be one of those influences. Modernism was one of the most significant philosophies that prevailed in the First Media Age. Modernism offered a changing society, a new future. It championed that science and reason could explain the mysteries of the universe, the origins of life itself. We were told that science and reason could unlock the answers to life’s questions.

During this time, people were fascinated and infatuated with anything modern. They had a desire for knowledge, understanding and enlightenment. Modernism provided a framework that helped to explain life’s mysteries. Radio and film developed during this period and offered a conduit where these ideas could be shared. There were also plenty of subtle philosophies floating around that found a home in the new, emerging media age such as Marxism, Darwinism and evolution.

Radio offered people an opportunity to hear information and news as it happened and also provided the first home entertainment experience where the family could gather around an electronic media device. It caused the world to become smaller, practically overnight.

Perhaps the most influential institution in the First Media Age was the creation and development of the motion picture industry which today we call Hollywood. The industry was established by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Looking for new opportunities, they established the first film industry on the East Coast. The industry got its start in 1891 when Thomas Edison applied for a patent on his new camera called the kinetoscope. Jewish immigrants embraced this new industry by opening Nickelodeons, nickel theaters dedicated solely to film exhibition.

By the early 1920s, men like Carl Laemmle, William Fox, and Louis B. Meyer came to control and dominate Hollywood for decades to come. Amazingly a few individuals would now have the power and influence to create movies for the entire American population and the world. They would decide which films would be made and which ones would not, which ideas would be expressed and which ones would be discarded. They would decide what was important and what was not. Never had so much power been placed in the hands of so few men.

The 1930s was a time when many Americans stood in bread lines. America was in the middle of a great depression. One-third of the work force was unemployed. The great dust bowls in the Midwest were in the process of turning America into a wasteland. But Hollywood was offering up glamour and a lifestyle that seemed to be from a different world, one that was out of reach for the average American.

It was a version of the American Dream based on wealth and materialism. The ideas that fueled the American Dream are complex. These ideas were powerful and capable of shaping the destiny of our nation, including our spiritual direction.

In the years to come, the battle will rage on. What is the American Dream? Who will define it and for what purpose?

The First Media Age laid the foundation on which all future media ages would be built. Worldviews and various philosophies may have been subtle by today’s standards but, nevertheless, the seeds had been sown.