Week 7: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week

Post by Sunday at midnight.

Some selected examples of the first mass media, mass culture, mass music, mass entertainment based cultures--in which mass youth first made thir mass consumer appearance.^^

As noted in the Savage reading (starting on p. 115), many things in mass youth culture happened between 1880s-1913, making the U.S. mass cultural area the first example of mass challenges intermixing worldwide--thus the U.S. version of the various cultural forms within these challenges set the imprimatur for mass culture export as "Americanization."

1880s - First Amusement Park by the World's Largest City 'Challenge' New York City, youth without mass schooling, could work, wider general youth and both genders opportunities to create a world without adult or even older youth supervision

1893 - Chicago Exhibition, the Fantasy "White City"




1895 - First films made (Melies, Lumiere; French, soon first U.S. films near New Jersey close to New York City)




1901 - first 10 inch grammaphone record, mass music industry born with youth adopting it as part of their culture--buying most of the records, particularly "adult subversive" dances and music (ragtime in 1900s, soon jazz and blues by the 1920s and 1930s; rock'n'roll by 1950s) around a mass commercial and mass media form where you might never see your 'favorite' singers or musicians, though millions of other people in the same homogenized situation

1903 - Second Amusement Park in the World, Luna Park, Opens--next to the other one at Coney Island



More Luna Park:



1903 - first powered airplane flight

1903 - first massively popular narrative film, The Great Train Robbery, 12 minutes:
The Great Train Robbery is a 1903 American Western film by Edwin S. Porter. Twelve minutes long, it is considered a milestone in film making, expanding on Porter's previous work Life of an American Fireman. The film used a number of innovative techniques including cross cutting, double exposure composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting. Cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique. Some prints were also hand colored in certain scenes. None of the techniques were original to The Great Train Robbery, and it is now considered that it was heavily influenced by Frank Mottershaw's earlier British film A Daring Daylight Burglary. The film uses simple editing techniques (each scene is a single shot) and the story is mostly linear (with only a few "meanwhile" moments), but it represents a significant step in movie making, being one of the first "narrative" movies of significant length. It was quite successful in theaters and was imitated many times. ; Savage mentions 10-20 million people watching films weekly in first decade of films, The U.S. population in 1900 was 76 million. In 1950, it rose to 152 million. So around 10-20 million of 76 million in 1900 watching films weekly. Mass image based culture, geared increasingly toward institutionalizing youth themes.




1904 - commercial lithography (mass pictures for first time much cheaper to mass publish, advertising entirely changed)

1905 - first nickelodeon (personal movie machine, like an arcade game)

1906 - first regular radio broadcasts

1908 - first mass car

1909 - Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung invited to the United States by Stanley Hall to popularize psychology (they come to have a huge influence on the "admen", that grew 10x in 1900-1910 as an industry. Freud hated the U.S. mass culture, calling U.S. culture an "abortion"; Freud's later years filled with fear for the power of organized irrationality and emotionalism upon society like the U.S. was doing)

1913 - first mass car so popular led to first assembly line by Henry Ford, where labor was plentiful: another mass challenge city: Detroit, "The Highland Park Ford Plant was a production plant for Ford Motor Company in the city of Highland Park, Michigan, which is surrounded by Detroit. The Highland Park Ford Plant was designed by Albert Kahn in 1908 and was opened in 1910. The complex included offices, factories, a power plant and a foundry.[3] Because of its spacious design, it set the precedent for many factories and production plants built thereafter. In 1913, the Highland Park Ford Plant became the first automobile production facility in the world to implement the assembly line. In the late 1920s Ford moved automobile assembly to the River Rouge Plant complex in nearby Dearborn. Automotive trim manufacturing and tractor assembly continued at the Highland Park plant."






Some of the original hits, sounding just like they did then thanks to mass media freezing that experience here as the same as anyone else's experience then:


Maple Leaf Rag Played by Scott Joplin



Joplin - Maple Leaf Rag Played by Asian American youth


Teenagers Still Enjoying Ragtime Today - same song played really fast on the last day of school year


Even faster:





Joplin: Elite Syncopations


Max Morath: Living a Ragtime Life! Part 1


Joplin - The Entertainer


Dances of the Ragtime Era, Review






Cab Calloway, Harlem Renaissance, Mass Music, Mass Movies, Mass Ethnic Mixing


The Nicholas Brothers when they were young, tap dance



Fred Astaire once called this performance "the greatest dance number ever filmed."



Females Cut Their Hair! 1920s "Flappers" (discussed in the readings by Savage)