1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society Jump to:
1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society Jump to:
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The first media moguls of the 20th century were the publishers of large-circulation American and British newspapers. As in so many other aspects of popular culture, British or American examples set precedents that were followed by the rest of Europe.... Read More
The real novelty of the daily press was not so much its content as the scale of its enterprise and its financing. In the last years of the 19th century, as the range of packaged food and drugs and manufactured goods intended for private consumption dramaticaliy increased, advertising became the mechanism by which the distribution of goods within the economy was stimulated,and regulated. Read More
With the perfection of a moving picture camera in 1892, and the subsequent invention of the peep hole kinetoscope in 1893, the stage was set for the modern film industry. Previewed at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago during the summer of 1893, the kinetoscope could handle only one customer at a time. For a penny or a nickel in the slot, one could watch brief, unenlarged 35-mm black-and-white motion pictures. Read More
The films shown in the nickelodeon era represented a striking advance over the flickering glimpses of dancing-girls first seen in the penny-arcade kinetoseopes. Read More
World War I drastically curtailed European production, and American distributors used this opportunity to secure a monopoly in their home market and expand their share of world business, by selling at other companies could not compete. By the end of 1918, in spite of war, famine and threatening revolution, a profound feeling for the film had been deeply implanted in Germany and already there was an originality about the German product which was to develop very fruitfully. Read More
Before 1910 the movies had discovered that sold cinema tickets; the earliest stars were stage actors like emme John Bunny or Biliy Anderson, bilied in 1912 as "The Greatest Photoplay Star". But the greatest of Hollywood' s formative years were Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
From 1914 with Charlie Chaplin, achieved a unlike anything ever seen before them. More than the scale of their popularity, what made stardom a new phenomenon was that it detached fame from achievement in the strenuous life of work or battle. Read More
At the opening of the twentieth century the decisive influence of the ragtime pianists fell on white audiences tiring of the minstrel show and willing to pay to hear black performers. At the same time the American band was being heard everywhere, promoted by John Philip Sousa, the most successful musician of his time, and testifying among other things to pugnacious nationalism. Both phenomena would modulate into dance bands playing vigorous dance music. Read More
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