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Rethinking Media and Technology: What the Kennedy-Nixon Debate Myth Can Really Teach Us

Journal Name:

  • Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies

Publication Year:

  • 2015

Key Words:

Author NameUniversity of Author
Abstract (2. Language): 
The presumption that communication technologies – TV, the Internet, social media – have fundamentally changed society has a deep cultural resonance. Indeed, the predominant framework for theorizing “media” – within both the academy and in popular culture more broadly – is rooted in technological determinist presumptions. The primary goal of this article is to challenge this framework, to demonstrate the ways it is incompatible with critical theory, and to make as case for a method and tradition that more productively problematizes technology itself. Taking on one of the most repeated claims and examples for the “effects” of media technologies, the Kennedy-Nixon debate, the article makes a case that a limited, binary theoretical model has fundamentally influenced the deductions. What’s at stake here is how to properly theorize media technologies and propose solutions to social problems and issues.
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REFERENCES

References: 

1 Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise, “Cultural Studies and Technology,” in The
Handbook of New Media, L. Lievrouw OC S. Livingstone (eds), (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, 2002
2 The first debate between the two candidates took place on September 26th, 1960.
3 Erika Tyner Allen, “The Kennedy-Nixon Presidential Debates, 1960,” The Museum of
Broadcast Communications, http://www.museum.tv/eotv/kennedy-nixon.htm
4 David L. Vancil and Sue D. Pendell, “The Myth of Viewer-Listener Disagreement in the
First Kennedy-Nixon Debate,” in Central State Speech Journal, Spring 1987, 38/1.
Pgs. 16-27
5 Hunter S. Thompson, “He Was a Crook,” CounterPunch,
http://www.counterpunch.org/thompson02212005.html
6 CNN Website, “1960 Presidential Debates,”http://wwwcgi.
cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/debates/history/1960/
7 Vancil and Pendell locate primary citations for this radio-television viewers’ disagreement
to as early as the day after the debate, anecdotal to be sure.
8 David M. Lubin, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images, (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, California, University of California Press, 2003), 135-136
Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies
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© Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies
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9 Marshall McLuhan, Medium is the Massage (New York, London, and Toronto: Bantam
Books, 1967), 6
10 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet Books, 1964), ix
11 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 33
12 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 39
13 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 261
14 Vancil and Pendell, 17
15 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London and New York:
Routledge Classics, 2003),131
16 James N. Druckman, “The Power of Television Images: The First Kennedy-Nixon Debate
Revisited,” in The Journal of Politics, Vol. 65, No. 2, May 2003, Pp. 559–571
17 Williams, 2
18 A survey of the major anthologies in television studies confirms this assertion. For
example, look at the references to Williams in Newcomb’s Television: The Critical
View (2006) or Spiegl’s Television After TV (2004) and you’ll see all of the authors
here focus on “flow” or “mobile privatization.”
19 Williams, 131
20 Quote taken from Terry Eagleton, Marx and Freedom (London: Orion Publishing Group,
1997), 13
21 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1934), 14
22 Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior,
(Oxford University Press, 1985), 281
23 Meyrowitz, 367
24 Meyrowitz, 292
25 Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture us
Actually Making Us Smarter, (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 103
26 Meyrowitz, 332
27 Slack and Wise, 485
28 David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
Maryland, 1973, Page 12
29 Johnson, 2
30 Williams, 2
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© Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies
156
31 Karen Sternheimer, Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture Why Media is Not
the Answer, (Westview Press, a Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2013), 2

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