Nostalgia for the "Progressive Era"

The uneasy relationship between regulation and the free-market plays a center role in Paul Starr's telling of the "wiring of America". In the age of News Corp., Clear Channel, and the Comcast/Verizon domination of broadband Internet, any talk of government regulation is market socialism, despite the hypocrisy of the "small government" coughing up trillions of dollars of bailouts for hemorrhaging mortgage banks and unfirm insurance firms. But anyway, the so called Progressive Era, which Starr defines from the turn of the century until the end of WWI, in comparison, seems to be a time I wouldn't mind living in.

Starr "constituent" historiography speaks directly to a claim that Prof. Newman has mentioned a few times in class: the Internet as the perfection of Häbermas's public sphere. The friction between the market and regulation in the 19th century transpired at a time before "broadcasting". The potential for "grassroots" media is larger than ever the same time as airwave domination across many paradigms is the also greater than ever before. Nonetheless, the anecdote about the DIY, indie development of rural telephony was an inspiring complement to Progressivism. Starr narrates "Rural telephony became a genuine grassroots movement. Governed by elected board, the rural co-ops made telephone service available at a cost they were determined to keep at a minimum" (Starr, 201). Even in at a Progressive time, people needed to make media work for themselves. At times, Starr seems to argue that the very fact that there is inevitably a new technology that will come to dethrone the old medium which, more likely than not, has become a monopoly. Research and development emerge from this equation which is beneficial for all, as he explains "In a purely competitive market, AT&T would have been too concerned with its short-term survival to invest in new knowledge potentially convertible into profitable innovations only many years later" (Starr, 221).
Obviously research spurs innovation, and this falls into the middle ground between technological determinism and ideological determinism which we talked about on Thursday.

Still though, Starr will not allow demand for communication account for the history of the medium(s). The nation-state's interests are a major bulwark for/against innovations at every step in the story:"The new networks [of telegraph and telephony] depended, therefore, not just on 'demand' in the conventional economic sense, but also on whether the state and other dominant institutions would allow that demand to be fully expressed" (Starr, 191). Starr is almost progressive, in the modern sense, himself in his optimistic portrayal of competition vs. regulation, and this lesson points the dangerous collusion of media and state in the 21st century.
If innovation and change, in the narrowest sense of the word, is our goal, we need to start thinking about anti-trust legislation and localized more than globalized media.