Bridging Media Psychology and History: An Interview with Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay (Part One)

This week, I am showcasing a new book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love, a magisterial work by a first-time author, Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay, which explores the intersection between American media history and media psychology.

Charisse has been talking about writing such book going back to when I knew her as an undergraduate student living in Senior Haus, the MIT dorm where my wide and I were housemasters for thirteen years. (The stories I could tell!) I was lucky to be able to connect with her again when I came to USC and served on her dissertation committee. And I was one of the people who got to read this book in manuscript form and give it my public endorsement:

“20th Century Media and the American Psyche is an ideal textbook for educators who want to help their students engage with the impact of more than a century of changing media on the ways we think, remember the past, interact with others, and construct our identities. The perspectives here are both productive and generative, pushing aside old assumptions and pushing us to ask new questions. And the writing is engaging, personal, and witty, all of the things most textbooks are not. The interdisciplinary fusion of media psychology and media history is especially welcomed as a way to get students thinking critically about what has changed and what has remained as a consequence of earlier media ‘revolutions.’"

I am proud as Hell for her and what she has accomplished with this ambitious project.

Across this interview, I ask her about some of the core principles which organize this project, allow her to address the issue of technological determinism, and explore her long-standing commitment to media literacy education.

You organized your book around media that enable “sharing experiences,” “synchronizing experiences,” and “affecting experiences.” Explain this distinction.

I cluster the technologies of the long 20th century (i.e., about 1860-2000) according to the capabilities that they afforded that were not available with earlier media in order to assess how the communication environment changed during this time. 

Prior to the 20th century, the primary means of exchanging messages across space and time was the written word. The written word is powerful and can deeply impact mass audiences but the mass audience being able to experience consistent and realistic (moving) images and sound – thereby sharing detailed sensory experiences – is a massive shift, an unprecedented one compared to the centuries of human communication that came before it. This fosters a sense of intimacy, or feelings of closeness between individuals in a way that was unavailable prior to the advent of photographic film and recorded sound

Similarly, being able to share visceral sensory experiences at the same time with the advent of radio and television – that is synchronizing experiences – is a blink in human communication history (i.e., widely available for less than 100 years) and yet it has become the default for mass communication experiences since. This regularity, or the quality of being stable and predictable through habitual interaction, allowed us to develop shared schedules as a nation and engage in synchronized activities across space that had previously only been salient to those in the same community, resulting in a national sense of community that is fostered through shared behaviors in shared time, not just shared messages or content.

 Finally, the opportunity to affect or manipulate mass media messages was not widely available prior magnetic tape, video gaming, and dialup service provider, but now we regularly ask ourselves, could we survive without the internet? The question seems absurd when you consider that human society survived without real time active information access for literally millennia. Reciprocity—as an aspect of any successful relationship—means that both parties acknowledge and engage with each other. Reciprocal media are communication technologies that reciprocate, or respond to, the actions of users with corresponding actions (vs. interactive media).  In 25 years, the internet has become a psychological necessity on par with food, water, and shelter. That’s beyond amazing and worthy of consideration. 

 The purpose of the book to address how our communication environment has changed with the rapid evolution of 20th century media and how this change in the communication environment has subsequently affected our expectations of ourselves, others, and future media. Each of these clusters represents a massive shift in how we communicate, affording things that were not possible previously. By clustering them, my hope is for readers to see how rapidly our communication environment has changed and even more shockingly, how we take these affordances for granted even though they have happened in less than a century. 

Your book brings together two approaches -- one psychological, the other historical. What do you see as the relationship between the two? 

I regularly identify as an interdisciplinary scholar because the term indicates that my work exists at the intersection of two different disciplines, but to be honest, I have never felt that I was bridging disciplines, I was just trying to use the best tools available to answer the questions that I was interested in. However, academia is so siloed that the idea that connecting theories across disciplines is an anomaly instead of resourceful.

Silos are often false constructions that allow us to operate and label ourselves within a given space, but also prevent us from seeing how our work connects. In this case, over time, I think psychology is deeply rooted in history, even though psychologists like to think of themselves as independent of time, that these are constructs that humans will have exhibited arguably forever. But the psychological arguments are missing the question: how does the communication environment change? 

For example, many psychological studies rely on manipulating text; changing a name, changing the words use in framing an argument, changing what information is presented to the subject at different points in the text. However, this research never addresses how these psychological processes operated before the written word and widespread literacy. 

 That’s what's so essential to the historiography of psychology; we need to understand that our psychology is dependent on the world in which we were raised, and our world has evolved more rapidly over the past 150 years than say the 150 years before that (1700-1850) or as is commonly referred to in our discipline, since the advent of the printing press in the west in the 15th century (China had moveable type printing 400 years prior). 

 Much of this is rooted in my experiences moving between cultures as a child. I spent summers in Guyana, moving annually between the suburbs of New York City to a farm in what was commonly referred to as the third world… Clearly that’s a problematic term, but so is developing, or banana republic, or any of the other terms that we use to refer formerly colonized countries that have spent years trying to attain some sense of agency and self-determination on the other side of colonization. 

 I talk about the experience of having cable and video games with my grandfather in Guyana and not having those experiences in my American home, but at the same time, I also experienced what it meant to have rolling blackouts, no air condition, no indoor plumbing, and shoddy television when I stayed with other family and friends. This marked disparity in technology impacted how I think about and how I engage with the world. It affected my psychology. But the trends in psychology, specifically that much of the fundamental research is conducted on WEIRD participants (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) is a painful blind spot that many psychologists are only beginning to address.

 As a post doc, I worked under Cheryl Grills, who focuses on Afro centric psychological phenomena. She spends a big chunk of the year on the continent, researching the cognitive processes of traditional African healing using psychological methodologies and approaches, but here in the west, we talk about that body of work using terms like African philosophy, spirituality, religion. We don’t think about it as a form of psychology and we don’t think psychology as part of their unique communication environment. 

 So back to your question about what the connection between history and psychology is. History is the story we tell ourselves about the past. But when we start to tell that story of the past, we see how we as humans have evolved over time. And by failing to correlate how we, our culture, our society, and again, our communication environment has evolved over time, then we fail to see how our psychology would arguably evolve over time as well. 

 As you are describing widespread consequences of introducing new media into the culture, how do you avoid the problem of technological determinism?

 Thank you for asking this question because this is a common assumption of my work. Long story short, I'm basically arguing the exact opposite of technological determinism. Technological determinism is the idea that technology determines society and is one of the first arguments that is debunked in the study of media; instead, I’m arguing that psychology determines technology use and our habitual use then in turn affects our psychology. We need to have an interdependent understanding of media because we have an interdependent relationship with the communication environment. Our psychology determines the communication environment and in turn the communication environment determines our psychology.

FIGURE 0.4 Psychology and the Communication Environment

How we communicate affects our psychology, and our psychology affects how we communicate. Communication technologies, including everything from language and music to smoke signals and radio, enable novel strategies for communication. As these technologies become normal, so do their associated strategies, thus impacting culture, society, and individual expectations for communicating. These expectations then impact the development and adoption of new technologies. (p. 9)

The phenomenon of early memories is particularly relevant here. The research in development psych reveals that infants actually form memories earlier than we are able to vocalize them. In the 1960s, Rovee-Collier revealed that 2-3 month-old infants “remembered” which leg would activate a mobile hanging over their crib. 

You can experience this when you have a visceral reaction to a smell, but you cannot recall where or when you first experienced it. Instead, psychologists argue that being able to communicate and encoding the memory into language is what allows us to then recall it later in life, and language largely doesn’t emerge until around 12 months. Coming back to your last question, the ability to communicate and how we communicate is essential to our psychology. Communication technologies have drastically expanded our opportunities for communication; therefore, they have drastically expanded our psychological abilities.

 Technology is affording new changes in the communication environment which then allow us to evolve. The criticism of technological determinism, or the idea that technology determines society, often ignores this major third variable: that technology changes the communication environment. We hear – and have heard for the past 25 years – that the internet and social media are going to change the world. And they have. But these technologies are social catalysts. Drawing from the definition in chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a [social] reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change; the internet and social media have afforded a communication environment that allows social changes to occur at a faster rate, much like the printing press, the written word, smoke signals, and even language itself.

 I will also take this opportunity to argue that the rhetorical use of the technological determinism is a shorthand critique that is used in spaces where technology develops quickly. I have not heard the term technological determinism applied to the advent of the written language or the printing press. However, we can all argue that the advent of the written language dramatically changed our society. 

I also think that our knee-jerk response to any whiff of technological determinism is an outcome of the popular discourse regarding media – we constantly hear arguments about the effects of media on society; the minute you tell someone what you do, their first question is “What do you think is the effect of MTV, rap music, video games, Facebook, [insert newest media here]?” Because the argument is so lazy and pervasive, we – as media scholars – have to push back on it every single time. I had a very unpleasant interaction at a history conference in 2017 when I was presenting some of my arguments on cable television and magnetic tape to discuss the environment of the 1990s. The respondent for my panel said, “I guess psychologists don’t have a problem with technological determinism,” then refused to allow me to respond. It was so sarcastic, dismissive, and righteous that it really set me down the path of having to defend my work against this particular criticism. 

I think that we need to address the connections between technology and society. And it is clearly not as simple as technology-determines-society. But technology changes the environment which we live. And that changes our society and our psychology.

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay is an Associate Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She holds BS degrees in Brain and Cognitive Science and Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA degree from the School of Cinematic Arts and a PhD in Social Psychology from University of Southern California. Charisse's work focuses on how media affects the way we think about others and our perceptions of ourselves. At Newhouse, she teaches courses on media theory, media psychology, and diversity. In her most recent book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche, she investigates changes to the communication environment over the past 150 years and how these rapid yet pervasive shifts have affected our psychology. A committed teacher, L’Pree has spent the past 20 years encouraging others to think differently about their relationship with all forms of media and across disciplines. You can read more of her work at charisselpree.me or follow her @charisselpree.