Memorandum from Adorno to the Rockefeller Foundation.
“Predicative Production Cultures: The Tempering of Chance in Research and Development, 1936-1940”
Josh Shepperd, Associate Professor, Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
March 12th, 3:30-5:00 pm, Cobb 311
In association with the Music & Sound Workshop and Digital Media Workshop, we are pleased to present our final Mass Culture workshop of winter quarter. Please join us the afternoon of Wednesday, March 12th, for an work-in-progress talk by Josh Shepperd. Note, there is no pre-circulated paper for this meeting. Refreshments generously provided by the Sound & Music and Digital Media Workshops.
Abstract: This presentation looks at the intellectual history of research and development in radio, television, and digital industries. I argue that the mass media industry system first consolidated a standardized “logic” for how it organizes and sustains its economy of scale through the appropriation of social psychological methods. The capacity to triangulate demographic data was formularized by the late 1930s after early communications researchers located techniques to predict reception to educational radio curriculum. In conversation – and conflict – with Theodor Adorno through a federal educational research project, early media researchers found that they could dependably recoup production costs once they coordinated likely response to “stimuli” through behaviorist typologies. At each subsequent shift in industry history, studios and companies have participated in what I’m referring to as “predicative production cultures”: the continuous adjustment of content, advertising sales, and distribution practices to reduce chance of investment losses, through the correlation of audience categories to anticipated action. This presentation looks at the early methodological discoveries that impacted how commercial, educational, and even government institutions interpreted the introduction of newly measurable public opinion to media representations.
Josh Shepperd is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press), which received the 2024 BEA Book Award and placed as a runner-up or finalist for four other book awards. He is co-writing the official History of Public Broadcasting for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Current, and is the founding Associate Editor of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (University of California Press). Since 2017 Josh has served as the sound research fellow of the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board, where he directs the Radio Preservation Task Force and Sound Submissions Project.