On April 14, 1912, the day the RMS Titanic sank in the frozen North Atlantic, a 21-year telegrapher named David Sarnoff was working at the Marconi Wireless station atop the Wanamaker Hardware building in New York City. It was one of the Big Apple’s tallest buildings at the time and therefore advantageous for signal propagation. He sent and received wireless messages for seventy-two straight hours, gathering names of survivors as anxious relatives of Titanic passengers congregated on the streets below. That incident, combined with swift promotion through the Marconi company lead Sarnoff to form his own company with funding from General Electric. He called that company the Radio Corporation of America – RCA.
The RCA stock market symbol became known by both bankers and barbers from New York to San Francisco. Others from around the world knew of RCA through newspapers. The telegraph was in general use, radio was emerging and battles between competing companies would all but be silenced by RCA. It had a virtual lock monopoly on ‘wireless’ communications. There was no serious competition in sight.
Although radios were primarily used by the military and the odd hobbyist Sarnoff championed the promotion of the ‘new’ technology as a ‘music box’ for the masses – the iPod of its time. He was right and RCA continued its climb into the stock market stratosphere.
Under the direction of Sarnoff, RCA became Wall Street’s darling high-flyer tech-stock of the 1920s. It made many investors and speculators very rich - my grandfather was one of them.
In essence RCA was the Microsoft of its day - a leading edge, high-technology company with dominant market share.
However, as we all know, 1929 brought the stock market crash that signaled the Depression.
In the five years prior to the ‘Great Crash’, RCA’s stock soared from about $11 to its September 1929 high of $114 per share. Such was the meteoric success of the stock that it spilt 5 for 1 seven months earlier in that fatal year. That’s an appreciation of 936% in only five years - equal to an annual compound return of a monumental 60%. Also unbelievable was the fact RCA stock had never paid a cash dividend! Investors didn’t care - the stock value increased almost daily. At its 1929 peak RCA boasted an astronomical price-to-earning ratio of 72:1!
From RCA’s 1929 high of $114 the stock price dropped continuously for the next three years, reaching the basement in 1932 with a share price worth less than $3. This represented a loss from its 1929 peak of 97%. It made many investors and speculators paupers - my grandfather was one of them.
What needs to be remembered here is this: RCA, although the predominant technology leader of its day, lost 97% of its value just as quickly as it had risen. However, even with the loss, and a stock price hovering below $3, and the world in Depression-era turmoil, it continued to be the dominant player.
Alliance Capitalism. New Technology. Business Consolidation. Wireless Standards. Stock Ticker. Revenue Generation. Engaging Content.
Nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be!
Context is everything.
Increasingly, we live in a world of one-liners, non-sequiturs and sound bites.
I did not have… sexual relations with that woman, said William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States.
How often have we heard or seen that response…? Now, how many times has it appeared in context to the greater issue…?
Humphrey Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam”, in Casablanca. The banditos never said, “Badges? We don’t need no steenking badges!” in Treasure of The Sierra Madre (what is it with Bogey and misquotes anyway…?!)
He may have died without ever having known the Internet let alone surf it, but Marshall McLuhan’s statement, ‘the medium is the message’, could have been about the Web. This quote is known to just about everyone, but how many of us can put it in context…? What is the phrase that this oft-quoted nugget is mined from?
Trying to understand McLuhan, in context or out, has driven many to distraction over the years, and probably more than a few directly into analysis. But I can’t think of a better way to end this treatise on content than to take the phrase that turned mass media on its ear more than thirty-five years ago and point it at the Internet…
Marshall McLuhan was the head of the Center for Culture and Technology at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto in 1964 when he said those things.
With the conflagration for attention that the Internet has spawned in just a few short years, with the fusion of mediums that is the Internet, if Marshall McLuhan were alive today, would he be saying:
The modem is the message…?!