The history of affordable news and entertainment in America is, in many respects, a chronicle of advertisingâ??s successful shifts from one medium to the next. After the Civil War, the coincident rise of cities and department-store advertising budgets pushed newspaper circulations skyward. Radio achieved its cultural peak in the 1930s and â??40s, not long after â??national advertising came into its own as a corporate entity,â? says the American-culture historian Jackson Lears. Televisionâ??s deep insinuation into our culture might never have happened without a second 20th-century advertising renaissance, centered on the boxes in our living rooms.
â??Weâ??re in the midst of something similar today with our phones,â? Lears told me recently. â??Advertising must come to terms with a new technology.â?
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