Transculturation
Print’ was taken out in the UK as early as 1714,
but the fi rst practical typewriter working faster
than handwriting was probably that of American
Christopher Latham Sholes (1868) who, after
several improvements to his machine, signed
up with E. Remington & Sons, gunsmiths of
New York. Th e fi rst Remington machines were
marketed in 1874.
1878 saw the introduction of the shift-key
typewriter, followed by machines that for the
first time allowed the typist to actually see
what he/she was typing (1883). Th at jack-of-all-
trades among inventors, Th omas Alva Edison
(1847–1931), produced an electrically operated
machine containing a printing wheel, in 1872,
though it was many years before a commercially
viable electric machine was produced (by James
Smathes in 1920).
IBM introduced the famous ‘golf-ball’ electric
typewriter in 1961, allowing for diff erent type
faces and type sizes to be used with the same
machine. Today electronic typewriters (and even
manual machines) continue to be manufactured
and sold despite being to all intents and purposes
displaced by the computer. See topic guide
under media history; media: technologies.U
U-certifi cate See certification of films.
UK Gold Launched on 1 November 1992, UK Gold
is a satellite channel run jointly by BBC Enter-
prises and Thames Television based on their
combined programme libraries.
Ullswater Committee Report on Broad-
casting, 1936 This government-appointed
committee under the chairmanship of Viscount
Ullswater was given the task of making recom-
mendations on the future of the BBC once its
fi rst charter expired on 31 December 1936. Th e
Report praised the BBC for its impartiality
and catholicity, but chided it for the heaviness
of its Sunday entertainment. The Charter of
the BBC was renewed following the Report for
another ten years; the number of governors was
increased from five to seven and the ban on
advertisements was to continue, though spon-
sorship was to be permitted in the case of TV (a
right the BBC only seldom exploited).
Like reports before and after it, Ullswater made
clear the very serious public responsibility of
broadcasting: ‘Th e infl uence of broadcasting
upon the mind and speech of the nation’ made it
an ‘urgent necessity in the national interest that
the broadcasting service should at all times be
conducted in the best possible manner and toRow, 1969); Eric Berne, What Do You Say After You
Say Hello? (Corgi Books, 1975); Ian Stewart and Vann
Joines, TA Today (Lifespace, 1987); Claude M. Steiner,
Scripts People Live: Transactional Analysis in Life
Scripts (Grove Press, 1990); Amy and Th omas Harris,
Staying OK (Arrow Books, 1995); Abe Wagner, Th e
Transactional Manager (The Industrial Society,
1996); Graeme Burton and Richard Dimbleby,
Between Ourselves: An Introduction to Interpersonal
Communication (Hodder Arnold, 2006).
Transculturation The movement of cultural
forms across geographical boundaries and
periods of time resulting in cross-cultural inter-
action that may give rise to new cultural forms.
See hybridization.
Transmission model of mass communica-
tion See attention model of mass commu-
nication.
Trigger events See agenda-setting.
Truth, visualization of See visions of order.
TV: catch-up TV See television.
TV: independent producers See television:
independent producers.
Twitter A social networking (see networking:
social networking) and microblogging
service, launched in the US in 2006. Th e ‘tweet’
is a message restricted to 140 characters. You
can post tweets and follow them. Celebrity
tweeters (called Twitterati) can prompt thou-
sands if not millions of subscribers. Encap-
sulating a message in 140 characters or fewer
can be said to encourage succinctness. On the
downside, triviality prevails, with side-orders
such as narcissistic self-promotion on the one
hand and highly contentious declarations on
the other.
Twitter has varyingly been described as
‘diabolically addictive’, a ‘shout in the darkness
hoping someone is listening’, twitterers being in
a constant process of ‘self-affi rmation’. Search-
ing the dictionary for an appropriate word to
describe the essence of Twitter-to-be, founder
Jack Dorsey ‘came across the word “twitter”,
and it was just perfect’, the term describing ‘a
short burst of inconsequential information’; or
what the San Antonio market research fi rm Pear
Analytics in 2009 termed ‘pointless babble’.
Two-step flow model of communication
See one-step, two-step, multi-step flow
models of communication.
Typewriter A patent for an ‘Artifi cial Machine
or Method for Impressing or Transcribing of
Letters Singly or Progressively one after another,
as in Writing, whereby all Writing Whatever
may be Engrossed in Paper or Parchment so
Neat and Exact as not to be distinguished from