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Hmm. Here's something I just happen to be reading at work about the year 1900 by Patricia McDonnell- and her quote by Taylor:
"The frenic and disjointed turn-of-the-century American city had, as noted, an intensely visual aspect, one that derived largely from the culture of consumption that now seemed to pervade every facet of urban life. Consumer culture relied on the mobile urban denizen, one who assimilated the display of products and attractions through his or her eyes. In the larger city marketplace, a commotion of shop signs, dazzling electric billboards,advertising posters on kiosks, immense plate-glass shop windows framing alluring displays, fashionable wares in encyclopedic department stores- all jostled for attention. This kind of visual display was novel and resolutely modern, a part of "a culture marked by an accelerated proliferation...of sensations, fashions and styles." As the historian William R. Taylor observes, "each new genre of commercial culture compressed a representation of city life into its format. These new genres had in common a seemingly random, potpourri organization that continued to dramatize the discontinuity, the kaleidoscopic varitety, and the quick tempo of city life, as in the vaudeville review."
Its fascinating to look back at early 20th century advertisement and the first narrative films to see how they were constructed and understood. Continuity, overlapping time,multiple perspectives, flash back, montage,... Perhaps the accelerated fragments, distant references and inferred associations in the mentioned ads are where we've landed 100 years later, reflecting an even more visually based contemporary consumer culture - linear communication blasted further apart.
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