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'A must-read to anyone interested in the digital world.' - Valérie Schafer, Center for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg A concise history of the digital revolution and the lore, rhetoric, and debates that surround it. The Digital Revolution aims to tell a story, one of the most powerful ideologies of recent decades: that digitalization constitutes a revolution, a break with the past, a radical change for the human beings who are living through it. The book aims to investigate the origins of this idea, how it evolved, which other past revolutions consciously or unconsciously inspired it, which great stories it has conveyed over time, which of its key elements have changed and which ones have persisted and have been repeated in different historical periods. All these discussions, large or small, have settled and condensed into a series of media, advertising, corporate, political, and technical sources. Readers will be introduced to new, previously unpublished historical sources. The main aim of the book is to deconstruct what looks like a "natural" and incontestable idea and to help rethink digital societies today.
The Global Wireless charts a history of wireless beginning in the 1910s, when it was used as a tool for global communication, and ending as it declined and slowly fell from view. Located at a crossroads of media history and science and technology studies, The Global Wireless recounts how the advent of wireless technologies created a novel socio-technical problem: since radio signals easily and unwittingly crossed national borders, they challenged existing systems and standards of national media infrastructure control. The book further examines the political negotiations around the International Telecommunication Union, the growth of international communication networks, and the expansion of global media companies on the eve of World War I. The Global Wireless demonstrates that long before Wi-Fi and 5G, another wireless technology had already spread around the globe and prompted, in its wake, a radical reconsideration of networked communication and community. The Global Wireless should appeal to a broad range of readers, from specialists in the history of radio, technology, and global politics, to professionals and hobbyists in today’s wireless and radio industries.
As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The...
Building on the momentum of the recent “historical turn” in digital media and Internet studies, this volume explores how digital journalism has developed from a historical perspective. With contributions from established and emerging scholars from Europe, Asia, South and North America, the book investigates not only how established journalistic systems transformed in the early days of digital but how the structural, technological, and cultural changes induced by digitization have reconfigured the trajectory of journalism. The book argues in support of three main claims. The first is that emphasis should be given to the plurality of histories instead of one single digital journalism histo...
From the punch card calculating machine to the personal computer to the iPhone and more, this in-depth text offers a comprehensive introduction to digital media history for students and scholars across media and communication studies, providing an overview of the main turning points in digital media and highlighting the interactions between political, business, technical, social, and cultural elements throughout history. With a global scope and an intermedia focus, this book enables students and scholars alike to deepen their critical understanding of digital communication, adding an understudied historical layer to the examination of digital media and societies. Discussion questions, a timeline, and previously unpublished tables and maps are included to guide readers as they learn to contextualize and critically analyze the digital technologies we use every day.
This edited volume explores different meanings of media convergence and deconvergence, and reconsiders them in critical and innovative ways. Its parts provide together a broad picture of opposing trends and tensions in media convergence, by underlining the relevance of this powerful idea and emphasizing the misconceptions that it has generated. Sergio Sparviero, Corinna Peil, Gabriele Balbi and the other authors look into practices and realities of users in convergent media environments, ambiguities in the production and distribution of content, changes to the organization of media industries, the re-configuration of media markets, and the influence of policy and regulations. Primarily addressed to scholars and students in different fields of media and communication studies, Media Convergence and Deconvergence deconstructs taken-for-granted concepts and provides alternative and fresh analyses on one of the most popular topics in contemporary media culture. Chapter 1 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
Artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as something extraordinary, a dream--or a nightmare--that awakens metaphysical questions on human life. Yet far from a distant technology of the future, the true power of AI lies in its subtle revolution of ordinary life. From voice assistants like Siri to natural language processors, AI technologies use cultural biases and modern psychology to fit specific characteristics of how users perceive and navigate the external world, thereby projecting the illusion of intelligence. Integrating media studies, science and technology studies, and social psychology, Deceitful Media examines the rise of artificial intelligence throughout history and expose...
Why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure. When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Jacob Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how ...
‘The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.’ — Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies – the idea that networks, by themselves, are the main agents of social, economic, political and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to netw...