The Creation of the Media
Paul Starr, about his new book The Creation of the Media:
what I suggest in this book is that when new technologies come along, they provoke a political question — how is this new medium going to be handled? Is it going to be private? Is it going to be public? Is it going to be a military technology? What will be the basic purposes that it serves? And so Europe and America often dealt with the same technology in very different ways. When the electric telegraph first appeared, the Europeans treated it as a military technology. We treated it as a commercial technology. The telephone, same thing. There was a period in the 1890s, early 1900s when there were hundreds of little mutual telephone companies, independent telephone cooperatives that were established, and telephones spread much more widely, much faster in America than elsewhere.
Others about this book:
When U.S. policy was at its best, it refused to give the titans of one technology control over the next technology that came along. For example, the Post Office was not given control of the telegraph; Western Union did not control the telephone; and AT&T was locked out of radio. The lessons for us now, when the masters of old technologies, such as the movies and recorded music, want to control Internet technologies, should be obvious.
At a recent forum on media coverage of the Iraq war at the University of California, Berkeley, a network television producer finally tired of the torrent of criticism. If you don’t like what you see, stop watching, he said. That was the way consumers could exercise ”choice.” Paul Starr’s original and compelling book shows that it’s not the only sort of choice available to the public.
[x]#596 fan vrijdag 4 juni 2004 @ 00:00:09
