Description
Challenging the popular myth of a present-day 'information revolution', Media Technology and Society is essential reading for anyone interested in the social impact of technological change. Winston argues that the development of new media forms, from the telegraph and the telephone to computers, satellite and virtual reality, is the product of a constant play-off between social necessity and suppression: the unwritten law by which new technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is limited.
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Storm from Paradise; Part 1 Propagating Sound at Considerable Distances; Chapter 1 The Telegraph; Chapter 2 Before the Speaking Telephone; Chapter 3 The Capture of Sound; Part 2 The Vital Spark and Fugitive Pictures; Chapter 4 Wireless and Radio; Chapter 5 Mechanically Scanned Television; Chapter 6 Electronically Scanned Television; Chapter 7 Television Spin-Offs and Redundancies; Part 3 Inventions for Casting up Sums Very Pretty*‘but not very useful’: Samuel Pepys Diary, 14 March 1668.; Chapter 8 Mechanising Calculation; Chapter 9 The First Computers; Chapter 10 Suppressing the Main Frames; Chapter 11 The Integrated Circuit; Chapter 12 The Coming of the Microcomputer; Part 4 The Intricate Web of Trails, this Grand System; Chapter 13 The Beginnings of Networks; Chapter 14 Networks and Recording Technologies; Chapter 15 Communications Satellites; Chapter 16 The Satellite Era; Chapter 17 Cable Television; Chapter 18 The Internet; Conclusion: The Pile of Debris;
