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.

Telecommunications is a major global industry, and this unique book chronicles the development of this complex technology from the electric telegraph to the Internet in a simple, accessible, and entertaining way. The book opens with the early years of the electric telegraph. The reader will learn how the Morse telegraph evolved into an international network that spanned the globe, starting with the development of international undersea cables, and the heroic attempts to lay a trans-Atlantic cable. The book describes the events that led to the invention of the telephone, and the subsequent disputes over who had really invented it. It takes a look at some of the most important applications that have appeared on the Internet, the mobile revolution, and ends with a discussion of future key developments in the telecommunications industry.

Here is an often cited panoramic history of the telegraph which discusses the principal telegraph firms and the key persons within them. Throughout his work, Reid stresses the business and economic aspects of marketing this remarkable scientific invention. The importance of The Telegraph in America as a classic reference in the field is under-scored by the fact that the author was active in telegraphy throughout the period he discusses. He thus had a personal knowledge of persons and events under examination.

It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics. Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.

A new edition of the first book by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses-the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first "Internet," which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the Internet has the twentieth and twenty first. The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.

Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internet's design and use. Since the late 1960s the Internet has grown from a single experimental network serving a dozen sites in the United States to a network of networks linking millions of computers worldwide. In Inventing the Internet, Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internets design and use. The story she unfolds is an often twisting tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players, including government and military agencies, computer scientists in academia and industry, graduate students, telecommunications companies, standards organizations, and network users. The story starts with the early networking breakthroughs formulated in Cold War think tanks and realized in the Defense Department's creation of the ARPANET. It ends with the emergence of the Internet and its rapid and seemingly chaotic growth. Abbate looks at how academic and military influences and attitudes shaped both networks; how the usual lines between producer and user of a technology were crossed with interesting and unique results; and how later users invented their own very successful applications, such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web. She concludes that such applications continue the trend of decentralized, user-driven development that has characterized the Internet's entire history and that the key to the Internet's success has been a commitment to flexibility and diversity, both in technical design and in organizational culture.

This book focuses on the history of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), from its origins in the mid-19th century to nowadays. ITU was the first international organization ever and still plays a crucial role in managing global telecommunications today. Putting together some of the most relevant scholars in the field of transnational communications, the book covers the history of ITU from 1865 to digital times in a truly global perspective, taking into account several technologies like the telegraph, the telephone, cables, wireless, radio, television, satellites, mobile phone, the internet and others. The main goal is to identify the long-term strategies of regulation and the techno-diplomatic manoeuvres taken inside ITU, from convincing the majority of the nations to establish the official seat of the Telegraph Union bureau in Switzerland in the 1860s, to contrasting the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance (supported by US and ICANN). History of the International Telecommunication Union is a trans-disciplinary text and can be interesting for scholars and students in the fields of telecommunications, media, international organizations, transnational communication, diplomacy, political economy of communication, STS, and others. It has the ambition to become a reference point in the history of ITU and, at the same time, just the fi rst comprehensive step towards a longer, inter-technological, political and cultural history of transnational communications to be written in the future.