From Big Bang to Big Data: A History of the Media

Description

Does media history really start with a bang? More than just newspapers, television, and social networks, media are the means by which any information is communicated, from cosmic radiation traces to medieval church bells to modern identity documents. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths.From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media – how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. Many media were invented as ways to store and share information, and many have served as powerful tools for administration and control. The concerns raised about media today, whether about privacy, piracy, or anxieties over declining cultural standards, preoccupied earlier generations too. In a playful style, accompanied by more than one hundred illustrations, the authors show us how every society has been a media society in its own way.From antique graffiti to last year’s viral YouTube clip, the past is only approachable through media. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history – and about human societies past and present. Cover FROM BIG BANG TO BIG DATA Title Copyright CONTENTS Key Thinkers in the History of Media Acknowledgments Introduction In the Beginning Was ... Geomedia Biomedia The Talking Human Doing Things with Words Visual Communication: Images, Sculptures, and Counting Systems From Bookkeeping to Writing Enduring Media: Stone, Clay, Rituals Connecting Empires Writing and Reading Practices: The Examples of Greece and Rome Silk Roads Arabic Convergence Culture European Information Overload Medieval Intermedia The Inca Empire Solves a Knotty Problem Early Modern Oral, Written, and Visual Continuity Multimedia Festivals and Everyday Life A Partially New Printing Technology A Printing Revolution? The Media of the Scientific Revolution Print Capitalism Politics and the Public Sphere Memory, Rights, and Literacy The Modern Experience – Media in the Nineteenth Century Speech in the Public Sphere The Medium Par Excellence? The Modern Press Electric Media A New Visual Culture Audiovisual Media – About the Past The Media of the Masses Mass Media as an Industry Mass Media as Politics in the Twentieth Century Mass Media Hardware: The Example of Japan Everyday Media Remediation and Mobility Analog and Digital Calculating Machines as Media (or Vice Versa) Memex, Infrastructures, and Networks Breakthrough of the PC World Wide Web The Social Significance of Computerization Mobile Devices – Social and Streaming Media Digital Media Specificity and Big Data Afterword References Index