Customer Reviews

A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a collection of essays on the movement of information, and how it has transformed the United States from its colonial beginnings to today. At the very beginning, the founders of the country subsidized the transportation of newspapers through the postal system; this allowed the free flow of information between cities and states, across the entire continent. As technology increased, it inevitably speeded and expanded the amount of information flowing throughout the country--from the railroad, through the telegraph, telephone, radio, motion pictures, television, and on into computers.

This book is an exciting history of information media. Though written by no less than seven contributors, it pulls together into seamless whole, almost as if written by one author. The depth of information is breathtaking, and the conclusions reached are fascinating. Indeed, I think that they admirably proved their contention that there was continuity in the development of information media, and I myself repeatedly saw history repeat itself through their narrative, right up to today.

This is a fascinating book, and one that I recommend without reservation.

I bought this book because my work is in information reporting and I thought it would provide an interesting perspective. It did succeed at that. Because I come from a technical background, I had a little trouble getting started with the book, until I released it was written from a sociology background. Once I got past that I enjoyed the book except for the ...

extremely poor editing. There were numerous grammatical and sentence structure errors, contradicting statements misspellings and general redundancy that really detracted from the information being presented.

In many ways the United States always was the most modern state. The first of the modern democracies, organized on rationalistic lines, mapped with modern mapping techniques, its population movements documented in censuses, and ever embracing new technologies. This book is a collection of essays on how changes in technology, and consequently information sharing, changed the country and created the nation we see today.

This is definitely a book on a very interesting subject. It has some editing problems that really should have been identified before the final publication, but nonetheless it really is a good read. It's great food for thought.

(Review of A Nation Transformed by Information by Alfred D. Chandler Jr.)

This book is a collection of essays on the movement of information, and how it has transformed the United States from its colonial beginnings to today. At the very beginning, the founders of the country subsidized the transportation of newspapers through the postal system; this allowed the free flow of information between cities and states, across the entire continent. As technology increased, it inevitably speeded and expanded the amount of information flowing throughout the country--from the railroad, through the telegraph, telephone, radio, motion pictures, television, and on into computers.

This book is an exciting history of information media. Though written by no less than seven contributors, it pulls together into seamless whole, almost as if written by one author. The depth of information is breathtaking, and the conclusions reached are fascinating. Indeed, I think that they admirably proved their contention that there was continuity in the development of information media, and I myself repeatedly saw history repeat itself through their narrative, right up to today.

This is a fascinating book, and one that I recommend without reservation.

This book was interesting, but the editing was so poor that I started to mistrust what I was reading. For instance the famous first telegraph message "What hath God wrought" was printed as "What God hath wrought." The book is full of typos.

I very much enjoyed this book, but like two other reviewers, noticed many technical writing errors. I still found the content fascinating and a good read, but the errors are distracting and that is the only reason why I gave it 3 stars instead of 5. The fact that I would bump it down to 3 stars instead of 4 based on that one criteria should give you an idea of just how bad the editting was. However, even with that said, I would still highly recommend the book if the topic is of interest.