Customer Reviews

A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet

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The book has a lot of arcane references. It tries to cover a lot of different aspects regarding the impact of communication media, but if you're looking for a "big picture" book, this might not be for you. It doesn't always connect the dots. It jumps between a lot of very specific examples. You sometimes wonder where they pull an example from. Ah, yes, Charles V visiting Bologna in 1529, of course. I remember it well. An example from the chapter on print:

"In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, small books became popular, the octavo, for instance, or the still smaller 12mo or 16mo format, which the famous Venetian printer Aldo Manuzio used for his editions of the classics."

The authors drop a lot of knowledge like this throughout the book, not always with enough context. But it's sort of up to you to follow up with some of these historical events or figures if you want to know more about it.

Edit: Ah, the authors are from the UK? I was wondering why John Logie Baird got more attention than Philo Pharnsworth.

Like other books I've read by Peter Burke, this is a great and informative work. Here he covers the "print revolution in context" showing the who, where, and how of the rise of printing, and discussing it's interaction with the continuing other media types such as oral communication, hand-written documents and visual images (woodcut printing, religious paintings and statuary). He also shows the political and religious conflicts and issues which are locked in a feedback loop with the development of the media.

Fascinating to compare to the rise of modern media types like weblogs in conjunction with the present political discourse.