Storia dei media digitali: Rivoluzioni e continuità by Gabriele Balbi, Paolo Magaudda (review)

This volume has the ambition to “draw a global history of digital media” (p. xv), and is part of a fairly recent tradition of historiographical studies, which the authors define in terms of a “socio-cultural history” (p. xviii). The work aims to identify the reasons for, the dimensions, and the turning points of the digitization phenomenon. Gabriele Balbi and Paolo Magaudda dedicate some interesting pages of the first chapter to show the complexity of the meanings of the digitization process. In the same chapter they develop the criteria to understand the relevance of such phenomenon: the economic weights (already in 2012 the digital business counted for 6 percent of the global GDP), the global distribution (albeit with significant differences between continents and countries), the cultural impact.

The last part of the first chapter discusses the earlier definitions of the digital revolution: information society, post-industrial society, convergence, post-modernity, network society. Each of these terms highlighted elements that somehow—according to the authors—digitization encloses, merging them into a complex unit. The following chapters are devoted to specific topics: the evolution of the computer (chapter 2), the development of the internet (chapter 3), the evolution of the mobile phone up to current smartphones (chapter 4).

The fifth chapter is dedicated to the digitization of analog media. The authors attempt to identify, for each medium, the main forces which contributed to encourage evolution and change. Thus, for example, when discussing music they highlight the role played by the MP3 format, by the birth of the iPod, by the growth of sharing platforms (and practices), and by the new streaming of audio. For television the topics stressed are related to the synergy between the evolution of the ownership structures, the digitization of the signal, and the transformations of the television set, as well as the progressive translating of cultural forms towards those of the internet. Print is also considered (books and newspapers both from the writing and reading points of view), as well as cinema and video, photography, and audio.

In the conclusion, the authors confront what they define as “foundational myths” (p. 144), that is, the collective imagination which has not only been influenced by digitization, but has also anticipated, coexisted with, and at times influenced it. The volume is completed with a rich bibliography, a timeline of digital media, and some charts on the worldwide diffusion of the most popular digital devices and tools. As mentioned above, the book is part of a growing body of work (including that of Jeffrey Meikle) which draws on some classical strands of thought on the diffusion and shaping of technology, but begins to build an ever-more-complete dynamic map of the digitization process, from the second half of the twentieth century to the advent of social media, recently studied (for instance) by Jan van Dijk and Meikle.

The volume’s purpose is to provide an overview; the authors are willing to take into account the whole spectrum of digitization-related phenomena, which allows them to offer a remarkable summary. On the other hand, some points are necessarily fleeting. In particular, the book closes by discussing the cultural and political roots of the digital, a topic that certainly requires deeper analysis. For example, it would be useful to integrate the global overview with a closer look at diversification and contradiction, starting from the fracture of the cultural roots of the digital between Europe and North America, where the active influences are often radically different. Such a perspective, among other things, would allow one to look at the story told here not as a complex yet still unified development, but rather as a long intertwinement of innovation instances, only some of which are destined for success.