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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.2 (2000) 296-298



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Review

Media Technology and Society--A History:
From the Telegraph to the Internet


Media Technology and Society--A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. By Brian Winston (London, Routledge, 1998) 374 pp. $85.00 cloth $24.95 paper

The disruptive potential of each new media technology is invariably thwarted by vested interests, or so Winston contends in this long, densely written, and often ponderous book. Time and time again, new technologies emerge more slowly than their champions dreamed, while powerful social forces defuse their radical import. The "primacy of the social sphere" is inescapable and continuity always wins out over change [End Page 296] (2). Ergo, there never has been, and presumably never can be, an information revolution.

To sustain this hypothesis, Winston organizes his book around case studies of the early development of various communications innovations, including the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, computers, satellites, and the internet. With predictable regularity, each innovation fell into the clutches of corporate managers who, through a combination of stubbornness, self-interest, and political savvy, blunted its creative potential. Thorstein Veblen could not have put it any better.

Winston's account serves as a corrective to the inflated, sometimes millennial, claims that new media technologies routinely spawn. Yet, he aspires to do more than merely second-guess business journalists, cultural critics, and media gurus. His aim is to write a major interdisciplinary work of social history. Unfortunately, he falls considerably short of his goal.

Had Winston worked more closely with historians of technology--or at least mastered more of their scholarship--he might have avoided the factual and interpretive errors that litter the text. Though long and detailed, his case studies are unreliable in their specifics, and often misleading in their conclusions. For example, in discussing the early years of electric telegraphy, Winston hails the railroad as the "supervening necessity" that made the new technology possible, and without which there would have been no "demonstrable need" for high-speed communications (23, 9). This proposition may well have true in Great Britain--Winston's principal frame of reference--but it is dead wrong for the United States. Had the railroad never been invented, the first fifteen years of electric telegraphy in the United States would have been little different, driven as it was by merchants dealing in agricultural staples, rather than by railroad managers intent on preventing accidents and improving efficiency.

Dubious, puzzling, and seemingly contradictory generalizations abound. Bell Labs, for example, is termed, at one point, an "expression of constraint, of the operation of the suppression of radical potential" and, at another, the "single most important source of technical innovation in mass communications history so far" (80, 259).

Particularly problematic is Winston's decision to focus exclusively on communications innovations that are dependent on electricity. Is this not technological determinism with a vengeance? Can one, after all, really write a history of media technology during the past century and a half that leaves out newspapers, the postal system, and the popular press?

What is, ultimately, most disappointing about Winston's approach is its peculiar angle of vision. To put it bluntly, outside of the rarefied haunts of media studies departments, few serious scholars worry much about whether new communications innovations have fulfilled the utopian hopes with which they are so often invested. Is it, after all, really so surprising that they have not? [End Page 297]

Winston's preoccupation with the gap between vision and reality precludes him from considering in any detail how new media technologies have, in fact, evolved. At no point, for example, does Winston seriously grapple--in the manner of, for example, Claude S. Fischer, American Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, 1992)--with the relationship between communications innovations and their audience. Equally absent from his account are the many reformers who have tried, and sometimes succeeded, to shape the development of a media technology after it has become widespread. Consider, for example, Winston's treatment of the early...

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