Winston Brian. Media technology and society

Routledge, 1998. — 392 p. — ISBN: 9780415142298.Challenging the popular myth of a present-day «information revolution», Media Technology and Society is essential reading for anyone interested in the social impact of technological change. Winston argues that the development of new media forms, from the telegraph and the telephone to computers, satellite and virtual reality, is the product of a constant play-off between social necessity and suppression: the unwritten law by which new technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is limited.Introduction: The Storm from Paradise: Technological Innovation, Diffusion and Suppression
Propagating Sound at Considerable Distance
The Telegraph: The First Electrical Medium
Before the Speaking Telephone
The Capture of Sound
The Vital Spark & Fugitive Pictures
Wireless and Radio
Mechanically Scanned Television
Electronically Scanned Television
Television Spin-offs and Redundancies
Device For Casting Up Sums Very Pretty
Mechanising Calculation
The First Computers
Suppressing The Mainframes
The Integrated Circuit
The Coming of the Microcomputer
The Intricate Web of Trails
The Beginnings of Networks
Networks & Recording Technologies
Communications Satellites
The Satellite Era
Cable Television
The Internet
Conclusion: The Pile of Debris
From the Boulevard des Capucins to the Leningradsky ProspectBrian Winston is Head of the School of Communication, Design and Media at the University of Westminster. He has been Dean of the College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University, Chair of Cinema Studies at New York University and Founding Research Director of the Glasgow University Media Group. His books include Claiming the Real (1995). As a television professional, he has worked on World in Action and has an Emmy for documentary script-writing.This book is a reworking and updating of material originally published in 1986 (Misunderstanding Media). I then essayed a polemic against the rhetoric of the Information Revolution grounded in a history, necessarily both synthetic and revisionist, of the central technologies of that supposed event. This current work is the other way round in that it again offers that history, mainly of electronic communications from telegraphy to holography, but now does so centrally with the anti-technicist polemic in the supporting role.
From the 1970s on I was increasingly aware of a gap between the rhetoric of runaway technological change and the reality of my professional life as a media worker and teacher. Working with film and teaching film-making when videotape was supposed to have wiped out that technology spurred a central thought that change was occurring more slowly than was (and is) commonly believed.
In synthesising the histories of these technologies I have obviously relied extensively on the work of others but my understanding owes more than can be adequately footnoted to colleagues and friends at New York University a decade and more ago—especially William Boddy, Michelle Hilmes, Aaron Nmugwen, Mitchell Moss and Martin Elton. Svein Bergum and Jimmy Weaver, members of my seminar group on technology and ideology at that time, were especially supportive as were others both at NYU and elsewhere including Daniel Zwanziger, Bernard Abramson,
Robert Horwitz, Herb Schiller, Janet Staeger, Michael Wreen, Steve Scheuer and Nick Hart-Williams. The Interactive Telecommunications Programme at NYU was a crucial forum, especially for testing the validity of early versions of the model proposed in the Introduction and applied throughout this book.
My two commuter friends on the AMTRACK Hudson Valley line, Wayne Barden and Frederick Houston, helped me refine the legal points I wanted to
make. (I am still grateful to ‘Mo’ Fink and the other AMTRACK conductors for making that period of commuting when I was doing much of my early reading for the book so pleasant. I am also happy that much of the rewriting was done on Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s still great railroad between Paddington and Cardiff.)
More recent thanks too to Xavier Delcourt and Angelo Agostini for guiding me to some fresh thoughts.
Bertell Olhman, Patrick Watson and Ted Conant kindly read bits and pieces of the original manuscript. Bill Boddy (in 1985) and Dwayne Winseck (in 1997) tackled the whole text and I am very much in their debt. Lynne Jackson was my research assistant at NYU and without her help this project would have been stillborn.
I am also grateful to Martin Barker and Geoff Mulgan (among others) for suggesting Misunderstanding Media might be usefully revisited; and I am pleased that Rebecca Barden thought so too. To Peter Hopkins goes my thanks for commissioning the original work and to Lindsay Waters for buying it as well. To my wife Adèle goes my usual gratitude for undertaking correcting chores. Cardiff
June 1997