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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When did the press become the media? It seems to have happened sometime during the last generation--long enough ago, anyway, for us to have forgotten that "media" is plural. But people who use "the media" as a more encompassing term for "the press" (because it includes broadcast journalism, too) may find it hard to get used to the even more encompassing way it's used by scholars of communications: for them, it takes in just about any channel through which information is transmitted. As you're reading this, you are probably near a telephone, a television set, a computer hooked up to the Internet, a radio, a pager, a mailbox. Some of those things receive and some can also send; some are meant for person-to-person communication and some for interacting with institutions. They're all forms of media.
In order to overcome ingrained habits of thought, suppose we remove all ideas about journalism from our minds--don't worry, we'll reinstall them later--and then contemplate the media. We immediately start to think about those machines whose wondrous inventors--Samuel F. B. Morse and Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi--we all learned about as schoolchildren. But the technology picture is still too simple, so let's delete the machines from our minds, too. What's left? The media start to look like an array of political, economic, and social arrangements, each of which, in a different way, turns people into a public.
This is the perspective that the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr forces on us in his ambitious new book, "The Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of Mass Communications" (Basic; $27.50). Starr, who has a practical acquaintance with the subject as co-founder of the liberal monthly The American Prospect (and whom I know professionally), has roamed through a vast scholarly literature to produce a history that stretches from 1600 to 1941. The book's real subject is media in America, though it's counterpointed with the experiences of Britain and France. Since Starr almost always finds this country's handling of communications superior to Old Europe's--in fact, he takes that to be a factor in our global preeminence--his book demonstrates that liberals, too, can celebrate the triumph of American civilization. "In the early nineteenth century," he writes, "when the United States was neither a world power nor a primary center of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications"--in postal service, newspapers, the telegraph. Starr is strict, however, about the winning formula: communications does well only when it follows his...
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