Each information revolution and its social consequences.
9 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Wireless Telegraphic Communication
Guglielmo Marconi · 1909
Recounts how progressively larger aerials and more sensitive detectors let signals cross the Atlantic reliably, arguing the working limit on wireless…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Report on Chain Broadcasting
Federal Communications Commission · 1941
Documents how NBC and CBS locked affiliate stations into network contracts that controlled their scheduling and rates, and uses that evidence to…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Singer of Tales
Albert Lord · 1960
Argues, from fieldwork recording living Balkan epic singers, that Homeric-style oral epic is composed anew in each performance from a flexible system…
+3 more at this level
11 works
Guglielmo Marconi
Recounts how progressively larger aerials and more sensitive detectors let signals cross the Atlantic reliably, arguing the working limit on wireless range was engineering practice catching up, not any ceiling in the underlying physics.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Neil Postman
Argues television did not corrupt public discourse with bad content but restructured it entirely, making entertainment the standard everything — news, politics, religion — now has to meet to be heard at all.
John Perry Barlow
Declares cyberspace a self-governing space beyond the reach of national law, on the claim that governments derive their authority from consent and control of force, neither of which extends online — an argument the following decades of platform regulation have substantially undermined.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Federal Communications Commission
Documents how NBC and CBS locked affiliate stations into network contracts that controlled their scheduling and rates, and uses that evidence to justify new rules forcing the networks to loosen their grip on local radio.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Leiner et al.
Written by several of its own protocol designers, argues that the internet grew from a small research network into a network of networks because it was built on open, layered standards that let anyone connect without asking permission first.
link checked 17 Sept 2026boyd & Ellison
Defines a social network site by the specific combination of a public profile, an articulated list of connections and the ability to traverse that list, and traces the form back to SixDegrees.com in 1997.
James Gleick
Traces information from African talking drums to the bit, arguing each information revolution is best understood not by its technology but by how it changed what a society was even capable of forgetting.
Albert Lord
Argues, from fieldwork recording living Balkan epic singers, that Homeric-style oral epic is composed anew in each performance from a flexible system of formulas rather than memorised word for word.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Erik Barnouw
Traces how American radio moved from an open, amateur-built medium into a small number of advertiser-funded networks within little more than a decade, treating that consolidation as a choice made by regulators and businesses rather than an inevitable outcome of the technology.
Elizabeth Eisenstein
Argues print did not just spread existing ideas faster but changed the nature of knowledge itself, making texts standardised, cross-referenced and cumulative in a way hand-copied manuscripts never were.
Benedict Anderson
Argues the nation is a community imagined into being by print capitalism — the newspaper and the novel let strangers who will never meet imagine themselves as simultaneous participants in one shared life.