What Are
Information
Revolutions?
Year by year more people are saying more
over more channels on more topics to a
bigger total audience. The Internet is ex-
ploding. The talk in cable television is of
500 channels. Videotape stores sell used
tapes to clear their crowded shelves. Desk-
top publishing pours out newsletters, self-
published books, magazines, and multi-
media presentations, with no end in sight.
New computer software arrives every day.
In free industrial nations, bookstores and
magazine stands are jammed with product.
Libraries hardly know what to do with all
their books. It has been true for decades
that anyone can own a book. Now, in indus-
trial societies, almost anyone can own a
movie. Meanwhile, more movies are being
shot than ever. And desktop video is bring-
ing a budget version of Hollywood to Main
Street. Meanwhile, home computers ex-
pand information use in ways only recently
undreamed.
Even if it were nothing else, our Infor-
mation Age is the latest in a series of social
revolutions that define and span recorded
history. A desire to produce communica-
tion as well as to consume it has been
present in every generation. Venturesome
souls have risked personal freedom, sav-
ings, reputation, even life and limb to cre-
ate and distribute information. In the
present generation, when technology has
merged the computer and other connective
media like cable and satellite with end-user
media like books and television, opportuni-
ties have arisen that find their closest com-
parison in the fifteenth century, when
printing began in Europe and the old limits
crumbled.
Defining an Information
Revolution
The wish to remember something by writ-
ing it down led over the course of millennia
to the start of the first information revolu-
tion. It and the revolutions that followed
would shape humankind more than any
wars or any kings ever did or could. With a
few scratches, our inventive ancestors set
in motion the never ending story of re-
corded information, the communication
and storage of knowledge outside the brain.
Here broke history's long dawn.
XV
xvi A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
What would constitute an information
revolution? The word revolution implies a
sudden and often violent change, but revo-
lutions can be more subtle, evolving over
decades, even centuries.1 In the general
parlance, revolution is an overwrought de-
scription of any societal developments.
The word long ago became a cliche. Con-
sider it here in the sense of profound
changes involving new means of commu-
nication that permanently affect entire so-
cieties, changes that have shaken political
structures and influenced economic devel-
opment, communal activity, and personal
behavior. Unlike so many of our wars and
switching of rulers, information revolu-
tions create changes, intended or not, that
stick. The new media of information be-
come part of the changing society.
It appears evident that for an information
revolution to succeed, media that will pro-
vide new means for communication must
be disseminated within societies already un-
dergoing change. Communication technolo-
giesby themselves are not enough. The media
both aid and are aided by whatever has
shaken the existing order, for those who
seek change will reach out to grasp what-
ever means become available to gain sup-
port for their opinions. This is not a new
idea. A Chinese of the T'ang dynasty (7th to
10th centuries A.D.) wrote, "When customs
change, writing changes."2 As those opinions
spread, so does awareness of the media
themselves. From awareness comes use by
other hands. The interwoven cause and
effect relationship between social change
and media development has continued
since the beginnings of recorded history.
The argument may be stated this way: if you
build a better mousetrap, the world will not
beat a path to your door unless the world
can be shown that there are mice to be
caught. That has been the story of the tools
of communication, the "better mousetraps."
They have affected much in our lives, but
inventions by themselves do not change
society. When people want change enough
to take action, an invention helps. In the
industrial nations throughout the century
that we are now completing, change has
been constant and constantly desired.
Social revolutions—those that perma-
nently affect the lives of most inhabi-
tants—do not emanate from royal edicts.
They grow from disturbed soil, an open-
ness to change, at least at some societal
levels. Media join the turbulence, fastening
means to purpose. The tools of communi-
cation become weapons in some hands,
while in others they serve to extend hu-
mankind's knowledge and the richness of
intelligent life.
The social turbulence that provides the
necessary basis for an information revolu-
tion leads to independence of thought and
the capacity for growth. Graham Greene
played a bit fast and loose with history, but
made at least a discussable point in The
Third Man, when his amoral character
Harry Lime said, "In Italy for 30 years
under the Borgias they had warfare, terror,
murder, and bloodshed, but they produced
Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had
brotherly love. They had 500 years of de-
mocracy and peace. And what did they
produce? The cuckoo clock."
One or more new communication tech-
nologies arriving in the midst of social
change can lead to an information revolu-
tion that adds to the turmoil and, more
importantly, leaves permanent marks on
the society. Indeed, the world is in the
midst of an information revolution now, a
period identified with capital letters as the
Information Age, a product of the informa-
tion revolution of the second half of the
twentieth century. Yet, the second half of
the fifteenth century, following Guten-
berg's invention of printing, deserves as
much as our own half century to be called
the Information Age. A strong claim as the
Information Age could also be made for
the second half of the nineteenth century,
following the inventions of photography
and the telegraph, a half century that gave
birth to the phonograph, telephone, type-
writer, motion pictures, and radio, plus
significant changes in printing and early
experiments in television and in recording
tape technology. Each of these communi-
cation technologies was born in the midst
of the Industrial Revolution, a time of ten-

sion across all layers of contemporaneous
society.
Of course, changes in communication
occurred during quieter periods as well, but
those identified here took a role in creating
a qualitative difference in society. The
change has always led toward an equalizing
of the status of members of society, the
road toward democracy. That there has
never in human history been true equality
should not detract from an appreciation of
genuine improvement in human affairs.
Six Information
Revolutions
This book identifies six periods in Western
history that fit the description of an infor-
mation revolution. The periods range in
time from the eighth century B.C. to the
near future.
The first of the six information revolu-
tions may be characterized as the Writing
Revolution. It began primarily in Greece
about the eighth century B.C., with the
convergence of the phonetic alphabet, an
import from Phoenicia to the east, and pa-
pyrus, an import from Egypt to the south.
With writing used to store knowledge, the
human mind would no longer be con-
strained by the limits of memory. Knowl-
edge would be boundless.
The second information revolution, the
Printing Revolution, began in Europe in the
second half of the fifteenth century, with
the convergence of paper, an import origi-
nally from China, but proximately from the
Arab and Moorish cultures, and a printing
system that the German goldsmith Johan-
nes Gutenberg assembled, perhaps from a
variety of sources. With printing, informa-
tion spread through many layers of society.
Printing lent itself to massive political, re-
ligious, economic, educational, and per-
sonal alterations. We have called these
changes the Reformation, the Renaissance,
humanism, mercantilism, and the end of
feudalism. Printing marked the start of the
modern world.
The third information revolution, the
Mass Media Revolution, began in western
Europe and the eastern United States dur-
ing the middle of the nineteenth century,
WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xvii
with the convergence of advances in paper
production and printing press methods,
and the invention of the telegraph, which
changed the way information was con-
veyed. For the first time, newspapers and
magazines reached out to the common
man with news about events near and far,
and packaged goods for sale. Photography
spoke to his heart. Public schools and pub-
lic libraries dotted the countryside and the
growing cities. For the masses, literacy
came within reach.
The fourth information revolution, the
Entertainment Revolution, started in
Europe and America toward the end of the
nineteenth century with such technologies
as stored sound, affordable cameras, and
motion photography. Stories were printed
and sold cheaply. Like the pots and pans
coming off the assembly lines of the Indus-
trial Revolution, entertainment could now
be infinitely replicated and canned. In the
coming decades, it would be seen in the
nickelodeons and heard on the radio. The
whole world would come to love the enter-
tainment products. At the start of the En-
tertainment Revolution, no one could have
imagined the number of hours that we
would spend entangled with this love.
The fifth information revolution, the
creation of the Communication Toolshed
Home, evolved during the middle of the
twentieth century, transforming the home
into the central location for receiving infor-
mation and entertainment, thanks to the
telephone, broadcasting, recording, im-
provements in print technologies, and
cheap, universal mail services. The cen-
tury has, of course, been a period of unre-
lieved political, cultural, and psychological
turmoil and shifting. That the media of
communication have become inseparable
from our lives is a matter that has been
written about in countless worried articles,
books, and research papers.
The sixth information revolution, the
Information Highway, is now being con-
structed out of the convergence of com-
puter, broadcasting, satellite, and visual
technologies. Communication is shaking
off transportation for work, study, and
play. Yet, if the information-elite can live
xviii A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
anywhere, doubt arises about the future of
our cities, which grew with the centripetal
demands of the Industrial Revolution cou-
pled with sharp population increases.
If economies depend upon information,
what does the future hold for vast areas of
the globe that are not fully plugged into the
information streams? What will happen to
our interdependent world of instant com-
munication and weapons of mass destruc-
tion if these areas continue to respond with
economic stagnation, environmental de-
struction, and overpopulation? Can we af-
ford to let the Information Highway bypass
any communities?
The pace of information revolution is
speeding up. The second revolution ar-
rived 1,700 years after the first crested. The
last four, each quite distinct, have over-
lapped during the last two centuries.3
Shared Characteristics
Each information revolution appears to
share certain characteristics with the others:
• Each is based upon the invention of more
than one tool of communication, such as
papyrus and the phonetic alphabet, paper
and printing, or television and satellites.
Their convergences have had powerful
effects.
• Each took place where change of a differ
ent sort was stirring the society and
where a social structure existed that en
abled change to occur, such as those in
modern Western democracies.
• The tools of communication gave social
and political changes added dynamism
and were themselves given a forward
thrust by those other changes, a symbi
otic relationship of cause and effect.4
• Information revolutions tended toward
some leveling of conditions for those who
participated in them. Their results tended
to be egalitarian. They pointed toward a
greater degree of democratization or
sharing of influence than previously ex
isted. Where the use of the tools has been
limited, both in ancient times and now,
human beings have been less free.
• The changes wrought by these disper
sions led toward a greater sharing and
more specialization of knowledge than
previously existed. They also led to an
overloading of information and to an in-
crease in misinformation.
• As each information revolution has run
its course, which was based on the
widening availability of the tools of com
munication, content broadened. More
producers sent a greater amount of infor
mation on a greater variety of subjects
over more channels to more and more
receivers.
• The spread of media production, emanat
ing from a multiplicity of independent
thought, led to increases in what post
modernism identifies as decentering and
fragmentation, with a widening of the
expression of points of view, frames of
reference, experiences, and histories.
Although by definition postmodernism
followed modernism, elements of a dis
tinctive pattern have been a charac
teristic of every information revolution.
• Each new communication technology
has displaced some other means of com
munication or behavior that had been
satisfactory until the new technology be
came available. When something was
gained, something of value may have
been lost.
• All tools of communication have had one
or more hardware components and at
least one software component; that is,
physical tools and methods or systems.
As the tools reached more hands, both
hardware and software became more
complex, but they became simpler to
manage. Their unit costs dropped and
they were also likely to shrink and to
transmit data faster.
• The need for physical transportation to
send information has been reduced as
communication replaced transportation
of messages.
• The tools of communication have been
diffused, or distributed, across most of
the societies into which they were intro
duced, or at least that portion of each
society that gave—or gives—direction to
the whole of that society; in short, the
tools were in the hands of each society's
movers and shakers. In fully open de-

mocracies, many of the tools are avail-
able to those who want them.
• Changes in communication encountered
opposition from those who, for political
or financial reasons, disliked the changes
taking place. Reaction was inevitable
from those who must surrender a share
of influence and power. They responded
both by using the media themselves and
by trying to control their use by others.
However, given enough time media
availability has continued to spread.
• New literacies have arisen to accommo
date the new communication technolo
gies, from the phonetic alphabet of the
first information revolution to the com
puter codes of the latest. With each new
language has come a new class of experts
fully aware of the advantage emanating
from the hoarding of their knowledge.
• As to the belief that the average citizen
lies increasingly helpless under the heel
of political and economic tyrants who
dominate the media and suppress free
dom of thought, history tells the opposite
story. The dissemination of the tools of
mass communication has increased the
potential for social protest, and to that
extent it has made humankind more free,
not less. Their limitation has the opposite
result.
• Tools of communication were influenced
by marketing considerations. Within the
boundaries of available technology and
scientific possibility, communication
tools ultimately have become what their
users wanted.
• The technology has changed markedly,
but not people's tastes or interests. The
old wine is poured into the new bottles.
• Use of communication media, their ef
fects multiplied by their convergence,
led inevitably to the separation of their
users. Herein lies a dilemma. The tools
have given us communication without
transportation, yet we still possess a hu
man need for face-to-face contact.
• Heavy personal use of the tools of com
munication has been accompanied by
less social activity. The more time spent
with mass communication, the less time
has remained for face-to-face communi-
WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xix
cation and group activity. In extreme
cases, a social dysfunction has resulted. •
Unlike political revolutions, the dates of
social revolutions, including information
revolutions, do not lend themselves to
pinpointing. All the information revolu-
tions had more or less identifiable begin-
nings. None has truly ended.
The Power of Information
Communication media intrude into our
lives more than most of us realize. They
influence our daily activities. We cannot
ignore them or abandon them. When we
use them judiciously, we harness their
strength.
At a national level they have assisted in
overthrowing governments. The tools have
worked quite efficiently in the hands of
those who would sell us every known form
of government from democracy to fascism,
communism to theocracy. From Tom
Paine's Common Sense pamphlets to Mao's
little red books and the Ayatollah Khome-
ini's audiotapes, media have been used as
tools of revolution. Lenin's smuggled writ-
ings promoted the Bolshevik revolution
and the underground samizdat of writers
living under communism promoted its
end.
Electronic tools have now joined the
printed tools to bring added breadth to
revolutionary fervor. Our age has also wit-
nessed successful media use by those who
have no apparent ideology, no political
agenda other than to grow rich or influen-
tial.
Even if control of information does not
always include responsibility, it does bring
influence by journalists and other writers
for the popular media, whom Witold
Rybczynski calls the "ragmen of informa-
tion."
While secondhand experience still depends,
to a certain extent, on personal contact-
rumor and hearsay—the greatest single
source of most people's secondhand experi-
ence is neither education nor conversation,
but the media: newspapers, magazines, film,
radio, and television. Nowhere is the
influence of these ragmen of information
XX A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
felt more than on the public perception of
technology.6
Highway and Village
Much consideration will be given in this
book to what is called the Information
Highway. To abuse an overworked meta-
phor, let us note that highways have direc-
tions, and their travelers have points of
departure and destinations. As the tele-
phone companies, cable companies, and
broadcasting companies pour the cement,
there are strong indications that this new
highway is not coming from the public
library or the news office despite the pub-
licity releases, as much as it is coming from
the cinema, the shopping mall, and the
video arcade. What we, the audience, want
is oftentimes the stuff of dreams.
And where is this information highway
going? It is not heading toward the "global
village." Marshall McLuhan was correct in
foreseeing the technological possibility of a
"global village" in which most of human-
kind could share information.7 However,
his metaphor of a village, where folks nor-
mally communicate by talking face to face,
presumes that radio and television are re-
turning us to an oral culture; for example,
"...the electric implosion now brings oral
and tribal ear-culture to the literate West."8
Yet, broadcasting although it strikes the
ear, has not returned us to an oral culture,
which is based upon a two-way, limited
scale of information on a human dimen-
sion. Instead, one-way radio and television,
plus their content of recordings and motion
pictures, are oral versions of the limitless
quantity of information that identifies a
written culture that no single human being
can, absorb in its totality.
A further reality has been that only on
rare occasions, such as a lunar walk, the
Olympic Games, or the Gulf War, do we
venture together into the shared space of a
global village. Mostly, we prefer to retreat
into our homes, where we now spend so
much of our time with so many communi-
cation media that our homes can be
thought of as communication toolsheds,
which is another focus of this book. It is to
these individual toolsheds that the Infor-
mation Highway will have its offramps.
The information will be cheaper, ena-
bling larger segments of the population to
ride on the Highway and dwell in commu-
nication toolsheds. At the turn of the cen-
tury, the cost of renting a telephone for a
month represented about two weeks wages
for an average workman. The first com-
mercial television sets sold for half the cost
of a new car. Just a few decades ago the
thought of self-publishing anything except
via mimeograph was almost out of the
question for middle-class Americans. To-
day, even making a movie is not beyond a
middle-class purse.
Sorting Media from Content
Why do we believe what we believe? What
are the sources of our opinions and atti-
tudes? Although the answers to such broad
questions are complex, it is obvious that
almost everything we know about present
events beyond our limited horizons comes
from media. In this we are different from
ancestors who learned most of what they
knew through direct experience. If not
from such current events media as newspa-
pers, radio, and television, our information
has come from books, the storehouses of
human memory. At times our information
is mediated through other people who de-
rive their information from communica-
tions media and may distort it in the
process.
It is a highly arguable point, but in rela-
tive terms of societal good, what we are
watching, the content, may not matter as
much as the way we shape our lives around
media. The medium, Marshall McLuhan
told us, is the message. The effects of con-
tent are quite independent of the effects of
using the medium carrying it. For example,
the effects on a child of watching violent
cartoons and junkfood commercials on a
Saturday morning are quite distinct from
the effects of spending the entire Saturday
morning watching television, no matter
what is on.
It has been argued that the problem with
television, a justifiable focus of irritation, is

that society, especially producers and edu-
cators, has not fully marshaled its re-
sources to use the television medium
wisely, or in fact to consider this medium
the way we regard the medium of books as
existing for more than financial gain. Yet,
a visit to the paperback racks of any drug-
store will remind us that books are not
always used as means of acquiring knowl-
edge. It is useful to distinguish content
from the carriers of content, media.
Replacing Transportation
Through recorded time, most communica-
tion depended upon transportation. Infor-
mation was bound by human limitations,
the sound of a voice, the time it took a pair
of feet, or a horse, or a ship to reach a
destination. Communication technology
changed that. Human limitations fell away.
The promise of the Internet and the rest
of the Information Highway is even more
replacement of transportation. Shopping
by electronic catalog, working and learning
at home via computer modem and facsimile,
video teleconferencing in place of business
travel, acquiring specialized education,
and receiving computer-assisted diagnostic
medical care are all reporting success.
If significant parts of one's work, mar-
keting, education, entertainment, and
well-being can be accomplished without
leaving home, will more people choose to
live in the countryside instead of in cities
or suburbs? Will they choose San Francisco
and commute electronically to Omaha in-
stead of living in Omaha? Such a pattern
could lead to a further decline in cities.
Population transfers resulting from
technology are not new. The Industrial
Revolution shoveled people out of the
countryside into cities. The post-World War
II shift of middle-class families from the
city to the suburbs, a move encouraged by
the technologies of cars and highways, al-
tered American life. A new population shift
based on the emerging communication
technologies promises to shake up life as
much as these earlier mass movements
did.
WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxi
Shaping and Being Shaped
As we spend time with the tools of commu-
nication, we spend less time with one an-
other. Fewer Americans attend town or
school meetings. Voter turnout has de-
clined. At the same time, distrust of govern-
ment has grown. Memberships in the PTA,
the League of Women Voters, and labor
unions is down, while social distrust is up.
Fewer volunteers turn out for the Boy
Scouts, Red Cross, Lions Club, Shriners, and
Jaycees.9 The nation has drifted from De-
Tocqueville's observation in the early nine-
teenth century that Americans liked to
form civic associations. In organizations
whose membership has increased, like the
Sierra Club, the National Organization of
Women, and the American Association of
Retired Persons, people do not normally
attend meetings.
McLuhan observed that not only the me-
dia are shaped. As the technology is shape4
for and by its users, the technology shapes
the users. It shapes our lives and our views.
When enough people adopt a new means
of communication so that people change
the way they go about their daily activities,
the society itself is altered.
... in operational and practical fact, the me-
dium is the message. This is merely to say
that the personal and social consequences of
any medium—that is, of any extension of
ourselves—result from the new scale that is
introduced into our affairs by each extension
of ourselves, or by any new technology. ...
the "message" of any medium or tech-
nology is the change of scale or pace or pat-
tern that it introduces into human affairs.10
For example, the ways that we use a com-
puter changed because the technology
changed. Because it is more efficient than
it used to be to work on an airplane or even
in a taxi weaving through traffic, people
now work who once relaxed while traveling
by reading a magazine article about some-
thing unrelated to their work, or staring out
of a window and thinking, or chatting with
a seatmate. Now the traveler works. We
changed the media and then the media
changed us.
xxii A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
Difficult Beginnings
Many tools of communication began with
quite limited ownership. For the centuries
when books were hand produced by monks
and booksellers, most people lived out their
lives not knowing that such a thing as a
book existed, let alone ever seeing a book.
For a half century after its invention, the
still camera was a complicated piece of
equipment for the serious hobbyist and the
professional. Even though ordinary people
aspired to own photographs they did not
think of owning a camera. The videotape
recorder and the video camera were not
initially designed for untrained hands. Sci-
entists alone worked with the first comput-
ers. In 1943 IBM chairman Thomas Watson
said, "I think there is a world market for
maybe five computers."
Some familiar means of personal com-
munication began as tools of government
and business, but achieved success in per-
sonal use. The world's postal systems, a real
communication technology, belong to this
category. In the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, the typewriter, the telephone, the
phonograph, and the radio all saw the first
light of day as aids to the world of com-
merce. In the twentieth century, audiotape,
videotape, and the computer evolved with
no idea that millions of ordinary people
would take them into their homes. Those
familiar business and government tools, the
fax machine and the copier, are in the proc-
ess of joining them in the home.
Not all technologies showed immediate
promise. The telegraph and the computer
went through periods of government sup-
port and little public acceptance. In time,
they altered our world.
New technologies found acceptance
when their superiority over existing tech-
nologies for specific uses was recognized,
but diffusion required an infrastructure that
extended far beyond an invention, bringing
together elements of business, finance, en-
gineering, and government regulation.
Businesses and individuals adopted the tele-
phone because it offered an attractive alter-
native to communication by mail and
telegraph. Then structures grew in support
of the technology to that end. Before the
turn of the century, Bell's telephone com-
pany, formed soon after the telephone's
invention in 1876, had become AT&T. By
1920, a web of telephone wires provided
long distance service for much of the coun-
try, and conducting business by telephone
had become a norm of American business.
Some common tools of communication
may have begun their public existence as
novelties beyond most people's under-
standing of how they could possibly have
any meaning to daily life, yet as they were
diffused into society, the public found that
meaning. Public feedback led to further
refinement, which in turn led to new uses
by yet more people. Photography, for in-
stance, had value for almost no one except
hobbyists until a steady stream of improve-
ments led first to a demand for family pic-
tures and later to a rush to own simple
cameras that required only the push of a
button. Market driven, photography flowed
into art and journalism. It spread to printed
media and, in motion pictures, photogra-
phy spawned a new medium of arguably
greater impact than its own.
As the quality of communication tools
improved and their advantages became
known, they spread throughout their po-
tential market. Their costs dropped in the
pattern of the so-called "calculator syn-
drome" that has affected the entire elec-
tronics industry. Engineers also improved
designs to make the equipment easier to
operate. The "buttons" went inside. Video
cameras and decks, once limited mostly to
television stations and industries, meta-
morphosed into camcorders, a hot selling
item for the home. As a result, for a growing
number of families, spoken words and pic-
tures have replaced words written on paper.
A letter to a distant loved one is sent in the
form of a video. In high schools, the video
yearbook joins the familiar bound version.
Life Is Different
The success of the means of communica-
tion in becoming almost transparent to the
user has the unintended effect of leading

us to overlook their individual and collec-
tive impact on the society.
For example, consider the percentage of
our lives devoted to watching a television
screen. The set is on in the average Ameri-
can home for more than seven hours a day.
Our general sense that life is different than
it was only a few short years ago—more
comfortable or more dangerous, more un-
der our control or more beyond it—may fail
to lead us thoughtfully to consider that
among the reasons that we regard life as
different is the time we spend looking at
phosphor dots. It is just a step from regard-
ing life as different to regarding life as
strange. That may raise some concerns and
unease that can affect our attitudes about
the world around us. Heavy television us-
ers, for instance, tend on the whole to be
more fearful persons than non-users. As a
result of our concerns, we may hesitate to
go out at night, we may buy a deadbolt lock
or a large dog, and we may vote for a law-
and-order candidate for mayor, all without
the attendant recognition that our
attitudes can be traced to one of the tools
of communication in the toolsheds that we
call our homes.
Political Tools and Weapons
Russian television carried the horrors from
Chechnya, of hungry dogs circling the
corpses in Grozny. For decades such
scenes, neither photographed nor transmit-
ted, did not disturb the Kremlin's rigid con-
trol. No longer. Russia and the rest of the
world are far different places now that tele-
vision cameras see, videotape records, sat-
ellites transmit, and television sets in living
rooms show. Even if the Kremlin had the
power it once had to block broadcasts on
Russian media, CNN would beam the sig-
nals from the border of Finland to Vladivos-
tok. Jamming a satellite TV signal is
considerably more difficult than jamming
radio. With 24-hour-a-day financial transac-
tions and the penetration by global news
agencies, we live in what is becoming a
borderless world.
WHAT ARE INFORMATION REVOLUTIONS xxiii
Recent telephone technologies like cel-
lular phones and facsimile machines have
affected some occupations, such as selling
real estate and the lunch trade of some city
restaurants. In the late 1980s and the early
1990s, cellular and fax were hot items in
news stories and full page ads, so they got
a lot of attention, but telephone answering
machines, based on a simple technology,
never were exciting. Yet, when we arrive
at home each evening, because of its time-
shifting advantage the answering machine
may be our first stop after opening the front
door. It liberated us from the need to be
physically near the telephone if we awaited
an important call. It will remain an impor-
tant tool of communication until the tele-
phone itself shrinks to a cellphone that is
as convenient to carry as a wallet, and we
are always "at home."
It is the communication tools themselves
and their effect upon the societies into
which they were introduced that compose
these chapters, the communication tools
that we all pick up as comfortably as a
Saturday sweater.
The power of the tools of mass commu-
nication first to shake and then to shape
national policy was evident on the streets
of American cities during the Vietnam War.
It became clearer in the Soviet Union just
a few years ago.
...while it once appeared that the new media
would enhance the power of governments
(as, for example, Orwell argued in 1984),
their effect recently has been the opposite:
breaking state monopolies of information,
permeating national boundaries, allowing
peoples to hear and see how others do things
differently. It has also made richer and
poorer countries more aware of the gap
between them than was possible a half
century ago, and stimulated legal and illegal
migration.11