Book Summary - A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet

 

Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet.
                    3^rd ed. Malden, MA: Polity, 2009.

 

Peter Burke and Asa Briggs, in “A Social History of the Media”, aim to provide a comprehensive contextual world in which different media platforms came to light, from Gutenberg to the Internet era. They interweave the rise of communication media and aspects of the social and cultural contexts within which they emerged and evolved over time. They explore topics such as the latest developments in the field, the wide range of secondary literature and theory that inform the study of media history today, and the media developments of the twenty-first century, including the rise of social media and the penetration of these technologies into every sphere of social and private life, avoiding shallow empirical and common-sense criticism that every form of communication received in its dominating days.

Burke and Briggs’ work brings a straightforward account of the history of communication, shedding light in contexts and scenarios and demystifying some concepts used in the 20th and 21st centuries to question and even bashing the use of new technologies as they rise and become dominant. For example, when they challenge the notion of the “Society of spectacle” as a 20th Century thing pointing that the concept as it is presented can be traced back to as early as the XVI century. Or when reflecting on the massive bashing of the TV fostered in the 1970’s and 1980’s compared to a less negative view of this vehicle years later.

This conversation can be helpful in conversing with notions of antagonism between the Church and the digital world, or that the Church would be condoning a destructive digital culture and behaviour by engaging in it, pointing to the fact that mostly every technology suffered similar criticism in its heyday, and the Church almost never refrained to utilize them.