From big bang to big data : a history of the media / Johan Jarlbrink, Patrik Lundell, Pelle Snickars.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jarlbrink, Johan, 1978- author.

Lundell, Patrik, 1969- author.

Snickars, Pelle, author.

Contributor:

Edward Potts Cheyney Memorial Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mass media--History.

Mass media.

Genre:

History

Physical Description:

vi, 310 pages : illustrations (some color), color maps, portraits (some color) ; 27 cm

Place of Publication:

Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2023]

Summary:

"Does media history really start with a bang? More than just newspapers, television, and social networks, media are best understood as the means by which any information is communicated, from cosmic radiation traces to medieval church bells to modern identity documents. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths. From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media--how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. Many media were invented as ways to store and share information, and many have served as powerful tools for administration and control. The concerns raised about media today, whether about privacy, piracy, or anxieties over declining cultural standards, preoccupied earlier generations too. In a playful style, accompanied by more than one hundred illustrations, the authors show us how every society has been a media society in its own way. From antique graffiti to last year's viral YouTube clip, the past is only approachable through media. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history--and about human societies past and present."-- Provided by the publisher.

Contents:

Key thinkers in the history of media

Introduction

In the beginning was...

Geomedia

Biomedia

The talking human

Doing things with words

Visual communication: images, sculptures, and counting systems

From bookkeeping to writing

Enduring media: stone, clay, rituals

Connecting empires

Writing and reading practices: the examples of Greece and Rome

Silk roads

Arabic convergence culture

European information overload

Medieval intermedia

The Inca Empire solves a knotty problem

Early modern oral, written, and visual continuity

Multimedia festivals and everyday life

A partially new printing technology

A printing revolution?

The media of the Scientific Revolution

Print capitalism

Politics and the public sphere

Memory, rights, and literacy

The modern experience- media in the nineteenth century

Speech in the public sphere

The medium par excellence?

The modern press

Electric media

A new visual culture

Audiovisual media- about the past

The media of the masses

Mass media as an industry

Mass media as politics in the twentieth century

Mass media hardware: the example of Japan

Everyday media

Remediation and mobility

Analog and digital

Calculating machines as media (or vice versa)

Memex, infrastructures, and networks

Breakthrough of the PC

World Wide Web

The social significance of computerization

Mobile devices- social and streaming media

Digital media specificity and big data

Afterword.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-291) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Edward Potts Cheyney Memorial Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Jarlbrink, Johan, 1978- From big bang to big data.

ISBN:

9780228014263

0228014263

OCLC:

1310151694