We are living at the crest of a communication revolution.

It’s not the first – several other communication revolutions have left their impacts – but it is the most significant.   

The rise of the Information Age, the fall of the traditional media, and the bewildering explosion of personal information environments are all connected to the historical chain of communications revolutions.

We need to understand these revolutions because they influence our present and future as much as any other trend in history.  And we need to understand them not simply on a national basis – an unstable foundation for history in any event – but rather as part of the emergent global communications network. 

Revolutions in Communication, as a university level textbook, examines these issues on the broadest possible level with a variety of supplemental and extensible peripheral information modules. 

The book brings a much-needed updating to media histories used in colleges today, explaining changes in technology (including the most recent digital media, such as Twitter) and providing Communications students with a variety of historical frames of reference for all their respective fields

This project will also use new communications technologies to invite international collaboration through a blog and wiki about media history.

The book and web site structure will serve as the student’s starting point, the professors resource and a community experiment in an important area of history.

About the author ...

Bill Kovarik is a Professor of Communication at Radford University in the Blue Ridge mountains of southwestern Virginia. He is on sabbatical in the fall of 2009 and serving as the 2009 Canwest Global Media Fellow at the University of Western Ontario. Kovarik is a journalist and historian who has worked with wire services, daily newspapers and national news magazines. He teaches science and environment writing, journalism, web design, media history media law, and peace studies. He currently writes for Appalachian Voice and other environmental publications. More >>

Prof. K's Historical research

• How New York World editor Walter Lippmann rescued The Radium Girls

Outline

Revolutions in Communication:
Media history from Gutenberg to the Digital Age

1. The toolbox – Understanding media history    

First mass media revolutions

2. Impact of the printing revolution

3. The industrial media revolution   

The visual revolution

4. Photography: Visualizing the world

5. Motion pictures: dream factories and pleasure palaces   

6. Advertising, public relations and the crafted image 

The electronic revolution

7. Radio: crystal sets and the national hearth

8. Television: the wars in your living room 

9. Satellites: first paths through the global village           

The digital revolution

10. Personal computers as accidental empires  

11. Networks become personal 

12. Web2 and Gnu: free global culture

The future of the massed personal media  

Conclusion -  Disorganized intelligence and organized chaos

Backmatter

Research notes

Bibliography

Index