Appendix C: Journalism: A Guide to Recent Literature - Section 3. Technology

A. General Histories

These are wide-ranging sources surveying many different technologies, often over lengthy periods of time. More specialized material appears in other sections of this chapter.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., and James W. Cortada, eds. A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. While this ranges back to print and the mails in the eighteenth century, study primarily focuses on electrical era since the 1830s. Includes considerable discussion of growing uses of computers in business and industry.

Dooley, Patricia L. The Technology of Journalism: Cultural Agents, Cultural Icons. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Discusses dynamics of change, quest for more news, printers and readers, electrification, visualizing news, development of digital modes, and likely future of printed news given growing Internet competition.

Fang, Irving. A History of Mass Communication: Six Information Revolutions. Newton, MA: Focal Press, 1997. Revolutions include those created by writing, printing, mass media, entertainment, electronic communication into households, and the Internet.

Fang, Irving. Alphabet to Internet: Mediated Communication in Our Lives. St. Paul, MN: Rada Press, 2007. Very broad-scale history by a longtime student of changing communication technology, ranging from writing up to digital video games, with a chapter on each over time.

Gardner, Robert, and Dennis Shortelle. From Talking Drums to the Internet: An Encyclopedia of Communications Technology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997. Some 210 entries, written (and often illustrated) for a general readership.

Lacy, Dan. From Grunts to Gigabytes: Communications and Society. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Development of communication systems from writing and printing to audiovisual revolution, and coming of computers.

Lebow, Irwin. Information Highways and Byways: From the Telegraph to the 21st Century. New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 1995. Telegraph and telephone, radio and television, growing communication-computer symbiosis and ongoing digital revolution are all outlined.

Lubar, Steven. Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Handsome coffee table book illustrating most communication inventions and some of their applications. Designed in part as a catalog for a long-running “Information Age” display, study focuses on print, film, and electrical media innovations as well as computers and related devices.

Meadow, Charles T. Making Connections: Communication through the Ages. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002. Described by publisher as “a Cook's tour of communication technologies across time,” this begins with writing and printing and progresses to modern scene in clear nontechnical language.

B. Printing Technology

B-1: History

See also Section 4-C for labor's reactions to technological change.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. London: Cambridge University Press, 1979 (2 vols.; reprinted as one in 1980). A classic analysis of watershed 1400s and 1500s revolution in printing technology (moveable type) in Europe. See also the author's shorter The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983), which contains the essential story. Author's discussion of the rise of print culture and its interaction with and speeding effects of both Renaissance and Reformation movements is unsurpassed.

...