Revolutions in Communication

This new and expanded edition of Revolutions in Communication, the 3rd edition, explores printing, imaging, electronic and digital media history within a framework of technological change and social impacts.

Using key figures in history to benchmark the chronology of technical innovation, Kovarik's scholarship narrates the story of revolutions in printing, electronic communication and digital information, while drawing parallels between the past and present. This edition builds on the success of the previous two editions as a leading media history textbook.

The 3rd edition includes:

- Digital media technology, impacts and expectations that have changed since 2015.
- Updated and additional information that has become recently available, including: declassified histories of super-computers, the US news media’s record on civil rights, Gutenberg’s printing experiments in the 1440s, the role of the 1796 invention of lithography and improving the printing and culture of music.
- A sharper international focus and effort to avoid the impression that Europe is more or less at the center of mass media history.

Revolutions in Communication does what few introductory media textbooks can—it captures and engages the attention of undergraduate students through savvy exploration of the major milestones in media history and the dramatic curves in the road that some navigated, and others neglected. It is the story of circumventing technologies bypassing legal and institutional barriers and information monopolies to bring media content to mass audiences for the first time at signal moments in human history. The creativity and ingenuity of technological discovery appear alongside media’s darker uses by monopolists and propagandists. All are meticulously set in their industrial and legal contexts, often roiling with contention sparking social and political transformation—from the Protestant Reformation to the digital revolution—that would forever change the world. David Dowling, Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa, USA
Kovarik’s book has become a staple of media history courses across the world since its first edition. This third edition goes even further and deeper in its research scope with a comparative historical approach and with rich updated examples on all types of media technology. A must read for the public and students of all ages alike. Murat Akser, Senior Lecturer in Screen Production, Ulster University, UK
The publication briefly and clearly, yet insightfully describes the development of communication and media history from antiquity to the current present, from the first drawings in caves and the birth of the first written systems to the world of social networks today. The book presents a readable text explaining the turning points on this journey in a way that allows them to be understood even by those who have been distant from communication and media history. Therein lies the main prize of this book. Pavel Vecera, Assistant Professor, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Bill Kovarik, Ph.D. is a Professor of Communication at Radford University, USA. His previous books include Web Design for the Mass Media (2001) and Mass Media and Environmental Conflict (1997).

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