- ISBN13: 9780465081943
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
A sweeping social history of the political roots of the information age, by one of this country’s most distinguished public intellectuals, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine. America’s leading role in today’s information revolution may seem simply to reflect its position as the world’s dominant economy and most powerful state. But by the early nineteenth century, when the United States was neither a world power nor a … More >>
The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication
It is not the media that plays games but an undercurrent of several opposing ideologies that makes the pawn move. In cases of life and death the answer is more than the difference between good and bad but rather more profound as in wrong and right(read “Brave new world” and you will understand). The family wishes and religious beliefs must be taken in account if the persons wishes are not known. Erring on the side of life is of utmost importance with the coexisting dilemma of upholding the law of the land. The media certainly ends up presenting all viewpoints with pull to the right being balanced by the pull to the left. Intrinsic beliefs and biases are ingrained in all of us and if we all try to reach over with a conscious effort to the other side (knowing our intrinsic tendencies) then negative feelings and hate are avoided and with less emotional burden on our shoulders.
Rating: 5 / 5
Great subject; poor execution. Starr is so determined to prove his point that people have the capacity to determine their historical decisions that he forces the facts of his arugment to fit his theory. There are some perfect moments of pure contradiction here. My favorite is the chapter on radio, where he concedes that maybe the technical limitations of media determines the process of their deployment in society, only to dismiss it with an offhand, “of course that can’t be the case.” The book is also hobbled by a limp wrist embrace of American exceptionalism, as though the geographic, social and class context of America weren’t enough to account for difference between the deployment of technology in America and Europe. No, it HAS to be the genius of our political institutions. There are at least three great stories here: How the aesthetic conventions of media determine historical consicousness (a la McLuhan), the role of media in price revolutions, and how media is used as a tool in class and ethnic competition. But Starr misses all of them either because he has an agenda when he gets to the facts, or because doing political history is easy, and economic history hard. Either way, lame. For bourgeois historians only. If you’re a media professional, pass.
Rating: 2 / 5
I read this book for a History of Mass Media class at the University of Pittsburgh during the fall semester of 2009. We had to do class presentations from the chapters in the book. One of the points that the class had to present on was the strengths and weaknesses of the chapters. Every week the class said the same thing. That Paul Starr doesn’t order his information chronologically, he doesn’t give good enough examples, he jumps from one time period to the next within the same paragraphs, he also jumps form Europe to America without telling us that he does it. He just writes as if he knows the information like its the back of his hand, he doesn’t have skill in explaining ordinary concepts in a clear and concise way. It seems as if he writes too academically, he should just write to explain his concepts and the history instead of going off on tangents. Also he frequently goes off topic. The book covers the Mass Media systems of the U.S. and Europe. He starts with the newspapers and the post office then goes to books, next is the telegraph, then the telephone, next is the radio then movies. He barely mentions the Television in the book.
My overall review of this book is that it is horrible. I would not reccomend it to any professor to teach from. My professor even gave the class her notes of the book every week because she thought that it was a tough read. I also wouldn’t reccomend it to anyone who would like it for just plain reading. Alot of books help you think critically, this book doesn’t help you think critically or abstractly, it just leaves you plain confused. You will be frustrated at the end. All of my classmates agreed that this was a horrible book for a class text.
Rating: 2 / 5
Paul Starr examines the development of communication in America and how it caused American democracy to develop differently from European powers.
Starr lays out the argument “that the United States has followed a distinctive developmental path in communications ever since the American Revolution. The origins of that path lie in the country’s founding as a liberal republic and its response to the peculiar challenges of building a nation on a continental scale.” (pg. 2) Starr sees the role of communications, especially newspapers and the way the Post Office was used to subsidize the press along with the restraint in state authority as the key to place the United States on a course that sharply diverged from the patterns in Britain and the rest of Europe. Newspapers played an important part in the development of the United States. American papers focused on news with political commentary added for color while European papers focused more on literary essays. This made newspapers more popular with the masses in America. From this beginning, Starr continues to follow the development of film, radio and TV along with the recent growth in the Internet. In almost all cases, the major inventions or improvements in communications occured in the U.S. The role of a large educated middle class and the ability to communicate have for Starr resulted in our liberal form of democracy.
Read this along with Michael Linds “The American Way of Strategy” to gain a new perspective of why the United States is currently involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is by far the most exhaustive reading on the creation, growth, and perpetuation of media I have ever read.
At the outset, this is not a light read. Laced with history, the sociology of people within history, and trends operating in American and European culture, this is for serious students of both history and media. For that crowd, it will be a very pleasant read.
I give high praise to Paul Starr for being able to outline not only the growth of media and opinion, but also putting the growth in light of America’s capitalistism and industrial strength.
He starts out by analyzing how European Nations like France and England tried to promote literacy through newsprint and postal services. He then outlines how those measures spilled into the United States during the Colonial Period.
Of course, newspapers were only the tip of the iceberg. Starr carefully analyzes how new inventions like the telephone, telegraph, film, and radio were used heavily for capitalistic gain as well as entertainment. At first, the U.S. Supreme Court was reticent to recognize First Amendment protection to these new mediums.
He also compares and contrasts Europe’s tendency to nationalize many inventions instead of letting the market allow inventors to make money on their projects. Meticulously, he shows how the U.S. Navy tried to squelch Marconi’s patent for wireless radio, and eventually how the Radio Act of 1927 preserved both the national and private interest.
In the end, Starr seems to point out that American Capitalism was instrumental not only in creating the media, but also allowing it to diversify and eventually find the same protection as print media–and eventually find a huge diversification in points of view.
Of course, all along he finds the naysayers like the Catholic League, the Hayes Code, and the Book Publishers Code that operated out of a fear of the public who did not trust these new medias.
Starr is a talented writer of history and can bring the elements related to new medias with such deft and articulation. He keeps the attention, occassionaly straying from the subject, but returning before interest is lost. Moreover, he does real well in keeping his own biases and prejudices aside, simply telling history instead of trying to interpret everything as either a conservative backlash, or a liberal trick.
Kudos to Starr. I look forward to his future endeavors.
Rating: 5 / 5