Fourth Edition
polity
Copyright © Asa Briggs and Peter Burke 2020
The right of Asa Briggs and Peter Burke to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2001 by Polity Press
This edition published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3374-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Briggs, Asa, 1921-2016, author. | Burke, Peter, 1937- author. | Ytreberg, Espen, 1964- author.
Title: A social history of the media : from Gutenberg to Facebook / Asa Briggs, Peter Burke, Espen Ytreberg.
Description: Fourth edition. | Medford : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The classic text for historians and media scholars, updated throughout and with a new chapter on social media and big data”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019040330 (print) | LCCN 2019040331 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533718 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533725 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509533749 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Mass media--History. | Mass media--Social aspects. | Mass media--Economic aspects.
Classification: LCC P90 .B695 2020 (print) | LCC P90 (ebook) | DDC 302.2309--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040330
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040331
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
The aim of this book – on a vast and ever-expanding theme – has been to show the relevance of the past to the present by bringing history into media studies and the media into history. Our own choice of medium reflects a qualified optimism in the future of the book, which we believe will continue to exist alongside newer forms of communication as manuscripts did in the age of print. There will, however, be a new division of labour between media, which is already apparent.
So far as our own division of labour is concerned, in earlier editions, Peter Burke was primarily responsible for Chapters 1–3, Asa Briggs for Chapters 5–8, and the two authors, converging in Chapter 4, joined forces both to write and to revise the text, meeting regularly in different locales, from King’s Cross Station to Claridge’s, as well as keeping in touch by telephone. Historians of the twenty-first century may like to note that the text was originally written partly in longhand and partly on a personal computer by two academics whose resistance to driving cars and using email is in no way incompatible with an interest in technological and social change in the present and the future as well as in the past.
We should like to thank Amleto Lorenzini for first yoking us together in a project on the history of communication, and John Thompson for commissioning the volume. We are indebted to Pat Spencer for her help in getting the first three editions into the hands of the printers, while Peter Burke is grateful to Joad Raymond for his comments on a draft of Chapter 3.
There are significant differences between all editions of this book. This fourth edition, revised after the death of the senior author, Asa Briggs, replaces his Chapter 8 with a major new chapter on twenty-first-century media developments by Espen Ytreberg, who has also comprehensively revised the introduction together with Peter Burke. Subheadings have been introduced to make this a more reader-friendly volume and the chronology has been updated. The ever-expanding bibliography has been replaced by recommendations for further reading, while Asa’s chapters have been reduced in length. We hope that our craft is now ready to sail or fly into the third decade of the twenty-first century.