From Grunts to Gigabytes: Communications and Society

Front Cover
University of Illinois Press, 1996 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 193 pages
Among the things we'll find while traveling the information superhighway should be new public policies governing nation's - and the world's - ever-burgeoning communication systems. In From Grunts to Gigabytes, Dan Lacy uses his broad knowledge of the field's history to explore communications systems of the present and the future, their social impact, and the policies that would most appropriately shape them in the public interest. Throughout, Lacy discusses the relation of communications systems to the existence and social distribution of power, the structure of society, and the perception of reality. He traces the stages of human communication from the beginning of speech through writing, printing, commercial publishing, the mass printing and publishing of the late nineteenth century, audiovisual developments of the twentieth century, and the computer networks that send gigabytes of information quickly from place to place.

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Contents

Words
1
Letters
9
Printing
21
The Flowering of Print
31
The Control of Print
37
Communications Policy in the Early American Republic
46
The Era of Print Dominance
61
The Technology of the Audiovisual Revolution
79
The Control of the Audiovisual Revolution
87
The Audiovisual Media and Society
109
The Coming of the Computer
125
Printed Media in the Audiovisual and Electronic Era
139
Now and into the Future
152
Bibliography
181
Index
187
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