Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
See also Public Opinion and Communication
Networks
in Eighteenth-Century Paris
[Page 1]
tanding here on the threshold of the
year 2000, it appears that the road
to the new millennium leads through Silicon Valley. We have entered the
information age, and the future, it seems, will be determined by the
media. In fact, some would claim that the modes of communication have
replaced the modes of production as the driving force of the modern world.
I would like to dispute that view. Whatever its value as prophecy, it will
not work as history, because it conveys a specious sense of a break with
the past. I would argue that every age was an age of information, each in
its own way, and that communication systems have always shaped
events.1
That argument may sound suspiciously like common sense; but, if pushed hard enough, it could open up a fresh perspective on the past. As a starting point, I would ask a question about the media today: What is news? Most of us would reply that news is what we read in newspapers or see and hear on news broadcasts. If we considered the matter further, however, we probably would agree that news is not what happened—yesterday, or last week—but rather stories about what happened. It is a kind of narrative, transmitted by special kinds of media. That line of reasoning soon leads to entanglement in literary theory and the World Wide Web. But if projected backward, it may help to disentangle some knotty problems in the past.2
I would propose a general attack on the problem of how societies made sense of events and transmitted information about them, something that might be called the
Click here to go to the next page
| Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Pages: 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
Footnotes
|
|||
| Discussion | Maps & Cafes | Songs | Site Index |
| AHR Home | Presidential Address Home | AHA Home | |