| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Hugh R. Slotten. Radio and Television Regulation: Broadcast Technology in the United States, 1920–1960. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000. Pp. xv, 308. $45.00.

Not since the writings of Marshall McLuhan have knowledge shapers in the broadcast field shown interest in technological determinism. Scholars have tended to view broadcasting from the vantage point of great people and big events. Starting with Eric Barnouw's 1970s trilogy, the evolution of broadcasting has been most widely attributed to the activism of people like RCA's David Sarnoff and the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) James Lawrence Fly, not to the field's discoveries and inventors. Finally Hugh R. Slotten redeems a technological perspective, his book the latest to examine the origins of radio and television. These media, Slotten affirms, did present social, industrial, and political opportunities. Yet their affairs were not as vagarious as past authors have made them seem. Broadcasting was grooved to a technical learning curve. Only those who knew the technology shaped key events. 1

This conclusion is reached in a valuable if highly scientific historical account. Slotten successively treats the introductions of AM and FM radio and monochrome and color TV. These subjects are not new. Nor are the people and events Slotten relates. A triad of AM-FM-TV long has been recognized as the foundation of electronic mass communication. That between 1920 and 1960 these media ushered in a communications "revolution" also is well known. Some readers may argue the firmness of division between AM, FM, and TV, which are usually seen as parts of the same technological feat. . . .

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