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Book Review
| The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. By Paul Starr. (New York: Basic Books, 2004. xii, 484 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-465-08193-2.)
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| Paul Starr has produced a book that many historians of communication have called for. Written with a broad readership in mind, it is simply the best available synthesis of the largest range of topics relevant to the history of the media. Moreover, it advances a strong argument that has encouraging policy implications. It is a major accomplishment by an important thinker. It takes pride of place among similar projects: broader than Michael Schudson's The Good Citizen (1998), more concrete than Asa Briggs and Peter Burke's A Social History of the Media (2002) or Armand Mattelart's The Invention of Communication (1996), more thorough than Daniel Czitrom's Media and the American Mind (1982), more coherent than the multivolume A History of the Book in America (volume 1 appeared in 2000; the other four are in various stages of preparation). |
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Starr's subtitle signals his argument. Moments of "constitutive choice" (p. 1) set the media down particular "paths of development" (p. 2) within particular national histories. Constitutive moments tend to come at points of crisis and conflict. In the United States, the inaugural constitutive moment was the Revolution, which led to policies of active promotion of communication, especially through the postal system, along with tolerance toward open political debate expressed in protections of freedom of the press. Starr calls this path of development "liberal constitutionalism" (p. 2). World War I was another constitutive moment, and it produced important modifications in the technologies, ideologies, and institutions (including law) structuring the media. In emphasizing policy, Starr sets his account apart from those that emphasize technology or markets or culture/ideology. |
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Specialists will recognize Starr's debt to the institutionalist approach best embodied in communication history by Richard R. John's universally cited work on the postal system (1995). But one also hears unacknowledged echoes of Raymond Williams, especially his Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), which emphasized intention and social investment in the construction of technologies. Starr is not interested in sharpening a theoretical debate with cultural Marxism (though he does skewer cruder Marxist interpretations of, say, the rise of public schools). His tendency is to bridge disputes in the interest of building an inclusive narrative. Nonspecialists will find his approach thoroughly reasonable; specialists will want more explicit engagement. |
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In any broad synthesis, choices must be made about what to include. Starr does not begin with an explicit definition of the media and is uninterested in the origin of the term; nor does he explore the difference between "media" in his title and "modern communications" in his subtitle. His sense of the media is guided by the framing concept of the public sphere and an interest in technologies, which lead him to focus on, first, print, the press, and the postal system; then, new networks, especially the telegraph and telephone; and, finally, film and broadcasting, yielding an elegant narrative moving through three stages. |
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This account does exclude many matters. Particular absences include music, non-mainstream groups and media, audience involvement, labor, and media content. Starr's interest in the determinative architecture of the media draws his attention away from some of these topics—African Americans, for instance, figure only when their exclusion from movie theaters and other media settings is noted. Likewise, the notion of the active audience, which has worked like a fetish since Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984), makes no appearance except in the form of the radio amateur. The neglect of labor—the relations of production within the media especially—is more serious but perhaps due to weakness in the secondary literature that Starr relies on. Likewise, the neglect of media content comes from reliance on secondary sources and Starr's sense of its irrelevance to the architecture of the media. |
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