| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media. By Steve J. Wurtzler. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xiv, 393 pp. $34.50, ISBN 978-0-231-13676-1.)

Once media technologies become embedded, they often acquire an aura of inevitability that leads scholars to debate degrees of economic, political, or technological determinism or turn to exceedingly broad explanations such as ideology. Few technological developments have had the market penetration or left as visible a mark on society and culture as the emergence of sound technologies for recorded music, radio, and cinema in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than succumb to either broad explanatory temptations, Electric Sounds cogently examines a nexus of factors that coalesced to lead to the establishment of a variety of media industries based on the mass dissemination of sound without eschewing important theoretical concerns that underlie debates over determinism or ideology.

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