impacts

This page considers some business and regulatory impacts of past communications revolutions.

     business 

The excellent Global Business Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 00) by John Braithwaite & Peter Drahos offers a  perspective on how government has dealt with jurisdictional and other challenges of new technologies in the past - often slowly and clumsily but in the long term quite effectively - and the likelihood of coping in future.

The provocative Politics in Wired Nations: Selected Writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool (New Brunswick: Transaction 98) edited by Eli Noam is essential reading for those wondering how digital technologies will affect politics, the economy and community.  We recommend his Technologies Without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 90).

The outstanding studies of business before a 'dot' seemed a mandatory part of the title are Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 80) and Scale & Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 90). 

James Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 86), JoAnne Yates' Control Through Communication: The Rise of System In American Management (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni Press 89) and Information Acumen: The Understanding & Use of Knowledge in Modern Business (London, Routledge 94) edited by Lisa Bud-Frierman are also of value.

The US report on Fostering Research on the Economic & Social Impacts of Information Technology (Washington, National Academies Press 98) and issues of the Magazine on Information Impacts (iMP) identify research issues.

     the long wave

For wider impacts David Landes' revisionist The Wealth & Poverty of Nations (New York, Little Brown 98) is outstanding. It offers a nuanced cross-cultural perspective. Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity & Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 90) and The Carrier Wave: New Information Technology & the Geography of Innovation, 1846-2003 (London: Unwin Hyman 88) by Peter Hall & Paschal Preston are also valuable. We've pointed to similar studies in our economy guide.

Armand Mattelart's Networking the World, 1794-2000 (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 00), like his The Invention of Communication (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 96) melds Castells and Fernand Braudel. 

     space, time, modernity

Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time & Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 83) dates the birth of the communications age to one hundred years ago.

At the turn of last century new media made it possible to think of Australia or other advanced economies as "running on the same clock of awareness and existing within a homogeneous national space." The fin-de-siecle communications revolution was foreshadowed by the growth of the telegraph, national and intercontinental, and the penny press. It saw the birth of the national magazine, the growth of mass newspapers, a symbiosis between news publishing and wire services, and experiments in online narrowcasting (eg subscribers in Melbourne, Paris and London were able to listen to live performances over the phone from theatres in their city.

Other writers featured in this profile argue that print (from the 1500s), mechanical images (around the same time), photographs or sound recordings (last century) had an immeasurably greater impact on local/international economies and society at large.


 

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