The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications

Starr's history of the "developmental path" of communications in the US offers a quiet but significant argument about the role of the state. He argues--on sound empirical and comparative grounds--that the major media forms in the US were shaped by distinctive political decisions made by the state. As a result, American media and media industries didn't follow the same historical path that shaped the media in European nations. But Starr is not making an argument for "American exceptionalism" in any crude or ideological sense. Yes, Starr clearly thinks the US has more successfully nurtured a robust public sphere (at least before WW II), and that its path of development has given it certain advantages in the global marketplace. But he is far from merely telling a triumphant story of American enterprise. Instead, he gives detailed historical evidence that will refute any jingoistic claim that private property interests and free market ideology are the key to US success.On the other hand, Starr argues, the very success of US media have also produced what Starr calls an "American dilemma": while democratic ideas helped create new media, those media have become vast industries with enormous power--power that has the potential to erode the very democratic practices and spaces (discussion, access, association, diversity) that brought them into existence.Starr's arguments unfold quietly and across the different chapters. This is not a bald polemic. But I would identify two key arguments that emerge (neither of which will easily comport with the right or the left):1. Commercial activity has always been part of the public sphere of mediated discussion, expression, and political debate. There is no pure, disinterested space of political speech; from the earliest newspapers and pamphlets to highly capitalized broadcasting, the search for profit has been part of what spurred innovation, expanded public discussions, and sparked competitive contests. While this links public speech to interests and ideology, it can also allow multiple perspectives and represent the interests of less powerful groups--although the interests of capital and ruling elites do try to dominate. (Free market types will like this thread in Starr's book, while more left-leaning thinkers may not.)2. While private and commercial interests have be part of the successful creation of media in the US, from the first it has been the state that has been the key the US competitive advantage. By supporting free speech in law, low taxation on print, broad access to education (in the North, though not in the South), infrastructure of roads, post offices, and postal rates, and by (sometimes) keeping monopolies from chocking off innovation, the state has been crucial to US success. It is a glaring mistake to assume that a hands-off government is the reason the US has succeeded so well in fostering high literacy (with damning exceptions like the exclusion of African Americans from access to education, even after abolition), technological innovation, and media industries like sound and cinema that have been adopted around the globe. (More left-oriented types will applaud this part of the book.)Note that Starr ends his history in the 1940s, right as the most pressing questions of the power of media industries and public relations begin to worry a lot of people. He doesn't down play these worries. But he does think they are inevitable "tensions" that can't be eliminated--though they should be carefully examined and deliberated. Starr's history is an excellent synthetic account that is very helpful for taking up just those problems.

If you're far enough on the left to hate markets, or if you're far enough on the right to hate any action by the state, this probably isn't for you. If you believe the course of the media has been shaped by a confluence of market forces and state actions, and that the result in the United States is on balance one of human advancement -- and if you've got plenty of time and patience for a long and complex yet very well-told tale -- this is for you. Especially if you've spent a career in various aspects of late 20th and early 21st century media, as I have, there's no better window into the historical forces on which our experiences were built.

An older book in the condition I was expecting. No surprises.

As a historian and writer and independent voter and thinker, I read this book while in graduate school at UC Berkeley. It's a valuable, exhaustive resource. The author is a "progressive" partisan who disdains Pres. Trump, but his analysis doesn't always read that way. I'm reading "Unfreedom of the Press" by "conservative" Mark Levin, who supports Pres. Trump, right now and I find it fascinating that they agree on a lot of key points: the Pamphlet Era, party presses, the terrible effect on freedom of the press of the Sedition Acts under Pres. John Adams and "progressive" Pres. Woodrow Wilson, and more. I feel like if you could put both books in a blender, I'd give it a 5-star review.

Starr's main thesis is the precise opposite of McLuhan's Understanding Media: He argues for important role of "institutions" and "policies" in the media evolution. He calls them "constellations of power" and they are cultural, rather than technological agents. As a McLuhanite myself, I was prepared to dismiss his arguments, but found that his analysis of evolutionary steps for each individual media was razor sharp, equal to McLuhan's insight. Perhaps the synthesis of both views may be the answer to understanding media as a mutual entrainment between genotypical technology and phenotypical culture. Together, they form inseparable system living and evolving in a "far from equilibrium" state.Missing 5th star is due to Starr cautionary approach, perhaps due to his university tenure. It could explain why he chose to ignore the significant role of both the religion and the Wall Street banks in media evolution, using instead generic terms such as "law and policy". If one replaces "policy" with "religion", Starr gets quite close to Max Weber, if one replaces "policy" with "Wall Street", he gets quite close to Mises and Rothbard. Finally, his admiration for "public" may not sit too well with those of us with high regard to Kierkegaard.

Starr provides a quality academic framework and the necessary historical background to make a wonderful argument about the way the political choices of the young (and current) United States impacted the growth of media technologies and businesses.

Got to love the used pricing! Excellent quality!

Great quality. Real "like new"

Paul Starr's book offers a comprehensive history of the media in the US with more than only an occasional comparison to the UK (less so to continental Europe). The core thesis of the book about "political origins" of the media is thoroughly elaborated. The book deserves a 4-star rating for this achievement alone.If one looks at the thesis about "political origins of modern communications" in the US a bit more in detail the picture gets blurred:1. Starr supports a "softened" view of American Exceptionalism based on on the influence of (democratic) values that are turned into institutionalized structures. So initial democratic and liberal decisions open up a path (of development and dependencies) that then leads to a distinctive development of the media in the US.The difficulty is that this view of an American Exceptionalism and a simultaneous approach of path development/path dependency don't fit comfortably together. You either have a history of consecutive, normative decisions based on values of democracy, free media and free market, which can then be called exceptional. Or you have a chain of constitutive choices where one decision becomes an institutionalized structure that limits successive decision-making so that you'll get a structural path. In the latter case the burden of "Exceptionalism" mainly rests with initial constitutive choices.2. It is in this respect that the use of anachronisms for the early post-revolutionary history United States is particularly unfortunate. It is to my knowledge not adequate to say that post-revolutionary politics was being based on "a deliberate effort to create a new society and a (...) powerful nation" (p. 49). Even to speak of "a nation" in the meaning of a united populace under one national government, is to pre-date the outcome of many conflicts, in particular of course the Civil War, to the immediate post-revolutionary state(s). The same holds true for the (positive) usage of the term "democracy" and democratic values. If Sparr thinks that "during the Revolutionary era the term democracy came into widespread use and acquired its positive connotations" (p. 63) he is unfortunately wrong. Starr could have simply read the work of Raymond Williams, which he himself cites as a proof (p. 63, cf note 49) for his opinion. For the (post) revolutionary America "it is worth noting that the great majority [of the use of 'democracy' in political vocabulary] (...) show the word being used unfavourably" (R.Williams, Culture and Society, p. XII). And if one want's to have a more historical proof about the undesirability of "democracy" as a model to form American polity, one could simply read the Federalist Papers (No. 10, 14, 63).It is to both reasons mentioned above that I can not add a star but must deduct one because from the point of view of historical science Starr's account is not scientifically sound (which is not the same as "wrong").

Great