Since we had to pick only one book out of all in this blog entry (in addition to Benkler), I'll just run quickly through the rest of the books and then spend a bit more time on a comparison between Benkler and Howard.

Raymond Williams: Reflects a Birmingham School-type insecurity about the arrival of a new form of technology which will surely have a negative effect on society -- but his analysis is rather blurred and unclear.

Susan Douglas: Probably my favorite book of the semester, mostly because it it a wholly historical piece that is very well researched. Points out the faults of industry-friendly government regulation, yet still comments on the social uses of the technology. I have little qualms here...

Claude Fischer: The only book in this course that spends an extended period of time on number crunching and statistical analysis instead of pure theory. Fischer tries to focus on the user -- on how the average person used telephony technology. Moral of the story: people use communication technologies in unpredictable ways that lead to no fixed conclusions at all. Yikes.

Miller and Slater: Ethnographic analysis of Internet use in Trinidad, demonstrating most of the ways ethnography should not be used. Little can be learned when the authors use a research method whose results can be steered.... and then proceed to steer them.

Harold Innis: Not to disparage Innis' knowledge and expertise in economics and history, but even if he has a strong interest in ancient cultures, it is convenient to use such a distant time period in academic arguments. No one can refute any of his grandiose claims even if they have no factual evidence. Thus he is immediately considered the sole person with all the answers and the book instantly becomes a masterpiece.

Price: His book touches on a highly contested topic, and it is really up to the researches whether s/he sides with globalization and transnational media flows or state sovereignty.

This quick and mindless critique of the books we've read isn't meant to ridicule them. I am simply pointing out the fact that approaches to the analysis of communication technologies range all over, are largely motivated by the author's initial judgments, and do not contain very much statistical, quantitative analysis. The only book that does so fails miserably in reaching a solid conclusion.

What this says about communication technologies is that they are infinitely complicated both in their development and their use within society. We all have initial reservations and opinions about the way particular media forms are used, but these feelings range all over and are determined by our own lifestyles as well as the practices of the people that surround us, in real life and in the media. Attempts to prove one reservation against another will most likely fail, as Fischer's account demonstrates.

With that, let's touch a bit on Benkler and Howard:
Benkler's Wealth of Networks provides an optimistic picture about the Internet as a new democratic medium. Benkler believes the Internet differs from older communication technologies in a revolutionary way, because it allows users to interact in a kind of barter system where information is exchanged freely within the online network without being tied to monetary cost. In a sense, he believes the arrival of the Internet is the arrival of a largely democratic form of communication. He engages in a lot of theoretical analysis but also examines some situations in which such non-market transactions occur. However, his work also does not contain much factual evidence, and he is not successful in really proving this point. Much of his analysis, rather than getting the views of Internet audiences and content providers, is more based on his own use of the Internet and his knowledge of various websites and online services.

Howard, on the other hand, goes to great lengths to provide an ethnographic analysis of a certain kind of online content provider, and his conclusions are quite distinct from those of Benkler. Through spending an extended period of time studying datamining organizations from within, he points out that the Internet can be used for quite restrictive and undemocratic purposes. Howard, however, does not engage in much big-picture analysis of the Benkler kind. Instead, he overemphasizes these negative aspects of the Internet.

Once again, the divergent conclusions depend on divergent research methods, which in turn are influenced by the author's initial opinion about the communication technology at hand.

What is the role of policymaking as it relates to society’s use of communication technologies? Work in groups of 4-5 to discuss how at least three of the readings in this course have approached policymaking. How do these approaches signal any underlying views the authors may hold about the influence of policies on the manifestation of communication technologies in everyday use? In your analysis, consider the entire life span of the communication technologies discussed, from their creation to their mainstream use. Discuss for 15 minutes, then explain your views in a 5-minute group presentation.

He argues that “in redlining some constituents and communities and then narrowcasting political content, hypermedia campaigns diminish the amount of shared text in the public sphere.” In his view, hypermedia limit citizens’ ability not only to learn about a variety of political views and information for themselves, but also to share their knowledge to broaden the scope of discussion within the public sphere. He also states, “Even though new media technologies have diffused quickly, there are still significant portions of the population either without the technology or without the informational skills to participate in the public sphere online” (183). The digital and educational divide, he argues, also influence the amount of information that enters public sphere dialogue.

I am conflicted about Howard’s position. On the one hand, I find his argument useful to contradict the early starry-eyed views of the Internet’s unlimited potential for democratic involvement. Hypermedia, at least in the way that Howard portrays it, is indeed exploitative and undemocratic. But another part of me doesn’t fully believe that things are really this black and white. Just because certain portions of the population get targeted with certain messages that they, based on their purchasing records and online activities, are supposed to be supportive of does not imply that the Internet itself, outside of the hypermedia sphere, cannot be used to gather further information. It does not mean that the Internet itself is wholly undemocratic for the purposes of gathering political information.

Howard does point out a unique characteristic of Internet-based political communication. The ability to control what portion of the whole picture is received by whom does create a more one-on-one relationship between the individual and the campaign. Such a space does privatize political communication in a market-based fashion. However, citizens still have the ability to find alternative information sources, and indeed they have a hard time avoiding other sources in day-to-day interaction with other citizens and with mass media. The public sphere doesn't have to be limited to certain sectors of communication -- they can be broad, or, at least, information learned in one can be combined with the influence of life's many other public spheres. Howard’s argument would make more sense if all people were tied to their computers with no person-to-person contact with society. Thankfully, real life isn’t symptomatic of the Parable of the Cave. A political campaign, which is designed to attract audiences even when it does not personalize its messages, is by no means the only outlet from which people gather knowledge about politics. Let’s hope things stay this way.

Philip Howard attempts to explain and engage in this method of analysis in his insightful book, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. In his definition of the notion of “political culture,” he combines what he views as two separate mainstream views of the term and creates a new, more nuanced understanding of it.

He argues that an explanation of political culture cannot be restricted to “hard cultural determinist” analysis, which argues that culture and value systems are “rarely, if ever, composed afresh” but “form slowly under the weight of history,” and individuals have little or no ability to take part in shaping them (68). Nor, he believes, is a definition of political culture completely up to “free will,” in which all people work together to create and mold culture day by day in a collaborative fashion (69).

Instead, he prescribes to a “soft cultural determinist” description of the concept. He says political culture can only be understood through acknowledging the existence and influence of the communication technologies that relay political information to the citizen, as well as of the power of campaign managers in control of those technologies to manipulate the shape of the political information they transmit. As such, political culture is defined as both participatory because of citizens’ ability to take part in political campaigns, voting, and other “democratic” activities, but also as restricted because everyday citizens do not and cannot know how much information they receive from the communication technologies controlled by campaign managers (71).

Although identifying communication technology as both a vehicle and a gatekeeper for political information is essential to understand political culture, Howard’s definition of this term is by no means comprehensive, though he seems to suggest it is so. One method of viewing political culture that he does not thoroughly include, for instance, is the Habermasian notion of the public sphere. Habermas' view of the world of politics is popular for a reason: it includes citizen deliberation as an important part of the culture of political decision-making. Howard does not consider what citizens do with the information they receive, how many outlets they consider when researching information on issues or candidates, and how they collaborate outside of new media campaigns to come to their decisions. In this sense, it may not be as crucial to consider the influence of communication technologies in the spread of information as it is to analyze information received from various campaign is assessed within the public sphere.

In short, despite Howard's rather depressing point of view of the lack of agency that hypermedia campaigns leave everyday citizens with, I am not willing to give up on the power of public deliberation just yet. I believe in the ability of groups of citizens to help themselves, to turn politics on its head and reshape democracy in their favor, even if the organizations they are supposed to trust manipulate the information they receive. People are smart, they converse, and they don't like hypodermic injections.

But Howard's quote of political consultant Phil Noble may certainly be right: "The amusement of youth is that they can remake the world."

He mentions several ways that states have tried to redefine and reassert themselves as they both gain and lose their power to govern populations, it appears from his writing that state governments' relations with domestic and transnational businesses serve as an overarching, determining factor in how globalization of media structures and messages plays out. States seem always to react to changes in the market. At times they support and promote increased corporate influence on the media, exemplified by new European Union member nations where commercial media ownership and programming have increased exponentially in recent years to catch up to EU business standards. At other times, they attempt to assert control over media forms, as in the case of the recently proposed indecency legislations and the V-chip, in which a government attempts to control media messages coming from outlets owned by large telecommunications companies.

At first glance, Price's description makes it seem that states and corporations are equally vying for power. Indeed, in the case of propaganda use to achieve certain foreign policy outcomes, it seems that the major players are the state governments themselves, who control media messages in deliberate ways (to mitigate war, to influence foreign public opinion, or for other uses). But in most cases, corporate influence plays an important defining role in how certain uses of media within globalization play out, while governments can often do little except react. Increasing interstate economic flows (in telecommunications as well as other areas), and states' loss of power and control resulting from corporate-driven modernity and globalization, are therefore at the heart of the redefinition of sovereignty that Price describes.

Even though Harold Innis, author of Bias of Communication, may be a bit confused about how to categorize the Internet at this point in time, I believe he would assume that the Internet is space-biased. Some have called the Internet a “series of tubes” (Sen. Ted Stevens), others believe it is a network whose infrastructure encompasses the entire world in a kind of “infinite space” (p. 111). It is mostly considered in the present tense, as opposed to printed written works that are considered to have a much longer history. Even though some Internet content is monitored and recorded by the U.S. government, most people do not record much of what they read on the Internet for a lengthy period of time. As such, the Internet is not very durable.

Also, despite the fact that many people today consider the Internet to be a democratic form of medium, we can see from the examples of other communication technologies discussed in this course (Douglas, Fischer) that the democratic potential of a new media form is often over-exaggerated. Congress has been making fervent attempts to regulate Internet content, and Internet access, especially that of broadband Internet, is still severely limited within and outside of the United States. Although it is possible that a more democratic medium will result than any we have seen in the past, historical precedent and current Congressional actions imply that the Internet will most likely stay in the hands of large telecommunications companies and state governments. This kind of elite control also points to what Innis would call a space-biased communication technology.

Innis' main argument seems to be that writing and the development of written language created channels of human communication that limited the expanse of human thought. As he states, "Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers" (11). In some cases, the use of a new form of written medium also limited, or 'checked' the power of tyranny within a society.

This argument is important to consider, since communication technologies have had an essential role in framing the development of societies through their methods of communication. However, Innis seems to overgeneralize and oversimplify his description of the particular ancient societies he discusses, and does not mention much historical data to back up his statements. What allowed certain forms of media to ‘check’ a particular power structure? How did that form of written communication develop to such an extent that it was powerful enough to fundamentally change social structures, and what is inherent within that technology that motivates publics to challenge authority? He needs to discuss these more substantially.

As Howard states, "The hypermedia campaign takes advantage of the norms and values that have been entrenched in technology when designer choices embedded attitudes about how democracy should work into code. The tools of a political campaign, the choices that campaign managers make about manipulating data, ideas, and people, reflect their own political norms. [...] Some campaigns choose to obstruct real learning about political issues, manipulate their membership, and precent too much interactivity" (203).

He also goes on to say, "Other campaign allow a range of interactive tools, adapt their organizational behavior to allow members to both produce and consume political content, and give such members the capacity to seed their own campaigns" (203). However, he thinks "even the hypermedia tools created by altruists [of this sort] are used for political redlining" (131).

Howard raises an important point about some of the negative aspects of using the Internet as a form of outreach for political campaigns. My paper looks to apply his argument to the work of media policy organizations and media reform movement, which have relied largely on the Internet as a way to build supporters. I argue that use of the Internet alone as a form of outreach is insufficient to build a holistic grassroots movement, and can alienate and confuse some participants who rely on websites and email as the sole form of communication between the 'leaders' of the media reform movement and themselves.

I also argue that email campaigns, though they reach impressive numbers, show little 'real' citizen involvement with political campaigns, while at the same time creating serious problems with constituent mail backlog in Congressional and other leadership offices. I will include demographic information about Internet usage in the United States as well, examining what portions of the population are reached by messages of the media reform movement. This will come from an analysis of records of public involvement, such as public comments filed to Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, as well as of websites and blogs that discuss media policy and media justice issues on a frequent basis to establish spheres in which discussions about these topics take place. I will also look at general Internet usage data from the Census Bureau and the Pew Center for the People and the Press.

I will also use my experiences as an intern at Free Press and a staff assistant at Congressman Maurice Hinchey's office to create an ethnographic portion to my paper. I will describe the ways that I, as the main organizer of constituent mail in a Congressional office, worked with the overwhelming amount of mail, nearly all of which were 'blast emails,' and how the mail overload often inhibits timely consideration of handwritten letters and emails. Indeed, Congressional offices, including Hinchey's, have begun attempts to reduce this mail overload using logic puzzles on their sites that prevent many blast emails from reaching Congressional offices. These blast emails, as many Congressional staffers agree, are not considered legitimate forms of communication between citizens and their leaders. (Obviously, this statement can and has been contested, mostly in the form of further blast emails to Congress; however, the fact remains that use of the logic puzzle has become widespread on Congressional websites.)

I am also in the process of conducting interviews with Free Press employees on how they have been conducting Internet-based outreach, and what ways they feel they can improve in this area.

I do not imply that Internet campaigns should be abandoned altogether, and my paper will point out that this form of outreach is essential for the media reform movement. However, I do argue that Internet campaigning still limits direct public involvement, especially on a more local, community-based level, creating a false sense of democratic participation without providing sufficient agency and public education.

In other words, more needs to be done. In my conclusion, I will attempt to lay out alternatives for media outreach that surpass the current singular focus on online political campaigns and involve community-based education about media literacy and the relevance of media issues to everyday life.

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"Information technology now provides the skeletal support for our democratic political culture, but in interesting ways this infrastructure was designed by a small group of campaign managers with a specific vision of how it should look. We do not regulate the informational infrastructure of two important political institutions: the political party and the political campaign. [...] The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue- or campaign-specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life" (203-4).

Douglas’ discussion of the amateur broadcasters, for example, was an explanation of both the initial efforts and success of the amateurs – what Miller and Slater might call their attempts to reach their “expansive potential,” – as well as the subsequent regulations by the government that limited further ‘grassroots’ development of wireless technology. It encompasses a story from beginning to end, with not only social, but also political and economic factors in a more well-rounded discussion due solely to the benefits offered by the history factor.

In comparison, Miller and Slater’s discussion of the clothing and textile firms in Trinidad can offer no more than a static analysis, since they cannot know how a particular business effort online will manifest itself in the future. Essentially, they are just making observations.

Although this method of research can be interesting and useful – or, at least, is a gutsy and interesting change of pace, – where Miller and Slater go wrong, in my opinion, is in their overly flowery and optimistic presentation of the textile firms’ use of e-commerce. They seem to be advertising Trinidadian e-commerce, as if to stick up for Trini modernism, more than objectively taking notes. Though it is clear that they are attempting to demonstrate Trini efforts to reach “expansive potential,” their analysis could be more useful, and may lead to more substantive conclusions, if it included more detail and less optimism.

Miller and Slater undertake ethnographic research to study the ways Trinidadians reposition themselves in the local and global context, interviewing and observing Trinis in internet cafes, schools, and other public locations where the Internet is used. They also examine Internet content, such as websites, for example, to find out how Trinis decide to identify and, essentially, label themselves in the virtual world.

Trinidadians, according to Miller and Slater, are expanding their horizons without leaving behind their local cultures, and use the Internet to communicate with diasporic Trinis in much the same way that they communicate with people locally. Similarly, the authors argue that web content created and visited by Trinidadians at home and around the world allows them to self-identify and self-objectify, thereby defining their placement in the world in both the physical and the social, ethnic sense. Ethnographic research of this sort is interesting and useful in the current state of academic research, where most studies on the usage of communication technology are conducted using statistical data instead of opinions and input provided by actual human beings living nuanced, complicated, multi-faceted lifestyles.

The analysis of positioning and repositioning in this way, then, is a valuable undertaking in communications and communications technology research, because it demonstrates the Internet's immediate effect of expansion into cosmopolitanism on a certain heterogeneous, but nationally-united group of people. However, the authors do not make sufficiently clear how much of their findings are based on the direct statements and input of the locals, and how much they deduce themselves. This is important, because ethnographic research presumably aims to give as much agency as possible to the populations being studied, labeled, and defined.

One way that Miller and Slater analyze the dynamics of positioning is showing that Trinidadians can keep up relationships with diasporic Trinis through using chat, ICQ, and email on a daily basis. They seem to contend that forms of communications online offer the same type of space as reality or, perhaps more fairly, other forms of communication technology to uphold personal ties over long distances.

This got me thinking about the inherent nature of the 'virtual' Internet as opposed to, say, the telephone, in keeping relationships with my friends far away. Being a diasporic Hungarian, I feel that the Internet, though admittedly useful to keep in touch with acquaintances, by no means facilitates the intimate, discursive environment necessary to truly connect with friends in my native country. In fact, it seems to me that the Internet attempts to forge the creation of such personal spaces, but, without the true awareness of my friends and I, fails rather miserably and has a pretty negative effect on my connections with these individuals. In instances when I would like to connect more personally and 'directly' with people far away, in the lack of physical contact I reach for my telephone.

As Miller and Slater themselves point out, the Internet is a place where people can (and often do) forge their identities - even pretend they live in Trinidad when in fact they are diasporic Trinis living in other countries. In this sense, it is not fully genuine, and, more importantly, it lacks much of the truly human forms of communication. Even on the telephone, which lacks the ability for users to transmit visual data, voice inflections add an immense amount of human touch.

You may think I've gone off on a tangent, but all of this connects back to positioning: as Miller and Slater argue, the Internet allows (perhaps forces) individuals to redefine themselves as more cosmopolitan beings, yet, as my argument above shows, this repositioning is somewhat false and misleading. Communication in the 'virtual' does not do justice to friendships and relationships in the way it proclaims, and Miller and Slater must dig a bit deeper through ethnographic research to emphasize this slight but significant difference.

I will relate Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks to my argument by pointing out that although, as Benkler argues, the Internet has great potential for greater diversity in access to media production and information exchange, those not involved extensively in the new, virtual culture of the Internet and the blogosphere have a limited ability to benefit from the possibilities of democracy that the Internet has to offer. I argue that Benkler overestimates the uniting power of the Internet; in fact, it may be dangerous to take such a hopeful and optimistic view of the Internet without remembering that some portions of the public do not have the ability to partake in Internet usage. Such assumptions leave behind those without access to the Internet, effectively deepening the digital divide and hindering the possibility for a large-scale grassroots media reform movement that is representative of all populations. Grassroots campaigns using Internet-based outreach alone distance certain parts of the public instead of requesting their input about media issues they believe require attention, and limits their agency to create and operate media outlets of their own and to organize locally.

As such, the outline of my paper, as it stands now, will be as follows:

• A thesis that explains the shortcomings of the Internet as a sole organizing tool in engaging portions of ce public without access to the Internet into debates on media issues.

• A study of the media reform movement as a social movement, with a review of major Internet outreach efforts such as the push to reinstate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2005 and the recent campaign for network neutrality, and methods through which the Internet has been used in outreach during these campaigns.

• A look at records of public involvement, such as public comments filed to Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, as well as at studies on what portions of the population use the Internet in general, to learn as much as possible about the demographics of people motivated to get involved.

• An examination of websites and blogs that discuss media policy and media justice issues on a frequent basis to establish spheres in which discussions about these topics take place.

• An introduction to Benkler’s argument, stating its main points and strengths and incorporating them to acknowledge the accomplishments of Free Press’ Internet outreach work.

• An attempt to point out the digital divide that is limiting the strengths of Benkler’s argument since it neglects to mention that portions of the population cannot engage in Internet use.

• A conclusion emphasizing the importance of local, community-based outreach that gives agency to all portions of the population for participation in the media reform movement.

Rather than disparaging the work of media reform and media justice organizations, who promote issues of immense importance to our nation’s democracy, my paper will attempt to suggest ways that outreach efforts could be improved to educate and empower all communities. Although Internet-based campaigns have been a successful start, locally organized outreach is essential for a nationwide media reform movement.

To show the significance of the public’s usage of the telephone in its ‘diffusion’ throughout society, Fischer describes the rise and the subsequent fall of telephone use in rural America from the 1900s to the 1930s. He attempts to show that this decline was created by the changes in the lifestyle of farmers around 1920, as a result of improved roads, greater use of automobiles, and the development of the radio, combined with decreasing competition in the telephone industry. Fischer’s method of analysis is unique, and he is correct in undertaking it to show the importance of social factors in the development of technology. At the same time, he fails to sufficiently combine his findings with other, possibly important economic and political issues relating to the build-out of telephone service to rural areas, and leaves some questions to linger in the reader’s mind.

Fischer argues that because the telephone industry focused on the development of telephone in urban areas and neglected to address build-out to rural regions of the country by the late 1800s, “[r]ural Americans largely discovered, demanded, and developed telephone service for themselves” (107) through the creation of small, locally-based telephone companies. After 1900, seeing the demand by the farming community, Bell and, even more significantly, large independent telephone companies “realized that farm customers were ‘essential’ to selling in the larger exchanges” (95), and the challenge of competition propelled them to increase their business in rural America. Even so, Bell and the independents did not pursue the development of telephony in rural areas to a significant degree because of the lack of profit resulting from build-out over large distances for much fewer subscribers than in urban regions. Fischer here seems to explain larger companies’ diminished interest in farming communities around 1920 by showing their lack of success in making a profit from their investments in rural regions, signified by their claim that “farmers did not really want or even need telephone service” (97).

However, Fischer believes this decline in build-out is not the whole explanation for the fall of rural telephony around 1920. In fact, he seems to place greater importance on the development of rural roads and radio technology around this time, and argues that farmers no longer had such a great need for telephone service when they could drive and use radios to communicate over greater distances.

This argument fails to prove as important as he makes it appear for two reasons:

1) It seems unlikely that any population, once introduced to a new form of communication technology, especially if that population developed the infrastructure and service of that technology for itself, would decide in a matter of one or two decades that it no longer requires the use of that technology. As Fischer himself argues, the telephone brought about groundbreaking changes in the way people could communicate with each other over larger distances, and it seems unlikely that driving (which is much slower) and the use of radio (which is not a two-way form of communication – at least not for farmers, as Fischer does not attempt to argue that farmers were proficient in the use of radio transmitters to any significant degree) would supplant the usefulness of the telephone, especially in rural communities where face-to-face communication even with one’s neighbor is usually not as simple as in urban areas.

2) As Fischer argues in other portions of his book, the federal government passed the Willis-Graham Act of 1921, allowing for a virtual monopoly by Bell, claiming that “telephony was a ‘natural monopoly’” and that “telephone competition ‘was an endless annoyance’” (50-1). The time period of the passage of this bill seems, coincidentally, to correlate closely with the industry’s sudden diminished interest in rural America. It is a likely possibility that rural areas stopped receiving telephone service because of lack of competition due to the federal government’s blessing of Bell’s monopoly. Indeed, as Susan Douglas’ book Inventing American Broadcasting also shows, federal intervention and regulation has had significantly adverse effects throughout history on the development of communication technologies and the advancement of diversity and democratic access. Fischer’s refusal to sufficiently explore this situation in his discussion about the decline of rural telephony, at any rate, is a major flaw in his argument.

Fischer's book provides an important insight into the social aspects of the development of communication technology, and proves that technological determinist arguments and those relying wholly on political-economic circumstances do not provide sufficient explanation for the creation and diffusion of technology. However, Fischer ends up going too far into the sociological, and his doing so leaves many questions unanswered.

Douglas' attempt to argue against the notion of technological determinism is also successful through her references to the way potential innovations by amateur operators were limited by regulation favoring the interests of business and the U.S. Navy. She gives an in-depth explanation of how amateur operators developed early inventions in wireless technology, such as Reginald Fessenden’s alternator and Lee De Forest’s audion, and were the first to popularize the use of wireless and radio around the country through their large masses and their coverage in the press. However, problems with interference due to the amateurs’ widespread use, and sometimes misuse, of the technology, and the dangers amateurs posed to business and state control as “agents of etheral anarchy” (317), prompted Congress to enact the Radio Act of 1912, allowing them to use only “a portion of the spectrum then considered useless: short waves of 200 meters and less” (234) and essentially forcing them onto the sidelines.

Although Douglas does not allude to other ways in which the technology of radio could have developed, she does explain that the regulations beginning with the Radio Act of 1912 and continuing with the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934, all of which favor big business over the rest of the public, could have been formed differently, with a greater focus on the importance of innovation and diversity. Instead of the implementation of these harmful regulations, a larger and more useful portion of the spectrum could have been allocated for unlicensed use in which amateurs could have continued to develop diverse forms of wireless technology, and could have kept some of the airwaves away from corporate ownership and in the hands of the public.

At first glance, I was in complete agreement with the critique. Williams’ book does not spend enough time developing any of his main points, and takes on an overly broad and burdensome topic of analysis. In the first part of the book, for instance, he attempts to recount the history of communications and broadcasting to explain the events leading up to the invention of television, but his book is simply not long enough to adequately explain the crucial turning points he mentions, such as the invention of the telegraph.

I also sympathize with Neuman’s feeling that Williams’ attention seems to wander throughout the book. Overall, the work has the tone of a personal journal filled with interesting thoughts and ideas, none of which are fully developed or followed through. His arguments are not adequately articulated.

After some thought, however, I disagree with Neuman’s assessment of Williams’ unfamiliarity with data gathering – or at least Neuman’s ability to judge the author in this regard based on this particular book. Television: Technology and Cultural Form is not a quantitatively oriented work full of number crunching and empirical evidence, nor does it pretend to be so. It is intended to be theoretical and discursive, with reflections on media’s effects on society, both historically and at the present (the 1970s). Data gathering is only half the work – thorough analysis and a limited, distinct focus is what makes for truly successful literary work. Sadly, this book is significantly lacking in both.