A sweeping social history of the political roots of the information age, by one of this country's most distinguished
public intellectuals, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine.
America's leading role in today's information revolution may seem simply to reflect its position as the world's
dominant economy and most powerful state. But by the early nineteenth century, when the United States was neither
a world power nor a primary center of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications-in postal
service and newspaper publishing, then in development of the telegraph and telephone networks, later in the whole
repertoire of mass communications.
In this wide-ranging social history of American media, from the first printing press to the early days of radio,
Paul Starr shows that the creation of modern communications was as much the result of political choices as of technological
invention. With his original historical analysis, Starr examines how the decisions that led to a state-run post
office and private monopolies on the telegraph and telephone systems affected a developing society. He illuminates
contemporary controversies over freedom of information by exploring such crucial formative issues as freedom of
the press, intellectual property, privacy, public access to information, and the shaping of specific technologies
and institutions. America's critical choices in these areas, Starr argues, affect the long-run path of development
in a society and have had wide social, economic, and even military ramifications. The Creation of the Media not
only tells the history of the media in a new way; it puts America and its global influence into a new perspective.