The Long History of New Media

Nineteen papers are presented by Park (Lake Forest College, US), Jankowski (Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences), Jones (U. of Illinois, US) on "the long history of new media," a label they have chosen for their topic in order to signify that the subject "challenges us to: become more reflexive in our understanding of how history operates, reconsider the meaning of `newness' as it relates to media and to broader themes in historical thought, reflect on how media operates in terms of information recording and storage, approach social thought with a renewed sense of how the theoretical relates to the historical, and contextualize what is taken as a new so as to establish broader and suggestive continuities in the history of communication." Specific topics include the historical construction of music in terms of novelty across different media; the history of mobile television, continuities in communication from the 18th century Republic of Letters to contemporary scholarship, "implied" neuroscience in the work of Marshall McLuhan as it relates to grand narratives in media history, the reception of digital radio in Europe, analogies between pneumatic tube networks and other networked communication, the history of the telephone and its relation to other media practices, and Web historiography and the emergence of new archival forms. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

David W. Park is Associate Professor of Communication at Lake Forest College. He is the founder and past chair of the International Communication Association’s Communication History Interest Group, and is co-editor of The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories (Peter Lang, 2008).
Nicholas W. Jankowski is Visiting Fellow at the e-Humanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He has co-edited some half-dozen books. Two recent edited volumes are Internet and National Elections: A Comparative Study of Web Campaigning (2007) and e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice (2009). Jankowski is co-editor of the journal New Media & Society.
Steve Jones is UIC Distinguished Professor, Professor of Communication, and Research Associate in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He was the founder and first President of the Association of Internet Researchers and is co-editor of New Media & Society.