Suchergebnisse

This article has a double aim: one empirical–historical and one theoretical. First, it analyzes how the idea of an "alternative" use of wireless (namely, broadcasting) emerged and was debated inside the British Marconi Company in the first two decades of the 20th century. This historical part, based on unpublished sources preserved in the Marconi Archives, shows that this idea was (rationally) opposed by the majority of company's management. Second, this article aims to place private companies at the center of media historiography, and more in general media studies, through a multifocal approach.

This article aims at identifying the turning points in the early history of Italian telephone (1877–1915) considering at the same level political, economical, technical, and social dimensions and trying to reconstruct conflicts and connivances among relevant social groups. The early history of the Italian telephone can be subdivided into four periods: the urban networks building during the 1880s; the nationalization attempt, concentration process and failed building of the long-distance network during the 1890s; the nationalization process between 1903 and 1907; and the failure of public management and return to private operation between 1907 and the First World War. This analysis helps identify some characteristics of Italian telephone history that configure a kind of Italian style in telecommunications: the relevance of old media (electric telegraph in particular) for the new one, political uncertainties, foreign investments, difficulties in interconnecting different systems, a lively and overlooked demand.

At consumer and tech fairs, the future of digital technologies has always been imagined. In this study, we investigate how the annual CeBIT tech fair (held in Hanover, Germany, from 1986 to 2018) and a keynote speech given there by Bill Gates in 1995 have been constructed, framed, and substantiated through media coverage and in mediated memory. Thanks to a qualitative content analysis, based on more than 500 articles published in general interest media and technology magazines, the ways the future of digitization was, and partially still is, imagined and narrated at tech fairs emerge. It is a quasi-religious future, predicted in quasi-religious gatherings (the 'Mecca' of digital futures), where gurus (Messiahs) and new ideas emerged, are celebrated, criticized, or rejected. During fairs, there is also a political and strategic use of the future because the ways digitization is forecast can shape and drive its future through investments and obliged visions.

This book focuses on the history of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), from its origins in the mid-19th century to nowadays. ITU was the fi rst international organization ever and still plays a crucial role in managing global telecommunications today. Putting together some of the most relevant scholars in the fi eld of transnational communications, the book covers the history of ITU from 1865 to digital times in a truly global perspective, taking into account several technologies like the telegraph, the telephone, cables, wireless, radio, television, satellites, mobile phone, the internet and others. The main goal is to identify the long-term strategies of regulation and the techno-diplomatic manoeuvres taken inside ITU, from convincing the majority of the nations to establish the offi cial seat of the Telegraph Union bureau in Switzerland in the 1860s, to contrasting the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance (supported by US and ICANN). History of the International Telecommunication Union is a trans-disciplinary text and can be interesting for scholars and students in the fi elds of telecommunications, media, international organizations, transnational communication, diplomacy, political economy of communication, STS, and others. It has the ambition to become a reference point in the history of ITU and, at the same time, just the fi rst comprehensive step towards a longer, inter-technological, political and cultural history of transnational communications to be written in the future.

This paper proposes that communication and media studies should refocus on maintenance. Indeed, maintenance theory can help underestimated aspects of communication infrastructures emerge. First, maintenance shows the similarity of communication and transportation infrastructures, which overlap to the extent that the two fields of study can no longer be separated. Second, maintenance shows the persistence of communication infrastructures over time. Infrastructures are seldom replaced, and even more rarely closed down, new communication networks do not replace old ones, but they overlap with them. Consequently, this focus makes clear the need to study communication in longue durée or at least in long-term perspectives. Thirdly, the decision to maintain a communication network or infrastructure is a political one. Communication studies have often focused on political decisions on innovation, while maintenance offers a new way to look at centralization, delegation, sabotage to infrastructures, and the political responsibilities of making communications function. Finally, thanks to maintenance, the material dimension of communication can be more visible. This allows the integration of the new agendas of STS and of media archaeology, with the emergence of topics such as malfunctions or technical jobs, which are often considered out of the scope of communication studies

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Radio and Audio Media on 15 Apr 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2015.1015860 ; This article argues that the "double-birth" model proposed by Gaudreault and Marion provides a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how wireless telegraphy was developed and eventually re-invented during its early history. Drawing from a case study on the role played by Italian "radio amateurs" between 1900 and the early 1920s, we examine how such users shifted the medium's definition, legislation, and identity in the first years after the introduction of wireless technology. The emergence of new potential meanings and applications ultimately rebuilt and redefined this medium, creating space for innovation and multiple "births."

An investigation into the origins of the digital revolution, how it evolved, which other past revolutions consciously or unconsciously inspired it, which great stories it has conveyed over time, which of its key elements have changed and which ones have persisted and have been repeated in different historical periods.