Irving Fang. Alphabet to Internet: Media in Our Lives. Second Edition. St. Paul Rada Press, 2012. 318 pp. $48.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-933011-01-1.
Irving Fang.
Alphabet to Internet: Media in Our Lives. Second Edition. St. Paul Rada Press, 2012. 318 pp.
$48.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-933011-01-1.
Reviewed by Andrew Salvati (Rutgers University) Published
on Jhistory (October, 2012) Commissioned by Heidi Tworek
Alphabet to Internet: Media in Our Lives
In a recent television spot teasing Amazon's new Kindle
Fire tablet, young families and savvy e-readers are seen enjoying the breezy
convenience of the company's wireless products and services--all apparently at
ease navigating the whirl of media and commerce at their fingertips. As upbeat
music fills the background, a kindly voiced narrator reflects on Amazon's
seamless network, the fruit of its commitment to digital innovation and
convergence. "We dream of making things that change your life, then
disappear into your everyday, of making the revolutionary routine." In
this case progress, in the form of Amazon's forthcoming products, can be
expected, and technology impels changes that we comfortably adopt into our
lives. "Look around," the narrator suggests, "what once seemed
wildly impractical is now completely normal."
Irving Fang's _Alphabet to Internet_ is concerned with
the historical developments of such cycles of change to and adaptation of
communication technologies. Designed as an introductory textbook for students
of media history, Fang surveys some twelve thousand years of human communication,
spanning early cave paintings, the Gutenberg press, satellite television, and
Web 2.0, and identifying common themes and effects these media technologies had
on their respective societies. While he wants to shy away from deterministic
formulations, Fang's thesis, like Amazon's claim, is that widespread adoption
and adaptation of new media technologies has generally resulted in social
changes "distinct to that medium"--reorientations of communicative
practices and habits which become "routine and habitual, baked into our
lives" (p. 4). Along the way, Fang often returns to a fundamental
contradiction that he takes to be implicit in new media forms--the unintended
consequences by which the global reach and instantaneity of our communication
tools creates distance between the isolated users of personal devices.
As an introductory text, Fang presents this vast history
in a concise and accessible manner, often complementing his examination of
distant, perhaps abstract historical media with modern comparisons--a feature
that might be useful for stimulating in-class discussions.
Any historical survey must discriminate, however. That
_Alphabet to Internet_ takes as its subject the entire historical scope of
human communication, all condensed into 318 pages, means that some things are
necessarily left out of the discussion. Based on their individual interests,
some readers will inevitably find glaring omissions in Fang's sweeping
historical treatment (no mention of the WELL in the context of social media?
Only passing reference to John Peter Zenger, to WikiLeaks?); and for an
introductory text, the book at times tends to presume too much knowledge on
behalf of the reader. This is not to nitpick, but rather to note that
instructors using the text would do well to equip themselves with supplemental
readings--some of which are helpfully suggested in the book's appendices.
Those familiar with the first edition of _Alphabet to
Internet_
(2008) will find a few new features and revisions to the
original text. Naturally, a few of these updates draw recent events and new
media forms into the larger historical narrative. To begin, Fang's introduction
calls on the memory of the Arab Spring and the global "social media
revolutions" of 2011 to illustrate his premise that "communication
media have been a factor in the course of history" (p.
2). Likewise Twitter, which merited a cameo as a trendy
kind of instant messaging service in the 2008 edition, proves more ubiquitous
in the second edition, appearing in the contexts of both personal communication
and political activism. Other revisions in the second edition have less to do
with contemporizing, but are worth mentioning. Notably absent is the original
chapter on reading and literacy, which contained an extended discussion of
newspapers and journalism that is now redistributed over several chapters. A
more unfortunate loss is the scant attention devoted to standards of American
journalism history, like the penny press and William Randolph Hearst, and the
development of objectivity--a crucial topic that makes its most conspicuous
appearances in a passage about the telegraph, and much later in a closing
section on rhetoric. In another move, discussion of computers and the Internet
are now spaced over two chapters rather than one, but are not accorded much
more length. Likewise, the chapter on video games--an emergent topic in media
studies--has been reduced by a third. Like other chapters, however, these
discussions have been supplemented with photographs, images, and text boxes
sorely lacking in the original edition.
While _Alphabet to Internet_ provides a quick and
accessible reference to media history studded with modern comparisons, its
overriding concern with the social and political effects of media technologies
tends toward the deterministic stance that Fang--at least in his
introduction--aims to avoid. Throughout the book, for instance, certain verb
choices (technologies often "arrive"
or"catalyze"; the Gutenberg press is a
"bomb thrown into the medieval world" [p. 45]) seem to foreclose
potentially fruitful conversations about the social construction of technology
and institutional power.
This perspective marks a preoccupation with long-term
trends and change in which old technologies are replaced with newer, better
media, all leading toward a McLuhanesque global village. Indeed, that the
Telecommunications Act of 1996--which allowed for a corporate consolidation of
media ownership--is mentioned only in terms of its introduction of the V-chip
rating system, shifts attention away from important questions about the role of
large institutions in the development, distribution, and regulation of media
systems. As with the advertisement for the Kindle Fire, an inexorable
progression of innovation appears as the order of history. This is not to say
that these technologies are unproblematic to Fang. Indeed, his discussions of
the exclusion of women and girls from premodern (and non-Western) media access,
objectification in various media content, and emergence as a key demographic
for video games demonstrate how media systems are inscribed with social and
gender relationships.
Encompassing a vast amount of terrain and synthesizing a
range of scholarly and popular sources, Fang's _Alphabet to Internet_ will
provide readers and instructors with a ready source of information on the
historical development of media technologies. Though at times brief and
teleological, Fang's overarching concern with media use and with historical
comparison is sure to engender provocative classroom discussions and an informed
appreciation of historical media development.
Citation: Andrew Salvati. Review of Fang, Irving,
_Alphabet to
Internet: Media in Our Lives_. Jhistory, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2012.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.