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impacts
This page considers some business and regulatory impacts
of past communications revolutions.
It covers -
The
final page of this profile features selected statistics
about the adoption and impact of communication technologies.
business
The excellent Global Business Regulation (Cambridge:
Cambridge Uni Press 2000) by John Braithwaite & Peter
Drahos offers a perspective on how government has
dealt with jurisdictional and other challenges of new
technologies in the past - often slowly and clumsily but
in the long term quite effectively - and the likelihood
of coping in future.
The provocative Politics in Wired Nations: Selected
Writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool (New Brunswick: Transaction
1998) edited by Eli Noam is essential reading for those
wondering how digital technologies will affect politics,
the economy and community. We recommend his Technologies
Without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global
Age (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990).
The outstanding studies of business before a 'dot' seemed
a mandatory part of the title are Alfred Chandler's
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1980) and Scale
& Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
(Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990).
James Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological
& Economic Origins of the Information Society
(Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1986), JoAnne Yates' Control
Through Communication: The Rise of System In American
Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1989)
and Information Acumen: The Understanding & Use
of Knowledge in Modern Business (London: Routledge
1994) edited by Lisa Bud-Frierman are also of value.
The US report
on Fostering Research on the Economic &
Social Impacts of Information Technology (Washington:
National Academies Press 1998) and issues of the Magazine
on Information Impacts (iMP)
identify research issues.
the long wave
For wider impacts David Landes' revisionist The
Wealth & Poverty of Nations (New York: Little
Brown 1998) is outstanding. It offers a nuanced cross-cultural
perspective. Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches: Technological
Creativity & Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford
Uni Press 1990) and The Carrier Wave: New Information
Technology & the Geography of Innovation, 1846-2003
(London: Unwin Hyman 1988) by Peter Hall & Paschal
Preston are also valuable. We've pointed to similar studies
in our economy guide.
Armand Mattelart's Networking the World, 1794-2000
(Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 2000), like his The
Invention of Communication (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota
Press 1996) melds Castells and Fernand Braudel.
Energy use and costs are illustrated in Long Run Trends
in Energy Services: The Price and Use of Road and Rail
Transport in the UK (1250-2000) (PDF)
by Roger Fouquet & Peter Pearson and their 2006 Seven
Centuries of Energy Services Light: the. Price and Use
of Light in the United Kingdom (1300-2000).
space, time, modernity
Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time & Space,
1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1983) dates
the birth of the communications age to one hundred years
ago.
At the turn of last century new media made it possible
to think of Australia or other advanced economies as "running
on the same clock of awareness and existing within a homogeneous
national space." The fin-de-siecle communications
revolution was foreshadowed by the growth of the telegraph,
national and intercontinental, and the penny press. It
saw the birth of the national magazine, the growth of
mass newspapers, a symbiosis between news publishing and
wire services, and experiments in online narrowcasting
(eg subscribers in Melbourne, Paris and London were able
to listen to live performances over the phone from theatres
in their city.
Other writers featured in this profile argue that print
(from the 1500s), mechanical images (around the same time),
photographs or sound recordings (last century) had an
immeasurably greater impact on local/international economies
and society at large.
imagination
[under development]
law and the state
[under development]Mark H. Rose, Bruce E. Seely, and Paul
F. Barrett. _The Best
Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks,
Airlines, and
American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century_. Historical
Perspectives on Business Enterprise Series. Columbus:
Ohio State
University Press, 2006
statistics
In
the interim notes with selected communications revolution
statistics are available -
- messages
- voice traffic, data traffic, telegraph traffic and
postal traffic
- uptake
- time to adopt particular media
- devices
- number of handsets, fax machines, mobile phones, personal
computers and other devices
- facilities
- number of broadcasting stations, cinemas and other
facilities
- audiences
- size of audiences for radio, television, film and
other media
- content
- production of books, newspapers, films and other content
- selected
internet statistics, drawn
from the Metrics guide and other pages on this site
Questions
about audience measurement are explored here.
Teledensity measures and
connectivity rankings
are discussed elsewhere on this site.
benchmarking and derivation
Non-specialist researchers face particular challenges
in placing adoption of the internet in historical context,
because much benchmarking information is problematical
or merely is not readily available.
In Australia, for example, it is difficult to identify
uptake of particular devices prior to the 1960s, particularly
on a per household basis, because information was not
collected by government agencies and because there are
uncertainties about figures in some commercial reports.
Some researchers have accordingly relied on figures from
the UK and US.
For benchmarking uptake of ICT see Sue Bowden & Avner
Offer's 'Household Appliances and Time Use in the United
States and Britain since the 1920s' in vol 47 No 4 of
the Economic History Review (1994).
The US Census Bureau offers a handy distillation (PDF)
of uptake of selected communications media from 1920 to
2001.
Questions about the measurement of consumption and audience
sizes are explored in the Metrics
& Statistics guide and the supplementary profile
on Opinion Polling & Audience
Measurement.
Metrics for growth, particularly after 1870, are provided
in Angus Maddison's Monitoring the World Economy,
1820-1992 (Washington: OECD 1995).
Data about contemporary and historic acquisition and use
of ICT hardware and software can also be problematical.
In discussing the number
of personal computers in use at any one time we have noted
that all figures are guesstimates. Figures about the number
of PCs manufactured and sold are more convincing. They
can be derived from survey data from retailers (eg monthly
surveys in the US since 1984), shipment and other figures
in financial disclosures by hardware and software manufacturers,
media releases (often boasting of market share) and government
statistics of varying detail and credibility (eg because
they recycle flawed commercial survey data).
Figures for privatisations,
telecommunication sector M&A
and benchmark acquisitions in other
sectors such as power, finance and aerospace are provided
elsewhere on this site.
populations
For points of reference about life expectancy see James
Riley's Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History
(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) and Life Under
Pressure: Mortality & Living Standards in Europe and
Asia, 1700-1900 (Cambridge: MIT Press 2004) by Tommy
Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell & James Lee.
prices and purchasing power
This site features detailed
pointers to indexes of prices and of purchasing power
over the past millennium.
As a point of entry into literature on prices, incomes
and purchasing power see John McCusker's How much
is that in real money?: a historical price index for use
as a deflator of money values in the economy of the United
States (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society 2001)
and Brian Mitchell's European historical statistics,
1750-1975 (London: Macmillan 1980)
For purchasing power see the 1997 essay
Time Well Spent: The Declining Real Cost of Living
in America, based on the notion that the
real
cost of living isn't measured in dollars and cents but
in the hours and minutes we must work to live.
EH.Net
features indicators
of the comparative value of US money - Purchasing
Power of the Dollar, 1665 - Present and What
is the Relative Value? Five Ways to Compare the Worth
of a United States Dollar, 1789 - Present. It also
includes indicators of the purchasing power of the UK
pound 1264-2002, UK average earnings and prices 1264-2002
and the annual real and nominal GDP for the UK 1086-2000.
For a European converter prior to 1700 see the Marteau
project's Early 18th-Century Currency Converter.
The UC Davis Agricultural History Center site
features data for several foodstuffs and non-foodstuffs
for Istanbul 1469-1914, prices in Paris 1500-1870 and
some prices and wages in Spain 1500-1800. There is no
online value converter for Australia and New Zealand.
Indicators of prices in the fine arts and other collectibles
are provided elsewhere
on this site.
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