overview

This timeline underpins several of the guides and profiles on this site - notably those about the evolution of the net, past communications revolutions and the book - by highlighting communications technology and media events.

We have included information about regulatory and commercial contexts - and about demographics - as technology does not exist in a social vacuum.

Dates for some developments are indicative, given disagreement about responsibility for particular inventions.

     media chronologies

An associated site provides more detailed chronologies.

The Ketupa.net site provides detailed profiles and comment on over 450 major media groups in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe and the Americas. The site includes an overall timeline and chronologies for each group.

     sense

In discussing fin de siecle Europe the great Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften explained

A great deal was happening everywhere, and people were certainly aware of it. It was regarded as a good thing when we were the ones doing it, and aroused apprehensiveness when it was done by others. Every schoolboy could understand each thing as it happened, but as to what it all meant in general, nobody really knew except for a very few persons, and even they were not sure. Only a short time later it might well have happened in a different sequence, or the other way round, and nobody would have known the difference, except for a few changes that inexplicably establish themselves in the course of time and so constitute the slimy track made by the snail of history

Several of the guides and notes elsewhere on this site feature more detailed and specific chronologies that may be of use in making sense of that track:

in the Guides -

• e-Money | here
• Identity Crime | here
• Privacy | here
• Publishing | here
• Censorship | here
• Consumer Protection | here
• Taxation | here

in the Profiles and Notes -

• auDA and dot-au | here
• audience research | here
• Australia Card | here
• Australian Censorship regimes | here
• Australian Constitution | here
• Australian Privacy regimes | here
• Australian Telecommunications | here
• Biometrics | here
• Blasphemy | here
• Cartography & GIS | here
• Collectibles | here
• Consumer Credit Reporting | here
• Copyright Societies | here
• Corporate Rating Services | here
• Defamation | here
• Discrimination Law | here
• Dot-com, Telco and Subprime bubbles | here
• Filesharing | here
• Financial Rogues | here
• Forgery & Fakes | here
• Hedge Funds | here
• Human Rights | here
• ICANN | here
• Intellectual Property | here
• Metadata | here
• Moral Rights | here
• Passports and Travel | here
• Patents | here
• Postal Systems | here
• Private Equity | here
• Cultural Repatriation and Spoliation | here
• Search Engines, Directories, Behaviour | here
• Sedition | here
• Surveillance | here
• Telco M&A | here
• Trademarks | here
• Colour Pages | here

They are complemented by a note highlighting sources of data regarding nominal prices, purchasing power, wages and inflation in different eras and markets.

A discussion of historical periodization - such as the 'age of the internet' - is featured here.

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