Marshall Poe, “A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet” (Cambridge UP, 2011)

New Books in Sociology · Mar 26, 2012 · 1h 21m

It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Marshall Poe does just that. At the same time, Poe guides readers through the history of communications media from the origin of speech through the culture of the Internet, and provides us with a carefully-articulated theoretical framework for explaining why successive media arose when and where they did, and how they have shaped the way people understand and organize themselves…