This work is about "the difference that communications media make in our lives" (p. xi). It has a broad historical scope, ranging from the development of the alphabet to the future of artificial intelligence, and takes a non-technical approach. Its scope and perspective promise great interest.
There are a number of isolated apercus. We learn that in ancient Greece, democracy was defined buy the extent to which an audience could hear a speaker's voice, although the implied congruence between a discourse and speech community is not noticed. Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1851 comment on the telegraph is quoted: "Is it a fact-or have I dreamed it-that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?" (p. 127). The possibility implied, by the date and geopolitical context of the quotation, that the mid-to late-19th century represents the critical period for the adoption of technologies subsequently subsumed under the generic term information technology, and that they were produced by the demands of American continental expansion for communication across space, is not explored. The quotation is indicative of the perspective assumed, which is from the United States, with little deep sense of the possibility of other cultural perspectives on information developments.
The historical range of reference of the work is not matched by a deeper historical understanding. For instance, it is asserted that no group without writing has achieved a civilization: Homeric, and other sophisticated, primarily oral, cultures provide counter-examples. The treatment of the development of copyright is particularly unsatisfactory. For Levinson, the "biological antiquity of property . . . is no doubt what led to the development of provisions for intellectual property when the printing press for the first time put such property in the form of books of everyone's shelf" (pp. 202-203). Yet non-American cultures, most notably feudal and Marxist ones, have valued copying and dissemination above personal property rights, if these were even acknowledged-for instance, Chinese printing, whose early development is remarked by Levinson, did not give rise to Western concepts of copyright. The transformation of copyright from a printers' to an author's right in the late-18th and early-19th centuries is seen as a correction, not as a transformation which could be connected to the concurrent emergence of the Romantic conception of the author as a creative individual. Significant, potentially highly relevant sources are neglected in discussions of other topics: For instance, considerations of orality and of the history of writing show no awareness of the classic work of Diringer or the more recent studies by Ong, Gaur, and Harris.