Individuals use ideas without any of those prerequisites as a source of power or influence or political authority, then the ecosystem that flowed out of the technology of the printing press was eclipsed by electronic medium -- the antecedent being the telegraph, and then the radio and then the big kahuna, you know television, which has you know the attraction for the brain because it's moving.
"For those of us who study the history of communication technology, this is of equal importance to the telegraph, which was the first medium that separated communications and transportation," said Frank A. Moretti, executive director of the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University.
The Internet's mobile offshoot will turn out to be an entirely new medium, as different from the Internet as the telephone was from the telegraph.
The book, which introduced the phrase "The medium is the message," described how technology -- from the wheel and the alphabet to the telegraph, airplane, typewriter and television -- changed social relations and mental attitudes.
Unlike so many industrial technologies -- railroads, say, or the telegraph -- the stored-program computer is a general-purpose tool, animated by software, a medium without material constraints.
"The first words that Samuel Morse transmitted through the telegraph were 'What Hath God Wrought?' " In its early days, radio was a much more anarchic medium than it has become, Mr. Czitrom observed.
The telegraph revolutionized battlefield communication.
He joined The Telegraph in 2005.
