On Press, Communication, and Culture (original) (raw)

Media and Modernity: The Role of the Printing Press in the Modernization of Western Society

KOMUNIKA: Jurnal Dakwah dan Komunikasi, 1970

One of the influential factors in the formation of modern society in the Western world and subsequently spread to over the world has been the discovery of printing press which can be found in the form of printing method, printing company and print media. Since it was firstly used by Gutenberg in about 15th century AD, information which was previously delivered through oral medium with a limited audience, then through a method of printing can be reproduced in large quantities and can be read by more audience, across distance and time. Printing method which encourages the emergence of large printing companies and then print media has contributed in transforming modern cultural life of society. In addition, the advent of the printing industries which has transformed into transnational corporations as well as the emergence of journals and regular newspapers also contributes significantly in raising public spaces as a medium for discussion and critical thinking amidst society. Ultimately, this information media transformation brings a change in the state system which is more open and leads to the emergence of ideas of nationalism which becomes an important milestone in transforming traditional societies into modern societies.

Media in History: An Introduction to the Meanings and Transformations of Communication over Time

2019

Media in History: An Introduction to the Meanings and Transformations of Communication over Time by Jukka Kortti is not just another attempt to be a 'history of media' volume. The author takes a fresh approach and places media into the perspective of human history, instead of vice versa. The prime goal of this method is to provide a counter argument to the 'revolution talk' concerning contemporary media studies. There is an argument that it is a necessity to understand the changes happening nowadays in the fields of media, such as the internet and social media, and in order to do that we should examine their evolution. This perspective may enable us to realize that although the antecedents of the phenomena were claimed to be innovative and novel, they have all existed earlier in the history of mankind. Jukka Kortti is Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University, so an educative spirit is noticeable through the whole text. As mentioned in the Acknowledgments part of the book, the original Finnish version was inspired by the author's own course in media history. The book could be an excellent source for students of various social science fields to understand the basics of media history. Nonetheless, it has more than enough content for seasoned scholars of communication studies, political scientists, historians and researchers of other segments of social sciences. It is also refreshing in regard to its scope. It not only focuses on the USA and western Europe, but also brings examples from other parts of Europe, mainly from Finland. The book besides the Acknowledgments, Introduction and Conclusion is divided into two main parts with each part being segmented into nine chapters, which are divided further into brief subchapters. At the end of some chapters, there are questions and thoughts for further discussions. The first part of four chapters is titled The Development of Media and provides a chronological historical background for the understanding of the importance of media in history. The first chapter begins with the invention of the alphabet 5000 years ago. The book guides us through the early transformation of oral communication into textual. The author underlines that large-scale written culture could only develop after Gutenberg invented the printing press in the fifteenth

Jukka Kortti (2019). Media in History: An Introduction to the Meanings and Transformations of Communication ver Time. London: Red Globe Press, 248 pp., ISBN: 978-1352005950-0

2021

Journal of European Periodical Studies, 2020

The notion of ‘popular’ as a determinant in the study of the interwar periodical press lies at the centre of this special issue. The question posed in its title places the subject matter in a specific historical timeframe and context but also addresses a universal cultural publishing phenomenon, that of the popular press, as it is seen and analyzed by scholars from different countries in Europe and beyond. Popular periodicals were widely published across the globe in vernacular languages that were freighted with region-specific but often contested cultural meanings. Whilst retaining distinctive national features, however, they also incorporated many common elements that were freely transferred across national borders and between languages, particularly in relation to their aesthetic appearance, subject themes, and format and writing styles. The current growth of interest in the comparative study of this hitherto neglected category of the ‘popular’ thus further enriches a literature which has, to date, remained markedly Anglophone in its orientation. Finally, by juxtaposing the specific approaches adopted by the contributors to this special issue, the guest editors, Fabio Guidali and Gioula Koutsopanagou, seek to start a wider conversation about the value of historical perspectives and methodologies in strengthening the collaborative work of the Journal of European Periodical Studies and of the activities of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) more generally. In that sense, this issue is offered as an example of the ways in which international collaboration by historians may contribute to the growing field of periodical studies.

Print and its Discontents: A Case for Pre-Print Journalism and Other Sundry Print Matters

The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication, 2009

This essay proposes to explore the historical movement of text from scribal media to print publication as a translation process in which the printed text is viewed, not as an entirely new cultural product but one that has enjoyed previous lives. The essay first undertakes a revision of the dominant discourses on print in the Middle East, which have generally offered a salvation narrative fraught with Orientalist assumptions connected to the 'sacredness' of Arabic and the status of the Qur'an in Islamicate cultures. Likewise, the essay interrogates the historiography of print culture in Europe, which has exaggerated the impact of print and utilized it to create a divided and unequal temporality and geography between Europe and its others. The essay then offers a tentative attempt at a new cultural history which looks at continuities rather than ruptures in genres and practices before and after print, and in which the printing press plays the role of the habilitated and domesticated mediator/translator. To illustrate this, the essay takes the case of the modern Arabic newspaper and resituates it as a direct descendent of the early-modern scribal chronicle rather than as an entirely new innovation of the print age.

Andrew Pettegree. The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

The American Historical Review, 2015

Historians of early modern Europe have for several decades been publishing detailed monographs on the evolution of the institutional arrangements that government officials, merchants, journalists, and professionals relied on in the period between 1450 and 1800 to make sense of the wider world. In The Invention of News, the distinguished University of St. Andrews historian Andrew Pettegree synthesizes this scholarship in a sparkling overview that should prove useful both to specialists taking stock of their field and to general readers curious about the historical foundations of journalistic practices takenfor-granted today. Pettegree's chronological bookends are the advent of printing in the 1450s, an innovation that for the first time made it possible for news to become part of popular culture (2), and the eighteenth-century "Age of Revolution," an epoch during which news not only accounted for unfolding events, but also played an "influential role in shaping them" (2). To render his topic manageable, Pettegree organizes his narrative around a deceptively simple question: When did news first become a "commercial commodity"? (2) In his justly praised Book in the Renaissance (2010) Pettegree demonstrated how a business history of publishing could provide a fresh perspective on the first century of printing. In Invention he brings an analogous sensibility to the history of news. In both books, he is concerned more with publishers than with printersor, for that matter, with the writers whose ideas circulated far and wide. The "prime considerations" that governed the news business in early modern Europe, Pettegree explains, were factors over which its purveyors could exert at least a modicum of control: namely, the speed with which news traveled, its reliability, the ability of its publishers to retain control over content, and its entertainment value (13). The history of news, Pettegree emphasizes, should not be conflated with the history of the newspaper. In fact, the newspaper would only emerge in the 1600s, and would long coexist with two other commercially successful printed news genres, namely, the pamphlet and the periodical journal. Pamphlets

Discourses of Print Newspapers

Newspaper is a method of sharing, and getting information, and it is defined in the Cambridge dictionary as "a document consisting of news reports, articles, and photographs, that is published every day or every week". Newspaper is one of the earliest methods of written communication which is still vastly used all around the world with the purposes of spreading news, knowledge as well as entertainment. It consists of a number of different genres to address almost every type of people, such as daily newspapers, educational, women's, men's, children's, entertainment, political or economical even notices and advertisements. In analyzing the Discourses of printed newspapers, a number of discourses can be identified such as the journalism, the politicalization, profit motivation, the socialization of concept and ideologies, the prioritization for newsworthiness, the sensationalization of information, and this paper is pivoted on analyzing these discourses in printed newspapers.

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