Book Review: Digital Universe: The Global Telecommunication Revolution, by Peter B. Seel

Abstract

Peter B. Seel Digital Universe: The Global Telecommunication Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 276 pp.The challenge of every revolution is how to understand it-how to define it, how to see its limits, and how to figure out what it means. Yet even to be able to look around in the midst of revolutionary upheaval and to be able to see and identify what is hap- pening is always a notable achievement. This is Peter Seel's book. He classifies the evolving technological changes, gives them historical and cultural context, and intro- duces the reader to constructs important to our understanding of new media.The dinosaur that is print media-threatened with extinction for the past twenty- five years at least-is now rapidly disappearing from the digital landscape and being replaced by multimedia and cross-platform approaches to information dissemination. The broad, umbrella term is convergence, which has game-changing implications for the form of media content, for the process of content dissemination, for the nature of the timeliness element of news, for the evolution of news into infotainment, for the different models of media control now sanctioned under the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press, for the changing public willingness to accept more govern- ment control and less and less (and less and less and less . . . ) privacy than in the recent past, and for the gratifications received from mediated content.Professor Seel's approach to the digital revolution is simple, straightforward, and noteworthy. He divides the main part of his book into four sections: theories and theo- rizing about the digital universe, history and development of ARPANET and its distrib- uted communication network that is the Internet today, technological convergence, and issues of public and private control of distributed communication. If Professor Seel has a shortcoming in these sections, it is the inclusion of a potentially overwhelming number of acronyms-even though he includes a helpful key terms table-and the number of theorizing fathers of our digital world, from Harold Innis to Steve Jobs, from Jacques Ellul to Thomas Friedman, and from Ted Nelson to Fernand Braudel.Professor Seel attempts to reign in this mass of information by mentioning, for example, Marshall McLuhan, but not including any further specifics or discussion of his theorizing about the global village and its creation of messages and meaning. Yet whatever one believes about McLuhan as a communication scholar, Professor Seel would have done well to consider including the seminal 1966 New Yorker cartoon by Alan Dunn, in which a college student explains McLuhan's theorizing to his distressed father, who is intellectually lost despite his own obvious education:You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. …