From grunts to gigabytes

the long version

Among the things we'll find while traveling the information superhighway should be new public policies governing nation's - and the world's - ever-burgeoning communication systems. In From Grunts to Gigabytes, Dan Lacy uses his broad knowledge of the field's history to explore communications systems of the present and the future, their social impact, and the policies that would most appropriately shape them in the public interest. Throughout, Lacy discusses the relation of communications systems to the existence and social distribution of power, the structure of society, and the perception of reality. He traces the stages of human communication from the beginning of speech through writing, printing, commercial publishing, the mass printing and publishing of the late nineteenth century, audiovisual developments of the twentieth century, and the computer networks that send gigabytes of information quickly from place to place.