Network Nation: Learning from the Past

 On Dec. 10, Pat Aufderheide joined historian Richard John and two policy activists, Sascha Meinrath and Andrew Jay Schwartzman, at the New America Foundation. Richard John discussed his recent book, Network Nation, which charts the origins of communication policies for the telegraph and the telephone. His rich history shows that, in each case, not only the evolution of policy but also the evolution of technology occurred through government action, often sharply conditioned by corporate mobilization. “Politics have artifacts,” he said, echoing but flipping the famous comment by Langdon Winner that “artifacts have politics.”

John’s book, like his earlier and widely-awarded Spreading the News, debunks technological determinism and also techno-utopianism and –dystopianism. He makes a historically-grounded argument that the history of communication is shaped, sometimes in unpredictable ways, by political decisions. Both books provide ample learning lessons for shaping communication policy today.