Media contexts Historical approaches to communication studies

The writing of communication history is woefully underdeveloped. In part, this is because communication media are to a large extent, as the name declares, the carriers rather than creators of the causes and effects historians normally attend to. Certainly, there are respects in which the medium becomes the message, and certainly, there are moments, especially as mass media institutions differentiate from church or state and attain a degree of autonomy, that the media exert independent influence on politics, society, and culture. But generally speaking, the media develop in the background, not the event-filled foreground, of mainstream historical subjects.