Communicating Europe Technologies, Information, Events

Since the early years of telegraphy, modernity at large generated and has depended upon technologies of electrical/electronic communication and information circulation: from telephone, radio, and television to the internet. This volume reveals these connecting technologies’ geopolitical importance and their crucial relationships with culture, commerce, and communities. Also the authors critically examine their spatial dimensions and transnational implications – as material objects with particular qualities, as elements in institutional complexes, and as ‘vehicles’ carrying complex symbolic meanings. Through in-depth assessments of critical, as well as mundane, events in the history of communications and information, these analyses will significantly alter conventional perspectives both on communications and on modern European history.

Introduction.- Who is in Charge? State & Private Initiative: A Shared Construction of New Technologies.- Not so Soft … International Telecommunications Networks, Geo-Strategy, & Power.- European Techno-Diplomacy: Negotiating European Telegraph, Radio, & Television Standards & Regulations.- The Mediated Experience of Europe: On Electronic Presence, Liveness, & Participation in the European Media Landscape.- Europe as a Jamming Session?: Intended & Unintended Spill-Overs & Techno-Political Challenges of Cross-Border Communication.- Between Sciences & Geopolitics: Europe  the Proto-Digitization of Society.- Digital Convergence & Neo-Liberalism in Late-Twentieth-Century Europe.- Acceleration, Mobility, & the Rhetoric of the New: Onthe Historical Alignment & Symbolic Power of Media & Mobility.

Andreas Fickers is Professor of Contemporary and Digital History and Director of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at Luxembourg University (C2DH). He has published widely on the subjects of transnational media history and European history of technology. He is currently doing research on the methodological and epistemological challenges of digital historiography.

Pascal Griset is Professor of Modern History at Sorbonne University (UMR Sirice/CRHI), France. He is the coordinator and Principal Investigator of the H 2020 project Inventing a shared Science Diplomacy for Europe (InsSciDE). A specialist in the economic and technical history of information and communication technologies, he is currently researching the history of scientific research organizations and high technology industries. He chairs the Comité pour l'histoire de l'INSERM.