Response to The Creation of the Media....

'The Creation of the Media': The American Information Revolution is an article by James Fallows on a book written by Paul Starr entitled "The Creation of the Media." Fallows asks questions such as "How can newspapers support increasingly expensive international coverage, when most keep losing readers? How can a television station afford not to trumpet disasters and scandals on its local news, when competitors that do get higher ratings? Does concentration of ownership really matter? Is there any longer such a thing as a broad market for the news?" He then critiques Starr's book by saying that it doesn't answer these questions, but it does provide historical information that is relevant to today's societal issues. Fallows says that the heart of Starr's argument is that Americans do not understand "what is unusual about their communications media and why?" Fallows also says "What Starr argues -- and, in my view, powerfully demonstrates -- is that every branch of the communications system reflects deliberate political choices made under particular historic circumstances."
I found this article to be kind of confusing at first but also very interesting because it addresses media issues that we face in America, and our understanding of the media as a whole. The entire article is pretty much Fallows discussing "The Creation of the Media" by Paul Starr, and he gives us a lot of information out of Paul Starr's book, while inputting his own information as well. The article discusses the telegraph and telephone and how those technologies impacted America, and the world. I feel that a lot of the article was almost common sense, or just stating facts about how the media has impacted society. I don't really understand why Fallows felt the need to write an article about this book when the book covers all of this information. One thing that really intrigued me about this article is the promise that another volume of this book would be released with new media. I was wondering if it ever was released and to what year this volume goes up until being that the last one ended in 1941. I think that it would be interesting to see what Paul Starr has to say about the media of today, and societies technology obsession.