Classics

One of my favourite popular culture critics has always been Raymond Williams. Today I want to share a slice from his article "The Technology and the Society", reprinted in The New Media Reader:

It is especially a characteristic of the communications systems that all were foreseen - not in utopian but in technical ways - before the crucial components of the developed systems had been discovered and refined. In no way is this a history of communications systems creating a new society or new social conditions. The decisive and earlier transformation of industrial production, and its new social forms, which had grown out of a long history of capital accumulation and working technical improvements, created new needs but also new possibilities, and the communications systems, down to television, were their intrinsic outcome.