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Communicating Europe

Technologies, Information, Events
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How have communication and information technologies - from the telephone, radio and television to the internet - made, unmade, circumvented and connected Europe?

Communicating Europe reveals how these connecting technologies deeply impacted geopolitics and were intrinsically connected with culture, commerce, and communities. Find out about their spatial dimensions and transnational implications following the case studies that uniquely explore radio, telephone, television and the internet as material objects with particular qualities, as elements in institutional complexes, and as ‘vehicles’ carrying complex symbolic meanings. You will be lead through critical and mundane events, significantly altering any conventional perspectives you might have on communications and on modern European history.

Authors

Andreas Fickers
Andreas Fickers Professor
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
Pascal Griset Professor
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.

Praise

  • “What a marvelous study! Fickers and Griset’s Communicating Europe establishes a benchmark in communications history and marks a fitting conclusion to the Making Europe series. It offers rich and nuanced analysis of the past two-centuries of European media - and within it, Europe - in the making. All this, and it manages to be a page-turner as well!”

    William Uricchio
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

  • “A brilliantly conceptualized transnational overview of the construction of a distinctive European approach to modern communications systems, from the telegraph to the Internet. As much insightful analysis as history, this engagingly - written volume brings together aspects of infrastructure, politics, technology, and culture to reveal commonalities and distinctions rarely revealed in works that take a more traditional national focus. A tour de force.”

    Michelle Hilmes
    University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

  • “A unique view of all the communication revolutions since 1850 from a European perspective. It stresses the dilemmas of European people: being one of the main sources of the dynamics of information and communication, using the strength of the State to support innovation, yet in the end losing ground to other continents. A fascinating approach of double identity and ambiguities.”

    Patrick Fridenson
    Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France

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