Gabriele Balbi is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at USI Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland), where he is Director of the China Media Observatory and teaches media history and sociology at the Faculty of Communication Sciences. His main areas of interest are media history and historiography of communication.

Paolo Magaudda is Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Padova (Italy) where his research is in technology, culture, and society with particular reference to media and consumption processes. Since 2013, he has been Secretary of STS Italia, the Italian Society for the Study of Science and Technology.

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Why Study the History of Digital Media and How?

1.1. Contextualizing Digital inContemporary Societies

1.2. Theoretical Paths

1.3. A Few of the Benefits of a Digital Media History

Chapter 2 - The Computer

2.1. The "Mother" of All Digital Devices

2.2. The Mechanical Computer Age and the Social Need for Calculation

2.3. The Birth of the Computer and the Mainframe Age

2.4. The Age of Personal Computers

2.5. The post-PC Age from a Global Perspective

Chapter 3 - Internet

3.1. What We Mean by the Internet

3.2. The Military Influence

3.3. The Academic Influence

3.4 The Counter-cultural Influence

3.5. The Public Service Influence

3.6. The Commercial Influence

3.7. The Social Influence

3.8. Re-reading the Internet in Historical Perspective

Chapter 4 - The Mobile Phone

4.1. The Origins of the Mobile Phone

4.2. Digital Rebirth and Growing up

4.3. The European Digital-Bureaucratic Miracle

4.4. The Power of Routine. A Concise History of Text Messaging

4.5. A New Mobile Phone Paradigm: 3G, Smartphones and Mobile Internet

4.6. The Global Mobile Phone Fever

4.7. Sociocultural Implications of Mobile Connectivity

Chapter 5 - The Digitization of Analog Media

5.1. Intermediality and the Digital Media Pattern

5.2. Music

5.3. Publishing: Books and Newsmaking

5.4. Cinema and Video

5.5. Photography

5.6. Television

5.7. Radio

5.8. Digitization and the Interweaving of Different Media

Conclusion

Myths and Counter-hegemonic Narratives in the History of Digitization

Chronology

Appendix: Statistical and Quantitative Data

Acronyms