Synopsis One aspect of such an early information society deliberately outside the scope of this book concerns the rise of mass communications and mass media. In part, this is because many others better qualified than ourselves have charted the rise of the press and telecommunications, and the publication of another media history was never our intention. More specifically, however, as our sub-title suggests, our goal is to focus upon those social systems which were developed with the aim of managing informations, rather than every aspect the history of communication.

Of course, the age of high industrial modernity which we cover witnessed the development of postal services, global telegraph; a mass circulation press; telephone; radio; and at the end of our period, television--and these technologies were fundamental in increasing both the speed and volume of the production and transmission of information. Our concern, however, is with the ways in which their products--new books; magazines; papers; records; cards; taps and photographs--began to be organised and exploited, and with the extent to which a sphere of activity developed which re-conceptualised them as 'information'