Cover -- FROM BIG BANG TO BIG DATA -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- Key Thinkers in the History of Media -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- In the Beginning Was ... -- Geomedia -- Biomedia -- The Talking Human -- Doing Things with Words -- Visual Communication: Images, Sculptures, and Counting Systems -- From Bookkeeping to Writing -- Enduring Media: Stone, Clay, Rituals -- Connecting Empires -- Writing and Reading Practices: The Examples of Greece and Rome -- Silk Roads -- Arabic Convergence Culture -- European Information Overload -- Medieval Intermedia -- The Inca Empire Solves a Knotty Problem -- Early Modern Oral, Written, and Visual Continuity -- Multimedia Festivals and Everyday Life -- A Partially New Printing Technology -- A Printing Revolution? -- The Media of the Scientific Revolution -- Print Capitalism -- Politics and the Public Sphere -- Memory, Rights, and Literacy -- The Modern Experience - Media in the Nineteenth Century -- Speech in the Public Sphere -- The Medium Par Excellence? -- The Modern Press -- Electric Media -- A New Visual Culture -- Audiovisual Media - About the Past -- The Media of the Masses -- Mass Media as an Industry -- Mass Media as Politics in the Twentieth Century -- Mass Media Hardware: The Example of Japan -- Everyday Media -- Remediation and Mobility -- Analog and Digital -- Calculating Machines as Media (or Vice Versa) -- Memex, Infrastructures, and Networks -- Breakthrough of the PC -- World Wide Web -- The Social Significance of Computerization -- Mobile Devices - Social and Streaming Media -- Digital Media Specificity and Big Data -- Afterword -- References -- Index.