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This interdisciplinary volume focuses on the politics, economics, technologies, uses, and cultures of maintenance of different forms of communication over long time or in Longue Durée.Throughout the chapters, contributors from a wide range of fields explore transversal and trans-temporal issues of communication maintenance. Among these are the struggles to keep communication infrastructures functioning, the hidden work of maintenance done by both experts and non-experts such as everyday users, the political significance of maintaining communications (or not maintaining them), and the different habits and significance of maintenance in different times and world regions. The forms of communication covered include broadcasting, telecommunications such as the telegraph and telephone, digital and popular media as computers and mobile phones, mostly forgotten media like pneumatic tubes, transportation infrastructures, maps as used as tools to politically control land, the clock as a medium and a material artifact, and many more.This book will be of interest to students and scholars of communication and media studies, the history of science and technology, general history, geography, maintenance studies, and other related disciplines.The Introduction, Chapter 5 and 8 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

'A must-read to anyone interested in the digital world.'- Valérie Schafer, Center for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg A concise history of the digital revolution and the lore, rhetoric, and debates that surround it. The Digital Revolution aims to tell a story, one of the most powerful ideologies of recent decades: that digitalization constitutes a revolution, a break with the past, a radical change for the human beings who are living through it. The book aims to investigate the origins of this idea, how it evolved, which other past revolutions consciously or unconsciously inspired it, which great stories it has conveyed over time, which of its key elements have changed and which ones have persisted and have been repeated in different historical periods. All these discussions, large or small, have settled and condensed into a series of media, advertising, corporate, political, and technical sources. Readers will be introduced to new, previously unpublished historical sources. The main aim of the book is to deconstruct what looks like a “natural” and incontestable idea and to help rethink digital societies today.