By admin<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

Before I opened \u201cA Nation Transformed by Information,\u201d I read Sherwood’s post which accuses Brown glossing over the effects of Protestantism in early America to favor Brown’s top-down interpretation of the period’s information dissemination. And thus I primed myself to expect a sleek, too-neatly-packaged history from Brown. Although I may be suffering from confirmation bias, by his second sentence Brown fulfilled my expectations.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Brown writes that the \u201cIn global terms [the information culture in early America] was an astonishing development\u201d because \u201c[c]olonial society had been by European standards relatively crude, even backward\u201d (39).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

My problem with Brown’s statement is that he moves too smoothly between the local and the global. Colonial American information system development was not globally astonishing, it only seems astonishing given how different America’s infrastructure was from Europe. Europeans found colonial America’s blossoming unlikely only because America’s trajectory differed from Europe’s. Brown’s worldview is solidly Euro-centric, and it irks me that he conflates European sentiments with the global.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

An even bigger sin, by not clearly contextualizing the viewpoint from which he departs (17^{th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> century European) Brown perpetuates what anthropologists like to call the \u201cmyth of} social progress<\/a>\u201d or \u201cmyth of social evolution.\u201d Rejecting the myth of progress means rejecting phrases like \u201cbackwards\u201d to describe cultures and instead promoting the idea that societies do not progress, but only change<\/em>. Brown does not write that contemporary Europeans found America \u201ccrude\u201d and \u201cbackward;\u201d he writes that America paled in comparison to \u201cEuropean standards,\u201d subtly yet clearly placing Europe a rung above America on the figurative ladder of progress.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Brown goes on in his chapter to posit the various political parties’ commitment to an \u201cinformed citizenry\u201d as the main motivation for developing a robust printing and pamphlet distribution infrastructure. But Brown’s overview left me with many questions. Who were the political parties targeting? In other words, who counted as a citizen? I would have appreciated at least a mention of who the recipients of information were.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I understand that his chapter is short and meant to provide a broad-brushed version of colonial information history, but overall the lack of nuance distracted me from being able to absorb Brown’s argument.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By admin Before I opened \u201cA Nation Transformed by Information,\u201d I read Sherwood’s post which accuses Brown glossing over the effects of Protestantism in early America to favor Brown’s top-down interpretation of the period’s information dissemination. And thus I primed myself to expect a sleek, too-neatly-packaged history from Brown. Although I may be suffering from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}