Modern media forms emerged when agrarian capitalism commodified artistic production

Evidence

The ideological role of the media is by no means their only or exclusive function. The modern forms of the media first appear decisively, though on a comparatively minor scale as compared with their present density, in the eighteenth century, with and alongside the transformation of England into an agrarian capitalist society. Here, for the first time, the artistic product becomes a commodity; artistic and literary work achieves its full realization as an exchange value in the literary market; and the institutions of a culture rooted in market relationships begin to appear: books, newspapers, and periodicals; booksellers and circulating libraries; reviews and reviewing; journalists and hacks; bestsellers and pot-boilers. The first new “medium”—the novel, intimately connected with the rise of the emergent bourgeois classes (Watt, The Rise of the Novel )—appears in this period. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 915

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel thesis on bourgeois readership, and generally to the media-commodification economic history arc of this reading.
• SEED: Angle: an economic history of the novel as the first mass medium — art becoming exchange value as a material precondition for cultural politics.