The modern media emerged with eighteenth-century agrarian capitalism
Evidence
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
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and Lowenthal’s work on popular culture.
Related
- Modern media forms emerged when agrarian capitalism commodified artistic production (similarity 0.95)
- The novel emerged with the rise of market-based bourgeois culture in eighteenth-century England. (similarity 0.93)
- Mass media emerged with agrarian capitalism as culture itself became a commodity. (similarity 0.81)
- Modern mass media matured alongside the shift to monopoly capitalism from the 1880s (similarity 0.79)