Let’s begin with a premise: with every change in the way we communicate in our culture there is a new struggle over meaning, significance, knowledge and power. Old rules and orders cannot be applied perfectly under the new regime of communication and thus formations of power are under threat from these new forms of expression.

The premise here is not exactly a technological determinist argument; that is, it is not saying that technology determines culture. New forms of communication are only partially determined by their technology and are shaped from social and cultural conditions and from the various manners in which cultural expression and intentions are conveyed. Cultural forms such as the novel are part technology and part cultural expression and their development is dependent on both cultural and the technological conditions. For instance, the novel as a book is dependent on the technologies of mass reproduction, mass printing and mass distribution; but the novel is also dependent on a cultural development of story-telling that allowed it to be expressed in narrative form, the expansion of literacy, and the emergence of printing in vernacular languages. Moreover, the book was equally dependent on the emergence of an industrial economy and the development of copyright. All of these technological, cultural and economic factors – along with a host of others that we have glossed over in our analysis – are imbedded in the cultural formation of the novel and its emergence in the 18th century. Nonetheless, the emergence of the novel was a challenge to existing structures of both knowledge and power. In its time it was a new media form that led to a struggle over meaning, significance, knowledge and power…