This chapter explores the concept of press freedom. Daniel Hallin argues that the concept is especially relevant today, when consensus on its value and the kinds of institutional arrangements that can sustain it are in important respects breaking down. He draws on research exploring Latin American media systems, where press reform efforts have launched debates about whether new policies are assaults to the press or genuine efforts to democratize media and public life. While standard press freedom ratings typically show decline, specific individual cases raise questions about how exactly media systems are changing, how the distribution of power in society reflects those shifts, and what the implications of both are for democracy. Hallin suggests similar issues are at play around the world, including in North America and Western Europe, as scholars consider questions such as how to regulate the circulation of news on highly centralized social media platforms. He concludes by calling for careful consideration about the utility and limits of the concept of press freedom for scholars of media and public life.

In 2008, the First Sounds project digitally scanned and converted the paper tracings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, recreating sounds that hadn’t been heard since the middle of the nineteenth century. Never intended to be played back, Scott’s phonautograms belong to a world in which writing was the universal standard for other media and literature was often the test case for new media technologies. But even by the time of Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph in the late 1870s, that orientation was changing. This book analyzes the relationships of print literature to other media in the late nineteenth century, a time when an astonishing array of new media technologies were imagined, invented, and adopted. It argues that writers became vernacular media theorists as they traced systematic relationships between different forms of print and nonprint media, and it brings the history of books and printed writing into closer contact with the interdisciplinary field of media archaeology.

Even before the end of the nineteenth century, Octave Uzanne’s essay “The End of Books” (1894) portrayed the arrival of newer media as the fin of print culture. In this account, books are heavy and slow, newer media are light and liberating, and modern culture is an area of obsolescence and obliteration. A richer consideration of the varieties of print formats and the relationships between print and nonprint media might help us avoid the inclinations that come together in such accounts and their many modern successors. Uzanne’s vision of a post-print culture actually illuminates the late nineteenth century’s cultures of print. A contemporary image of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab offers a more illuminating figure for the relationships between literature, print and nonprint media, and new technology.