At the turn of the twentieth century, successive waves of innovation began to redefine the fields of media and communication: the telegraph (invented in the middle of the nineteenth century and commonplace by the early twentieth), “wireless telegraphy,” AM radio, FM radio, and monochrome and then color television. Set against this backdrop of steady technological advance, the breakthroughs of recent years—the Internet and mobile telephony for example—are not really such breakthroughs after all, but merely the latest rounds of a patiently unfolding cycle.