I’m reading the 13th edition (2022) and am not past the first chapter, but I’m already troubled as an Asian American and as someone who studied printmaking as a major.

Let’s start with the authors: Richard Campbell who is listed as a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami University. The population is 33.4% White (Hispanics) and 11.9% White (Non-Hispanic), 12.8% Black/African American (Non-Hispanic) and only 1.33% Asian (Non-Hispanic).

Ron Beck is a professor of media and communications and strategic communication at the Miami University. All of them look White.  Back is the last author listed, so the listing is not in alphabetical order.

Florida is predominately White, but only at 52% and that includes the 18.4% who are Hispanic/Latino and identify as White. Black/African American are only 14.9% of the population with the largest minority population being Hispanic/Latino at 27.4 percent. Asians are 2.9%.

Christopher R. Martin is a professor of digital journalism and former department head of the Department of Communications and Media at the University of Northern Iowa which is located in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Cedar Falls, Iowa is 91.2% White, 1.3% Black or African American and 4.5% Asian (with 2.7% Latino/Hispanic).

Betinna Fabos who is a professor of visual communications and interactive digital studies is also at the University of Northern Iowa. Fabos is the third person listed.

Iowa is 83% White, 6.9% Latino/Hispanic, 3.78% Black/African American and 2.48% Asian.

Contrast this with Santa Monica (the text is being used at Santa Monica College), California.

Santa Monica is 69% White, but 8.85% Asian. Black/African American is 5.27%. Latino/Hispanic is 17.2%. Los Angeles County is 69.6%  White, but 48.6% Hispanic/Latino. White alone and not Hispanic/Latino is only 25.3%. Asian alone is 16%. Black/African American is 9%.

Statewide, the demographics show that no race or ethnic group is a majority. While White alone is 70.4%, White alone and not Hispanic/Latino is 34.3%. Hispanic/Latino is 40.4%, Asian alone is 16.5%. Black or African American is 6.5%.

Chapter 1 is titled “Media, Culture, and Communication: A Critical Approach.” In the first paragraph, the text discusses the year 2020.

The year 2020 was perhaps the most seismic year in a generation, or maybe even in a century or more. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst economy since the Great Depression, a national protest movement for social justice that reverberated around the world, and the most divisive national political climate in memory, capped off by a presidential election and its tumultuous aftermath–it was hard to make sense of a year that overflowed with such news.

Even before the worst of 20202 hit, people were already struggling with information overload. A Gallup/Knight poll of Americans (taken just before the pandemic and social justice movements hit the United States) found that “Americans feel overwhelmed by the volume and speed of news.”

Media outlets tried to help people put the year in historical perspective, by comparing it first to 1918, the year of another global pandemic, and then to other significant moments in time, including 1929 (the year of the economic crash that started the Great Depression), 1968 (a year of political chaos and protests for racial justice), 1919 and 1943 (years of other classes for racial justice) and 1941 (the shocking attack on Pearl Harbor), 1968 (when President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, undermined Black civil liberties), and –perhaps the scariest comparison–the period from 1347-1351, when the Black Death killed roughly half of Europe’s population.

What’s missing here, despite the mention of Pearl Harbor, is the anti-Asian rhetoric and the rise of anti-Asian hate that was tied to the pandemic. Historically, one should not mention Pearl Harbor without Manila Bay or anti-Asian hate.

• Asian Americans and Discrimination during the COVID-19 Pandemic (30 November 2023)
• One-Third of Asian Americans Fear Threats, Physical Attacks and Most Say Violence Against them Is Rising (21 April 2021)
• Anti-Asian American Hate Crimes Spike During the Early States of COVID-19 Pandemic (3 June 2022)
• COVID-19 Has Driven Racism and Violence Against Asian Americans: Perspectives from 12 National Polls (12 April 2022)
• More than 9,000 Anti-Asian Incidents Have Been Reported Since the Pandemic Began (12 August 2021)
• Anti-Asian Hate Crime Events During the COVID-19 Pandemic 

By page 7, there’s a  more problematic issue under the section “The Print Era.”

While forms of printing using wood-carved blocks developed in China around 1045, what we recognize as modern printing did not emerge until the middle of the fifteenth century, when Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, invented a printing press that used movable metal type. His invention ushered in the print era. Printing presses and print publications spread rapidly across Europe by the early sixteenth century. Eventually, books became one of the first mass-marketed products due to the combined benefits of the printing press:

• Machine duplication replaced the tedious system in which scribes hand-copied texts.
• Duplication could occur rapidly, so large quantities of the same book could be reproduced easily.
• The faster production of multiple copies brought down the coast of each unit, making books more affordable to less-affluent people.

These developments prompted several important changes throughout Europe, each of which ultimately affected the larger societal structure and cultural values.

The problem here is that China began using movable type in 1040 (Bi Sheng), using clay. Clay is fragile but in about 1297, wood began to be used. Cast-metal movable type was used in Korea in the 13th century.

• China in 1000CE: The Most Advanced Society in the World
• Wooden Movable-Type Printing of China (List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding)
• History of Printing (Britannica)
• Printing Press (14 May 2024)

According to the AFE Columbia.edu website article:

As in Europe centuries later, the introduction of printing in China dramatically lowered the price of books, thus aiding the spread of literacy. Inexpensive books also gave a boost to the development of drama and other forms of popular culture. The storytellers depicted in the Beijing Qingming scroll (below) may have benefited from “prompt books” that would help them review the stories that they told orally to their audiences.

As any printmaker or artist knows, the technique for making paper came from East Asia, specifically China.

Paper, the production of which was known only to the Chinese, followed the caravan routes of Central Asia to the markets at Samarkand, whence it was distributed as a commodity across the entire Arab world.

The transmission of the techniques of papermaking appears to have followed the same route; Chinese taken prisoner at the Battle of Talas, near Samarkand, in 751 gave the secret to the Arabs. Paper mills proliferated from the end of the 8th century to the 13th century, from Baghdad and then on to Spain, then under Arab domination. Paper first penetrated Europe as a commodity from the 12th century onward through Italian ports that had active commercial relations with the Arab world and also, doubtless, by the overland route from Spain to France. Papermaking techniques apparently were rediscovered by Europeans through an examination of the material from which the imported commodity was made; possibly the secret was brought back in the mid-13th century by returning crusaders or merchants in the Eastern trade. Papermaking centres grew up in Italy after 1275 and in France and Germany in the course of the 14th century.

Britannica discusses why clay and wood did not work in Europe.

The letters of the roman alphabet were smaller than Chinese ideograms, and cutting them from wood was a delicate operation. Moreover, type made in this way was fragile, and it wore out at least as quickly as blocks carved with a whole text. Further, since the letters were individually carved, no two copies of the same letter were identical any more than when the text was engraved directly on a wood block. The process, thus, represented no advance in ease of production, durability, or quality.

The Chinese did not make a printing press according to Britannica, but History.com has a different opinion:

Woodtype made a comeback in 1297 when Ching-te magistrate Wang Chen printed a treatise on agriculture and farming practices called Nung Shu.

Wang Chen devised a process to make the wood more durable and precise. He then created a revolving table for typesetters to organize with more efficiency, which led to greater speed in printing.

Nung Shu is considered the world’s first mass-produced book. It was exported to Europe and, coincidentally, documented many Chinese inventions that have been traditionally attributed to Europeans.

Wang Chen’s method of woodblock type continued to be used by printers in China.

• Who Invented the Printing Press? (24 February 2014)
• Printing Press (14 May 2024)

Under its heading “The Invention of Typography–Gutenberg (1450?), the Britannica by Robert Lechêne explains:

This association of die, matrix, and lead in the production of durable typefaces in large numbers and with each letter strictly identical, was one of the two necessary elements in the invention of typographic printing in Europe. The second necessary element was the concept of the printing press itself, an idea that had never been conceived in the Far East.

Johannes Gutenberg is generally credited with the simultaneous discovery of both these elements, though there is some uncertainty about it, and disputes arose early to cloud the honour.

The conclusion the textbook authors of “Media & Culture” come to is that mass-produced printed material helped develop “Resistance to Authority,” “The Spread of Literacy” and “Focus on Individualism.”

In its Chapter 10, “Books and the Power of the Print,” China is mentioned again.

At about the same time the Egyptians began using papyrus, the Babylonians recorded business transactions, government records, favorite stories, and local history on small tables of clay. Around 1000 BCE, the Chinese began creating book-like objects, using strips of wood and bamboo tied together in bundles. Although the Chinese began making paper from cotton and linen around 105 CE, paper did not replace parchment in Europe until the thirteenth century because of its questionable durability.

Japan gets barely a mention in this text although the world’s first novel is often credited to a woman known only as Murasaki Shikibu for her “Tale of Genji.”

To further question how this textbook serves a community with a history of Asian Americans, I looked up Asian American newspaper. Asian American newspapers do get a brief mention (p. 242), but it isn’t really enough for a course that takes place in Los Angeles County or in the state of California.

Yet if China, Korea and Japan already had printing presses and movable type before Europe, then the immigrants came with a different set of expectations. They were not necessarily learning a concept from the West or Europe. They were learning new techniques and using new equipment, but the tradition was already there.