Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on analysis of constitutive choices that affect media development. Vaidhyanathan Siva has described “The Googlization of Everything” in his famous texts baring the same title. However, Vaidhyanathan has focused on the development of the internet and the role of Google in understanding the impact of the internet. This paper will seek to analyze the constitutive choices discussed by Starr and how they apply to the development of the internet.

In Paul Starr’s book titled “The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, ” he offers an extensive explanation of his argument that the American media was shaped by the political decisions made by different leaders in the period between the American Revolution and the conclusion of the World War II. The political decisions he mentions are referred to as “Constitutive Choices” throughout his texts. He uses the phrase constitutive choices to denote the numerous specific decisions that American leaders were compelled to make by ongoing critical moments. In order to make the reader understand the constitutive choices, Starr presents a comparison of the African and the European media which were shaped by different actors. According to Starr, the American media underwent four different waves of institutional development. Notably, the first one was the revolution and its aftermath while the emergence of the technological networks formed the second one (Starr 85). The third one was the emerging need for developing policies that would govern technological networks (Starr 100). The rising of the mass media defined the fourth wave.

One of the constitutive choices that the American leaders made was allowing the media to inform citizens in order to ensure that they had the capacity to vote wisely and vet their leaders. This choice was made after the American Revolution, which altered the existing relationship between the media and the American state. In a bid to promote this choice, national postal service was introduced. In the years&nbsp.that followed, political parties would rely on the media in a bid to convey their messages to the people. This transformed the ownership of many newspapers placing them under partial ownership of party leaders.