The Wire: Television, Cable, and the Privatization of Public Signal(American Infrastructure: Engines of Belonging)

The airwaves once belonged to the public. Today, they belong to the algorithm. The Wire: Television, Cable, and the Privatization of Public Signal by Bill Johns traces the evolution of American media-from the moral ambitions of early broadcasting to the silent empire of streaming-in a sweeping cultural history that asks how democracy survives when its language is sold to the highest bidder. Blending media theory, political economy, and the human drama of technological change, Johns delivers an unforgettable account of how the nation's shared voice became a private network of noise. From the "vast wasteland" speech of Newton Minow to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, from the rise of cable monopolies to the reign of Netflix and broadband, The Wire charts the transformation of communication as both industry and idea. It is a story of invention and erasure: the gradual dismantling of a civic commons once known as the public airwaves. Johns follows the signal from the early promise of television-where networks were granted licenses in exchange for public service-to the deregulated age of corporate consolidation, where freedom became a synonym for consumption. In this richly documented narrative, the reader watches the same technological optimism that built the national network dissolve into a world of personalized feeds, privatized discourse, and vanishing community. At the center of The Wire lies a paradox that defines the digital age: we have never been more connected, and never less in common. Johns examines this contradiction through the intertwined histories of television, cable, and broadband, showing how each new medium redefined what it meant to be public. Where midcentury broadcasting imagined citizenship as shared witness, streaming reimagines it as subscription. The result, he argues, is not simply a change in technology but a moral reprogramming of attention itself. The screens that once united a nation now divide it, turning visibility into currency and truth into content. Drawing on thinkers like Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, and Raymond Williams, Johns situates the modern media landscape within a larger tradition of American infrastructure-the networks of power, water, roads, and information that built the republic and now define its decline. His background in cybersecurity and industrial systems gives the book an unusual vantage point: the story of media as the story of control. He moves effortlessly from the physical-the buried fiber lines beneath the sea-to the philosophical, showing how infrastructure itself became ideology. In Johns's hands, the history of communication becomes a meditation on the ethics of connection, the fragility of the commons, and the privatization of the human voice. The Wire is more than a chronicle of media; it is a reflection on citizenship in an era of automation. Its pages reveal how the promise of "open access" disguised a system of perpetual rent, how the algorithms of personalization dissolved the shared horizon of collective meaning, and how the very act of watching became a form of labor. Johns writes with precision and moral clarity, capturing the disquiet of a society that mistakes connectivity for communion. Each chapter uncovers another layer of the digital republic's transformation, where bandwidth replaced public discourse and engagement replaced understanding. In the end, Johns returns to the signal itself-the invisible current that binds every screen, every voice, every unseen exchange. What remains of the public, he asks, when the signal no longer serves its citizens but commands them? The answer, like the light of the screen, is both beautiful and blinding. The Wire: Television, Cable, and the Privatization of Public Signal invites readers to look again at the technologies that shape their perception and to ask, with renewed attention, what kind of world they are transmitting to the future.