"The law of the suppression of radical potential" is an idea first described by Brian Winston in his book, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television. According to the law, when a communications technology is realised, its growth is suppressed through the constraining influence of already prevailing institutions and other mechanisms.
Winston shows how the law can be used as a model for describing the life cycle of many communications technologies. His approach is in particular directed against technological determinism and instead proposes that the emergence of new media and new technologies is mediated and controlled by society.
Winston has elaborated his model of technological change in particular in the books Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (1997) and Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (1998; Kindle publication in 2007 )
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