Great changes in technology are coming at a faster and faster pace, introducing new opportunities, challenges, careers, and fields of study at a rate that hasn’t been experienced in human history. Keeping up with these changes can simultaneously provide amusement and befuddlement, as well as economic prosperity and ruin.

That’s where you come in. Whether you are trying to plan a lucrative investment or a career in media, or you simply have to pass a particular class in order to graduate, the field of communication technologies has become important enough to you that you are investing in the time to read this book. Be warned: the goal of the authors in this book is to serve all of those needs. To do so, the book starts by explaining the Communication Technology Ecosystem, then applies this ecosystem as a tool to help you understand each of the technologies presented.

This is the 16th edition of this book, and most of the book is changed from the 15^th edition. In addition to updating every chapter with the latest developments, we have a first-time chapter exploring eSports (Chapter 19) and a chapter we haven’t seen in more than a decade discussing Virtual Reality (Chapter 15). A few other chapters, including Video Games (Chapter 14), Home Video (Chapter 16), ebooks (Chapter 19), and Computers (Chapter 11) have been rewritten from scratch to provide a more contemporary discussion.

One thing shared by all of the contributors to this book is a passion for communication technology. In order to keep this book as current as possible we asked the authors to work under extremely tight deadlines. Authors begin working in late 2017, and most chapters were submitted in February or March 2018 with the final details added in April 2018. Individually, the chapters provide snapshots of the state of the field for individual technologies, but together they present a broad overview of the role that communication technologies play in our everyday lives. The efforts of these authors have produced a remarkable compilation, and we thank them for all their hard work in preparing this volume.

The constant in production of this book is our editor extraordinaire, TFI’s Helen Mary V. Marek, who deftly handled all production details, moving all 27 chapters from draft to camera-ready in weeks. Helen Mary also provided on-demand graphics production, adding visual elements to help make the content more understandable. Our editorial and marketing team at Routledge, including Ross Wagenhoffer and Nicole Salazar, ensured that production and promotion of the book were as smooth as ever. We are most grateful to our spouses (and partners in life), Diane Grant and Floyd Meadows for giving us this month every two years so that we can disappear into a haze of bits, pixels, toner, and topics to render the book you are reading right now. They know that a strange compulsion arises every two years, with publication of the book being followed immediately by the satisfaction we get from being part of the process of helping you understand and apply new communications technologies.

You can keep up with developments on technologies discussed in this book by visiting our companion website, where we use the same technologies discussed in the book to make sure you have the latest information. The companion website for the Communication Technology Update and Fundamentals: www.tfi.com/ctu. The complete Glossary for the book is on the site, where it is much easier to find individual entries than in the paper version of the book. We have also moved the vast quantity of statistical data on each of the communication technologies that were formerly printed in Chapter 2 to the site. As always, we will periodically update the website to supplement the text with new information and links to a wide variety of information available over the Internet.

Your interest and support is the reason we do this book every two years, and we listen to your suggestions so that we can improve the book after every edition. You are invited to send us updates for the website, ideas for new topics, and other contributions that will inform all members of the community. You are invited to communicate directly with us via email, snail mail, social media, or voice.

Thank you for being part of the CTUF community!

Augie Grant and Jennifer Meadows

April 1, 2018