International Journal of Communication 6 (2012), 1022–1041 1932–8036/20121022 Copyright © 2012 (W. Russell Neuman, Yong Jin Park, Elliot Panek). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org. Tracking the Flow of Information into the Home: An Empirical Assessment of the Digital Revolution in the United States, 1960–2005 W. RUSSELL NEUMAN University of Michigan YONG JIN PARK Howard University ELLIOT PANEK University of Michigan This study analyzes the increasing dominance of electronic media in the American media diet and a growing discrepancy between supply and demand in the digital cornucopia. Drawing on the communication flow methodology pioneered by Ithiel Pool in the 1980s, the study tracks U.S. industry data on technology penetration and household behavior from 1960 to 2005 to reveal a transition from “push” to “pull” media dynamics. At the dawn of the digital age in the early 1980s, pioneering student of media technology Ithiel de Sola Pool published a series of studies on the growing flow of information in the American and Japanese mass media (Neuman & Pool, 1986; Pool, 1983; Pool, Inose, Takasaki, & Hurwitz, 1984). Pool had worked with Japanese and American colleagues over the previous decade, trying to quantify the increasingly electronic media supply in meaningful terms and subject the analysis to further theoretical study of how these trends might affect levels of information, diversity of information, and possible polarization within the mass population consuming these media. Pool saw himself as expanding the research agenda and the key methodologies for better understanding the dynamics of the information age. Until the publication of Pool’s work, scholars had relied primarily on aggregate economic data focusing on employment patterns to track the transitions from the agricultural to the industrial and in turn to the information age (Bell, 1979; Machlup, 1962; Porat, 1977). W. Russell Neuman: rneuman@umich.edu Yong Jin Park: yongjin.park@howard.edu Elliot Panek: elpanek@umich.edu Date submitted: 2011–08–04