Downey explores the history of communication technology in the United States from the colonial period to the present, including print culture, wired networks, broadcast communication, and the digital covergence of communication in cyberspace.

GreGory J. Downey is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is also the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Downey received his B.S. and M.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A. in liberal studies from Northwestern University, and a joint Ph.D. in the history of technology and human geography from Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850-1950 (Routledge, 2002).