New media, 1740-1915 / edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Gitelman, Lisa.

Pingree, Geoffrey B.

Series:

Media in transition

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mass media--History.

Mass media.

History.

Physical Description:

xxxiii, 271 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2003]

Summary:

Reminding us that all media were once new, this book challenges the notion that to study new media is to study exclusively today's new media. Examining a variety of media in their historic contexts, it explores those moments of transition when new media were not yet fully defined and their significance was still in flux. Examples range from familiar devices such as the telephone and phonograph to unfamiliar curiosities such as the physiognotrace and the zograscope. Moving beyond the story of technological innovation, the book considers emergent media as sites of ongoing cultural exchange. It considers how habits and structures of communication can frame a collective sense of public and private and how they inform our apprehensions of the "real." By recovering different (and past) senses of media in transition, New Media, 1740-1915 promises to deepen our historical understanding of all media and thus to sharpen our critical awareness of how they acquire their meaning and power.

Contents:

What's new about new media? / Geoffrey B. Pingree and Lisa Gitelman

Zograscopes, virtual reality, and the mapping of polite society in eighteenth-century England / Erin C. Blake

Heads of state: profiles and politics in Jeffersonian America / Wendy Bellion

Children of media, children as media: optical telegraphs, Indian pupils, and Joseph Lancaster's system for cultural replication / Patricia Crain

Telegraphy's corporeal fictions / Katherine Stubbs

From phantom image to perfect vision: physiological optics, commercial photography, and the popularization of the stereoscope / Laura Burd Schiavo

Sinful network or divine service: competing meanings of the telephone in Amish country / Diane Zimmerman Umble

Souvenir foils: on the status of print at the origin of recorded sound / Lisa Gitelman

R.L. Garner and the rise of the Edison phonograph in evolutionary philology / Gregory Radick

Scissorizing and scrapbooks: nineteenth-century reading, remaking, and recirculating / Ellen Gruber Garvey

Media on display: a telegraphic history of early American cinema / Paul Young.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0262072459

OCLC:

50252046