Download e-book for kindle: When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric by Carolyn Marvin

By Carolyn Marvin

ISBN-10: 0195044681

ISBN-13: 9780195044683

Within the historical past of digital verbal exchange, the final zone of the nineteenth century holds a distinct position, for it used to be in this interval that the phone, phonograph, electrical mild, instant, and cinema have been all invented. In When outdated applied sciences have been New , Carolyn Marvin explores how of those new inventions--the cellphone and the electrical light--were publicly expected on the finish of the nineteenth century, as obvious in really expert engineering journals and well known media. Marvin can pay specific recognition to the phone, describing the way it disrupted proven social kin, unsettling usual methods of dividing the non-public individual and relations from the extra public surroundings of the neighborhood. at the lighter aspect, she describes how humans spoke louder whilst calling lengthy distance, and the way they frightened approximately catching contagious ailments over the telephone. a very robust bankruptcy bargains with telephonic precursors of radio broadcasting--the "Telephone Herald" in manhattan and the "Telefon Hirmondo" of Hungary--and the clash among the technological improvement of broadcasting and the try to impose a homogenous, ethnocentric version of Anglo-Saxon tradition at the public. whereas concentrating on the best way execs within the electronics box attempted to manage the hot media, Marvin additionally illuminates the wider social influence, providing a wide-ranging, informative, and exciting account of the early years of digital media.

Show description

Read or Download When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century PDF

Best media studies books

Download PDF by : Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment

Mapping the resonances, dissonances, and linkages among the concept of Gramsci and Foucault to discover new instruments for socio-political and demanding research for the twenty-first century, this booklet reassesses the widely-held view that their paintings is incompatible.

With discussions of Latin American innovative politics, indigenous knowledges, applied sciences of presidency and the instructing of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, complexity thought, scientific anthropology and biomedicine, and the position of Islam within the transition to trendy society within the Arab international, this interdisciplinary quantity provides the newest theoretical learn on varied elements of those thinkers’ paintings, in addition to analyses of the explicit linkages that exist among them in concrete settings.

A rigorous, comparative exploration of the paintings of 2 towering figures of the twenty-first century, Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment will entice students and scholars of social and political conception, political sociology, conversation and media reviews, and modern philosophy.

Download e-book for iPad: Atlantic Communications: The Media in American and German by Norbert Finzsch, Ursula Lehmkuhl

Atlantic Communications examines the improvement of communications expertise and its influence on German-American family from the 17th to the 20th century. How was once assorted media used or abused politically? How did the constitution and strategy of Atlantic conversation swap? How did universal social spheres emerge?

Download PDF by Annamaria Carusi, Aud Sissel Hoel, Timothy Webmoor, Steve: Visualization in the Age of Computerization

Digitalization and computerization are actually pervasive in technological know-how. This has deep effects for our figuring out of medical wisdom and of the clinical procedure, and demanding situations longstanding assumptions and standard frameworks of deliberating medical wisdom. electronic media and computational methods problem our notion of ways within which belief and cognition paintings in technology, of the objectivity of technological know-how, and the character of medical items.

Additional info for When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century

Sample text

These powers displayed the features of the oral and written models they were 22 WHEN OLD TECHNOLOGIES WERE NEW based on, few of the unique capacities of electrical communication, and additional magical capabilities that to experts were inconceivable for any mode of communication. A popular misconception was that telegraph and telephone messages were written down and physically transported over the wire. 30 Now, he implied, only the most socially marginal could make this error. Some enthusiasts imagined that electrical communication was mysteriously enhanced oral discourse in which speakers and listeners were seen as well as heard, just as if their conversation were face-toface.

Tit-Bits printed a story in 1897 about two male friends who found the telephone puzzlingly superfluous: "Halloa Fletch! " "This is Sid. " "Glad to hear from you, Sid. " "First-rate. " "Calooshus. " "Oh, nothing especially. ) "Awfully warm up here to-day. " "Fine. " "Why, yes. " "So you did. " "Not a bit. " "First-rate. " "No. Things are about as usual. It's—h'm—beastly warm here. ) 32 WHEN OLD TECHNOLOGIES WERE NEW "Well, I must be going now. "50 Electrical Deception and Coercion A proud and public component of professional identity was the integrity of the electrician who served no master but truth.

Woodbury, a prominent industrial engineer and spokesman who rose to Stanley's defense. It is beyond understanding why fault should be found with this harmless and efficient method of teaching a truth. 62 Woodbury related another "lesson" from an incident in which a Plains Indian was electrocuted as he shimmied up a telegraph pole and chopped the wire with his tomahawk at precisely the instant it was struck by lightning several miles away. " Electrical World picked up a report from La Lumiere Electrique of a "triumph of science over superstition" during British attempts to suppress the rebel leader Mahdi and his "wild followers" in the Sudan in 1884.

Download PDF sample

When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century by Carolyn Marvin


by Paul
4.5

Rated 4.86 of 5 – based on 8 votes