New Media, 1740-1915

by Gitelman, Lisa

• ISBN13: 9780262572286
• ISBN10: 0262572281
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-10-01
• Publisher: Mit Pr

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, 1740-1915promises to deepen our historical understanding of all media and thus to sharpen our critical awareness of how they acquire their meaning and power.

Author Biography

Lisa Gitelman is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Catholic University. Geoffrey B. Pingree is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and English at Oberlin College

Table of Contents

Series Foreword	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: What's New About New Media?	p. xi
Documents	p. xxiii
Zograscopes, Virtual Reality, and the Mapping of Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century England	p. 1
Heads of State: Profiles and Politics in Jeffersonian America	p. 31
Children of Media, Children as Media: Optical Telegraphs, Indian Pupils, and Joseph Lancaster's System for Cultural Replication	p. 61
Telegraphy's Corporeal Fictions	p. 91
From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope	p. 113
Sinful Network or Divine Service: Competing Meanings of the Telephone in Amish Country	p. 139
Souvenir Foils: On the Status of Print at the Origin of Recorded Sound	p. 157
R. L. Garner and the Rise of the Edison Phonograph in Evolutionary Philology	p. 175
Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating	p. 207
Media on Display: A Telegraphic History of Early American Cinema	p. 229
Contributors	p. 265
Index	p. 267
Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved.