New Media and Popular Imagination Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States

by Boddy, William

• ISBN13: 9780198711452
• ISBN10: 019871145X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-09-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This pathbreaking book offers a highly original account of the ways in which successive media of electronic communication--radio, television, and digital media--have been anticipated, debated, and taken up in the twentieth-century United States. Intended as an intervention in the emerging scholarly and policy debates around contemporary digital culture, the book analyzes popular responses to earlier moments of technological innovation in the twentieth-century. Successive electronic media have challenged the borders between private and public, disturbed notions of national identity, and disrupted the gendered routines and spaces of the private home. Illuminating both the continuities and disjunctions between old media and new, New Media and Popular Imagination offers new insights into the relationship between technological change and cultural form.

Author Biography

William Boddy is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and Co-Ordinator of the Film Studies Program at the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
Cinema and Wireless in Turn of the Century Popular Imagination	p. 7
Wireless Nation: Defining Radio as a Domestic Technology	p. 16
The Amateur, the Housewife, and the Salesroom Floor: Promoting Post-war US Television	p. 44
US Television Abroad, 1960/1990: Market Power and National Introspection	p. 56
'Mission Number One is to Kill TV': Remaking the Domestic Television Apparatus in the 1990s	p. 68
Weather Porn and the Battle for Eyeballs: The Transition to Digital Broadcasting in the USA and UK	p. 79
Redefining the Home Screen: The Case of the Digital Video Recorder	p. 100
Marketers Strike Back: Virtual Advertising	p. 108
How God Watches Television: Early Responses to Digital Television	p. 123
High Tech in a Falling Market: Interactivity and Advertising Form in Contemporary US Television	p. 136
'Too Easy, Too Cheap and Too Fast to Control': Intellectual Property Battles in Digital Television	p. 152
Conclusion	p. 165
Index	p. 169
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