Marconi's Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology

By Aaron A. Toscano

This book examines the discourse surrounding the wireless, created by the Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The wireless excited early twentieth-century audiences before it even became a viable black box technology. The wireless adhered to modernist values-speed, efficiency, militarization, and progress. Language surrounding the wireless is a form of technical communication, overlooked by today's practitioners. This book establishes a broader definition for technical communication by examining a selection of the discourse surrounding Marconi's wireless. The book's main themes are the following: 1) technical communication is all discourse surrounding technology, 2) the field of technical communication (or technical writing) should incorporate analyses of discourse surrounding technologies into its epistemology, 3) the wireless is a product of the society from which it comes (early twentieth-century Western civilization), and 4) the discourse surrounding the wireless is infused with tropes of progress-speed, efficiency, evolution, and ahistoricity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9400739761
• ISBN13: 9789400739765
• Release Date: February 2012
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 145 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.2"