New Media, 1740-1915

By: Geoffrey B. Pingree

Book Overview

A cultural history of media that were "new media" in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

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.

Contributors
Wendy Bellion, Erin C. Blake, Patricia Crain, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Geoffrey B. Pingree, Gregory Radick, Laura Burd Schiavo, Katherine Stubbs, Diane Zimmerman Umble, Paul Young

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262572281
• ISBN13: 9780262572286
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.0" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Matthew Purdy in THE IOWA REVIEW says --

"New Media, 1740-1915 traces a history of the dialogue between media and society that has continued into the present. The title alone is somewhat startling, pairing an emphatically contemporary coinage with a time frame well before the dawn of modern technology as we've come to think of it. But one of the goals of the volume is to establish a context for our own notion of new media and how its newness is constructed. . . . All of the devices in New Media, 1740-1915 were new media in their respective eras, and in a sense they are still new. They are- Gitelman and Pingree use Bruce Sterling's term- 'dead media,' media no longer used and, in many cases, long since forgotten.These devices never got the chance to become fully enmeshed in the fabric of everyday life; the telegraph and phonograph evolved, the rest faded away. As such, they appear to us today perpetually strange, embalmed in their own original novelty. The volume's central lesson, then, is not to become blinded by the promises of our own new media. Because it isn't new at all."