|
Frequently Bought Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century by Marina Warner |
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Clarendon Lectures in English) by Marina Warner |
by Jonathan Sterne
|
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century by Marina Warner |
by Guy Debord
|
Product details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Product Description
Review
"This is a powerful, compelling, and historically informed analysis of popular representations of electronic presence. Sconce has a rare ability to write about complex cultural phenomena in a poetic fashion, offering the reader a fascinating counterpart to existing scholarship." - Michael Curtin, author of Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics "Sconce offers an original and productive examination of the diverse social responses to 150 years of electronic communication. The result is an important and evocative book, notable for both its insights and its engaging style." - William Boddy, author of Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics
Product Description
In "Haunted Media", Jeffrey Sconce examines American culture's persistent association of new electronic media - from the invention of the telegraph to the introduction of television and computers - with paranormal or spiritual phenomena. By offering a historical analysis of the relation between communication technologies, discourses of modernity, and metaphysical preoccupations, Sconce demonstrates how accounts of 'electronic presence' have gradually changed over the decades from a fascination with the boundaries of space and time to a more generalised anxiety over the seeming sovereignty of technology. Sconce focuses on five important cultural moments in the history of telecommunication from the mid-nineteenth century to the present: the advent of telegraphy; the arrival of wireless communication; radio's transformation into network broadcasting; the introduction of television; and, contemporary debates over computers, cyberspace, and virtual reality.In the process of examining the trajectory of these technological innovations, he discusses topics such as the rise of spiritualism as a utopian response to the electronic powers presented by telegraphy and how radio, in the twentieth century, came to be regarded as a way of connecting to a more atomised vision of the afterlife. Sconce also considers how an early preoccupation with extraterrestrial radio communications transformed during the network era into more unsettling fantasies of mediated annihilation, culminating with Orson Welles' legendary broadcast of "War of the Worlds".Likewise, in his exploration of the early years of television, Sconce describes how programs such as "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits" continued to feed the fantastical and increasingly paranoid public imagination of electronic media. Finally, Sconce discusses the rise of postmodern media criticism as yet another occult fiction of electronic presence, a mythology that continues to dominate contemporary debates over television, cyberspace, virtual reality, and the Internet. As an engaging cultural history of telecommunications, "Haunted Media" will interest a wide range of readers including students and scholars of media, history, American studies, cultural studies, and literary and social theory.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Within a five-year span in the 1840s, the American public witnessed two of the most remarkable moments in telecommunications history. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Within a five-year span in the 1840s, the American public witnessed two of the most remarkable moments in telecommunications history. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
 |
90% buy the item featured on this page: Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Console-ing Passions)£14.24 |
 |
10% buy Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century £13.29 |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
 |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Business, Finance & Law > Law > Scots Law > Commercial, Financial, Industrial & Taxation > Communication
- Books > History > Cultural History
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Film
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Television > History & Criticism
- Books > Science & Nature > Engineering & Technology > Electrical > Nanotechnology
- Books > Science & Nature > Engineering & Technology > Electronics & Communications Engineering > Telecommunications
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Academic Sociology
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Communication Studies
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Cultural Studies
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Sociology
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
