Description:
New technologies, whether text message or telegraph,
inevitably raise questions about emotion. New forms of communication bring with
them both fear and hope, on one hand allowing us deeper emotional connections
and the ability to forge global communities, while on the other prompting
anxieties about isolation and over-stimulation. Feeling
Mediated investigates the larger context of such concerns, considering both
how media technologies intersect with our emotional lives and how our ideas
about these intersections influence how we think about and experience emotion
and technology themselves.
the historical roots of much of our recent understanding of mediated feelings,
showing how earlier ideas about the telegraph, phonograph, radio, motion
pictures, and other once-new technologies continue to inform our contemporary
thinking. With insightful analysis, Feeling
Mediated explores a series of fascinating arguments about technology and
emotion that became especially heated during the early 20th century. These debates, which carried forward and
transformed earlier discussions of technology and emotion, culminated in a set
of ideas that became institutionalized in the structures of American media
production, advertising, social research, and policy, leaving a lasting impact on
our everyday lives.
Brief description: Brenton J. Malin is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of American Masculinity under Clinton: Popular Media and the Nineties "Crisis of Masculinity."
Review Quotes: "This is an important book for thinking about the relationship between science and public culture. Instead of simply looking at media representations of science, it demonstrates so well how the public sphere itself is a sociotechnical assemblage of networked devices, concepts, bodies, measurements, and various audiences. Malin steers a clear course between technological determinism and social constructivism. We think, feel, and act in relationship with our tools, but it is precisely this relationship that matters. In the end, he leaves the reader with a rich picture of mass media as an assemblage whose infrastructure includes the often neglected social technologies of the human sciences."-- "American Historical Review"