Colligan and Linley 2011

Colligan, Colette and Margaret Linley, eds. Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Pub. Company, 2011.

intro

… media machines, but in tandem with unprecedented increases in literacy rates, enlargement of urban spaces and imperial networks, and expansion of industrialization and commodity exchange, the nineteenth century experienced the emergence of media ubiquity.

after a century of innovative encounters between industrial technology and the communicative imperative, media emerged in the early twentieth century as a modern myth.

More than an umbrella under which to huddle the aggregate means of mass communication, media has come to describe an industry and an ideology.

The moment of consolidation of the nineteenth-century multiplicity of media into a totality of unique singularity in the early twentieth century thus marks the simultaneous appropriation and disavowal of media history, the spatial incorporation of the historical many into the one true media now understood as the first sign of a media matrix. The significance of this double move of spatial appropriation and temporal erasure cannot be understated. When the word that had been used in the particular to refer to specific means of mass communication evolved into the singular term for the heterogeneous plurality of media, history would seem to begin out of nowhere anew.

any recovery of the history of media must therefore also historicize media logic: temporal rupture signifies the renunciation that is a precondition for copying on a different register.

The introduction of the electric telegraph in the middle of the century not only revolutionized communications, it also retuned the ear and retooled the sense of touch. Similarly the introduction of the solo piano recital trained audiences to listen for the sound of the musician’s touch.

This incorporation of the body into the period’s mediating structures reveals not only the expansion of the human sensorium, but also shows how the two were enmeshed, creating the possibility for understanding the seeing, hearing, and touching body as a multi-media machine.

The science of perception and the study of physiology grew alongside the marvelously unstable triumvirate of object, organ, and medium.

Seeing, hearing, and touching were mediated through the instruments of science, measured and objectified for the larger purpose of knowing, educating, and modernizing the senses.

if the book had ordered cognition literally since the renaissance through a spectrum of bibliographical practices from title pages and chapter divisions right down to the spacing of paragraphs and typesetting, the mass produced multi-media art book of the mid-Victorian parlor permeated domestic space with the touch and smell of the physical artifact, the music of the words on the page, and the dual perspective of reading and gazing at images.

attending a piano recital, playing a player piano, operating telegraph networks, even reading Braille—these too were unique media events of the nineteenth century that generated new tactile-acoustic models of social experience. While suggesting music’s renewed centrality to art and society, they also participated in a

developing early digital revolution that converted data into discrete units for storage, transmission, and expression and altered psychic and social consciousness.

Media became a practice in the nineteenth century, a device, process, and artform that could be practiced as one might practice piano, writing, or politics.

13We are interested in the meanings of touch that developed alongside digital technologies and experiments with electricity, 14especially its repeated figuration as an escape from visual hegemony and alternative forms of media.

…ins and david Thorburn’s Rethinking Media Change does similar historical mapping while James lyons and John Plunkett’s Multimedia Histories from the Magic Lantern to the Internet applies a dialectical approach to the study of past and present visual media.

transportation lay important groundwork for thinking further about new haptic and kinetic encounters with time and space: See Jay clayton, richard Menke, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and Michael Freeman.