Sublime Communication Technologies [Hardcover]

This lively new study?is a critical cultural history of communication technologies, from railways and telegraphy to computers and the Internet, in which?Rod Giblett argues that these technologies?play a pivotal role in the cultural history of modernity and its project of the sublime.Preface Acknowledgements Flow along a Channel: Communication and its Technologies? Crude Conqueror of Nature: Steam Railways? Mind over Matter: Electrical Telegraphy??? Shooting the Event: The Camera is a Gun, Photography is a Shot The Hell of Images: Cinema Paradiso?? Magician's Bower and Monstrous Mechanical: The Car as Communication Technology? The Magical in the Modern: Ethereal Radio? Disciplinary and Fl?nerie: The Panopticon and Panorama of Television? Orbiting in the Sublime Company of Heavenly Bodies: Satellites from Cold War to Gulf War? The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace and the Slimy Swamps of War: Computers and the Internet Blue Sky Mining: Spectrum and Space References Index

'An engagement with the history of the future immediately aligns [this] book and its project with the wider issues of our time: interdisciplinarity, ecological responsibility, and environmental sustainability. This is a book with a global agenda... rich, stimulating and rewarding' - Lelia Green, Australian Journal of Communication

'Sublime Communication Technologies is a lively read and a useful contribution to theorising media, space and body and bringing together a range of diverse theorists and -ospheres examples.' - Mark Balnaves, Media International Australia

'This is a trenchantly argued and important book whose arguments deserve to be widely read and taken very seriously. Giblett convincingly shows his readers that if we unthinkingly take for granted what might be at stake in the existence of modern communications technologies we are likely to overlook some of the most important political, social, and intellectual challenges posed by recent history and by lÃâ