Full Description
What will wireless media be like in the future? How might they change people and societies? Will the future differ significantly from the past? Wireless Futures argues that meaningful answers to these century-old questions depend equally on markets, technical limits, and sociotechnical imaginaries of media change. Before wireless came to mean 'Wi-Fi,' before 'the wireless' meant 'radio,' even before the first trials in radiotelegraphy, it was a central object of financial and theoretical speculation. Wireless Futures unpacks the speculative media question for the case of German modernity. Interrogating the materiality, temporality, and contingency of wireless, this critical project contributes to media philosophy, modernism & modernity studies, and German literary & cultural studies. Wireless Futures models an approach to speculative media based on testing out the limits of media knowledge and questioning the limits of limit-thinking. It shows how the present continuously remakes connections between the past.
Contents
Series Editors' Preface
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Preface: Signs, Signals, Speculations
Introduction: Wireless Futures, 1900/2000
Wireless Imaginations
Speculative Media Studies
Chapter Overviews
Coming to Terms with Wirelessness
1. Ends of the Wire: Thinking Through Wireless, Reimagining Media Change
Wired Wireless
Wireless Before Wireless
From Origins to Origin Stories
Media, Philosophy, Anthropology
Reimagining Media Change
2. Etheric Speculations: Science, Fiction, and the Power of Prediction
The Physics of Wireless Media
Action at a Distance
Epistemic Things
Ether Stories
Specters of the Wireless Spectrum
Figurations of Electromagnetism
3. The Wireless Age: From Imaginary Media to Speculative Infrastructure
Modernity, Novelty, Media Topoi
The Primal Scene of Wireless Communication
Telemedia and Telesthesia
The Wireless Century
Pocket Wireless
Speculative Infrastructure
4. Patent Fiction: Wireless Writing in Worldwide Networks
Range Tests
National Systems
International Regulations
Worldwide Wireless Networks
Signals Intelligence
Wireless Writing Beyond the Telegram Style
5. Beyond Broadcasting: Programming, Forecasting, and Power
Radiodetermination
The Absent-Minded Audience
Emergent Programs
Energetic Futures
'Radio for all'?
6. The Antenna: At the Limits of Wireless Imaginations
Beautiful Antennas
Structure and Infrastructure
Wireless Stations
Broadcasting Towers
Crisis, Panic, Futurity
Conclusion: Wireless Futures, 2000/2100
Notes
Bibliography
