In this Book
- Tantalisingly Close: An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: Amsterdam University Press
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
summary
While studies of mobile wireless communication devices usually focus on their social implications, De Vries proposes to venture into a more historical and comparative direction to shed light on our preoccupation with them in the first place. He constructs an archaeological view of the development of communication technologies over the past 200 years, providing a comprehensive account of how persistent hopes and beliefs have come to give mobile wireless media such a prominent position today. Our expectations and uses of them are surprisingly similar to those of older media; consequently, they reconfirm the idea that living in an ‘anyone, anything, anytime, anywhere’ world is both a blessing and a curse, and that the desire for sublime communication is a tragic yet highly powerful regulative principle in our media evolution.
Table of Contents
- Title, Copyright
- pp. 1-4
- Preface and acknowledgements
- pp. 7-10
- Introduction
- pp. 11-24
- Part I. Venturing into the Familiar Unknown
- 1. Discourses of progress and utopia
- pp. 27-56
- Part II. Where Angels Speak
- 4. Mobile communication dreams
- pp. 125-162
- References
- pp. 187-206
Additional Information
ISBN
9789048514915
Related ISBN(s)
9789089643544
MARC Record
OCLC
1178919619
Launched on MUSE
2020-07-30
Language
English
Open Access
Yes
Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND