Description
Book SynopsisAn exploration of trends and cultures connected to electrical telegraphy and recent digital communications, this collection emerges from the research project Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1866â1900, which investigated cultural phenomena relating to the 1866 transatlantic telegraph. It interrogates the ways in which society, politics, literature and art are imbricated with changing communications technologies, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Contributors consider control, imperialism and capital, as well as utopianism and hope, grappling with the ways in which human connections (and their messages) continue to be shaped by communications infrastructures.
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1
ANNE CHAPMAN AND NATALIE HUME
1 To Be Connected: Perspectives on Autonomy and Risk from the Electric Age 7
MANU LUKSCH AND MUKUL PATEL
2 Cyborg Imperium, c. 1900 48
DUNCAN BELL
3 Universal Visual Languages in the Age of Telegraphy 71
GRACE BROCKINGTON
4 Plotting Passengers at a Metropolitan Station: Paddington in the Mid-Nineteenth Century 96
NICOLA K IRKBY
5 ‘Some Sentient Creature’. The Cable Body and the Body of Labour: Robert Dudley, William Howard Russell and the 1865 Voyage of the Great Eastern 114
KATE FLINT
6 Signal Markings in Victorian Miscellanies: Noise and Signal from the Idyll to Aestheticism 137
CAROLINE ARSCOTT AND CLARE PETTITT
7 ‘Recoding the Sea’: Uneven and Combined Capitalism in the Work of Allan Sekula (Telegraph Version) 161
GAIL DAY AND STEVE EDWARDS
8 random international 189
INTERVIEW BY ANNE CHAPMAN AND NATALIE HUME
