Abstract
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL9000 expresses both aspiration and fear, showing an affective dimension to its existence: machine emotion as well as machine intelligence. Is this simply the stuff of science fiction? We know that technology, from phonography to Internet websites like Facebook, can be used to capture, communicate and transmit emotions, and it is an easy step from there to think of technology as itself emotionally powerful. In this book, Brenton Malin attends to the rhetorical uses and consequences of the technology and emotion relation, with the intention that this will enable us to think more critically of the ways in which we interact with and through communications media. It develops and works with a welcome historical perspective, with Malin focusing on the United States during the first 35 years of the 20th century. This was a period in which the rhetorical of the technological sublime was flowing apace. The idea that communications technologies could capture and transmit emotion was taken seriously, especially in administrative research (to use Lazarsfeld’s term). Malin explores the intersection of thinking about technology with thinking about emotion, drawing particular attention to media physicalism as a pronounced technologized version of the human body. He does so through chapters dealing with specific communications technologies, from stereoscopes through recording and radio broadcasting to cinematography and related recording technologies. A concluding chapter considers the legacy of early 20th century attitudes to emotion and technology, showing how the rhetoric of media physicalism persists in the early 21st century. Malin has written an illuminating study, bringing to our attention areas of research and thinking, some now quite neglected, that are concerned with the complex relationship between media technologies and our emotional lives. In the contemporary period, when so-called new media seem to some to demand attention only to their newness, this book offers the salutary reminder that views taken to older yet once-new technologies continue to influence interpretations of our more recent experience.