Abstract
Whether getting plaudits or the pillory, new communication technologies tend to bring out polarizing emotions in people who talk about them. This was true in ancient Greece, when Socrates, among others, criticized writing in an era of orality. It has been true in recent years, as when commentators such as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, gets pitted against the views of Steven Johnson, and his ideas in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.
Brenton Malin’s newest book, Feeling Mediated, does not pick a side. It instead redirects such divisive debates. It does so first by stripping away from them the related propaganda and mysticism, and second by repositioning those discussions into the social, cultural, historical, and ethical contexts that they share. His primary approach includes a comparison and analysis of the rhetorics of both emotions and technologies, particularly those that arose in 1890s to 1930s’ America, when radio, phonographs, and motion pictures became established. Along the way, he puzzles over the intertwining of emotions and technologies that gets shrouded in a pervasive attitude of what he calls “media physicalism.” This key term describes the focus on physiology or medium affordances at the intersection of thought about emotion and technology that shields larger societal understandings of mediated emotions.
Rather than delve into the emotional potency of any particular technology, Malin concentrates on our persistent uses of language to relate our feelings about communication tools as they emerge. These rhetorics have clear impacts on the ways in which we talk to each other and simultaneously morph those feelings into the metaphors that the technologies create. In this vein, Malin picks a variety of compelling examples from which to make his points about media physicalism. These arguments include both artifacts that might seem obscure today, such as a stereoscope, and also prominent and enduring modern media forms, such as the movies. Malin, an associate professor of communication and the associate director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, also has written American Masculinity Under Clinton: Popular Media and the Nineties Crisis of Masculinity, plus a diverse collection of other pieces that similarly investigate ways in which identity gets composed and shaped by—and especially through—the media.
In odd contrast to the topic being addressed, Malin chooses to craft the first few chapters of this book in a nearly emotionless style. This clinical approach conveys a textured resonance of his deep knowledge about the subject matter, through the careful layering of the meticulously collected evidence. It also can plod along, in many places, in an almost encyclopedic tone, with barely a hint of a humanly voice. This procedural style lays bare for all to witness many collections of historical rhetorical passages that demonstrate the recurring nature of discussions people have had about new technologies, such as this 1883 Philadelphia Medical Times prognosis:
When a man only got his letters in the morning he was pretty safe from surprises for the rest of the day; but with the telegraph he has no remission from anxiety and is on the tenter-hooks all day long.
To build the case, Malin then juxtaposes eerily familiar quotes from other old articles, such as “the telegraph’s ‘constant excitements of feeling unjustified by fact . . . must in the end, deteriorate the intelligence of all to whom the telegraph appeals.” And, the telegraph “searches every nook and corner of the world every day, dragging into light, not only every crime that is committed, but every disagreeable feature of human society.”
As part of his evidence against media physicalism, Malin documents various machines created to measure humanity’s most precious immaterials, such as artistry. The “voice tonoscope” of the early 1900s, for example, claimed to be able to assess the beauty of sound better than a highly trained listener—by measuring sound waves and determining not only that the vibratos of the best singers oscillated at an average of a half-tone, and at an average rate of six or seven cycles per second but also that the true beauty of the voice could be found below its surface, in its technical details. Measures of intelligence, vocal articulation, and truth-telling all could become processed and understood through, as Malin summarized, the “phenomena observable to the laboratory apparatus.” Such heavy phrasing sets the tone of the book throughout the first four chapters, until Malin unwinds in Chapter 5 and the conclusion, with a much different voice, as one who has made his charge and now intends to prosecute any opposition to it. Those who persist through the long discovery stages of the book will discover a trove of insightful commentary at its moment of judgment.
When he loosens his tone, Malin sharpens his weapons against prevalent narratives of oversimplification, which many times also serve to perpetuate discrimination by class, gender, and race. Nailing the biggest irony of this trope, Malin also argues how the laboratory instruments (as new technologies themselves) measure other new technologies in ways that create a complex feedback loop. This loop generates a variety of problems and contradictions for researchers, which not only make comprehension of their findings difficult to assess but raise even deeper doubts about projections they make onto a larger cultural situation, or even more speciously, onto multiple cultures at once.