Then You Need a Telegraphone (1906)
1 2013-12-19T08:18:28-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339 249 2 From the Magazine of Business (July-December 1906) plain 2013-12-19T08:21:05-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339This page has paths:
- 1 2013-11-26T14:30:08-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339 Media Jentery Sayers 6 All Media for Making the Perfect Record, American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P plain 8387 2013-12-19T08:58:37-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339
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- 1 2013-10-14T18:22:29-07:00 No Neat Distinctions between Genres 8 An Array of Publications about the Telegraphone Emphasized and Exaggerated Its Specifications plain 2014-01-01T16:51:03-08:00 Read collectively, almost every publication referenced in this essay contains hyperbole, dramatization, or prose bordering on science fiction. What’s more, most of these popular publications privilege the pleasing aesthetics of magnetic audio, stressing its noise-free character, ease of erasure, and amenability to productive listening. In so doing, they tend to eclipse or inaccurately depict the particulars of brittle wire, glitchy playback mechanisms, and isolating earpieces. And yet, curiously enough, most of them explain magnetic recording with precision. For instance, recall Reeve’s two-page demonstration in The Dream Doctor. It reads like a technology journal or patent of its time. Although such explanations do not always make for an engaging read, they do demystify aspects of magnetic recording for audiences who are unaware of the process. Plus, they trouble assumptions about the content of popular representations—a troubling that would flatter Reeve’s realist sensibility. His scientific detective stories construct and enact technologies to perform speculative functions without entirely abandoning the material specificities of their processes. This claim is not to say Reeve never stretches the affordances of those particulars. He certainly does. It is to say that materialist histories can be comprehensive without dichotomizing writings as “popular” (or “cultural”) and “expert” (or “technical”). Indeed, when it comes to learning about the stuff of media and technologies, neat distinctions between genres can be misleading.
