The Personal Interview

From the Publisher: \nThe telephone looms large in our lives, as ever present in modern societies as cars and television. Claude Fischer presents the first social history of this vital but little-studied technologyhow we encountered, tested, and ultimately embraced it with enthusiasm. Using telephone ads, oral histories, telephone industry correspondence, and statistical data, Fischer's work is a colorful exploration of how, when, and why Americans started communicating in this radically new manner. Studying three California communities, Fischer uncovers how the telephone became integrated into the private worlds and community activities of average Americans in the first decades of this century. Women were especially avid in their use, a phenomenon which the industry first vigorously discouraged and then later wholeheartedly promoted. Again and again Fischer finds that the telephone supported a wide-ranging network of social relations and played a crucial role in community life, especially for women, from organizing children's relationships and church activities to alleviating the loneliness and boredom of rural life. Deftly written and meticulously researched, America Calling adds an important new chapter to the social history of our nation and illuminates a fundamental aspect of cultural modernism that is integral to contemporary life. \nAuthor Biography: Claude S. Fischer is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of To Dwell among Fris: Personal Networks in Town and City (1982) and The Urban Experience (1984).

America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940

necessarily add to the critique of news organisations as a whole, while also denying newscaster agency. A more important issue is the lack of theoretical or conceptual application in the text. Theory is mentioned in passing – the analysis of ideological interest is mentioned (p. 30), and moral panic theory is also signposted in the conclusion (p. 166). Aside from these references, there is no attempt to develop a detailed analysis of the ideological processes at work (the occasional mention of neo-liberalism, the Washington consensus and World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policy do not do this). Neither is there an attempt to apply the stages of any moral panic approach to the data. Moreover, there exists no rigorous application or development of concepts of stereotyping, prejudice, immigrational racism or stigma, which seem to be fundamental to the critique presented. Although more theory would have been satisfying for this reader, the lack of academic or theoretical terminology does render the text highly accessible. The book will be of use to professionals working in the field and should be understandable to policymakers. One last criticism concerns the interview and focus group sample. This might have been added to through the inclusion on white Britons as a focus group. This population may have allowed the study to record the existence of a majoritarian discourse that mirrors media coverage of refugees. Overall, this text is a good example of what social science can add to our understanding of the social world. It takes the dominant ideological myths created on some of the most vulnerable, stigmatised people in society and begins to illuminate the structures that encourage these myths.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age:

The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom

(2006) The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times History: Reviews of New Books: Vol 34, No 4, pp 134-135

The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

This article proposes a contextualist approach to machine learning and aesthetics, using LANDR, an online platform that offers automated music mastering and that trumpets its use of supervised mach...

/pdf/machine-learning-in-context-or-learning-from-landr-538rhvzbrg.pdf

Machine Learning in Context, or Learning from LANDR: Artificial Intelligence and the Platformization of Music Mastering

Preface: The Moral Economy of American Broadcasting 1 At Ringside 2 Jumping the Waves 3 Voice of the Listener 4 Listeners Write the Scripts 5 Measuring Culture 6 Gang Busters 7 Vox Jox Epilogue List of Abbreviations Notes Index Acknowledgments

The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public

This article traces informal world cinema networks at Soviet film festivals. It argues that the cultural diplomacy approach, where state objectives determine the value of cultural exchange, fails t...

World cinema at Soviet festivals: cultural diplomacy and personal ties

Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news,” Gilbert Keith Chesterton pointed out in 1923.1 Yet today historians are more and more taking this transitional period as their subject of study. Consider Thomas J. Sugrue on Barack Obama and the legacy of the civil rights movement, Bethany Moreton on WalMart as an example of Christian free enterprise, or the Journal of American History publishing a special issue on the 9/11 terror attacks in September 2002, only a year after the tragedy.2 This issue of Radical History Review (RHR) explores this transitional, recent period of history as it relates to digital culture at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, a period characterized by a post9/11 growth in the use of electronic surveillance by states and governments, a surge in the use of social media by social movements, rising online activism, or “hacktivism,” and charged debates about the impact of digital research tools and digital information on the nature and practice of scholarly research. In a rapidly changing digital information and communication world, we believe that radical scholars from all fields, including history, must take seriously the challenge of documenting, examining and analyzing, historicizing, and, where necessary, contesting the political, cultural, and historical trajectories that are presently unfolding. Some historians have cautioned against a “presentism” within history scholarship, where contemporary concerns shape investigations of past eras.3 Too old to be news, but too young to be the object of conventional historical scholarship, the

Framing the Contested History of Digital Culture

Some time between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, my grandmother, Kira Razlogova, translated an African film at the Moscow Interna tional Film Festival. It was an official screening, with the ambassador of the African country present in the audience. She sat in a translator’s booth at the back of the theater, reading into the microphone from a printed French dialogue list just given to her. She had never seen this film before. She watched it now for the first time through the window of her booth, and synced her reading to the spoken lines flowing into her earphones, lines in an African language she did not know. Loudspeakers transmitted her voice into the cinema hall over the partially muted original soundtrack. Ten minutes before the end, the script ran out of pages. The film goes on; she has nothing to say; an administrator storms into her booth predicting a diplomatic crisis. To save the situation, she went ahead and invented the dialogue for the rest of the film on the basis of the moving images. After the screening, the ambassador, made aware that the script was too short, thanked her for making up the final scenes. He claimed her translation was quite close to the original (Kira Razlogova). My grandmother’s experience underscores Soviet innovation in simultaneous film translation—as an improvisational sound art and as a form of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. As the postwar Soviet Union opened up its cultural borders, it aimed to compete with Western powers for the attention of the decolonizing and unaligned countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Engerman). Film festivals in Moscow and Tashkent played a key role in this project. Simultaneous interpreters made these festivals possible, through their screenings as well as their heated debates about the role of cinema in newly independent states and ongoing liberation movements in the Third World. The Soviet state tightly controlled the festival in Moscow, and to a lesser extent, in Tashkent. Even so, festival participants formed friendships and discovered films in ways that explored dissident and postcolonial politics. New work on world cinema, film festivals, and film translation has barely acknowledged the existence of live film interpreting after the silent era, when live sound accompaniment was widespread. 1 Audiovisual translation scholars today focus almost exclusively on dubbing and subtitles (Gambier). I learned of this forgotten chapter of Soviet and world cinema history only because I experienced live translation myself,

Elena Razlogova

Papers

Machine Learning in Context, or Learning from LANDR: Artificial Intelligence and the Platformization of Music Mastering

The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public

World cinema at Soviet festivals: cultural diplomacy and personal ties

Framing the Contested History of Digital Culture

The Politics of Translation at Soviet Film Festivals during the Cold War