While many studies on mobile wireless communication devices predominantly take a micro-scale approach and concentrate their often ethnographically informed focus on use values, social implications, conversation strategies, changing norms and ethics, culture-dependent domestication, and so forth, with this Ph.D. dissertation I propose to venture into a more historical and comparative direction, mainly in order to shed light on and engage the question of why we invest so much of ourselves in mobile wireless communication devices in the first place. I aim to extend the existing body of research on mobile communication to include a more expanded view of the development, marketing, and reception of mobile communication technologies, and to provide a more comprehensive account of how mobile communication technologies have come to occupy such a prominent position in our media landscape. Starting with an analysis of how human affects like hope and desire stand at the base of necessary fictions, of myths that tell us that a better tomorrow is near if only we improve, I determine in what ways and to what purpose such hopeful and luring myths come to be expressed in the ideals of communication that are presupposed in various communication models. I show that these ideals, despite the fact that in their radical conclusions they end up being experienced as dystopian scenarios, are powerful strategic elements in portraying communication as something that can can be improved. I then argue that recurrent myths of improved communication inform and constitute the 'good tricks' of media evolution: they supply the discursive tropes of what ideal communication could be, and how it should be reached. Hence, in the development of communication technology we find stories that tell us, over and over again, that better communication is at hand, if only the technology is perfected and people learn how to use it effectively. To analyse the function of idealised ideas of communication in media development, I take on a multi-sided perspective that adheres to the guidelines of what is called a 'media archaeological approach', which deals with studying cyclically recurring discursive elements in the historical contexts of media machines. With this approach I proceed to uncover the regulative function of utopian communication claims in order to study how throughout time they have known various manifestations, and to what extent they play a role in co-constructing discourses of mobile wireless communication devices. This dissertation concludes with the notion that so far all media have tried to reach ideals of communication by improving on themselves, but have failed. Mobile wireless communication devices, as the most recent addition to our media spectrum, may seem to achieve communication utopia, but our experience and expectations of these media are surprisingly similar to those of older media; they reconfirm and reinforce the idea that actually reaching an all-encompassing 'anyone, anything, anytime, anywhere' experience can be both a blessing and a curse, that the desire for ideal communication is a tragic and paradoxical yet highly powerful regulative principle in our media evolution.

The Telephone, the Microphone, and the Phonograph

Tantalisingly Close: An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media

This article uses the history of early sound recording technology in the united States between 1878 and 1915 to show how published discourse contributed to the way the talking machine was defined and situated as a commercially viable product. Comparing the published accounts of Edison's phonograph and Berliners gramophone in popular scientific articles between 1878 and 1896 illustrates that technological advances in sound recording technology take on important cultural meanings. Critical to these meanings is the way in which the technological “fidelity” is linguistically transformed into an aesthetic quality, projected and interpreted within demonstrable values of musical culture. Beginning in 1902, the Victor Talking Machine Company, formed to market the gramophone, took advantage of these cultural meanings to claim a technological advantage over Edison's cylinder recorder. Whose voice was recorded became part of the claim to technological superiority. The Victor Company succeeded in capitalizing “Culture” by promoting their recordings of opera stars like Enrico Caruso as technologically and culturally faithful to live musical performance and as a democratically available access to a privileged lifestyle. Thus did the Victor Company use a terrier and a tenor to legitimate their talking machine as an American musical instrument

Aesthetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture: How the Talking Machine Became a Musical Instrument

A fter “filling four dozen cylinders,” Mark Twain confessed to William Dean Howells in April 1891 that he had given up trying to dictate his latest novel The American Claimant into a phonograph that Howells had rented for him.1 As a result of his experience, Twain, unlike those astounded early listeners who found the Victorian phonograph a “recording angel,” concluded it was a corrupting demon. “You can’t write literature with it,” he wrote to Howells, “because it hasn’t any ideas & it hasn’t any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk, or vigor of action, or felicity of expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, & as grave & unsmiling as the devil” (641). Within the novel itself, Twain blasted the supposed utility of the new invention when his hero Colonel Sellers proposes a “grand adaptation of the phonograph to marine service”: “You store up profanity in it for use at sea . . . a ship can’t afford a hundred mates; but she can afford a hundred Cursing Phonographs. . . . Imagine a big storm, and a hundred of my machines all cursing away at once—splendid spectacle, splendid!—you couldn’t hear yourself think. Ship goes through that storm perfectly serene—she’s just as safe as if she’d been on shore.”2 With his fruitless experiment in dictation, Twain joined an increasing number of writers who recognized that while the phonograph, which had been invented by Thomas Edison in 1878 and “perfected” by him ten years later, might delight and affirm those recording their voices, it could also mock and betray them. Endless repetition of a disembodied voice had the potential to distort even the most benign speech into a monotonous rant that sounded diabolical, perhaps even terrifying. As an audience member at one of the early demonstrations of the machine famously put it, “It sounds more like the devil every time.”3 Although the art of ventriloquy historically had fostered the notion of a gap between speaker and voice, the phonograph mechanized this theatrical act, displacing it with a simple scientific process that had similar results. Quite suddenly in the late 1880s, throwing voices became easy, but lost was the control that the ventriloquist had always had over placement and timing. With such fiendish possibilities, the operation of the phonograph

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The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice

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Graphomania: Composing Subjects in Late-Victorian Gothic Fiction and Technology

This thesis is an exploration and problematization of the practice of lipsynching to prerecorded song in both professional and vernacular contexts, covering over a century of diverse artistic practices from early sound cinema through to the current popularity of vernacular internet lipsynching videos. This thesis examines the different ways in which the practice provides a locus for discussion about musical authenticity, challenging as well as re-confirming attitudes towards how technologically-mediated audio-visual practices represent musical performance as authentic or otherwise. It also investigates the phenomenon in relation to the changes in our relationship to musical performance as a result of the ubiquity of recorded music in our social and private environments, and the uses to which we put music in our everyday lives. This involves examining the meanings that emerge when a singing voice is set free from the necessity of inhabiting an originating body, and the ways in which under certain conditions, as consumers of recorded song, we draw on our own embodiment to imagine “the disembodied”. The main goal of the thesis is to show, through the study of lipsynching, an understanding of how we listen to, respond to, and use recorded music, not only as a commodity to be consumed but as a culturally-sophisticated and complex means of identification, a site of projection, introjection, and habitation, and, through this, a means of personal and collective creativity.

/pdf/lipsynching-popular-song-recordings-and-the-disembodied-4bk17jxy7a.pdf

The Telephone, the Microphone, and the Phonograph

Citations

Tantalisingly Close: An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media

Aesthetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture: How the Talking Machine Became a Musical Instrument

The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice

Graphomania: Composing Subjects in Late-Victorian Gothic Fiction and Technology

Lipsynching : popular song recordings and the disembodied voice

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