Sublime Communication Technologies (Hardcover)

This is a lively look at communication technologies from railways and telegraph to the mobile video phone - a critical cultural history.This title provides an account of competing cultural theorists' positions illustrated by case studies of real-life communication technologies. It investigates the metaphorical and cultural 'baggage' that comes with these representatives of the sublime as a commentary on other aspects of political and social life, especially on consumption of cultural products. It is the first book to assemble in a single overall account the work of Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin and Paul Virilio on communication technologies. This lively new study is a critical cultural history of communication technologies from railways and telegraphy to computers and the Internet, in which Rod Giblett argues that these technologies play a pivotal role in the cultural history of modernity and its project of the sublime.