Digital Mobility: a Critical-Materialist Exploration of Dispersed

DIGITAL MOBILITY: A CRITICAL-MATERIALIST EXPLORATION OF DISPERSED

AGENCIES AS ASSEMBLAGE

MATTHEW CHARLES CORN

(Under the Direction of James F. Hamilton)

ABSTRACT

The widespread use of digital mobile devices has accompanied a range of new practices, as well as hopes, fears, and prognostications regarding the relationship between humans and technologies. This dissertation investigates the study of human/technology relationships and corresponding conceptions of agency.

Traditional approaches to studying communications technologies rely on distinguishing individuals from devices, thus reflecting an Enlightenment and empiricist tendency that isolates and places individuals or devices at the center of effectivity. To address the inadequacies of this approach, the term “digital mobility” calls attention to the dispersion of agencies constituted by humans and devices rather than the movement of humans or devices through geographic space.

After presenting the theoretical and conceptual basis for the study, the dissertation focuses on two component practices which comprise digital mobility as an assemblage of dispersed agency. Historical formations of miniaturization produce objects as transitive rather than whole and complete, thus critiquing empiricist conceptions of objects as unitary wholes.

Whereas crafting miniatures relied on a referent, the generalizable process of miniaturization discards the referent and instead shrinks capabilities. Likewise, historical formations of remote control both affirm and negate Enlightenment conceptions of individual agency. While remote control allows the distant manifestation of individual command, its production as a nonhuman capability renders devices as active enabled through their human counterparts. Drawing from the concepts of transitive and active objects, the study then focuses on three contemporary agencies as digital mobilities and their articulations with broader formations. The dissertation concludes by discussing the implications of digital mobility for the study of communication and agency, as well as offering directions for future studies.

INDEX WORDS: media, communication, technology, digital mobility, agency, assemblage,

materialism, miniaturization, remote control, smartphone, Google Glass,

Kinect, Siri

DIGITAL MOBILITY: A CRITICAL-MATERIALIST EXPLORATION

OF DISPERSED AGENCIES AS ASSEMBLAGE

MATTHEW CHARLES CORN

BA, Southern Methodist University, 2006

MA, University of Georgia, 2008

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2012

Matthew Charles Corn

DIGITAL MOBILITY: A CRITICAL-MATERIALIST EXPLORATION OF DISPERSED

AGENCIES AS ASSEMBLAGE

MATTHEW CHARLES CORN

Major Professor: James F. Hamilton Committee: Horace Newcomb Janice Hume Carolina Acosta-Alzuru Ronald Bogue

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2012

DEDICATION

For my mom who always offers an encouraging word. For my dad who brings everything back down to Earth. For my sister who graciously laughs at my most unfunny jokes. For Kristen who empathized with every bout of joy and frustration throughout this process. I hope to make you all proud.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Jay Hamilton, whom I will probably forever refer to as “Dr. Hamilton.”

Your graduate seminar opened my eyes to exciting perspectives and strategies for studying communication and culture. I had no doubt that a dissertation directed by you would push me beyond my preconceived limits. The large majority of this project was conducted away from

Athens, and yet we kept in near constant communication. We have exchanged innumerable emails, within which are words of wisdom and encouragement, as well as heaps of patience and understanding. You have helped me to accomplish my proudest achievement. Thank you.

Each of my committee members deserves special recognition for his and her role in shaping this project. Thank you to Dr. Horace Newcomb who has encouraged me and countless other students to pursue their interests and to think outside conventional boundaries. Thank you to Dr. Janice Hume whose course on historical research methods allowed me to expand my scope and to paint a broader picture. Thank you to Dr. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, the kindest and most encouraging professor a graduate student could wish to have. Thank you to Dr. Ron Bogue who encourages his students not to “apply” theory, but to put it to work.

Thank you to the great people at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, specifically Ms. Debbie Sickles who guided me through the entire time. Thank you to all of my classmates for the exchange of ideas, but most importantly for the friendships that will last well beyond our time together in Athens.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v

PREFACE………………………………………………………………………………………… 1

INTRODUCTION: FROM DEVICES TO AGENCY ...... 3

Notes ...... 7

CHAPTER

1 HUMANS, TECHNOLOGIES, AGENCY ...... 9

Distinctions ...... 10

Relations ...... 12

Fusions-in-Practice ...... 15

From Mobile Technologies to Mobilities ...... 16

Strategy of Analysis ...... 20

Research Process ...... 23

Overview of Chapters ...... 26

Conclusion ...... 28

Notes ...... 29

2 FROM MINIATURES TO MINIATURIZATION: PRODUCING THE

TRANSITIVE OBJECT ...... 32

Transitive Objects and the Critique of Empiricism ...... 35

Miniatures as Representations ...... 37

Portrait Miniatures ...... 40

Miniatures as Objects ...... 44

From Miniatures to Miniaturization...... 48

Conclusion ...... 53

Notes ...... 54

3 REMOTE CONTROL: PRODUCING THE ACTIVE OBJECT ...... 59

Active Objects and the Critique of Empiricism ...... 62

Early Formations ...... 64

Commanding Performances ...... 69

Assembling Critical Objects and Critical Agencies...... 76

Articulations of Remote Control and Miniaturization ...... 80

Promoting the Active Object ...... 84

Conclusion ...... 88

Notes ...... 89

4 DIGITAL MOBILITIES AS DISPERSED AGENCIES ...... 97

Perceptual Digital Mobilities and Google Glass ...... 99

Kinetic Digital Mobilities and Microsoft Kinect ...... 104

Emotional Digital Mobilities and Siri ...... 110

Conclusion ...... 116

Notes ...... 120

5 CONCLUSION: ...... 127

Impetus of the Study ...... 127

vii

Chapter Summary ...... 128

Implications for Communication and Agency ...... 130

Directions for Future Research ...... 132

Notes ...... 135

REFERENCES ...... 136

viii

PREFACE

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with television. While certain shows grabbed my attention, it was television’s ambience, its everydayness, which sparked the most interest. During the late

2000s my interest in television gave way to a fascination with smartphones for many of the same reasons. The sudden presence of smartphones everywhere and seemingly by everyone was like something I had never seen before. Again, it wasn’t the devices themselves that intrigued me, but the ways in which they quickly permeated so many facets of everyday life. Perhaps this interest stems from my age, as someone who can easily recall a time before this stuff, but yet could see how necessary and routine they had become even to me. There was something going on culturally, and I wanted to know more about it. That curiosity launched this dissertation.

Perhaps it’s fitting a dissertation titled “Digital Mobility” would have been written in such a digital and mobile fashion. The majority of this work took place away from Athens, and to complete this dissertation I relied on a smartphone, an internet connection, hundreds of email exchanges, Skype sessions, and the loyal companionship of a 15 pound Boston Terrier aptly named Gypsie. A typical day would begin by checking email on my smartphone. Dr. Hamilton would have already responded to a chapter draft, often so early in the morning I wondered if he maintained a secret life as a farmer. Subsequent days would be spent at one of two libraries, or at home logged into online research databases. After some time I would send another draft and begin the process again. Those email exchanges form the diary of this dissertation – ideas in formulation, struggles, dead-ends, and tiny victories. They also recall the obsessions that came to comprise a good portion of this study.

While that describes the typical days, the atypical days also shaped this experience. Many were spent travelling the four and a half hours between Athens and Tuscaloosa, where library books from two universities bounced around the backseat. After moving to Tuscaloosa, some days were spent battling a persistent flood in my new apartment while trying to meet self- imposed deadlines. Another was spent at the Birmingham museum to see a special temporary exhibit that coincidentally related to one of my chapters. While these were the unusual days, they are the ones that I remember the most.

I also remember sitting in an undergraduate philosophy class thinking to myself that if I wrote a dissertation, if I could muster the discipline and will-power to produce something such as this, I will have truly accomplished something. After finishing this project I am more humble than ever. There’s so much I don’t know.

INTRODUCTION

FROM DEVICES TO AGENCY

Although extending beyond mobile phones in ways that will become apparent, this study was born in 2009 out of an interest in the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones in everyday life.

In an estimated global population of roughly 6.8 billion, mobile phone subscriptions reached 4.6 billion by the end of 2009 with estimates of 5 billion at the end of 2010.1 By 2010, 85 percent of

U.S. adults owned a mobile phone, with 96 percent of adults ages 18-29 owning at least one.2

The number of active mobile phones in the U.S. finally broke past the total population at the end of 2011as traditional landline phones continued their slow but steady decline.3 But just as landlines were replaced by mobile phones, smartphones began overtaking their predecessors. By

March 2012 more Americans owned smartphones than “ordinary” mobiles, 46 to 41 percent.4

Such rapid growth spawned a range of projects, studies, and campaigns focusing on the impacts of mobile phones on individuals and societies. The 2010 PBS Frontline documentary

Digital Nation captures the sentiment well, stating on its dust jacket that mobile phones and other digital technologies are remaking “nearly every aspect of modern culture,” from the ways we work to how we socialize.5 Accompanying this accelerating curiosity were a host of worries regarding the mobile phone’s impact on mental and physical health. Several commentators warned about the potential risks of brain cancer associated with mobile phone use, although research from the World Health Organization, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health found no link between mobile phone use and diseases such as brain cancer. 6 Despite

this, worries over the neurological effects of mobile phone use persist.7 Citing a need for more long-term, real-time study, in 2010 researchers across Europe launched COSMOS (Cohort Study of Mobile Phone Use and Health), the largest longitudinal study to date into the potential neurological and cancerous effects of mobile phone use.8 Additionally, worries persist regarding noise-induced hearing loss, with the CDC reporting 12.5 percent of children and adolescents ages 6-19 suffering permanent damage to their hearing.9 Stereo headphones attached to mobile phone devices often reach levels of 100 decibels, a level much higher than the 85 decibels required to damage hearing.10

Other news reports also express worries over the physical, mental, and public safety effects of excessive mobile use, such as increased anxiety, developmental issues in adolescents, and permanent damage to thumbs due to excessive texting.11 Many celebrities joined campaigns such as Oprah Winfrey’s “No Phone Zone” in order to encourage people not to use their mobile phones while driving, citing the large number of deaths and injuries associated with texting and talking while behind the wheel.12 Even walking while using a mobile phone has been called risky due to the many distractions and dangers of busy, crowded urban areas.13

Despite these persistent worries, industry and government advocates tout mobile communication as the future. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has made no secret of this vision, stating at an event in 2010, “We operate with the assumption people will carry with them a mobile device […] at all times.”14 Verizon and other wireless companies have made significant investments in network infrastructure as demands for increased data speeds intensify. According to investment analysts, from 2006 to September 2009 capital expenditures by Verizon and

AT&T on their wireless networks reached $25.4 billion and $21.6 billion, respectively, with spending increases in 2010.15

However, views that the expansion of mobile communication is both inevitable and unproblematic discount significant disagreements. The Federal Communications Commission

(FCC), which controls the allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum, announced in March 2010 its National Broadband Plan with a specific focus on mobile networks. Under the plan, the FCC will allocate 500 MHz for broadband within 10 years, of which 300 MHz would be specifically allocated for mobile use within five years.16 But broadcasters were upset over the FCC’s proposal to reallocate 120 MHz of spectrum currently operated by broadcast networks to wireless providers.17 The National Association of Broadcasters’ (NAB) official statement regarding spectrum reallocation cites currently unused wireless spectrum and “the important public services broadcasters offer to all Americans free of charge.”18 Debates aside, the initiatives by the FCC were at least partially supported by President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, which specifically mentioned the deployment of “high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans” as a key ingredient to “winning the future.”19

It didn’t take long to recognize that these practices, promises, fears, and tensions in the wake of the rapid rise of mobile telephony were not simply responses to the ability to make phone calls more easily. Rather, they suggested that the very patterns and organization of life and perception are undergoing rapid change and reformation. While it is tempting to attribute such changes to the device (as many popular commentators do), the extent and nature of these changes display an effectivity beyond the device. Theorizing and exploring this effectivity then became the key task of this study. The analysis that follows rests on a claim about mobile communications that differs greatly from what supports the praise and concerns only alluded to above. It views this effectivity not as a direct effect of mobile phones or any other device, but as the remaking and acceleration of a particular set of practices, devices, conditions, and institutions

that will be referred to here as “digital mobility,” and as an assemblage (a term explored in more detail below). This revision in turn emphasizes a very different view of what is made “mobile” in mobile communications technologies. Rather than assume that what is made mobile is people or devices, this study views mobility as the dispersion of agency across humans, devices, and the worlds in which they operate. Finally, such a revision is itself based on a critique of humanist,

Enlightenment conceptions of agency, which center agency and explanation in the actions initiated by humans or by devices. Thus, how the assemblages of digital mobility were produced technically, culturally, and historically and in what ways they remain active today becomes the focus of this study.

Notes

1 Lance Whitney, “Cell phone subscriptions to hit 5 billion globally,” CNET, last modified February 16, 2010, http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-10454065-78.html.

2 Aaron Smith, “Gadget Ownership,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, last modified October 14, 2010, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1763/americans-and-their-gadgets- technology-devices.

3 “U.S. Wireless Quick Facts,” CTIA, accessed April 23, 2012, http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/index.cfm/AID/10323; For more on the dramatic decline in landlines and reactions by telecommunications firms, see “America Loses Its Landlines: Cutting the Cord” The Economist, last modified August 13, 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/14214847; Hanna Jones, “Have Cell Phones Killed the Landline Telephone?,” TIME NewsFeed, last modified December 22, 2010, http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/12/22/have-cell-phones-killed-the-landline-telephone/; Sinead Carew, “Verizon profit falls, eyes 8,000 job cuts,” Reuters, last modified July 22, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE56Q1JA20090727.

4 Aaron Smith, “Nearly Half of American Adults are Smartphone Owners,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, last modified March 1, 2012, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-2012.aspx.

5 Digital Nation, produced and directed by Rachel Dretzin (2010; Boston, MA: Public Broadcasting Service and WGBH Educational Foundation, 2010), DVD.

6 Kate Holton and Georgina Prodhan, “Biggest Study on Cellphone Health Effects Launched, Reuters, last modified April 22, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63L1ZD20100422.

7 Russell Goldman and Matt Spector, “Cancer Controversy Causes Consumer Confusion: Will One Scientist’s Warning about a Cancer-Cell Phone Link Change Buyers’ Minds?,” ABC News, last modified July 24, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5444572&page=1.

8 “Cohort Study of Mobile Phone Use and Health,” COSMOS, accessed April 2, 2011, http://www.ukcosmos.org.

9 “Noise-Induced Hearing Loss,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Adolescent and School Health, last modified March 1, 2011, http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/noise/index.htm.

10 Dan Childs, “7 Surprising Ways Cell Phones Affect Your Health: Mobile Devices Can Pose Health Risks – and Not in the Way You Might Think,” ABC News, last modified March 9, 2009, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/story?id=7017768&page=1.

11 Katie Hafner, “Texting may be taking a toll,” New York Times, last modified May 25, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/health/26teen.html?_r=1&8dpc.

12 “No Phone Zone,” accessed September 4, 2012, http://www.oprah.com/questionaire/ipledge.html?id=4.

13 Matt Richtel, “Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone is Risky,” New York Times, last modified January 16, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/technology/17distracted.html.

14 Jason Kincaid, “Eric Schmidt: Mobile is the Future and There’s no Such Thing as Communication Overload,” TechCrunch, last modified April 12, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/eric-schmidt-mobile-is-the-future-and-theres-no-such-thing- as-communication-overload/.

15 Jeff Bounds, “Wireless Wars,” Portfolio.com, last modified February 9, 2010, http://www.portfolio.com/companies-executives/2010/02/09/verizon-leads-att-by-billions-in- infrastructure-spending/.

16 “National Broadband Plan: Executive Summary,” Federal Communications Commission, accessed April 2, 2011, http://www.broadband.gov/plan/executive-summary/.

17 Brian Stelter and Jenna Wortham, “Effort to Widen U.S. Internet Access Sets Up Battle,” New York Times, last modified March 12, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/business/media/13fcc.html.

18 “Promoting Spectrum Policies that Serve the Public,” National Association of Broadcasters, accessed April 2, 2011, http://www.nab.org/advocacy/issue.asp?id=2025&issueid=1011.

19 President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in State of Union Address, January 25, 2011,” The White House Office of the Press Secretary, accessed April 2, 2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/remarks-president-state-union-address.

CHAPTER 1

HUMANS, TECHNOLOGIES, AGENCY

Recent academic studies of mobile phones and other mobile communications technologies address issues ranging from tallies of cross-cultural differences in the proliferation and uses of mobile devices to more critical evaluations regarding the social construction and individual consequences of mobile communication.1 Underlying this range of scholarship are conceptions of the relation between people and technologies and corresponding modes of agency.

The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate these implicit conceptions in order to develop a theoretical basis for this study. These implicit conceptions need to be recovered in order to formulate a key argument this dissertation seeks to make: that new concepts are needed to adequately grasp the integral relation, if not fusion, of individuals to their mobile devices to such a degree that retaining the terms “individuals” and “devices” hinders rather than aids understanding. Existing studies have yet to provide an adequate account of this integral relation and modes of agency.

As a response to this inadequacy, this chapter develops a conception of digital mobility as a contemporary assemblage of component forms and practices that pose contradictions for ideas about agency. By doing so, the focus of scholarly inquiry moves from individuals and their uses, particular devices or institutions (although these certainly play a role), to the assemblages through which they are constituted and practiced as the cultural forms through which they operate and that they help produce.

Distinctions

Several approaches to studying communications technologies rely on making a conceptual distinction between people and devices. As a result, questions regarding agency and determination are pursued largely in terms of whether humans determine technologies or vice versa. Making explicit the varying conceptions of the human/technology relationship and corresponding treatments of agency characterizes a range of scholarship to which this study is a response.

As some influential positions, both McLuhanist medium theory and the cybernetics tradition not only make ontological distinctions between individuals and technologies. They also locate agency within technologies, a move that spawns critiques of essentialism (accepting the technology as the given starting point of analysis) and determinism (claiming that a technology’s intrinsic characteristics are the necessary and sufficient cause of various effects). Medium theory demonstrates this position by not only centering its analysis on the technical device, but also by implicitly placing as the effect of technologies’ causes the “universal” individual. According to the oft-cited maxim, the “medium is the message,” which can be seen as the assertion that what matters in the study of technologies is the technical medium. Technologies are thus seen as the means by which individuals are transformed and transplanted from a fragmented, individualistic society to a “global village” characterized by sensory unification.2

While the expansive field of cybernetics offers more specificity regarding the relationships between humans and technologies, its reliance on a-historical closed systems poses similar problems. Cybernetics emerged with Wiener’s introduction of the term to describe the processes by which, as he put it, both animals and machines engage in communication, and thus ultimately, action.3 Of relevance to scholars of technology was the then controversial proposition

that humans and machines act through, rather than in conjunction with, each other. Rather than conceiving individuals and machines as wholly distinct and thus producing causes and effects in relation to each other, cybernetics attempts to circumvent such instrumentalism by demonstrating how both entities function within a system of information, communication, feedback, loops, and regulation. While such insights have been useful in a range of fields, its focus on closed systems reveals a rigid a-historical functionalism in which machines and humans interact in a continuous loop, leaving the sense of people as virtual automatons within already established, a priori systems.

Whereas the previous approaches locate agency within technologies and systems, the diffusion-of-innovations and uses-and-gratifications approaches to the study of communication technologies emphasize human agency. Rogers defined diffusion as a process involving innovation, communication channels, time, and a social system.4 The diffusion-of-innovations approach demonstrates a brand of behaviorism that claims individuals follow systemized procedures while particular social systems either contribute to or hinder the technology- saturation process. Correspondingly, agency manifests itself in individual user adoption decisions and within official and unofficial promoters of a technological device.5 Ultimately, when all steps of the diffusion process are completed, innovations reach full saturation within a society. Of course, not all technologies successfully reach this stage. In order for an innovation to achieve saturation, a sufficient amount of people must complete a “mental process” involving knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and finally, confirmation.6 When used to investigate mobile telephony, diffusion of innovations steers studies into forms of marketing research, in which rates of technological saturation address such issues as the comparative

amount of “mobile telephone have-nots” versus early adopters, and how to increase consumer willingness to accept short message service (SMS) advertising.7

A similar division between people and technologies is found within the uses-and- gratifications approach, which locates agency within the needs and desires of individuals. Early iterations of this work regard the audience as active, in that people make choices and take actions in order to achieve a goal or to gratify an urge, claims that indicate its philosophical basis in utilitarianism.8 Methodologically, explanations of mass-media use derive from an exploration of audience members’ orientations “on their own terms.”9 While the uses-and-gratifications tradition moves beyond technological determinism by investigating social and individual agency, it inverts but still preserves a causal schema by placing individual urges and needs instead of technologies as the cause worthy of study.

Relations

More nuanced approaches to the study of relations between people and communications technologies proceed by using different conceptions. Many of them seek to conceptualize the relations between individuals and technologies as social, cultural, and historical rather than functional, psychological, and universal. For example, cultural histories of technology propose a holistic analysis by describing how historical processes construct a technology as well as its popular uses and meanings. The emphasis thus moves away from the device or isolated need or use to the social processes, needs, and desires that shape and constitute devices, needs, and media practices more generally. Reflecting this strategy, Marvin argues that “the history of media is never more or less than the history of their uses, which always lead us away from them to the social practices and conflicts they illuminate.”10 While her book touches on an array of

technologies such as photography, the telephone, and the telegraph, the focus rests on the social and cultural situations and conflicts from which these technologies derived meaning and in which they operated.

A resulting strength of this approach is how it regards emerging technologies as simultaneously products and instigators rather than simply and exclusively as causes or symptoms. For instance, Gitelman offers a perspective that locates both past and recent technological developments as embedded within issues of private space and the maintenance of difference.11 Still, despite this improvement, insofar as the focus of such studies remains on mutual determinations between technologies, societies, and cultures, there remains a categorical distinction between people and technologies, albeit with a more nuanced understanding of their relationships.

More radically contextual approaches for understanding constitutive human/technology relationships have been energized in recent years by drawing from Marx’s writings in the

Grundrisse, and, in particular, the so-called “fragment on machines.” By bringing together an analysis of automatic machinery with an analysis of labor, Marx highlights the ways in which workers’ activities shifted during the Industrial Revolution.12 Technologies as machines of production are not regarded in instrumentalist terms, but (in part through the use of anatomical metaphors and imagery) rather as “organs of […] human participation in nature [… and as] the power of knowledge, objectified.”13 Contrary to more recent claims about the relations between humans and distinct technologies seen in terms of cause/effect, Marx conceptualized in dialectical terms how boundaries between people and machines were remade into an amalgam of laboring agency. While the implications of this still remain largely undeveloped, it presents new

possibilities for rethinking the limitations of conceptual boundaries around “people” and

“machines.”

A second attempt to develop a conception of the deeper relation between humans and communications technologies exists in the cyberstudies literatures. Despite calling important attention to distinctive aspects of digital communications, such as the degree to which technologies have become embedded within everyday life, this perspective still retains a definitional distinction between humans and technologies and thus also offers a too-limited way of adequately grasping their new configuration. For example, Kurzweil argues that humankind is currently on an inevitable path toward a techno/human “singularity” in which humans and machines will ultimately become indistinguishable.14 Among a host of predictions, he argues that the impending singularity will witness the fusion of humans with biotechnologies and nanotechnologies so much so that it will usher an unprecedented form of consciousness, along with digital immortality.15 Assertions of the inevitability of such developments and fusions are complemented by writers such as Negroponte, who claims the 21st century will be won by those who perhaps literally “become digital.”16 Yet despite the focus on the integral fusion of humans and technologies, this tradition’s teleological claims leave behind talk of historical agency in its focus on an ever-present imputed state of being. In it, people must learn to properly appropriate and manage technological advancement, while epochal claims confine such a fusion to a specific and never-arriving future historical event.

A more nuanced attempt can be seen in the work of Haraway. While addressing specifically the potentials for a late-20th century feminist politics, Haraway’s contributions to a non-totalizing theory of identity allow for alternative perspectives on the relations between individuals and technologies. She argues that dualisms such as nature/culture and self/other

reveal their instabilities particularly when considering high technology. Such instabilities pose problems for claims of determination between humans and technologies. As she writes, “It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine […]. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.”17 For Haraway, such insights allow for a heightened awareness of the apparent connection between humans and their tools, and thus she expresses a form of political agency that rids the essentialized individual and the technologies s/he uses in favor of what she calls the “cyborg.”

Fusions-in-Practice

The previous discussion demonstrates an important conceptual trajectory away from discussing devices in instrumentalist and essentialist terms to embedding forms and practices within particular social and historical contexts as various kinds of extensions of human activity or reformations of human-machine agency. Despite doing so, ontological distinctions remain between people and machines, with such distinctions ultimately influencing corresponding conceptions of agency.

However, recent work suggests other ways of thinking about and thus critiquing the foundational distinction between humans and technologies. Articles in a recent issue of the journal Communication Review address the changing nature of communication as a result of what its issue editors call the “mobilities turn.” This term helps extend a sense of human/technology relationship and constitution. Along with the recent increase in geographic mobility made possible by the proliferation of mobile devices, the mobilities turn calls attention to and provides methods for “mapping the contours and flows that are constitutive of place and

space.”18 For example, Sloop and Gunn use the term “mobile prosthetics” to theorize the implications that emerge when “mobile media and mobility alter the material abilities/senses of the body and—combined with other factors—encourage particular changes in identity and meaning.”19 By focusing on processes rather than on people or technologies, they and others turn away from debates about causal or mutual determination, and by contrast raise awareness of amalgam forms of effectivity—what this complex of situation, context, device, and humans accomplishes by virtue of its constitutive elements’ alignment and relation.

Other studies attempt to understand the deep connectedness between (broadly) the human and nonhuman, and thus (specifically) humans and technologies. Scholars such as Coonfield and

Savat use postmodern and Deleuzean insights to deconstruct these foundational dualisms. For example, Coonfield argues that, by thinking in “machinic” terms, one begins to see more clearly the various “assemblages of bodies, machines, codes, and connections from which humans and tools are formed.”20 Savat supports this assertion by connecting senses of being to the particular

“doings” enabled by these assemblages.21 These efforts represent the beginnings of ways of better grasping the effectivity of communications technologies not in terms of cause/effect or object/meaning relationships, but as a fusion-in-practice. This present study seeks to contribute to this effort.

From Mobile Technologies to Mobilities

In response to the sustained interest in the relationship between individuals and technologies, especially the progressively more integrated ways of thinking about this relation, this study seeks to understand this relationship as not a relationship at all, but as a fusion-in- practice (the serial phrase meant to distinguish it from a stable, essentialized, unproblematic,

completed object). The term “digital mobility” will be used to refer to this fusion-in-practice and how it takes shape, reveals, and enacts itself.

How mobility is defined helps specify the perspective the present study seeks to develop.

The term “mobility” has a long history, although many of its applications define mobility as a general property of objects and a resulting ability to move through geographic space. Many current uses of mobility also rely upon this definition, thus conceiving of mobility as essential (a property of certain kinds of objects) and spatial (the ability to move through space).

The etymology of the term reveals how it has operated in an array of applications. As an early articulation, Hume’s 1739 A Treatise of Human Nature defined mobility, alongside separability, as the “distinguishing properties of extended objects.”22 In the 1800s physicists began speaking of the relative mobility of gasses such as hydrogen and oxygen. At the same time, mobility became used as a means to describe degrees of change, specifically of human emotion and expression. In particular, uses of mobility described women’s supposed tendency toward excitement and emotional instability, thus suggesting the degree to which its essentialism was gendered by suggesting inherent differences between sexes.23

Within more recent military and sociological uses, mobility became reconfigured as a spatial concept encompassing the movements of forces, bodies, and capital from one location to another. In the late 1800s to the mid 1900s, mobility characterized the strategies and maneuvers of armies. Greater mobility was more desirable, and military strategists of the time wrote about ways to increase an infantry’s ability to strategically arrange itself across distances. During the late 19th and 20th centuries, the term was used in a socioeconomic sense to describe the movements of individuals and capital. For people, this meant moving between class positions

(social mobility) whereas for capital, this meant the reallocation and distribution of resources through space.

In addition to the need to recognize the essentialism embedded in dominant conceptions of mobility, an effort to reconceptualize mobility relies upon new theorizing about the division between humans and nonhumans, in which mobility operates as a complex and assembled agency, rather than an essential trait belonging to individuals or devices. Deleuze and Guattari offer ways to understand the implications of complex, multivalent modes of agency of this sort.

Their term “assemblage” turns away from a conception of individuals and technologies as distinct, essential things coming into contact with each other. To critique essentialist views, they argue that any understanding of a body must first begin with an understanding of its affects and

“how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects.”24 The term “affect” here refers to what bodies can do resulting from their connections and alignments. Furthermore,

Deleuze argues that understanding these bodies comes from mapping their relations, and not by uncovering essential, intrinsic traits or components.25

The concept of an assemblage has gained traction in studies of communication technologies to the extent that it has been featured as a viable theoretical approach in entry-level books on cultural analysis.26 Slack and Wise use the example of a self-service checkout- machine to illuminate the nuances of this approach. To study this technology as an assemblage requires “not only mapping the invention, design, and distribution of the machines, but a whole constellation” involving their relation to other types of self-service machines, values of convenience, models of purchasing, and so on.27 The device itself only works in its configuration with other elements. As those relations change, so too does the effectivity of the device.

As another example, Wise demonstrates the insights generated by such a view by discussing texting as an assemblage. He describes it as involving “being present elsewhere, phatic communication […] becoming private publicly […] how it shapes space, transforms behavior.”28 When the phone rings, one reterritorializes (and is reterritorialized) by entering the assemblage in a different way, enacting (and enacted by) different elements and flows.

Assemblages thus operate as particular modes of agency, making and unmaking territories of affects and becoming recognizable once these heterogeneous parts and qualities temporarily form into cultural practices. More in the spirit of their processual nature, one might think of assemblages not as though they were separate things or places, but in terms of a neologism such as “assemblaging,” an admittedly awkward effort to emphasize the need to think about assemblages not as a thing or place but as a process and activity.

Thinking of mobility as an assemblage brings to awareness intersecting and transforming flows of cultural practice that operate within and through, and that constitute the physical individual and device. Thus, for example, when one uses a mobile phone, s/he is simultaneously enacting and enacted by the broader assemblage of digital mobility. Thinking in these terms offers a perspective that dispenses with essentialism and instrumentalism in favor of relations and contingencies that constitute digital mobility, and the agencies its particular configurations do and do not make possible.

Based on this past work and the potential in extending it, the perspective of the present study critiques mobility and the theorized division between humans and devices. First, the plural term “mobilities” will be used to distinguish the phenomenon and practice from “movement” and from a corresponding conception of mobility as an inherent, a priori property of bodies or devices. Second, the compound term “digital mobilities” will refer generally to the dispersion

and re-spatialization of agencies, much of which does not require movement through space but, rather, (re)connection and (re)contextualization. Mobilities of connection without movement occur, for example, through modes of electronic communication ranging from telegraphy to teleconferencing. These and other connections re-spatialize practices without geographically transporting bodies. And mobilities of contextualization occur by reconstituting spaces and practices in relation to larger historical conditions. For example, participation within internet hotspots and wireless networks remakes the range within which actions are effective. One can correspond with absent others and join non-present diasporic-like formations. These and other means of producing mobilities through connection and contextualization play a critical role in the production and reconstitution of agencies without necessarily relying on movement through geographic space.

In sum, this study regards digital mobilities as important to study because they constitute ongoing efforts to rethink relationally the nonhuman and the human, and thus to practice different kinds of agency. Put a bit differently, digital mobilities are produced through efforts to humanize devices or, with an alternative emphasis, to mechanize humanity. In the production and experience of digital mobilities, Enlightenment utopian claims of identity, completeness, and extension of individual capability rub against the grain of dystopian claims of dehumanization, ineffectivity, entrapment, and loss. As part of the many-centuries old reflection on technologies and society, the fact that digital mobilities evoke opposing evaluations with equal intensity points to their multivalence and complexity.

Strategy of Analysis

The term “assemblage” suggests that elements are assembled to constitute it. However, these elements are not essentialized, pre-existing objects, but ones produced through dialectical

and mutually constitutive relationships—an “arrangement,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms.

Conceptualizing an arrangement as a set of relationships avoids essentialism in favor of examining the contingencies and contexts that form an assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate this when they write “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do.”29

In the same vein, we know nothing about mobile phones, for example, until we know what they can do or how, through a specific assemblage, they help produce a territory of social practice. A mobile device does not operate independent of a system of infrastructures and institutions, or without a system of meanings that produce its uses. More specifically, a text message is not an isolated technological practice, but a relationship between hardware and software, language and forms of sociality, networks and individuals, all of which are historically produced.

As a result, this study will focus on the production and operation of relations that form territories of technological practice within an assemblage of digital mobility. This study ranges by necessity over broad swaths of time as well as in some ways widely disparate institutions, practices, and texts, focusing on none of these as the center or origin of explanation, but on their co-emergence and articulation. An analysis of an assemblage always turns away from the elements themselves toward a “patient tracking of the apparatus within which things take on particular meanings and play particular roles.”30

To help develop a way of investigating arrangements and agencies as themselves constituted by other processes, and in addition to the theoretical insights of Deleuze and Guattari discussed previously, this dissertation uses a generally conceived materialist approach to the study of culture. As Williams argues, culture names not a content or text, but the continual activity and practice of producing an actionable world. As a human practice, culture is also a capability struggled over, protected, sometimes shared, but always subject to power relations, the

nature of which are variable in any given situation and context. What’s more, this process is premised on a recognition that literature, the arts—indeed, all artifacts and activities—are not creations independent or passively reflective of the social world, but the practical embodiment of social relations which constitute the social world, thus providing a powerful rationale for the importance of communication and culture in social analysis generally.31

The emphasis of this materialist perspective can perhaps best be put as the difference between viewing culture as objects and viewing it as historical practices. For example, one might describe the making of artifacts, propose their importance, and interpret their significance at various times, all of which help constitute artifacts’ contextual production. Recognizing and recovering the materialization of cultural practice is an important methodological move in that, as material practices, varieties of traces remain available for study and analysis.

A materialist approach suggests in turn two key methodological points that are relevant for this study. First, digital mobilities will be regarded as produced through cultural forms.

Where culture emphasizes activity, “form” is the open, provisional, historical, cultural organization of this activity. Williams regards the form of an artifact as “a specific structure of social relationships” at various scales and locations:

“internally,” in that the signs depend on, were formed in, relationships; “externally,” in

that the system depends on, is formed in, the institutions which activate it (and which are

then at once cultural and social and economic institutions); integrally, in that a “sign-

system,” properly understood, is at once a specific cultural technology and a specific

form of practical consciousness […]32

For example, television as a cultural form involves not only relationships between devices and institutions but, as developed in particular societies, particular ways of instituting relations between people.33

Second, to avoid simple description, one needs to address matters of determination in the production of mobilities, but in ways amenable to a critical perspective. Consistent with the critiques of direct, individual intentionality as an explanation for social phenomena, determination here is not located in a Lockean Enlightenment individual, nor in an identity between conception, action, and consequence, but as a critical interpretation that seeks to recover a particular pattern of relations that places always incomplete but discernible ranges and directions upon practice.34

Third, in ways that will become apparent, an analysis of this kind needs to place specific observations within a very broad span of time. This is necessary for putting into high relief the extent and depth of the developments of interest.

Research Process

Three research questions guide this study:

1. How is digital mobility produced and practiced?

2. In what particular modes of agency does digital mobility work?

3. What are the implications of theorizing and studying the effectivity of digital

mobility?

As material practices, digital mobilities create various kinds of traces that are recoverable through a diverse body of materials. The possible range of sources of such traces includes biographies, institutional accounts (popular press either for general readers or for industry

specialists), and popular culture, from newspapers and books to music, television, film, and advertising.

To systematically focus the research process, the following inductive and deductive process was used. At the outset, a major problem to confront was how to productively focus the empirical research. While I initially had in mind particular technologies on which the study was to focus, the purpose was to reconstruct them as assemblages and as historical productions.

Simply searching for materials that discussed “smartphones” yielded much information about the device and uses, but very little else that illuminated its constitutive relations or that helped place in high relief the widespread capabilities it shared with other devices on which I felt I needed to focus.

As a result, I proceeded in a very different way. First, I posited that identifying constitutive general technical features of smartphones might help me focus on features and capabilities shared by many devices, thus providing the more inclusive and relational view that I was after. After some false starts, I settled on two general features: miniaturization and remote control.

Evidence of the importance of miniaturization can be readily seen in the steadily shrinking size not simply of smartphones, but of electronic devices of all kinds (with the exception of flat-screen televisions). The greater portability of miniaturized devices also seemed to lend itself well to the premise of this study regarding the interest in dissolving the dividing lines between people and devices, in that the smaller the device, the more easily it can be carried on one’s person. Furthermore, current research in nanotechnologies suggests that miniaturization is not only a long-standing trend and imperative, but that it remains the leading edge for the design of technologies generally, thus also suggesting its centrality.

The second general feature I settled on was remote control. As a capability shared by a wide range of devices, its use as an entry into primary research might also help focus my research on general capabilities and by doing so assist in the relational understanding I sought to build. Furthermore, and unlike miniaturization, it valuably drew attention to actions that required a device. A focus on the necessity of a device for a particular kind of human action also seemed to hold promise for a study that sought to explore constitutive human/device relations as well as the actions that produced such relations.

The second task was to use these terms to direct empirical research into primary sources.

After some trial runs and experimentation, I used the online full-text database “ProQuest

Historical Newspapers Online” (which indexes the Atlanta Constitution (1868-1945), the

Christian Science Monitor (1908-1996), the New York Times (1851-2006), the Wall Street

Journal (1889-1992), and the Washington Post (1877-1993)) to search the full text of all content

(news stories, commercials, classified ads) for the phrases “miniaturization” and, in a separate set of searches, for “remote control.” This particular database was used because it includes a range of newspapers, thus boosting the chances of returning a significant number of relevant results.

Given that they were published daily, searching newspapers instead of periodicals or books provided a more detailed chronology.

The list of results was then sorted chronologically beginning with the oldest item to see not only when the term first appeared, but also in what context it was discussed and thus seen as relevant.35 Furthermore, this database also provides a chart of the frequency of mentions by year, so that certain times in which the volume of mentions spiked could also be identified for investigation. All items for three years of the first mention of each phrase were read, as well as all items at times of spikes. Paired with this inductive method was a corresponding process of

finding and interpreting patterns and commonalities among and across items. This allowed me to abstract to more general areas and claims that in turn suggested the relevance of that particular agency and practice to larger, specific institutions and formations.

Based on the larger institutions and formations suggested in my primary research, I conducted parallel research into secondary sources. For example, historical studies of military technology devote chapters and entire books to rationales for, and strategies and practices of remote control, thus not only providing a more detailed picture, but also in turn through their own citations suggesting additional primary sources to examine. Thus, by conducting simultaneously primary-source research of newspaper content, secondary-source research, and following secondary citations of primary sources as needed, I built an understanding of the emergence and technical-cultural constitution and embodiment of these component agencies as assemblages.

Overview of Chapters

Chapter Two, titled “From Miniatures to Miniaturization: Producing the Transitive

Object,” examines miniaturization as the production of what will be called transitive objects, one form of a critique of empiricist conceptions of objects. By referring to objects as “transitive,” I mean to draw attention to objects that are not self-sufficient but rather that are constituted only through their relation with other objects and uses. The chapter recovers the development of miniaturization in earlier forms of crafting “miniatures,” which were objects that gained significance only in their relation to a referent. Emerging in religious contexts from Bibles to liturgical books, miniatures subsequently became secularized in portraiture and replica toys.

Military-industrial imperatives of the mid-20th century produced methods of manufacture in support of a burgeoning consumer electronics industry. Developments in microelectronics

miniaturized not only devices, but capabilities – a key basis for dispersed agencies of digital mobility.

Chapter Three, titled “Remote Control: Producing the Active Object,” examines remote control as the production of what will be called active objects, which also through the adjective

“active” critique Enlightenment conceptions of objects as inherently acted-upon as a way to distinguish and valorize human creative action. Remote control as an explicitly named set of cultural practices emerged in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century as a particular kind of human/device agency. Variously formed within military, industrial, and social contexts, remote control was introduced to the public in traveling exhibitions and promotions.

Although these demonstrations promoted a secure, reliable connection between a rational agent as the origin of intention and an object of command as its manifestation, they also revealed a contradictory relation between remote control and Enlightenment agency, which was made more evident during the years surrounding the Cold War. Remote control as the reliable, secure extension of human intention continued to be integral to postwar developments in television and other consumer electronics. Whereas miniaturization dissolved the referent into a general agency, remote control came to dissolve origins of effectivity located in either the individual or the device.

Chapter Four, titled “Digital Mobilities as Dispersed Agencies,” examines how digital mobility works as contemporary modes of dispersed agency. The chapter draws on the prior chapters’ analysis of transitive and active objects to analyze the production of perceptual, kinetic, and emotional dispersed agencies. Three recent consumer products – Google Glass, Microsoft’s

Kinect for Xbox 360, and Siri for Apple’s iPhone 4S – operate by dispersing agencies among

configurations of individuals, devices, and networks. These agencies articulate with formations of consumer capitalism increasingly reliant on dispersion and recursivity of command.

Chapter Five, titled “Conclusion,” summarizes the key contributions of the study and provides implications for the study of communication and agency. It poses potential directions for future research drawing from the concepts of transitive and active objects, and from conceptualizing mobility as an agentic rather than geographic practice.

Conclusion

This chapter argues that Enlightenment and empiricist conceptions of differences between individuals and devices are inadequate to address the production of agencies especially characteristic today. The term “digital mobility” is meant to address the deficiencies of these conceptions. Whereas mobility can mean the movement of bodies across geographic space, this study regards mobility as the flow of agencies across configurations. Implications of this approach are a fuller understanding of the production of agencies by examining their historical formations and articulations.

Notes

1 James Katz, ed., Machines that Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003); Andy Kavoori and Noah Arceneaux, eds., The Cell Phone Reader: Essays in Social Transformation (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qui, & Araba Sey, eds., Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); James Katz, ed., Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

2 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

3 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambirdge, MA: MIT Press, 1948).

4 Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd edition (New York: Free Press, 1983).

5 Elihu Katz & Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955).

6 Ibid, 36.

7 Louis Leung & Ran Wei, “Who are the Mobile Phone Have-Nots?: Influences and Consequences,” New Media & Society 1, no. 2 (1999): 209-227; Alexander Muk, “Consumers’ Intentions to Opt in to SMS Advertising: A Cross-National Study of Young Americans and Koreans,” International Journal of Advertising 26, no. 2 (2007): 177-198.

8 James Carey, “The Chicago School and the History of Mass Communication Research,” in James Carey: A Critical Reader, eds. Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 21.

9 Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler, & Michael Gurevitch, “Utilization of Mass Communication by the Individual,” in The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives of Gratifications Research, eds. Jay Blumler and Elihu Katz (Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1974).

10 Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8.

11 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

12 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973), 705.

13 Ibid, 706.

14 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005).

15 Claims of techno/human synergy and the inevitability of progress do not remain confined to futurists. As Mosco (2004) notes, the 1990s witnessed policy makers at the highest levels champion the works of Kurzweil, Negroponte, and other cyber enthusiasts in preparation of the imminent digital age. These types of enthusiastic predictions were, and continue to be, similarly witnessed in popular media outlets. Wired magazine named McLuhan its “patron saint” in a 1991 issue while in 2011 TIME dedicated a cover story to Kurzweil’s theory of the upcoming singularity.

16 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knoph, 1995).

17 Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991): 177-8.

18 Stephen B. Crofts Wiley and Jeremy Packer, “Introduction: Rethinking Communication After the Mobilities Turn,” The Communication Review 13, no. 4 (2010): 263.

19 John M. Sloop & Joshua Gunn, “Status Control: An Admonition Concerning the Publicized Privacy of Social Networking,” The Communication Review 13, no. 4 (2010): 296.

20 Gordon Coonfield, “Thinking Machinically, or, the Techno-Aesthetic of Jackie Chan: Toward a Deleuze-Guattarian Media Studies,” Critical Studies in Communication 23, no. 4 (2006): 296.

21 David Savat, “(Dis)Connected: Deleuze’s Superject and the Internet,” in International Handbook of Internet Research, eds. Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, & Matthew Allen (London: Springer, 2010): 423-436.

22 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (A Digireads.com Book: Digireads.com Publishing, 2010), 138, http://books.google.com/books?id=EEo5ombCkzwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=a+treatise+of+h uman+nature&source=bl&ots=knFE7VZFx2&sig=nOptshnJgkOA3PQFP6X7fhzquas&hl=en&s a=X&ei=NVI- UK_FGYqI8QTm2oGACA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=a%20treatise%20of%20hu man%20nature&f=false.

23 “mobility, n.1”, OED Online, June 2012, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com.proxygsu- uga1.galileo.usg.edu/view/Entry/120494?rskey=ie4kFZ&result=1#eid (accessed August 26, 2012); “mobility, n.2”, OED Online, June 2012, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com.proxygsu- uga1.galileo.usg.edu/view/Entry/120495?rskey=ie4kFZ&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid (accessed August 26, 2012).

24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 257.

25 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988): 19.

26 Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise, Culture + Technology: A Primer (New York City: Peter Lang, 2005), 125-133.

27 Ibid, 130-131.

28 J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Stivale (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 84.

29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 257.

30 Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise, “Cultural Studies and Communication Technology,” in Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, eds. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (London: Sage, 2002), 491.

31 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980).

32 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 140.

33 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974).

34 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” 32.

35 The premise underlying this kind of cultural and historical research is explained in more detail in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

CHAPTER 2

FROM MINIATURES TO MINIATURIZATION:

PRODUCING THE TRANSITIVE OBJECT

The ability to store, carry, and share an unprecedented volume of data has become a primary appeal of the latest digital devices and platforms. The increase in the volume of storage and processing capacity coincides with the shrinking of devices, but more importantly, with the expansion of capabilities. Managing and sharing music, photos, calendars, address books, and many other cultural practices have been reduced to a tap on a screen. The portability and personalization of digital devices comes not as a result of simply miniaturizing a device, but of miniaturizing the array of practices they facilitate. Thus, while a received understanding of miniaturization is the process of physically reducing of the size of objects, this chapter argues miniaturization is the production of a particular type of “transitive object.”

Examples of the appeal of miniaturizing practices can be seen in two television commercials that garnered much national attention. A tear-jerking advertisement debuted in May

2011 for Google’s Chrome operating system. Titled “Dear Sophie,” it features various life-stages of a child named Sophie as digitally diarized by her father. Sophie’s first birthday, becoming a big sister, illness, moving, and other milestones are recorded and stored using various Google platforms including YouTube, Google Maps, and Picasa. The ad concludes with the closing of the father’s email to his daughter: “I can’t wait to share these with you someday. Until then…Love, Dad.”1 Another advertisement airing one year earlier promoted the debut of

Apple’s first iPad.2 Up-tempo rock music corresponds to frenetic screenshots of the iPad cutting

between displays of photos, the New York Times, a movie, a book, emails, and so on. The demonstration of these practices is seamless despite the massive volume of data being stored, recorded, and ultimately shared.

Far from being a result of recent breakthroughs in electronic engineering, miniaturization in broader cultural terms has its roots in the centuries-old practice of crafting “miniatures.” How miniatures became miniaturization traces the disengagement of the object from its intrinsic,

Cartesian identity. This chapter documents a process whereby, via miniatures, the object has been “de-objectified.” This critical-historical process provides a basis for dispersed agencies of digital mobility.

This chapter proceeds by first discussing in general what is meant here by transitive objects. Its primary point is that miniaturization produces a transitive object and critiques empirical theories of objects and, as a result, cause-and-effect thinking about communications technologies. The concept of transitive objects critiques empiricism by regarding objects not as self-sufficient and complete, but as congealed relationships, because a miniature has no meaning in and of itself. Rather, it derives its identity from its relation to what it is a miniature of.

Recognition of transitive objects is also a means of critiquing technological determinism, which as has already been discussed is the tendency to regard technological devices as causes/origins of effects. Recognizing devices not as self-sufficient origins or causes, but as supplements and supplemented through relationships recognizes their dispersed rather than essential nature.

The chapter then provides an account of the emergence of miniaturization as the means of producing transitive objects, a process that figures centrally in the production of digital mobility.

This process can be organized into three general stages, although neither cleanly bounded nor exclusive to each other. In the initial period, the representational and thus relational and

transitive nature of explicitly named “miniatures” became embodied as illustrations in ancient illuminated manuscripts. Between the 15th and 19th centuries this practice was extended into portrait miniatures, produced first for royalty and aristocracy before becoming more generally available. As portrait miniatures, they became extended and more corporeal as objects in their own right, but ones still constituted through their relation to a referent.

In the second general stage, miniatures became more fully not only representations, but objects in their own right. The extension of miniatures continues in the 19th century, when miniatures become more general—not specific only to religious scenes or portraits. Items that were used as toys, keepsakes of various kinds, and other such items left further behind the focus on representing humans. They also become more corporeal. Instead of being two-dimensional drawings, illustrations or etchings on objects, miniatures emerge as three-dimensional objects.

In the third general stage, the emergence of miniaturization as a process takes place under the pressures of industrialization, mechanized production, and the emergence of consumer commodity culture. Within these conditions, the object “miniatures” expands into

“miniaturization” as a generalized process applicable to anything. The referent that produced miniatures as a transitive object becomes irrelevant to “miniaturization” as a general industrial process. The referent that produced miniatures from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century dissolved as miniaturization focused on increasing the productive capacity of electronic circuitry.

The story of miniaturization is thus told here by recalling the trajectory of miniatures from features of objects, to objects, and finally to processes. This historical development marks the productive basis for contemporary transitive objects, which mark a distinctive feature of dispersed agencies of digital mobility.

Transitive Objects and the Critique of Empiricism

As has already been discussed, many theories explain the effectivity of communication technologies by resorting to various versions of cause-and-effect reasoning. The shortcoming of doing so is treating technologies as isolated, self-sufficient objects distinct from societies and the cultural-historical contexts of their formations. Such a conceptualization makes possible causal claims by holding technologies, societies, or individuals as determinant. Once the critique is recognized however, the task remains of how to reconceptualize technologies and account for their materiality, but without resorting to cause-and-effect theories.

One way of doing so is to decompose the purportedly stable, unitary objects, and instead to consider them as neither stable nor unitary. The necessity for doing so can be suggested in very concrete ways. As but one example, electronic devices do not generate their own power; they need to be supplied with it from outside sources. Thus, this “outside” source—despite being outside the object—is still paradoxically intrinsic to but at the same time wholly separate spatially from the object. Another example is modern networked devices, which only have effectivity to the extent they remain connected to the network and its central data services. Here again, a capability and infrastructure wholly “outside” the object nevertheless is intrinsic to the object and its use.

The degree to which the devices of communications technologies are only usable and

“whole” when supplemented by capabilities outside themselves is what the term “transitive object” is meant to suggest. Recognizing devices as transitive is a way of critiquing empirical theories of objects and cause-and-effect thinking about communications technologies. An empirical argument concerns itself with the properties and uses of self-sufficient, complete objects. Doing this makes possible claims of causal determination. Contemporary studies of digital technologies reflect this empiricist stance and demonstrate its limitations. However,

sufficient analysis of the effectivity of such objects cannot focus on the objects and their attributes, because they have no essential effectivity. By abstracting objects from their productive contexts, such studies limit themselves to determinist claims of the range of effects a particular device or technological practice can achieve.

By contrast, recognizing objects as transitive—that they and their effectivity are constituted through relationships—enables alternative ways to think about the materiality of effectivity. And doing so is a key move for adequately grasping new ways of conceiving human/device agency, because the effectivity of devices—while not being intrinsic to them— nevertheless relies in part on them. Thus, objects are not only constituted through relationships, but produce relationships (hence, have agency). Such a conception reflects a materialist approach which attends to the cultural-historical production of practices and the ways in which objects are constituted not in themselves, but through their articulations with broader contexts.

The case of miniaturization similarly critiques empiricist abstractions of objects from social contexts. Miniatures gained their significance not as isolated objects, but through their articulation with broader social contexts. As transitive objects, they directed attention toward a referent and helped to produce and reinforce sets of social relations. Miniaturization also gained significance through its articulation within military and industrial imperatives first during World

War II, and subsequently throughout the Cold War years. Technical developments during this time, along with various social and economic conditions, helped to spur a burgeoning consumer electronics market. A critical difference from miniatures was not only in the generalized process of producing tinier objects, but in the elimination of a referent for such objects to gain significance. This dissolution would come to mark a productive basis for dispersed agencies of digital mobility.

Miniatures as Representations

Overtly named “miniatures” first emerged as representations. They were a transitive object in the sense that they were significant due only to their relation to a referent (miniature replicas of a non-present original). As representations, they produced relationships as well.

Throughout the Middle Ages miniatures were graphic features of illuminated manuscripts.

Produced for priests and clergy, they were incorporated into bibles, as well as gospel and liturgical books. The significance of miniatures remained largely religious as they expanded from decorative letters and borders to more detailed depictions of holy figures and biblical scenes. They served to orient the viewer to God and to establish a set of religious practices among priests, clergy, royalty, and ultimately, laity.

The roots of today’s general process of miniaturization can be traced to these illustrations called miniatures that were placed in religious manuscripts. Despite being applied to small illustrations, the term “miniature” had nothing originally to do with size. It derives from the

Latin minius, meaning “red lead,” and a reference to the Minho River in Spain from which a colorful pigment was mined. Explicit use of the term “miniature” to describe this art form does not appear in the English language until the mid 1600s in the diary of John Evelyn, a founding member of the Royal Society.3 Prior to this, the term “limning” emerged in the late 1400s and stood for the practice of illuminating manuscripts.4

The production of illuminated manuscripts spanned at least from copies of the Iliad in the

4th century to the Middle Ages, and were an important art both in the West and in Muslim countries.5 What was pictured in miniatures ranged from popular myths and religious scenes to recreations of warfare. An early 5th century reproduction of the Roman poet Virgil’s epic Aeneid

(also known as the Vatican Virgil) contains dozens of miniatures, some full page, illustrating

scenes such as the flight from Troy, Dido and Aeneas taking shelter from a storm, and the arrival of serpents at the Trojan shore.6 Produced around the same time, the Cotton Genesis depicts hundreds of scenes from the first book of the Bible.7 Illuminated manuscripts from the Ethiopian

Orthodox Church date from the 6th to the 18th centuries, with artistic influences drawing first from Egyptian Coptic painting to later reflecting Syrian and Italian contact.8 During the late 16th century when “Turkish miniature painting […] reached their zenith,” chief Ottoman miniaturist

Nakkaş Osman was commissioned to illustrate victories of the Ottoman armies, depictions of social activities, and even the hunting prowess of the sultan.9 Due to their geographic range and cultural significances, miniatures from Europe to south Asia remain to this day subjects of scholarship into the performativity of culture and meaning.10

Miniatures gained early significance within a religious context. Throughout now modern day Europe, illuminated manuscripts incorporating miniatures were largely produced for and used by priests and clergy, but would subsequently become an important part of the practice of spirituality among laity. The uses of miniatures centered in religious ceremonies and as prized artifacts of royal courts. While emerging first in manuscript culture largely as decorative letters and borders, miniatures by the Middle Ages came to depict human likenesses and holy images in gospels, liturgical books, and bibles. Evangelical portraits produced as early as the 7th century demonstrate the growing importance and centrality of miniatures as a reproduction of religious iconography.

Miniatures came to be placed at the opening of a book and at the beginning of each gospel. As an early example, The Book of Durrow, produced between 650 and 700 AD, begins with miniatures of the four symbols of Matthew (man), Mark (eagle), Luke (calf), and John

(lion), and begins each gospel with a full page miniature of each respective evangelist’s symbol.11 The Book of Kells, believed to have been produced around 800 AD, also uses miniatures to represent holy figures. The symbolic rendering of the four evangelists are illustrated in slight variation from The Book of Durrow (a man for Matthew, lion for Mark, ox for Luke, and eagle for John). But a more significant variation is the presence of full-page naturalist illustrations depicting the Virgin and Child (the earliest surviving depiction in an illuminated manuscript), Christ on a throne, his temptation, and his arrest.12

Outside bibles and gospel books, miniatures were also used in sacramentaries, which were liturgical books during the Middle Ages that contained words spoken by a priest. The ascension of Christ was represented in one such book owned by Drogo, Charlemagne’s son, during the mid-9th century.13 Another book owned by Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the

Bald, contained a miniature of Christ’s crucifixion, and marked for the priest the beginning of a

Eucharistic prayer.14

However, miniatures of the early Middle Ages appear in contexts other than religion, and many of them marked an important extension of miniatures from within religious to more secular contexts. A famous example is a reproduction of the Physiologus, one of the earliest bestiaries

(texts consisting of animals often conveying moral lessons). As one of the most read books of the era, the Physiologus was a 2nd-century didactic text produced as a synthesis of Christian meanings and Roman paganism.15 It was reproduced in the 9th century, but this time with miniatures integrated into the text.

By the mid 12th century, miniatures in illuminated manuscripts became more widely available to laity thanks to the production of prayer books known as “books of hours.” The production of these devotional manuscripts was encouraged by the church after the Lateran

Council of 1215 decreed clergy should attend more to the needs of parishioners.16 The invention of the Gutenberg printing press and subsequent mass production of printed books marked yet another critical moment for the expansion of illuminated manuscripts.17 Mass production of books of hours in Flanders for a burgeoning English market further expanded the circulation of miniatures into popular books of the era.18

The production of miniatures within illuminated manuscripts, books of hours, and other texts continued into the 18th century. Representations of holy figures and various biblical scenes helped to produce and reinforce set of social relations between royalty and clergy, clergy and laity. Referents that produced their significance directed attention toward God, parables, and other religious symbols. The significance of these miniatures was produced not by themselves, but in their articulation with these broader contexts. Subsequent iterations of miniatures would similarly rely on referents, but in different ways and within different contexts.

Portrait Miniatures

Outside of a religious context, miniatures oriented viewers toward earthly figures, ranging from kings to members of one’s own family. As versions of portraiture, miniatures became extended and more corporeal as objects in their own right, but ones still constituted by their relation to a referent. Whereas miniatures in religious manuscripts oriented the reader toward heaven, portrait miniatures produced for a broader public redirected focus toward earth, and more specifically, to loved ones and to oneself. The first of these forms was commissioned in competitive spirit by royalty for royalty. Their expansion into the upper-classes marked the beginning of a more general expansion of miniatures into everyday life. Portrait miniatures

became a staple of middle-class life both in Britain and in America as techniques of production allowed for faster, cheaper portraits incorporated into a range of personal items.

By the 16th century, what came to be regarded at the time as “portrait miniatures” were pocket-sized painted likenesses of people who were significant to the person who carried them.

The earliest works can be traced prior to the 16th century, with French painter Jean Fouquet’s

1450 self-portrait often attributed as the first portrait miniature.19 While Fouquet’s work marked a critical moment in the history of portrait miniatures, the practice remained limited in scope until artists commissioned by English royalty gained notoriety for the emerging technique.

During the Northern Renaissance, artistic rivalry between Francis I of France and Henry

VIII of England was represented by early miniature artists Jean Clouet and Luke Horenbout.

Portrait miniatures created by these artists were exchanged between the Courts between 1525 and 1526, including among those images of Henry VIII.20 By the 17th century, demand for portrait miniatures in England continued to rise after news spread that Charles I had many of his paintings copied in miniature form in order to make them more portable for his travels.21 Yet despite their increasing popularity, the practice remained limited to upper classes until the mid to late 1700s.

Their increasing affordability coupled with a rise of British consumerism subsequently extended portrait miniatures more deeply into middle classes, prompting some painters in the

British Royal Academy to lament the loss of their once exclusive art form. As far as the Royal

Academy was concerned, the emerging market comprised not artists, but a “mercenary core” whose sole motivation was profit instead of producing high art.22 Indeed, portrait miniatures, once held by aristocratic elites as private personal keepsakes, became public displays and fashion accessories incorporated into necklaces, brooches, watches, and even snuffboxes.23 Whereas

portrait miniatures of the Elizabethan era were largely kept hidden in lockets and often attached the wearer to political parties or native countries, their transformation in England in the late

1700s allowed wearers to publicly showcase lifelike images of loved ones or even themselves.

Portrait miniatures subsequently travelled from Europe to the American colonies as they continued expanding from cultural objects meant for wealthy elites to becoming more generally available thanks in part to an increase in the number of artists and advances in techniques of production. As in Europe, these pictures first became a staple in upper-class circles by virtue of their association with English royalty and aristocracy.24 Artists not only advertised their services, but also the ability to train students. In then Charlestown, South Carolina, an artist advertised a drawing and painting academy where students would learn portrait miniatures as an artisanal craft.25 The lessons would be housed within a watchmaker’s shop, thus suggesting the technical skill associated with the craft, and its production within professional, rather than hobbyist, circles.

Following the American Revolution, professional miniaturists continued to advertise their services in periodicals, and stressed their ability to capture exact likenesses of their subjects.

One such artist who called himself “Mr. Mack” advertised his gratitude to his current clients along with his hope to “never fail taking the most striking likeness of every subject.”26 This promise was central to the appeal of portrait miniatures. Rendering an exact representation established for people a deep connection to loved ones both living and dead. A few stanzas from a poem in a 1796 issue of New-York Weekly Magazine titled “On Miniature Painting” captures this well:

How pleasing is the picture of a friend Whom fate has destin’d to some distant shore, Or dear relation, whose lamented end Forbids mortality to see him more.

Or if a father or a mother die, And leave the likeness of their features here, What pleasing anguish when the flowing eye Of their fond offspring scarce contains the tear. […]

A parent’s picture to th’entender’d heart Brings all their valu’d precepts to our aid, Forbids our acting vice or folly’s part Thro’ love and rev’rence to their honour’d shade.27

The expansion of portrait miniatures was paired with efforts to produce even more tangible and direct relationships with the subjects of the painting. This transition was evidenced within a coterie of artists who incorporated hair work into their miniatures. The hair would be braided and glued onto a setting within which the portrait would rest, thereby providing an even deeper connection between the wearer and subject. As an indication of the competition for such work, one artist advertised his ability to produce these portrait miniatures for impatient clients in less than five minutes.28

Another variation of the portrait miniature gained fad-status in Britain and America beginning at the turn of the 19th century. Eye miniatures gained popularity after the Prince of

Wales (later King George IV) secretly proposed to Maria Fitzherbert, a twice-widowed Catholic, by mailing her a small painting of his eye. She accepted his forbidden proposal and returned the favor by commissioning a portrait of her own eye to give to her new husband. During the next 30 years countless eye miniatures were produced mostly for aristocracy in Britain, but also in the newly formed United States. Often incorporated with hair work and engraving, these pictures were set in a variety of objects, from bracelets and lockets to rings and even toothpick boxes, and quickly became associated with love, mourning and remembrance.29

Miniatures as Objects

From illuminated manuscripts to portraiture, miniatures gained their significance by faithfully representing an absent original. It was their articulation with enabling conditions, not the miniatures themselves, which produced their significance in establishing relations between people and a referent. Within religious contexts these representations helped to orient the viewer toward God or other holy figures while later becoming more available to laity thanks in part to developments in printing. Miniatures were rearticulated within royal and aristocratic circles as portrait miniatures became increasingly popular during the 16th and 17th centuries. With enhanced techniques of production in support of an expanding consumer market, portrait miniatures became key artifacts that connected everyday people with loved ones both living and dead.

The same context of expanding consumer culture which propelled portrait miniatures to fad status at the turn of the 19th century would help to extend miniatures as three-dimensional objects for purchase as toys and other collectibles. Miniatures began to take on another dimension on the heels of developments in mass manufacturing. The extension of miniatures continued in the 19th century when miniatures became more general and not specific to religious scenes or portraits. They also became more corporeal as three-dimensional replicas, rather than two-dimensional bas-relief or etched images. Toys as replicas of everyday objects and people were advertised in popular magazines as an emerging mass market took shape. One specific type of toy, the miniature soldier, exemplified the relation between forms and more general formations, most notably militarism and mass production.

The practice of crafting small, portable objects of cultural significance can be traced back to the earliest human civilizations and to nearly every region of the globe. Their forms range as widely as their cultural significances, with some produced for leisure, others for spiritual

transcendence, and some still yet to be understood. Miniature clay mammoths have been discovered dating back 25,000 years while Egyptian and Mesopotamian replicas of animals date from 2300 to 1000 BC.30 Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of hundreds of thousands of

Neolithic figurines made of clay, stone, and bone in southeastern Europe, dating from 6500 to

3500 BC.31 This range continues from Chinese terracotta warriors to Russian matryoshka dolls.

Indeed, dolls as human likenesses similarly range from prehistoric to current forms, evidenced in ancient African spiritual objects to American Girl dolls of the 20th century.32

While the history of miniature forms could be traced to prehistoric times, toys explicitly labeled “miniatures” rose to prominence in Western countries during the 19th century and often appeared as replicas of everyday objects. In Colonial America, miniature guns, as well as dollhouses and furnishings were among the more popular toys.33 Colonial artifacts excavated from houses also include miniature replicas brooms, thimbles, teapots, and other everyday domestic objects individually crafted from materials such as pewter, lead, copper, and glass.34

While these early forms were individually made, subsequent forms explicitly labeled

“miniatures” relied on advances in industrial production and promotion through mass media publications. During the late 1800s miniature toys were promoted in popular, general readership magazines and became widespread in the wake of developments in manufacturing and an emerging consumer market. This marked a critical time for the transformation of miniature toys into mass marketed consumer goods.

Miniature toys were often promoted through their likeness to the life-sized objects that they mimicked. Several examples exist of this relation between life sized objects and miniature toys. A tiny table and chairs for “Miss Dolly’s tea-party” along with miniature steamboats were advertised directly to children in such magazines as The Youth’s Companion during the late

1800s.35 Ad copy for the table and chairs emphasized how they were an “exact model of a large set for actual use.” Likewise, the steamboat was a “correct representation” complete with “boiler and engine.” Parents at the time could also purchase such miniature toys as building blocks, stockings, and pianos from popular magazines just in time for Christmas.36 A 1905 advertisement in Life for the Studebaker Wagon centered its appeal on how the toy was “built after the style of the regular Studebaker.”37

Of all the “real-world” objects available in miniature, one specific type emerged during the latter 19th and early 20th centuries within the dual formations of mass-production and militarism. Beyond mere enjoyment, tin soldiers were valued for their lifelike appearance and their use for education in warfare.38 They were even romanticized in Hans Christian Anderson’s

1838 fairytale, The Steadfast Tin Soldier. The noble soldier falls in love with a paper ballerina, only to be swept away in a paper boat. His bravery in the face of danger (facing off against a rat and being swallowed by a fish) becomes a central theme of the story. Unfortunately, both the toy soldier and the ballerina meet their demise in the end.

The mass production of miniature toy soldiers later stemmed from the development of hollow casting, a technique attributed to British toy manufacturer William Britain, Jr. in 1893.39

This allowed for the production of lighter and cheaper toys by introducing a thin layer of liquid metal into a prefabricated mould.40 Prior to hollow casting, toy soldiers were typically made of tin. For nearly 200 years, beginning in the late 17th century, German manufacturers held a monopoly on the craft, mass manufacturing and exporting their products to neighboring countries.41 With the introduction of hollow casting at the turn of the 20th century, toy soldiers could be manufactured at a greater rate and cheaper than before.

Subsequently, the production of military miniatures with both tin and hollow casting reached a zenith surrounding the First World War and into the mid 20th century. In Germany, miniature figurines and weapons helped to foster a sense of nationalism and duty among middle- class youth.42 Britain similarly witnessed a “toy soldier craze” in the decades leading to 1914 that was significant in producing a sense of militarism.43 At the beginning of the 20th century, and in the midst of the Second Boer War, Britain saw an increase in production and demand for miniature soldiers. As one 1900 report stated, “never before […] has juvenile England been so martial or the English papa so ardent a purchaser of ‘munitions of war’.”44

Such a craze existed in the United States during this time, as well. A New York Times article in 1909 detailed the extent of the demand for miniature toy soldiers, stating “the toy soldier industry is much more extended and more completely organized than is generally imagined.”45 Germany was the leading manufacturer of toy soldiers at the time, with reports of exporting nearly four million units during the latter half of 1909.46 It was such activity that, two years earlier, prompted the president of the Pittsburgh Peace Society to urge German manufacturers to cease production while on a visit to the Hague Peace Conference.47

Nevertheless, by 1934 in the United States, the Barclay Manufacturing Company was producing nearly half a million miniature military figurines per week.48

The extension of miniatures as three-dimensional objects was articulated within an emerging consumer market. Such a market relied on advanced techniques of production and promotion, and in the case of the toy soldier, soon became important in fostering nationalism while becoming the objects of alarm for peace activists. Despite their articulation within differing contexts, miniatures up to this point remained dependent on a referent and were transitive objects insofar as they materialized social relations between the owner and the

representation. A critical change would follow during World War II when military and industrial imperatives led to a series of “miniaturization projects,” which expanded the sense miniatures of whatever kind into the generalized process of miniaturization.

From Miniatures to Miniaturization

The extension of miniatures continued under the pressures of industrialization, mechanized production, and the slow emergence of consumer commodity culture. Within these conditions, the object “miniatures” expanded into “miniaturization” as a generalized process applicable to anything. The technical and cultural invention of miniaturization and its implicit benefit of portability produced a characteristic kind of human/object relation. They “personalize” devices and their functionality, making them able to be carried easily and widely. This makes them functionally (at least) coterminous with their human owners.

Joint military and industrial developments in the 20th century spurred the technical basis of miniaturization. Miniaturizing electrical components made possible the practice of affixing various devices directly to human bodies. This, in turn, produced portability and the connection of humans to devices across geographic space. Continued miniaturization by the computer industries made possible the expansion of this physical connection into virtual space, thereby requiring not only a human/device connection, but connection to a network. Increasing processing power and data storage capabilities within ever-smaller spaces were necessary precursors. These human/device relations are not simply technical accomplishments, but cultural-historical projects and practices that emerged as crucial for the assemblage of digital mobility.

The transformation from miniatures to miniaturization was tied to the expansion of mass manufacturing, with increased productivity through “waste elimination methods” a key

imperative. During 1920s efforts such as President Hoover’s Committee on Waste in Industry and groups such as the International Institute of Scientific Management headquartered in Geneva set their focus on rationalizing industrial processes. To do so, they linked reduction of waste and processes to the increase of productivity.49 Indeed, it is with the consolidation of mass factory production in service of a burgeoning consumer culture that we first start to see explicit references to miniaturization. This is how and why it came to occupy such a central place in electronics, first those pioneered in the military and later in consumer goods.

Military and industrial programs during the 1940s and 1950s demonstrated the importance of miniaturization programs for wartime supremacy. These programs highlight the integration of military and commercial goals, the growing ubiquity of which was underscored by

Eisenhower’s phrase “military-industrial complex.”50 In few places was this military-industrial integration as important as in pioneering developments in weaponry and communications that together made possible the portable transistor radio for the consumer market, a quintessential miniaturized electronic device.

Prior to the transistor radio, most radio sets were equipped with vacuum tubes. The development of vacuum tubes was only a stage in a longstanding project of capturing and regulating electricity, with research in these efforts dating back to the 17th century.51 During the

1920s, despite being in some ways a technical breakthrough, vacuum tubes enabled only an interim stage in the progressive miniaturization and portability of radio. Their ability to amplify electric current and increase the range of radio signals provided the technical means for transmission across greater distances. By contrast, the older crystal sets were able to demodulate signals across only comparatively short distances. Moreover, radios equipped with vacuum tubes could amplify weak signals. This eliminated the need for headphones while producing a clearer,

more robust sound.52 However, vacuum tubes had their own limitations, most notably the emission of high levels of heat and their relatively bulky size.53 Thus, great efforts continued to be taken to further miniaturize vacuum tubes and circuitry.

A subsequent stage in this process was the $800 million proximity fuse project headed by the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II. The outcome of this project was a “radio sending and receiving station […] the size of an ice cream cone” that could fit on the nose of an artillery shell.54 A miniaturized vacuum tube inside the fuse emitted electromagnetic waves that, when reflected back by any plane within 70 feet, detonated the shell’s charge. Such design proved more efficient and accurate than previous methods for exploding German V-1s and Japanese Kamikazes, and was “rated second to the atomic bomb” in its “success in war.”55 Many civilian companies were involved in this work, including Radio

Corporation of America (RCA), Sylvania Electric Products, Westinghouse, and Eastman Kodak

Company.56 All saw great opportunity for further improvements on the proximity fuse following the War in fueling new consumer electronics. 57

Following WWII, improvements continued with the development of the printed circuit board. The printed circuit connected electrical components on a single, flat, conductive plate, rather than relying on comparatively bulky wired connections. It was first developed for the proximity fuse to “withstand the force of 50,000 times gravity given a shell on firing,” and became the subject of global interest when the National Bureau of Standards announced it would release details of the technology to private industry.58 Enthusiasm was such that a meeting conducted by the Bureau on the printed circuit was attended by representatives from every major

American electrical manufacturing company, along with representatives from firms across the globe.

These military breakthroughs soon took a leading role in communications devices, further demonstrating the powerful imperative to further miniaturize devices and make them more portable. By the end of the 1940s, and in the midst of emerging technical developments by Bell

Laboratories in transistors, joint projects by the Army, Navy, and private industry sought to reduce the size of radio receivers and radar equipment.59 Miniature wrist-watch radio transceivers developed by the Bureau of Standards were built around miniature vacuum tubes the size of a grain of rice.60 The use of smaller radio tubes along with printed circuitry transitioned after the War into two-way portable and pocket radios for use in a range of settings, from farming to policing.61

Advertising soon became the key means of articulating these technical developments and imperatives to the emerging consumer electronics industry, often through the rhetoric of exploration. For example, RCA promoted its involvement with this research in full-page advertisements in popular, general readership magazines. One 1947 advertisement for the RCA

Victor Globe Trotter portable radio featured a globe-circling woman with the caption “She shall have music wherever she goes!”62 Another contained a soldier in a vast open landscape using a backpack radio transceiver. Underneath, ad copy emphasized how RCA Laboratories redesigned and streamlined the old “backie-breakie” into the more useful “walkie-talkie.”63

Pressures for greater portability and cost savings culminated in the eventual replacement of vacuum tubes by transistors. Unlike vacuum tubes, transistors were better suited to mass production due to their lack of connecting wires or dedicated batteries. By the mid 1950s, the transistor business was booming, with construction of 100,000-plus square-foot transistor factories by RCA, Philco, and Westinghouse, and a 200,000 square-foot facility opened by Texas

Instruments.64 The creation of a mass market for transistor radios, beginning with the Regency

TR-1 in 1954, was not only the result of these mass production capabilities, but the impetus for further automation and, ultimately, reduced cost.65

With these technical innovations and the resulting rise in productive capacity, the imperative and promise of further miniaturized and portable electronic devices could be more completely fulfilled. New markets were created for these devices, all of which were enabled by miniaturization and portability. In 1952 the Sonotone Corporation unveiled the first consumer product to make use of the transistor. Sonotone’s hearing aid had twice the power of conventional hearing instruments while weighing only three ounces.66 By 1955 the entire device shrank to one ounce and could fit inside the ear.

While these developments provided the technical means for an agency centering on a physical human/device connection, this form of agency was also produced through advertising and popular culture. These and other technical developments made possible new kinds of mobilities, all of which represented novel agencies about which consumers needed to be informed and educated. Their promotion valorized Enlightenment agency through the rhetoric of exploration and freedom. For example, devices from other manufacturers that competed with the

Sonotone hearing aid included models that clipped to one’s necktie or were worn as a brooch pin.67 Advertisements of these devices constituted their value as a result of their invisibile merging with the human wearer. They featured close-up photos of active men and women, and stressed the hearing aid’s invisibility by challenging readers to find where it was fastened to the body.68 Other manufacturers, such as Beltone, created hearing aids embedded in eyeglasses and ran advertisements challenging readers to determine “which twin is wearing Beltone hearing glasses?”69 A central promise of these advertisements was the freedom to venture in public

without the embarrassment or stigma of bulky devices. Their value was precisely in their ability to be forgotten, to be seamlessly integrated with the body and thus naturalized.

The portability of electronics allowed not only the freedom derived from joining various devices to the body, but the ability to perform a variety of functions across space. One popular comic strip valorized a hero who exemplified this capability. Beginning in 1946, Dick Tracy comics featured prominently a wrist watch communicator that distinguished the detective from his also-ran counterparts. In 1964, the watch became upgraded with video capabilities, allowing

Tracy to solve cases on-the-go in superhero-like fashion. Dick Tracy’s novelty was not just in the feats he accomplished, but in the distinctively mobile means by which he accomplished them, thanks by-and-large to his unique use of a miniaturized device, which helped constitute his abilities.

Conclusion

Miniaturization as a generalized industrial process renders a referent irrelevant. In doing so, it not only describes the spread of transitive objects. It also provides the productive basis for what can be called active objects. How it does so becomes more apparent when considering the relationship between miniaturization and remote control. Coupled with the development of remote control, miniaturization further establishes the critique of empiricist conceptions of

“objects-as-origin.” The same context of industrialization, mechanization, and emerging consumer commodity culture also produced an associated critique of objects in the agency of remote control.

Notes

1 “Dear Sophie,” YouTube video, 1:32, from a television commercial for Google Chrome, posted by “googlechrome,” May 2, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk.

2 Pete Cashmore, “First iPad Commercial Airs During Oscars,” Mashable Tech, last modified March 7, 2010, http://mashable.com/2010/03/07/ipad-oscars.

3 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Guy De la Bédoyère (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 1995).

4 “limning, n.”, OED Online, June 2012, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com.proxygsu- uga1.galileo.usg.edu/view/Entry/108510?result=1&rskey=kCsHt3& (accessed August 26, 2012).

5 J.A. Herbert, Illuminated Manuscripts (New York: Burt Franklin, 1911), 1-13; Jonathan J.G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Anna Contadini, “The Manuscript as a Whole,” in Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, ed. Anna Contadini (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2010), 3-16.

6 M.J.H. Liversidge, “Virgil in art,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 92-3.

7 John Williams, “Introduction,” in Imaging the Early Medieval Bible, ed. John Williams (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 4.

8 “Illuminated Manuscript, Artist Unknown, 18th or 19th Century,” information placard, African Art Gallery, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, May 2, 2012.

9 Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Masters, Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 272.

10 Marilynn Robin Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage, & Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

11 Robert G. Calkins, Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Bernard Meehan, The Book of Durrow: A Medieval Masterpiece at Trinity College Dublin (Dublin: Town House, 1996).

12 Bernard Meehan, The Book of Kells: An Illustrated Introduction to the Manuscript in Trinity College Dublin (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994).

13 “The Drogo Sacramentary,” World Digital Library, accessed April 25, 2012, http://www.wdl.org/en/item/590/.

14 “The Library of the Medieval Institute: The Sacramentary of Metz,” University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries, accessed April 25, 2012, http://medieval.library.nd.edu/facsimiles/litfacs/metz.html.

15 Michael J. Curley, “Introduction,” in Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore, trans. Michael J. Curley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); J. Holli Wheatcroft, “Classical Ideology in the Medieval Bestiary,” in The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, ed. Debra Hassig (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 142.

16 Charity Scott-Stokes, Women’s Books of Hours in Medieval England (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer), 4.

17 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

18 Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 83.

19 Daphne Foskett, British Portrait Miniatures: A History (London: Methuen, 1963), 36- 7.

20 Graham Reynolds, British Portrait Miniatures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1.

21 Foskett, British Portrait Miniatures, 38.

22 Patrick Noon, “Miniatures on the Market,” in The English Miniature, ed. John Murdoch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 163-209.

23 Steven J. Gores, Psychosocial Spaces: Verbal and Visual Readings of British Culture, 1750-1820 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 146-7.

24 Robin Jaffe Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 5.

25 Advertisement for “J. Stevenson, Limner, At Mr. Bower’s, Watch-Maker,” in The South Carolina Gazette, October 5, 1773.

26 Advertisement for “Mr. Mack: Miniature Painter,” in Weekly Museum, August 31, 1793, 3.

27 “On Miniature Painting,” in The New-York Weekly Magazine, June 1, 1796, 384.

28 Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 12.

29 “The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection,” exhibit of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham AL, February 7 – June 12, 2012.

30 Dan Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 81.

31 Douglass Whitfield Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3.

32 Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and Peggy J. Kreshel, “’I’m an American Girl…Whatever That Means’: Girls Consuming Pleasant Company’s American Girl Identity,” Journal of Communication, 52, no. 1 (2002): 139-161.

33 Ivor Noël Hume, A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 313-314.

34 “Miniature Toy Collection from New York City Colonial Houses and Military Camps,” New-York Historical Society Museum and Library, accessed April 26, 2012, https://www.nyhistory.org/node/35230.

35 Advertisements for “Miniature Toy Set” and “The ‘Little Wonder’ Steamboat,” in The Youth’s Companion, October 25, 1877, 358.

36 Advertisement for “Building Blocks,” in Ladies Home Journal, December 1891, 48; Advertisement for “Christmas Favors,” in Harper’s Bazaar, December 1908, 1313; Advertisement for “Best & Co.,” in Town & Country, December 10, 1910, 68.

37 Advertisement for “Studebaker ‘Junior’,” in Life, December 7, 1905, 697

38 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 141.

39 Sharon M. Scott, Toys and American Culture: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 312.

40 Fleming, Powerplay, 152.

41 Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 141.

42 Bryan Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009).

43 Kenneth D. Brown, “Modelling for War? Toy Soldiers in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 2 (1990): 237-254.

44 Marshall Lord, “Toy Soldiers to the Front,” Atlanta Constitution, February 18, 1900, B4.

45 “A Metal Army of Varied Uniforms and Its Annual Fortunes,” New York Times, October 31, 1909, SM9.

46 “Where Toys Come From,” Washington Post, January 2, 1910, MS2.

47 “Wants No Toy Soldiers,” New York Times, April 21, 1907, 9.

48 William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, “Toys,” in The Great Depression in America: A Cultural Encyclopedia, Volume 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 550.

49 “Hoover Deplores Waste,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 1925, 15; “Industrial Management Leader Seeks Ways to Reduce Waste,” Christian Science Monitor, June 27, 1927, 2.

50 President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Eisenhower Farewell Address, January 17, 1961,” C-SPAN video library, accessed September 3, 2012, http://www.c- spanvideo.org/program/15026-1.

51 Sogo Okamura, ed., History of Electron Tubes (Tokyo: Ohmsha, 1994), 7-8.

52 Derek K. Schaeffer and Thomas H. Lee, The Design and Implementation of Low- Power CMOS Radio Receivers (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 3.

53 Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (New York: Routledge, 1998), 209.

54 Harland Manchester, “Coming _the Radio that Was Shot from a Gun,” Popular Science, March 1948, 133.

55 Winifred Mallon, “Navy Discloses Radio Shell Fuze,” New York Times, September 21, 1945, 4.

56 Ibid.

57 “Small Radios, Rocketed 4,000 Miles an Hour to the Moon, Could Transmit Signals to Earth, Westinghouse Electric Corp. Scientist Predicts,” Wall Street Journal, August 28, 1946, 5.

58 “Midget Electronics,” Wall Street Journal, December 3, 1947, 1.

59 T.R. Kennedy Jr., “Tiny Radios Made by Armed Services,” New York Times, March 11, 1949, 50.

60 “Tiniest Tube Paves Way for Wrist-Watch Radio,” Popular Science, November 1947, 142.

61 Manchester, “Coming_the Radio that Was Shot from a Gun,” 134-6.

62 Advertisement for “RCA Victor Globe Trotter portable radio,” LIFE, June 16, 1947, 76.

63 Advertisement for RCA, Popular Science, December 1951, 8.

64 “Transistors Galore,” Christian Science Monitor, April 12, 1956, 20; Johnny Apple, “Transistor’s Rise,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 1956, 1.

65 Ibid.

66 “New Hearing Aid Uses Transistor,” New York Times, December 30, 1952, 29.

67 William Freeman, “Goods Outmoded, Rarely Worn Out,” New York Times, August 6, 1955, 19.

68 Advertisement for “Sonotone Hearing Aid,” LIFE, April 2, 1956, 7; Advertisement for “Sonotone Hearing Aid,” LIFE, May 7, 1956, 167.

69 Advertisement for “Beltone Hearing Glasses,” LIFE, March 5, 1956, 30.

CHAPTER 3

REMOTE CONTROL: PRODUCING THE ACTIVE OBJECT

In a 2009 television advertising campaign for the Palm Pre smartphone, a glowing, pale- skinned young woman framed in a medium close-up against a stylized rural backdrop speaks directly to the viewer in a soothing tone about what the Pre does for her. In one commercial titled

“Mind Reader,” she states “my phone was doing what I hoped it would do before I even thought to ask it to.”1 In another titled “Past Lives” the actress says the device can keep track of “all of the [lives] that I’m living right now.”2 Another titled “Green Lights” centers on the sensation of everything going your way “like you’re not even trying.”3 To many, the soft focus, New-Age background music, and CGI look of the visual effects combined to render the actress as an android. Seizing on this, Wired called the campaign “creepy,” joining a chorus of YouTube parodies, blogs, and audience reactions on Twitter.4 It seemed to many that the human in the ads was more device-like than the device, with the device more human than she was.

A similar appeal is seen in 2012 commercials for Siri, the vocal assistant that comes standard with the iPhone 4S. Celebrities are featured speaking with the virtual assistant who speaks back while setting appointments, giving the weather forecast, and playing music, all by voice command.5 These commercials differ from the Pre ads in their depictions of everyday settings, such as Samuel L. Jackson cooking gazpacho in his kitchen.6 However, their central appeal remains the same – that of the personal relation between humans and devices thanks to the development of a smartphone that too exerts a degree of command. This human/device relation can be highly personal, as demonstrated in one commercial featuring a philosophical

John Malkovich. In it, he sighs to Siri, “life,” to which she responds with a series of advice such as “be nice to people” and “try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”7 The implication of this sort of response is a heightened state of machine intelligence and thus the potential for a deeper human/device relation.

As these and many other examples suggest, a key capability of smartphones is their ability to interact with users. The increasing array of capabilities these devices can perform is due to their ability to exercise command seemingly on their own. Setting alarms, signaling updates, messaging, alerts from social networks, and many other functions occur without the direct, immediate command of the user, but in concert with the wishes or desires of the user, whether determined by the user ahead of time (such as in setting an alarm for a future appointment) or seeming to independently intuit a user’s wishes or desires.

The ambiguities raised by these examples are part of the more general topic addressed in this chapter. While remote control is commonly considered as the exercise of command from an individual onto a distant object, this chapter argues that remote control in a more expansive sense helps grasp better these ambiguities. As will be argued, remote control is better seen as not merely a human capability or feature of a device, but as a type of human/device agency and, furthermore, as the production of what will be referred to here as an “active object.” When considered alongside miniaturization, remote control marks the insufficiency of

Enlightenment/empiricist divisions between acting humans and acted-upon objects. In doing so, it marks as well a consolidation of forms of agency referred to in this study as digital mobility.

Remote control is a type of human/device relation and agency with deep roots in broader attempts at control from a distance. The story of its formation as an explicitly named cultural practice reveals remote control’s critique of Enlightenment/empiricist conceptions of

individualized agency. This chapter documents a process whereby remote control, once reliant on an individual origin, became detached from a singular source of command, thus rendered not only more dispersed, diffuse, and mobile but also problematizing for the positing of a unitary human origin. Its critical-historical emergence provides a basis for recursive agencies of digital mobility.

This chapter proceeds by first discussing what is meant here by active objects. The central argument is that remote control produces an active object, thus critiquing

Enlightenment/empiricist theories of individualized agency which are predicated on distinct human/device relations. The concept of active objects critiques this stance by regarding humans/device as integrally related and by regarding agencies as recursive and constitutive rather than linear and essential. This recognition presents a further critique of Lockean

Enlightenment rationality which positions the individual as the origin of command and control over an external world.

The chapter then provides an account of the emergence of remote control as the means of producing active objects, a process that articulates with miniaturization and its production of transitive objects in the production of digital mobility. Like miniaturization, the historical development of remote control can be organized into three general stages, although overlaps and interrelations can be identified. Remote control emerged in part from technical developments in radio. It was articulated during the Progressive Era within the contexts of militarism, industrialization, and public opinion. Widespread concerns over the motivations of those in control produced a contentious prelude to remote control’s introduction to the general public.

In the second general stage, remote control was promoted to the public within the traditions of traveling exhibitions, fairs, and advertising, all of which articulated the transmission

and application of a purposive, Enlightenment agency originating from a rational subject and manifest in a distinct object. These “commanding performances” were seen in two prominent exhibitionists of the day. Maurice Francill and a robot named Mr. Televox (“televox” roughly translatable as “distant voice”) underscored the contradictions of remote control, albeit in different ways. Francill affirmed Lockean agency by demonstrating that individual intention could be extended onto external objects without direct physical contact. Mr. Televox was instead a critique of Lockean agency, in that it was a proxy device. Rendered in human form, the robot was a necessary intermediary that was required to perform more complex and wide ranging feats of individual remote control.

In the third general stage, the initial promise of the guaranteed extension of individual intention weakened in the context of Cold War geopolitics. Despite these tensions, the production of remote control through promotion and exhibition became integral to a burgeoning post-WWII consumer electronics market on the heels of further advances in electronics miniaturization. By the 1980s, tensions surrounding remote control in both geopolitical and domestic contexts underscored its simultaneous articulation as both a threat to and a fulfillment of Enlightenment agency. The origin of command that produced remote control in its earlier stages dissolved as devices became connected to a network. The relationship between remote control and miniaturization provided a productive basis for active objects which mark another distinctive feature of recursive agencies of digital mobility.

Active Objects and the Critique of Empiricism

As discussed earlier, many theories of the relationship between individuals and communications technologies rely on what could be called a directional conception of agency: that it is exerted at an origin, with the effects manifest at a different location or on a different

body. With this conception, a central task becomes which pole (humans or devices) to identify as the origin and which as the effect. As can be seen, such conceptualizations lead to determinist analyses of communications technologies, which are predicated on essentialized conceptions of individual and device agency. The theoretical and practical problems of such a position have been addressed above.

A key task, then, is to reconceptualize human/device relations to take better account of their varieties and implications, but doing so without resorting to claims of which side holds more or less agency and thus recalling all the theoretical problems in such a move. A way of thinking beyond human or device-centric modes of agency is to consider humans/devices not as distinct things coming in contact with each other, but as an integral relation that constitutes and practices agency. A concrete way of thinking in these terms is to consider the range of effectivity made possible in given human/device combinations. While devices have certain kinds of preferences and potentialities, a person cannot make a device perform any function. At the same time, devices are enacted in their use and gain significance only in their relations to individuals.

By seeing humans/devices as an integral (although also unstable and transitory) relation, one can see how agencies work through this relation, rather than originating from one essential side.

The degree to which devices of communications technologies exert agencies not in themselves but in their relations is what the term “active object” is meant to suggest. Their production through human/device relations distinguishes active objects from a conventional conception of objects as passive due to their inanimate nature. In this way, the active object helps reconceptualize human/device relations.

Like transitive objects discussed in the prior chapter, active objects also critique empiricism and its Enlightenment conceptions of agency. Cause-and-effect modes of explanation

rely on a distinction between subjects who act and objects that are acted upon. In terms of

Enlightenment thinking, this is seen more specifically as the definitive opposition of humans to objects. Only living beings are seen to possess the potential of agency, with humans regarded as the penultimate example. In studies of communications technologies, such thinking is the inverse of technological determinism, in which individuals are seen as wholly determined by a particular device’s technical nature.

The historical formation of the active object through the development of remote control traces the rearticulation of a cultural practice, and thus the rearticulation of human/device agencies within and by shifting conditions. Remote control overtly and explicitly named first emerged as a conduit/means of unified human/device agency, which facilitated the extension of individual intention across geographic space. Later, remote control became articulated to shifting geopolitical contexts, which placed in tension the affirmation and negation of Enlightenment agency. More recently, remote control expanded as a proxy first by mimicking human agency, then as a “smart” device enabling and sometimes seen as active as human agency. In this way and similar to transitive objects, remote control critiques empirical theories of objects and cause- and-effect thinking about communications technologies. “Transitive objects” and “active objects” thus become critical concepts with which to rethink and reformulate human/device relations and agencies.

Early Formations

Remote control describes not only technical achievements, but also broader attempts at controlling remotely. When considered in the broadest sweep of human civilization, one can argue examples from the Roman aqueduct system, to developments in weaponry and various conceptions of automata. While this range should be acknowledged, during the early 20th

century “remote control” as an explicitly named form of agency developed within some key institutions and imperatives. Military applications briefly became a topic of popular interest in the United States during the height of the Spanish-American War. At the Electrical Exhibition of

1898 held in Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla performed the first public demonstration of wireless remote control with a miniature boat he called a teleautomaton. Tesla patented the invention in the same year under the name Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles, 1898.8

Using this invention, Tesla controlled the boat while standing at the other side of the auditorium and using a handheld transmitter to steer it and illuminate its lights. Audience members called out maneuvers, and the boat responded in sync with Tesla’s manipulation of the transmitter.9 Prominent investors such as George Westinghouse, J.P. Morgan, and Cornelius

Vanderbilt arranged private viewings of Tesla’s boat.10 Despite the amount of attention, Tesla’s hope that the War Department would adopt his invention never materialized, as officials doubted its suitability for live battle conditions.11 Tesla later formed a business venture to develop radio remote-controlled torpedoes, which were tested at sea between 1914 and 1916, though the Navy never pursued them further.12 Despite Tesla’s initial failure at seeing his patent adopted by the military, his work on wireless control is credited for “having fathered the concept of [remotely controlled] cruise missiles and the larger concept of unmanned [remotely controlled] aviation.”13

European interest in military uses of remote control also emerged at the beginning of the

20th century. Spanish inventor Leonardo Torres y Quevedo began work on his Telekine system in 1901 as a way to test dirigible balloons without risking human life. He later sought financing from the Spanish Minister of the Navy to test his Telekine system on submarine torpedoes, but

this was rejected and Torres y Quevedo abandoned his project.14 German researchers were also interested in remote control during the years leading to WWI, which in 1911 demonstrated the principles for submarine wirelessly controlled torpedoes.15 And, in England, the first prototype of an aerial remote-controlled torpedo was demonstrated to British generals in March 1917.16

However, military applications were not the only ones seen initially for remote control. In conjunction with military developments were emerging forms of remote control in service of industrial commodity production. The remote exercise of command increased efficiency and profitability under the rubric of scientific management, also labeled “Taylorism” for its principle developer, Frederick Winslow Taylor.17 Scientific management sought to more efficiently control the activities of workers by assimilating them into more efficient and rationalized forms of labor. Remote control was a key part of Taylorism in terms of making possible industrial expansion and automation through a system of centralized management issued from bosses outside the factory.18

Not all groups involved in industrial production were as enamored by remote control. For labor groups, remote control in industry meant redundancy and, ultimately, alienation. Reactions to scientific management focused on the increasingly estranged nature of factory labor under such a system. Organized labor and Progressive-Era reformers critiqued the rationalization of work. The introduction of time clocks and other management tools in factories led to mass walkouts, protests, and even violence. For many who resisted the new reforms, remote management meant the theft of specialized craft knowledge and thus the possibility of making highly skilled craftspeople irrelevant and replaceable.19 Such reactions to the remote control of labor were also present in England and the emerging socialist response. In the late 19th century, groups such as the Labour Emancipation League stressed as a point in their program that “As

Labour is the foundation of all Wealth…the Regulation of Production must belong to Society” rather than to individual capitalists absent from the factory floor and serving purely private goals.20

Labor critiques of remote control were part of a broader reaction to the dehumanization brought about by automation. In Germany, the 1927 silent film Metropolis presented a dystopian view of the future of capitalism and the position of workers in relation to increasing alienation and rationalization of labor. The 1936 Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times presents a satirical reaction to the endurance of scientific management. In the opening scene the main character becomes hysterical after losing pace with an assembly line and being force fed through a malfunctioning machine. These and many additional examples suggest a progressively broadening range of objects remotely controlled, from mechanical objects such as torpedoes to human activity in the factory.

But the deepest fears about remote control were spurred by viewing it in terms of human thought and belief (this, one can argue, is ultimately behind the proclaimed “creepiness” of the

Palm Pre ad campaign noted above). In the wake of these developments within military and industrial spheres, remote control in the form of propaganda worried cultural critics, who were concerned about the manipulation of people’s thoughts and actions for political and economic purposes, a concern linked to broader ones about general cultural and moral decline.21 Should the “power elite” prevent a sovereign public from forming, or should public deliberations be replaced by a process stage-managed by the power elite, the deployment of mass culture was viewed as a form of remote political control made possible by the centralization and wholesale commercialization of cultural production.22

Statements made by public figures of the day lent some credence to such concerns. For example, Walter Lippmann argued that an individual’s thoughts, which include a range of stereotypes, were the necessary objects of manufacture and control through proper research and the deployment of propaganda. “Consent” was thus understood as something that could be manufactured, like a product, as a means of control. The debates between Lippmann and John

Dewey during the 1920s highlighted this tension over propaganda and the political role of publics in a democratic society. Claims of the need to manufacture consent extended from wartime propaganda to consumer goods. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and public- relations pioneer, directed the Committee on Public Information’s work in Latin America during

WWI and published Propaganda in 1928. In it, he argued that American democracy necessarily operated through the manipulation and organization of public opinion by those belonging to what he called an “invisible government.”23 This nascent field was fueled by foundation activities during the 1930s by such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation.24 One of its funded projects, The Princeton Radio Project, led by Paul Lazarsfeld, eventually formed into the Bureau of Applied Social Research, whose methodological focus shaped the field of mass communication, thus suggesting the degree to which remote control as a form of agency was deeply embedded in the understanding, study, and development of communication devices and techniques of study.

These initial formations of remote control demonstrated its simultaneous articulation as an affirmation and negation of Enlightenment agency. Its affirmation was asserted in the demonstrations of Nicola Tesla and promises for military supremacy. Furthermore, Taylorism sought to derive greater efficiency and productivity through the remote control of factory labor.

However, its critique was clear in concerns over public manipulation in the hands of

propagandists. Activists saw remote control as more completely alienating labor. Thus already at its initial stages remote control produced conflicts surrounding Enlightenment agency—conflicts that would become more pronounced as remote control became introduced to the general public.

Commanding Performances

In the context of military, industrial, and political experimentation and development, remote control as a new, powerful form of personal command was publicized through traveling exhibitions during the 1920s and 1930s. General Electric’s “House of Magic” at the 1933

World’s Fair in Chicago exemplified the association of remote control with progress and magic, during which a wand-wielding engineer turned on an incandescent light without using a wired connection.25

What was then novel enough to be described with the label “magic” eventually transformed into a consumer good showcased as an exercise of human agency. These demonstrations were directed at lay publics, suggesting to consumers the potential relevance of remote control for their individual lives. The demonstrations and shows were part chautauqua, part public lecture, part magic show, part circus, and part sales pitch. As such, they sought to entrance, excite, inform, and sell not so much specific devices, but simply the capability itself.

Local newspapers often wrote about the shows in great detail, suggesting the use of a well-oiled publicity machine, but also the fit of the shows to newsroom routines and perceived desires of readers.

One prominent early promoter of remote control was Maurice Francill, who traveled the country as “America’s [self-proclaimed] radio wizard.”26 Referred to as “one of America’s outstanding inventors during the war,” Francill’s fame as a radio exhibitionist began in the early

1920s.27 He appeared in print advertisements as an expert endorser for Zenith’s Long Distance

Radio while performing in radio expositions and other public events.28 By age 27 he was reported to be the nation’s “highest paid scientific lecturer,” performing feats of wireless radio control across the country to crowds numbering in the thousands.29 While other exhibitions of remote control by radio existed prior to and alongside Francill, his showmanship and proclamations regarding the potential for remote control through radio waves earned him his celebrity status.30

The means of control, rather than the acts or effects, were the center of attention in

Francill’s shows. None of the specific feats he demonstrated was one of extreme strength, speed, or precision. Instead, they were quite pedestrian tasks that any person could complete easily. His staging was also simple. Francill held a visible but small remote-control transmitter with a receiving apparatus attached to the object of command. He simply demonstrated that agency separated from its manifestation was just as effective as direct, physical acts, thus showcasing remote control as an extension of unitary human agency.

Francill’s demonstrations embodied the transition of remote control from a miraculous feat reserved for geniuses such as Tesla and institutions such as the military to a commonplace activity showcased for everyday radio enthusiasts. Throughout the decade, accounts of his

“mystifying stunts” appeared in the local newspapers of the mostly Midwestern cities he visited.31 In live demonstrations, Francill announced his stunts just before activating his handheld radio transmitter, which was often explained by Francill during demonstrations.32

Francill showcased his talents at radio and electrical exhibitions alongside acts ranging from appearances by radio stars to performances from trained chimpanzees.33 His feats similarly ranged from frying eggs in a skillet resting on a block of ice, to controlling a 400-pound

miniature sea vessel by firing its guns, focusing its searchlight, and moving it forward and backward—all by using radio remote control.34 During an exhibit in Chicago in 1928, Francill took radio control of two power plants operating in service of a bakery and creamery, producing

“radio-baked bread” and “radio-frozen ice cream” for sale in the city the following day.35

When not performing in electrical and radio expositions, Francill performed in public outdoor promotional events at the request of newspapers and automobile dealers.36 The final act in such events was the remote control of an automobile furnished by the dealer, upon which

Francill typically started and stopped the motor, drove it forward and backward, honked its horn, and flashed its lights. Audiences were encouraged to check the automobile prior to demonstration to ensure there were no hidden wires or other machinations other than what a newspaper story called the “seven and a half pounds of delicate, brain-like wireless apparatus.”37 These demonstrations extended into the mid-1930s, surrounding Francill’s appearance at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago.38

Paired with these feats were those that emphasized the remote control of people. While drawing record crowds during a week-long exhibition at the Atlanta Radio-Electrical exposition in 1926, Francill proclaimed that he had stumbled upon a “death ray” in his experiments with radio waves. Due to its similarity to radio waves, this death ray could be used in a variety of contexts. Police could “stop engines of speeders and bandits” and with proper adjustment one could even “start fires at a distance,” “explode powder” and “supersede explosives in time of war.”39 Francill stated that the deadly ray was too dangerous for radio amateurs and that he was in the process of asking a willing state governor to allow him to demonstrate “the death-dealing properties on a condemned murderer.”40

A second prominent traveling show of the day starred Mr. Televox (also dubbed “the mechanical man”). While it too celebrated a purposive, Lockean rationality as the origin of decision and action, it differed from Francill’s practice of remote control by employing an intermediary or proxy between the origin of the intention and the object being controlled. The proxy was not only a link between the agent and the object, but a proto-product for sale. Its promotion sought to generate an awareness of and hopefully a consumer demand for eventual manufacture and sales of goods with such capabilities.

Where Francill directly exercised remote control (thus practicing an affirmative form of modernity that celebrates the submission of the physical world to a singular Lockean rationality),

Mr. Televox was a necessary intermediary between the master and the physical, distant manifestation of her/his wishes. This critical form of Enlightenment agency fit within the imperatives of the emerging system of commodity capitalism, in that it was organized by the need for the development of future marketable commodities that served as such proxies.

Mr. Televox was a robot introduced in 1927 by the Westinghouse Electric and

Manufacturing Company. The humanoid, promotional embodiment of Westinghouse’s remote- control electric system promised increased efficiency along with the ability to perform tasks at great distances “without the usual human arguing, impudence or procrastination.”41 With the creation of Mr. Televox, Westinghouse joined the robot craze that had emerged six years prior, following the English language premier of R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”), the science- fiction play by Karel Čapek. The play introduced the word “robot” to the English language, derived from the Czech word robota, meaning forced labor, or drudgery. The first televox robot weighed 600 pounds, but by 1928 Westinghouse had created one more suitable for travel that weighed only 40 pounds.42 The slimmer Mr. Televox and his handlers crisscrossed the country

and attracted popular press attention through demonstrations staged and assisted by his inventor,

Westinghouse engineer R.J. Wensley.

Operating Mr. Televox was simple. The robot was wired to its human agent by a telephone connection. During demonstrations, Wensley stood near Mr. Televox with a windpipe and telephone, and rang another telephone that was connected to the robot. The ring of the bell caused a relay to lift the robot’s telephone hook and establish the connection. Wensley then sounded a pitch on a windpipe into the telephone. A microphone installed in Mr. Televox received the sound and sent the electrical impulses through filters to a relay circuit in the head of the robot. The relay circuits were connected by wire to any number of devices that could be turned on or off. Mr. Televox could thus perform a number of actions depending on the number of relay switches installed in his head. For example, if Wensley sounded a note two times, Mr.

Televox connected the second relay, and another “feat” would be performed. Mr. Televox gave a corresponding number of buzzes to confirm the connection was made. The duration of the buzz

(short or long) indicated whether a switch was open or closed.43

Similar to Francill’s emphasis in his demonstrations on everyday tasks, Mr. Televox impressed crowds with a range of nevertheless quite normal human actions. In 1928 at the Level

Club of the National Masonic League of New York City, Mr. Televox’s demonstration included running a vacuum cleaner, starting a fan, turning on lights, and in a grand finale, pulling down an

American-flag shroud to reveal a portrait of George Washington.44 In the same year during an exhibit at the Atlanta Athletic Club, Mr. Televox turned on a street light, sounded an automobile horn, and removed a covering on a framed sign that read, “It’s Great to be a Georgian.”45 Mr.

Televox appeared in a range of other settings, from a New York City church where he preceded sermons on the “need of God in exerting power over nature” to the Convention of the Pacific

Coast Electrical Association in Pasadena, California where he played bridge with women in attendance.46

In other instances, Mr. Televox performed tasks typically delegated to municipal workers. Its first commercial use was commissioned by the War Department to report reservoir depths in Washington, D.C., responding to telephone calls with coded buzzer signals.47 That same year, a private presentation was given to the American Electric Railway Association in

Cleveland where the mechanical man operated a street car, called out approaching street names, and instructed disembarking passengers to step forward.48 In a highly publicized demonstration in 1929 at the Newark airport, Mr. Televox was used to illuminate a runway at night in response to a siren from a landing plane.49 This same system was used during a tribute to inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison when the street lights of East Orange, New Jersey were illuminated by an airplane flying overhead and sounding a siren.50

Later applications put the robot in closer contact with the general public. Mr. Televox was installed at a California street intersection as a mechanical policeman directing traffic. When drivers sounded their horns, Mr. Televox responded by activating a blinking light and warning arms on the main road until cars on the cross street had cleared. Trouble came when a group of young boys found they could imitate the pitch of the horns with their voices, causing untimely signals and prompting readjustments to the mechanism.51

Mr. Televox also demonstrated advances in housekeeping. The earliest press mentions highlighted its benefit for housewives who might find it useful to start a stove or open a furnace draft by simply calling the system on the telephone and sounding a particular pitch on a windpipe.52 Westinghouse later commissioned Miss Katrina van Televox, introduced as the sister of Mr. Televox, as the perfect housewife. She was featured during a 1930 cooking school

sponsored by the Atlanta Constitution and Georgia Power Company that took place at Loew’s

Grand Theater (made famous as the venue for the 1939 premier of Gone with the Wind). During the event advertised in the Atlanta Constitution, Miss Televox spoke, cooked, turned on lights, and ran a vacuum cleaner under the command of a member of Westinghouse’s domestic- appliances department.53

Both Mr. and Miss Televox demonstrated the contradictory potential of remote-control robotics. On one hand, the televox promised efficiency and resulting human freedom from monotonous tasks. Mr. and Miss Televox were characterized as “electrical slave[s] […] created to meet very definite industrial requirements.”54 A New York Times article went as far as to claim that Mr. Televox was “the liberator of the modern worker.”55 An article in Popular

Science heralded its “opening [of] new opportunities for creative efforts,” while another article claimed the televox could “rid the world of drudgery.”56 As it continued, “Men thus freed from unpleasant chores […] never need fear unemployment in a well-organized society but, on the contrary, may look forward to a better opportunity for the development of their inherent talents and intellectual powers. They will receive the gift of leisure, which will enable them to apply their released energies to the achievement of a finer, fuller life than they can enjoy at present.”57

On the other hand, Mr. Televox’s promises of efficiency recalled earlier concerns over the rise of Taylorism and the perceived loss of worker control over his own labor. Embodying such a position was a satirical and ironic “interview” with Mr. Televox that appeared in a 1929 issue of The Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators (published by the International

Brotherhood of Electric Workers). When asked why he was invented, Mr. Televox responded, “I was born to meet […] the demand of men to make more money by saving labor costs […] by replacing men.”58

Where Francill and Mr. Televox demonstrated a difference with respect to direct intention, they both promoted an agency characterized by a reliable and secure connection between a rational agent as the origin of intention and an object of command as its manifestation.

Such a security of connection was essential for the allure of the performances as well as for the prospects of selling Westinghouse’s future remote-control system, but more fundamentally for selling the promise and the hope of such a capability. However, a challenge to the reliability and security of the connection between the individual and the outcome became acute in the decades following WWII, which began to remake the linear, one-way form of agency that Francill and

Mr. Televox had celebrated.

Assembling Critical Objects and Critical Agencies

The stability of the link between a unitary Lockean intention and remote, certain outcome

(celebrated by Francill, Mr. Televox, and others in the early part of the century) began to fracture in the context of Cold War geopolitics and at a scale much larger and more abstract. The adoption by the U.S. of the strategy of containment rather than direct confrontation and destruction of the Soviet Union recognized that intentions could not always be fulfilled. Fears of missile attacks from Soviet satellite bases—and knowledge that such a threat could only be managed, not eliminated—suggested on a global scale an indeterminacy that called into question how completely all intentions can become fully manifest. Images of the “large red button,” along with the popular film Dr. Strangelove, extended this association between limitations of remote control and the fears of nuclear destruction in the years following the Cuban Missile

Crisis. The red button symbolized instant, often anonymous, nuclear destruction from a distant or intermediary source.

Despite this uncertainty, the military remained important for the subsequent refinement and enhancement of remote control. Due to the greatly increased distances involved, developments in rocketry demanded new solutions to problems of aiming and targeting. These emerged most directly in the development of ballistic missiles as part of Cold War armament as well as of orbital space flight, which required more powerful techniques of ongoing monitoring and telemetry. Developing alongside new missiles was an emerging discipline focused on guidance and control systems.59

Tensions over isolationism and interventionism provided a backdrop for remote-control military activities surrounding the Korean War. The early 1950s were a time of significant isolationist sentiment in the United States, evidenced by presidential candidate Dwight

Eisenhower’s speech in Illinois opposing direct intervention in the Korean peninsula. He cited a

“shadow” hanging over the heads of every family following two world wars and increased presence in Asia.60 This speech came within weeks of reports that drone missiles equipped with television transmitters began launching from naval carriers in the Sea of Japan. The benefit of these guided camera-equipped missiles was not simply in giving “control officers the same view they would have in the Hellcat’s cockpit,” but in their potential to replace human pilots in warfare.61 These and other remote-control military tactics continued despite warnings about removing soldiers too far from the realities of combat.62 Army Secretary Wilber Brucker told the National Press Club in 1956 that the idea of a remote-control war “can only lead to psychological, spiritual and physical unpreparedness for the realities of military conflict.”63

However full of promise they might have been, military and geopolitical developments challenged the security and reliability of remote control. Weapons and defense testing continued in the years following the Korean War, with remote control central to those efforts. Regular tests

by the Atomic Energy Commission relied on remote detonation and detection of radioactivity released from atomic warheads. In many instances these tests produced unexpected and even disastrous results. Dozens of Pacific Islanders and Japanese fishermen sustained injuries from radioactive ash after a test of a hydrogen bomb over the Marshall Islands.64 Two years later in

1956, a Snark test missile “designed to carry an atomic warhead over intercontinental distances” went off course, presumably landing somewhere in the jungles of Brazil. Tests of these missiles relied on remote control for guidance over a 5,000 mile range spanning from Florida to British territories in the mid-Atlantic Ocean.65

In response to these challenges, during the early 1960s the United States took efforts to both centralize and mobilize the “command and control” of nuclear weapons. The delivery of small tactical atomic weapons to U.S. military divisions in Western Europe led to concerns throughout the government. White House officials worried that a distressed commander might, in the heat of battle, launch an atomic weapon without presidential authority.66 Coupled with the stockpiling of U.S. weapons at European military bases, President Kennedy requested the installation of remote-controlled electronic locks on all nuclear weapons at home and abroad.67

Congress acted when a panel from the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee met with

Department of Defense officials to set forth the development of a “remote-control device […] similar to the TV channel switcher” that could send a radio signal from command headquarters to the locks affixed to the nuclear weapons.68 Military researchers continued to investigate weapons mobilization despite abandoning plans to mount Minutemen intercontinental missiles on trains due to budgetary and logistical complications.69 Railcars, trucks, ships, and submarines were a handful of mobile sites that Navy and Air Force officials claimed would make weapons less vulnerable to enemy detection.70

Just as military and geopolitical developments challenged the security and reliability of remote control, research in intelligent control systems challenged its conception of originating from singular, rational, human intention. Such work demonstrated the flexibility of remote control by conceptualizing rationality beyond human-centric command. Emerging work in artificial intelligence centered on machines that did not need to be controlled by humans because they were regarded as capable of controlling themselves. These developments problematized the initial form of remote control that was so dependent on human rationality. If machines could make their own choices and decisions, then had agency become wholly divorced from a controlling, human origin? A famous, early example is mathematician Alan Turing’s study of artificial intelligence, which proposed to determine whether machines could “think” by replicating a common party game.71 In it he demonstrated by presenting a series of questions and answers that a computer could trick a person in a separate room into believing that the computer was a human.

The work of Norbert Wiener similarly broadened notions of agency by arguing that both humans and machines engage in the same system of control. Instead of focusing on an individual issuer of command, cybernetics called attention to systematic processes within which humans and nonhumans participate in their interactions.72 According to Wiener, both humans and machines provide feedback in response to commands and in relation to variable external conditions. A common example is an elevator door, which does not open immediately after someone presses a button, but only once the elevator has reached the proper floor. While only a simple mechanical function, it demonstrates how machines respond by adjusting themselves in accordance to actual (not just expected) environmental conditions. For Wiener, this form of rationality was shared by humans and nonhumans alike.73

Articulations of Remote Control and Miniaturization

While the work of Turing, Wiener, and others deeply problematized the definitive distinction between living/active agents and non-living/passive objects, developments in geopolitics and computer science posed a full-fledged assault on remote control as the guaranteed extension of individualized Enlightenment agency. Not only was remote control agency made unreliable in the context of Cold War geopolitics, but conceptions of agency as an exclusively human trait were interrogated by developments in artificial intelligence and cybernetics. The recognition that nonhumans were able to exert rationality provided the conceptual basis for active objects. The technical basis was furthered by remote control’s relationship with miniaturization.

In conjunction with developments in remote control, corresponding developments in miniaturization pioneered by the military during the Cold War years also provided the productive basis for active objects. As post World War II economic expansion provided a context for a burgeoning consumer electronics market, miniaturization projects lent to an array of remote- control gadgets for the home. Where transistors replaced the vacuum tube, the integrated circuit replaced complex wired circuitry and allowed for the production of new devices that promised greater control over one’s life. Recalling the development of “the chip” and the rise of the microprocessor provides the technological context that brought together remote control and miniaturization.

Despite improving on vacuum tubes, transistors had their own problems, which were eclipsed by the development of the integrated circuit (or microchip).74 On one hand, transistor circuitry contained many more miniature components while avoiding vacuum tubes’ problems of large size and excessive heat. On the other hand, these circuit designs required millions of hand-

soldered connections between hundreds of thousands of electrical components.75 Thus, while engineers could use transistors to design complex circuitry for performing any number of feats, the difficulties and costs of actually making such circuitry slowed down and often prevented these designs from being realized.

The integrated circuit solved this problem. It eliminated the need for wired connections between components by instead forming them via an integrated molding process that formed a thin semiconductor chip. Due to its great advantages, military and space program contracts at the height of the Cold War supported the development of the integrated circuit, which in turn boosted by many times the productive capacity for a new consumer market. At first, the integrated circuit market relied almost exclusively on government contracts. Examples include the Apollo space missions and the Minuteman nuclear-missile projects. However, the integrated circuit industry led by Texas Instruments, Fairchild, and later, Intel, soon saw potentials for a consumer market.76 Zenith Radio Corporation in 1964 introduced a hearing aid as one of the first consumer devices to make use of the integrated circuit, shrinking their previous transistorized hearing aids by nearly 25 percent while allowing the wearer to hear sounds at double the previous distance.77 Two years later RCA announced the use of integrated circuits in the sound systems of their portable television models, eliminating many connecting wires and thus increasing the reliability of the sets.78

Despite these initial consumer applications, it was not until the 1970s that the development of microprocessors began to more fully reform and remake the human/device relation configured by earlier miniaturization programs. The potential for seemingly infinite miniaturization and expansion of complexity and power underwrote a significant research-and- development program. This promise was codified in 1965 by Gordon Moore, then Director of

Research and Development in Fairchild’s semiconductor division, who published the outline of what became known as “Moore’s Law.” It stated that when taking into account shrinking cost curves in production and continued miniaturization, the number of components placed on a single chip would double every year, eventually reaching up to 65,000 components per integrated circuit by 1975.79 Industry excitement over this potential for the development of microprocessors was indicated when RCA forecast a 12-fold increase in the market, from $50 million in 1975 to $600 million by 1980.80 Indeed, by the early 1970s, the computer industry had replaced the federal government as the leading consumer of the integrated circuit.81

While earliest applications of the microprocessor centered on portable calculators, a flurry of interest, proclamations, and predictions surrounded future possibilities.82 By the late

1970s, the National Academy of Sciences proclaimed the field of microelectronics had “ushered in a second industrial revolution.”83 In 1982 the Club of Rome, a global think tank, commissioned engineers, social scientists, and economists to report on the potentials for microelectronics in society. The result was a published book-length volume that related the development of the integrated circuit and microprocessors to changes in work patterns, globalization, and war, among other effects.84 During the 1980s and 1990s continued research and development in integrated circuits and microprocessors with increasing memory led to home computers with unprecedented data processing capabilities.

Through these developments, not only did it become possible to shrink the size and thus make more portable these devices, concomitant developments in networking extended data from individual devices across virtual space. Practices of networking are not a product of the computer age, but were developed in the earliest periods of communication. Networks operated in times of the early, physical transportation of messages. Systems of correspondence and manuscript

circulation were key features of manuscript culture in early modern England.85 Semaphore networks from the 18th century linked together via sight and agreed-upon signaling conventions.86

Networks became more essential with the development of electronic forms. The connection of portable digital devices of the last two decades to the Internet makes use of different techniques and devices, but operates through similar forms. Transatlantic telegraph networks were first established in the mid 1800s. Throughout the latter 19th and 20th centuries, developments in communication technology accompanied the rise of a range of networks. With the telephone came a system that connected subscribers to each other via a central exchange.

Similarly in the 1920s and 1930s broadcast networks accompanied the popular adoption of radio and television as a system of content distribution.87 Microwave relay networks in the 1950s and

1960s facilitated long distance telephony by transmitting calls by radio rather than by cable. This system also carried the first coast-to-coast television broadcast in the United States, airing

President Truman’s 1951 speech on the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference.88

The rise of the Internet is due in large part to aims of capitalizing in all senses of the word upon the processing power of consumer devices made possible by the integrated circuit and the microprocessor. Concomitant developments in remote control during the latter part of the 20th century were made possible by these miniaturization programs. The promotion of active objects following World War II relied heavily on this relationship between remote control and miniaturization. These twin forms would ultimately provide the productive basis for dispersed and recursive agencies of digital mobility across networked space.

Promoting the Active Object

While the certainty, security and reliability of connection between rational agent and object of command began to fracture in the second half of the century, the promotion of remote control continued in support of a burgeoning consumer-electronics market that relied first on miniaturized vacuum tubes and transistors, then subsequently on miniaturized circuitry pioneered by the military and computer industries.

A context of economic growth and domestic ideology in the postwar years produced the conditions and desires for domestic technologies.89 The rise of an affluent middle class and accelerating suburbanization following WWII created a context for profitable innovations in household technologies. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Levittowns of New York and

Pennsylvania provided a model for mass-produced, affordable housing. The expansion of these types of communities, coupled with low unemployment and steady economic growth, made buying homes more affordable. The United States reached near full employment from 1948 to

1953. Average family household income increased 178 percent from the mid 1930s to 1950, with average family expenditures during the same timeframe increasing by nearly 152 percent. The percentage of American families owning their own home increased from 30 percent in the mid

1930s to 48 percent by 1950.90

The realm of personal domestic uses thus became the preferred general-public site of development and innovation. Such products were first presented in largely futurist, utopian demonstrations similar in form to what had taken place in the 1920s. However, what differed from the 1920s was a greatly increased sophistication of consumer electronics on the heels of post-War economic growth and suburbanization, in which remote control soon became an affordable and desired capability of household appliances.

The introduction of home wiring systems and the rise of consumer electronics made possible remote control as a generally affordable form of agency within the sphere of the home.

Prior to WWII, the primary domestic embodiment of remote control had been the radio.

Companies began advertising wired remote control tuning units for home radios as early as

1927.91 During the early 1930s the prospects of remotely controlling one’s home radio was a hot topic in popular electronics magazines.92 By the end of that decade Philco broke ground by offering their Model 516 radio phonograph with wireless control.93

With the development of more economical remote-control home wiring systems and continued developments in microelectronics, the late 1940s saw the beginnings of a number of emerging hopes and practices come to fruition, led by promotion and publicity for consumer electronics in general-reader technology magazines.94 A 1946 issue of Popular Mechanics featured “the house that’s run by pushbuttons” as an example of a domestic remote control wiring system that allowed its owner to perform such tasks as opening and closing windows, turning on an electric grill, starting coffee, switching on a furnace, and opening a garage door.95

During the late 1950s, appliance manufacturers in response to “growing resistance on the part of consumers to what they feel is deliberately-planned obsolescence” began researching and developing automated systems for household chores.96 Among these new developments was a remote-controlled stove that could be operated by a one-channel transmitter. RCA Whirlpool’s remote-control air conditioner was introduced in 1960, while three years later lawn sprinkling systems were becoming equipped with remote-control valves.97

By the late 1960s the promotion and exhibition of consumer electronics had expanded from individual promoters, magazine stories, and World’s Fairs to the first Consumer Electronics

Show (CES). CES debuted in the midst of a significant decline in consumer-electronics sales. By

1970 sales of televisions were down more than 20 percent, radios by 19 percent, and phonographs by 34 percent compared to the previous year.98 The yearly consumer-electronics trade shows received relatively little general-press attention until the 1980s, when remote- controlled televisions and stereos reached an apex.

Tensions surrounding remote control as direct intention continued into the 1980s with its articulation as both a geopolitical threat and domestic promise. Remote-controlled bombs were used in a number assassination and terrorist attempts, such as the 1979 attempt in Belgium on

U.S. General Alexander Haig’s life.99 Systematic terrorist attacks included the Irish Republican

Army’s tactic of planting remote-controlled bombs on roadsides and inside automobiles.100 The proliferation of remote-controlled attacks was indicated by their global reach, with such attacks occurring in Lebanon, Kuwait, England, Germany, Greece, and Bolivia, among others.101

Despite these nefarious uses, remote control as the reliable extension of individual intention continued to be integral to developments in television and other consumer electronics.

By the 1980s, the television remote control emerged as the embodiment of Lockean control within the home due in part to its reduced cost in the wake of advances in miniaturized circuitry.

First introduced in 1956, the Zenith Space Commander model marked the beginnings of changes in how viewers watched television. That same year Motorola’s Transituner was advertised as a

“transistor miracle,” thus further indicating the early relationship between remote control and miniaturization projects.102 It took nearly 30 years, but by 1985, remote-controlled color television sets outsold for the first time their manually controlled counterparts.103

Coupled with the proliferation of video cassette recorders, stereos, and cable television, remote-control gadgetry reached an apex during this period.104 Television networks and audience-research firms faced problems with the popular adoption of the television remote

control. Its use was cited as a reason for declines in network ratings, as audiences could more easily surf from station to station.105 The A.C. Nielsen Company caused a stir in 1987 when it switched to remote-controlled “people meters” from relying on handwritten viewer diaries for ratings data. Diaries were thought as unreliable, especially considering the new practice of channel surfing. In their place, people meters that were attached to televisions allowed viewers to simply push a button to record their choices. Among a range of concerns, network executives claimed the new meters favored younger audiences and would inaccurately deflate ratings of programs tailored to older audiences.106

Academic interest in the television remote control was spurred by works that celebrated its ushering in a new wave of audience control. Scholars focused on it as a subversive technology that “works in opposition to the historic structure and operational parameters of the U.S. television industry.”107 Viewers were said to possess “newfound control” in their ability to more easily select programming and avoid advertising.108 But while some celebrated this new

“zapper culture,” others satirized it. During the late 1980s MTV’s popular game show Remote

Control relied on contestants who knew little about world affairs, but could recall several mundane details of reruns and other pop culture tidbits.109

Remote control as a secure, reliable, and linear agency came under full assault during the

Cold War years and into the 1980s. Not only was the reliability and security of the link between individual and object of command weakened, but the human monopoly on rationality came under question by emerging research on intelligent systems. Nonetheless, an emerging consumer electronics market in the wake of post-War economic growth relied on the forms of remote control promoted decades earlier by Francill and Mr. Televox. This contradictory articulation of

remote control as both a geopolitical threat and a domestic promise demonstrates its validation and critique of Enlightenment agency.

Conclusion

The extension of remote control promoted in service of a consumer-electronics market was enabled by miniaturization and further developed in the field of microelectronics. It first relied on a directional conception of command originating from either a human center or human/device configuration. The continued shrinking of electrical devices, notably the development of the microprocessor, provided the productive basis for mobilizing such command across digital networked space. Whereas miniaturization dissolved the referent, developments in remote control dissolved the unitary agent. Assembled by these historical developments, agencies of digital mobility are characterized not by referents and origins, but by dispersion and recursivity. In other words, agencies—not just people—are mobilized within digital mobility.

The implications of this assemblage call to question empirical conceptions of objects-as-origin and Enlightenment conceptions of individualized agency.

Notes

1 “Mind Reader,” YouTube video, 0:29, from a television commercial for Palm Pre, posted by “modernistaboston,” August 5, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8_Q6WOfTz0&feature=plcp.

2 “Past Lives,” YouTube video, 0:30, from a television commercial for Palm Pre, posted by “modernistaboston,” August 5, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X5pOa- si54&feature=plcp.

3 “Green Lights,” YouTube video, 0:29, from a television commercial for Palm Pre, posted by “modernistaboston,” August 5, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuXgirybf20&feature=plcp.

4 Priya Ganapati, “Palm Pre Admaker Defends ‘Creepy’ TV Commercial,” Wired Gadget Lab, last modified August 3, 2009, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/palm-pre- ad.

5 “Rainy Day,” YouTube video, 0:30, from a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S, posted by “Apple,” April 17, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5Dt0YlN2nM&feature=context-chv.

6 “Date Night,” YouTube video, 0:30, from a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S, posted by “Apple,” April 17, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azBzUEFZIss&feature=context-chv.

7 “Life,” YouTube video, 0:30, from a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S, posted by “Apple,” May 23, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t- lsULa8ZM&feature=context-chv.

8 Nicola Tesla, U.S. Patent No. 613,809 (issued Nov. 8, 1898), http://www.google.com/patents/US613809.

9 John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (Hollywood, CA: Angriff Press, 1981), 166.

10 Marc J. Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nicola Tesla: Biography of a Genius (New York: Citadel Press, 1998), 195.

11 Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man out of Time (New York: Touchtone, 1981), 161-2.

12 Laurence Newcome, Unmanned Aviation: A Brief History of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004), 13.

13 Ibid, 14.

14 Antonio Pérez-Yuste, “Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Early Developments of Wireless Remote Control: The Telekino of Torres-Quevedo,” Proceedings of the IEEE 96, no. 1 (2008): 186-190. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=04399975.

15 “Newest Engine of War an Ideal Weapon for Coast Defense,” The Washington Post, October 29, 1911, B3.

16 Kenneth P. Werrell, The Evolution of the Cruise Missile (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1985), 8.

17 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911).

18 David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Knopf, 1984).

19 David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 115.

20 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press, 1977), 286.

21 Tony Bennett, “Theories of the Media, Theories of Society,” in Culture, Society and the Media, eds. Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott (London: Routledge, 1988), 30-41.

22 Dwight MacDonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture, eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 59-73; C. Wright Mills, “The Mass Society,” in The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 298-324.

23 Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: H. Liveright, 1928).

24 Jefferson Pooley, “The New History of Mass Communication Research,” in The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, eds. David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 50.

25 Cheryl R. Ganz, The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

26 “Deadly Radio Waves Seen as Preventative of War by Francil (sic), ‘Radio Wizard’,” Atlanta Constitution, October 21, 1926, 3.

27 “Francill, Radio Wizard, Exhibits Radio Power over Two Automobiles,” Youngstown Vindicator, April 10, 1926, 10.

28 Advertisement for “Zenith Long Distance Radio,” Atlanta Constitution, December 10, 1922, B8.

29 “Wizard Francill to Visit Atlanta,” Atlanta Constitution, April 22, 1923, B8; “Nash Stock Model Chosen for Radio Demonstration,” Atlanta Constitution, October 12, 1926, 16.

30 “Mr. McQuhae Featured at Show Tonight: Henry Lane Mystifies Group with Radio- Controlled Train,” Christian Science Monitor, September 30, 1926, 7.

31 Advertisement for “3rd Wisconsin Radio Exposition,” Milwaukee Journal, November 10, 1925, 22.

32 “Gives Command and Autos Obey,” Painesville Telegraph (Painesville, OH), August 23, 1930, 1.

33 “Interest Grows at American Legion Circus,” Warsaw Union (Warsaw, IN), February 12, 1926, 6.

34 “Will Fry Eggs by Radio,” Toledo News-Bee, November 25, 1925, 11; “Maurice Francill at Boston Show: Wireless Control Exhibition to be a Feature,” Christian Science Monitor, September 11, 1926, 6.

35 “DeSoto Car Run By Radio Waves,” Pittsburg Press, November 18, 1928, Automobile Section, 5.

36 “Francill, Radio Wizard, Exhibits Radio Power over Two Automobiles,” Youngstown Vindicator, April 10, 1926, 10.

37 “Wizard will Operate Auto Using Radio,” Telegraph-Herald and Times-Journal (Dubuque, IA), June 27, 1927, 7.

38 “Radio Control to be Shown: Chevrolet Autos to be Started and Driven by Maurice Francill,” Portsmouth Times (Portsmouth, OH), September 19, 1933, 10; “Auto Demonstration Here Monday Night,” Gettysburg Times (Gettysburg, PA), October 20, 1934, 1.

39 “Deadly Radio Waves Seen as Preventative of War by Francil (sic), ‘Radio Wizard’,” Atlanta Constitution, October 21, 1926, 3.

40 Ibid.

41 Waldemar Kaempffert, “Science Produces the ‘Electrical Man’,” New York Times, October 23, 1927, XX1.

42 “Televox, the Mechanical Man,” Milwaukee Journal, February 23, 1928, 2.

43 Herbert F. Powell, “Machines that Think,” Popular Science, January 1928, 12.

44 “Mechanical Man Doesn’t Miss a Cue,” New York Times, February 23, 1928, 2.

45 Ralph T. Jones, “’Televox,’ Mechanical Man, Gives Amazing Demonstration,” Atlanta Constitution, May 11, 1928, 5.

46 “Televox in Pulpit Gives Pastor Sermon’s Text,” The Washington Post, October 27, 1928, 11; “The Perfect Bridge Partner,” New York Times, July 1, 1928, 90.

47 “Machine Answers Telephone Inquiries and Obeys Orders,” Christian Science Monitor, October 15, 1927, 1; “Mechanical Man is Now Given the Gift of Speech,” Popular Mechanics, August 1928, 192.

48 “Speaking Robot to Man Cars Shown to Trolley Delegates,” New York Times, September 25, 1928, 30; “How to Get Rich Quick,” Washington Post, September 26, 1928, 6.

49 “Mr. Televox Hears Call of Plane in Air and Illuminates Field for Night Landing,” Christian Science Monitor, February 19, 1929, 1; “Televox Lights Port at Call from Plane,” New York Times, February 19, 1929, 1; “Aerodrome Lit by Pilot’s Siren,” The Times, February 20, 1929, 16; “Lighting by Televox,” Washington Post, February 20, 1929, 6.

50 “Oranges Pay Tribute to Edison Today,” New York Times, October 16, 1929, 26.

51 “Operate Electric Policeman by Sound of Voice,” Popular Mechanics, March 1929, 409.

52 “Piping over Telephone, Distant Wife Can Cook,” Washington Post, October 14, 1927, 1.

53 Advertisement for “The Constitution Free Cooking School,” Atlanta Constitution, February 24, 1930, 12; “Proper Food for Children will Mean Much to Nation,” Atlanta Constitution, February 24, 1930, 5.

54 Ibid.

55 “By-Products: The Gentleman with a Vacuum Cleaner,” New York Times, February 26, 1928, 54.

56 Powell, “Machines that Think,” 13; Robert E. Martin, “Mechanical Men Walk and Talk,” Popular Science, December 1928, 22.

57 Ibid, 138.

58 “We Interview Mr. Televox, Mechanical Man,” Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators 28, no. 1 (1929): 6.

59 George M. Siouris, Missile Guidance and Control Systems (New York: Springer, 2004).

60 W.H. Lawrence, “Eisenhower Wants Koreans to Bear Brunt of Fighting,” New York Times, October 3, 1952, 1.

61 “Navy Uses Robot Missiles Against Targets in Korea,” New York Times, September 18, 1952, 1.

62 “Remote-Control Machine Gun,” New York Times, February 22, 1951, 10; “New Air Force Camera Has Remote Control,” Washington Post, July 10, 1951, 6.

63 “Warfare ‘Myths’ Worry Brucker,” New York Times, February 2, 1956, 14.

64 Nate Haseltine, “A-Test Victims Recovering, AEC Reports,” Washington Post and Times-Herald, July 31, 1954, 1.

65 Alvin Shuster, “Missile Runs Wild and is Lost in Test on Atlantic Range,” New York Times, December 7, 1956, 1.

66 John G. Norris, “Check on A-Weapon Use Developed,” Washington Post and Times- Herald, June 16, 1962, A1.

67 “New Book Tells of A-Arms Locks,” New York Times, February 26, 1969, 21.

68 Jack Raymond, “U.S. to Install Locks on Atomic Weapons as Extra Safeguard,” New York Times, July 6, 1962, 1; “White House Seeking $23.3 Million to Use for A-Weapon ‘Locks’,” Wall Street Journal, July 6 1962, 22.

69 Jack Raymond, “Plan for Missile on Rails Killed in Favor of Underground Sites,” New York Times, December 14 1961, 20.

70 William Beecher, “Future Missiles: Defense Experts Weigh Many Ways to Lessen Weapons’ Vulnerability,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 1964, 1.

71 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433- 460.

72 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948), 12.

73 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

74 T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution (New York: Random House, 1985).

75 Ibid, 15.

76 Gene Smith, “Pinhead-Size Solid Circuits Spur Electronics Revolution,” New York Times, December 6, 1964, F1.

77 Peter Gall, “Lilliputian Circuits,” Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1964, 1.

78 “RCA Says it Will Use Integrated Circuits in Some 1966 TV Sets,” Wall Street Journal, February 1, 1966, 11.

79 Gordon Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (1965): 114-117.

80 “RCA Division Introduces Low-Cost Microprocessor,” Wall Street Journal, March 9, 1976, 4.

81 Reid, The Chip, 157.

82 Victor K. McElheny, “New Markets Are Sought for Miniaturized Computers,” New York Times, January 16, 1975, 74.

83 National Academy of Sciences Panel on Thin-Film Microstructure Science and Technology, Microstructure Science, Engineering, and Technology (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1979), 1.

84 Günter Friedrichs and Adam Schaff, eds., Microelectronics and Society: For Better or Worse: A Report to the Club of Rome (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982).

85 Jason Scott-Warren, “Reconstructing Manuscript Networks: The Textual Transactions of Sir Stephen Powle,” in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, eds. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 18-37.

86 Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995).

87 Winston, Media Technology, 243-275.

88 AT&T Technology Timeline, “1951: Microwave Radio-Relay Skyway,” accessed August 26, 2012, http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/51microwave.html.

89 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

90 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending: Data for the Nation, New York City, and Boston,” May 2006, http://www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/report991.pdf.

91 Advertisement for “Thermiodyne Remote Control Radio Tuning Unit,” Popular Mechanics, October 1927, 170.

92 “Remote Controls for Set Operation,” Popular Mechanics, March 1930, 477; Alfred P. Lane, “Radio Aims at Remote Control,” Popular Science, November 1930, 78.

93 Advertisement for “Philco Radio Phonographs,” LIFE, December 4, 1939, 68-9.

94 Mary Roche, “Remote Control for Home Wiring,” New York Times, May 12, 1948, 31.

95 “The House that’s Run by Pushbuttons,” Popular Mechanics, November 1946, 148.

96 Stanley W. Penn, “Tomorrow’s Home: Robot Floor Scrubber, Remote-Control Stove, Dry Cleaner Studied,” Wall Street Journal, June 2 1959, 1.

97 “New Air Conditioner Has Remote Control,” New York Times, March 14, 1960, 22; Bernard Gladstone, “By the Clock: Timers Control Lawn Sprinkling Systems,” New York Times, August 4, 1963, 100.

98 “Consumer Electronics Show Gets Cool Review from Some Retailers,” Wall Street Journal, July 1, 1970, 20.

99 John Vinocur, “Gen. Haig Unhurt as Car is Target of Bomb on Road to NATO Office,” New York Times, June 26, 1979, A1; Michael Getler, “Haig Escapes Apparent Try on His Life,” Washington Post, June 26, 1979, A1.

100 Jon Nordheimer, “5 Killed in London as Bomb Explodes Outside Harrods,” New York Times, December 18, 1983, 1.

101 Nora Boustany, “Remote-Control Bomb Kills 8 in Beirut,” Washington Post, February 24, 1980, A21; Nora Boustany, “Lebanon’s New President Killed,” Washington Post, November 23, 1989, A1; “7 Dead in Kuwait as 6 Blasts Rock Sites Across City,” New York Times, December 13, 1983, A1; Nordheimer, “5 Killed in London as Bomb Explodes Outside Harrods,” 1; Robert J. McCartney, “Terrorist Group Kills Executive Near Munich,” Washington Post, July 10, 1986, A1; Ferdinand Protzman, “Head of Top West German Bank is Killed in Bombing by Terrorists,” New York Times, December 1, 1989, A1; Patrick Quinn, “Car Bomb Kills U.S. Naval Attaché in Athens,” Washington Post, June 29, 1988, A1; Shirley Christian, “Shultz Caravan is Bomb Target on Bolivia Visit,” New York Times, August 9, 1988, A1.

102 Advertisement for “Motorola Television,” LIFE, October 8, 1956, 86-7.

103 Johnnie L. Roberts, “Homes Have More Remote-Control Gear, Bringing Both Ease and New Headaches,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 1985, 35.

104 Robert Bellamy, “Remote Control Device,” in Encyclopedia of Television, ed. Horace Newcomb (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), 1918-1920.

105 Eleanor Randolph, “Network News Confronts Era of Limits,” Washington Post, February 9, 1987, A1.

106 Peter J. Boyer, “TV Turning to People Meters to Find Who Watches What,” New York Times, June 1, 1987, A1.

107 Robert V. Bellamy, Jr. and James Walker, Television and the Remote Control: Grazing on a Vast Wasteland (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), 1.

108 Ibid.

109 Dennis Kneale, “MTV’s Game Show Tries to Be Dumb and Fully Succeeds,” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 1989, A1.

CHAPTER 4

DIGITAL MOBILITIES AS DISPERSED AGENCIES

While wide-ranging in time and focus, by concretely reconstructing the production of transitive objects and active objects, the prior two chapters laid the necessary groundwork for this chapter, which is a concrete analysis of three assemblages of digital mobility.

As argued in the previous two chapters, miniaturization and remote control produce objects as transitive and active. Rendered as a generalizable process in the contexts of military weapons development and the post-WWII boom in consumer electronics, miniaturization came to refer not to the shrinking of specific objects, but to the generalized process of shrinking capabilities. Coupled with miniaturization, remote control described less an exclusively human agency than one that required devices. Together and in articulation they critique Enlightenment and empiricist conceptions of agency while forming a key basis for assemblages of digital mobility.

Because the analysis here needs to proceed in a somewhat different way that what was done in the prior two chapters, the major premises upon which it is build should be made clear here. First is the recognition that assemblages of digital mobility are indeed plural. An analysis thus should explore different kinds in a non-exhaustive way rather than assert that all or one has been definitively found, thus foreclosing the demonstrated complexity of practice. Second is the usefulness of identifying different assemblages in relation to concrete human practice, whether primarily physical or psychological (although, as will be argued, the line between these only makes sense analytically).

Building upon these two premises, this chapter presents analyses of digital mobility exerted across three discernible assemblages. A perceptual digital mobility is produced through the assemblage enabled by Google Glass.1 A kinetic digital mobility is produced through the assemblage enabled by the Microsoft Kinect. Finally, an emotional digital mobility is produced through the assemblage enabled by Siri as part of various Apple products.

The strategy of analysis of these three proceeds in a similar way. First is an account of the concrete development of each. This is important because it demonstrates the degree to which military research and pressures of profitability (pressures that were central to the production of transitive and active objects) also drove their development. This recognition places these three instances directly within and part of the much larger process of development described in the prior two chapters.

Second is an emphasis on the broader cultural production of these devices and capabilities. What they can do and thus are is partly a result of wires and electrical connections, but their configurations and agencies are also products of long-standing cultural traditions and ways of thinking about dispersed agency. Thus, accounts of each of the three instances also include observations about the more general patterns of imagining and representation of their specific capabilities. The analyses do this by identifying and exploring different rhetorics that constitute the device and its uses within the assemblages. Where Google Glass helps enable perceptual agencies through rhetorics of omniscience, Microsoft Kinect enables kinetic agencies through rhetorics of magic, and Siri through rhetorics of companionship. Such rhetorics as part of the assemblage of each were presaged and produced in popular culture and extended in promotional campaigns, news reports, product reviews, parodies, corporate statements, among other sources that were consulted for this study.

Third, and following Deleuze and Guattari’s admonition that one cannot understand an assemblage separate from what it can do, the emphasis in the analysis of each of these three instances is on what kinds of capabilities the assemblages of which they are a part make possible.

The capabilities will be seen in terms of the degree to which they rely upon and exemplify those of transitive objects (ones whose primary agency is to produce relationships) and active objects

(ones whose primary agency is to act).

After examining three cases in which agencies of digital mobility were produced and operate, the chapter concludes by demonstrating how these agencies articulate with formations of consumer capitalism reliant on dispersion and recursivity.

Perceptual Digital Mobilities and Google Glass

The dream of omniscience through the use of a personal, wearable device has been a key component of appeals embodied in toys, comic books, television, and film. Digital mobility as omniscience has been imagined as a valorized and individual capability derived from the use of a device. Capabilities differ according to who possesses the device – whether an everyday person or cyborg superhero – but they share nevertheless the ability to perform otherwise impossible feats of vision and understanding. During the latter half of the 20th century, film and television began to imagine these capabilities as derived from computational, digital means.

Decades prior to their present imagining, x-ray vision was showcased in novelty items and in comic books, producing the allure of omniscience through the aid of a device.2 X-ray specs gained popularity during the mid 20th century as a toy advertised to children in general readership publications. As a novelty item, they did not allow true x-ray vision, but rather produced an optical illusion when worn. Part of their appeal was due to voyeurism, as evidenced by ad copy and photos featuring a young male wearing the glasses and the silhouette of an

unsuspecting person.3 Lightning bolts emit from the glasses while the wearer grins slyly, knowing that s/he has gained secret information. A key appeal behind x-ray specs was this individualization and privatization of the capability such that the person being watched would not suspect anything awry.

Comics of the 1930s and 1940s featuring Superman showcased the hero’s x-ray vision without the use of glasses or any other aid. By not relying on a device and instead performing feats of x-ray vision through beams emitted from his eyes, the ability was centered in the individual. This ability allowed Superman to intervene in crimes, save lives, and perform other types of heroic acts. Superman’s x-ray vision thus became a critical function in the fight for

“truth, justice, and the American way.” Superman’s x-ray vision appeared throughout the 20th century and more recently appeared in the television series Smallville wherein a young Clark

Kent discovers that he has the superpower and must learn to apply it properly.

Science fiction in film and television has also demonstrated a fascination with the possibility of omniscience through a perceptual, wearable device. During the 1980s films such as

RoboCop and Terminator featured cyborg heroes with the ability to gather information about their surroundings through the use of an optical apparatus. These depictions differed from earlier imaginings through the depiction of a cyborg, or hybrid of human-machine, which achieves feats through digital, computational means. Such means allowed characters to gather more information than merely what is behind a wall or around a corner. Moreover, such information is perceived only by the cyborg. What remains similar, however, is the valorization of characters with these abilities. For RoboCop, thermal vision and precise audio capabilities produced a crime fighting superhero whose weapons were aimed with precision accuracy and who could detect minor fluctuations in sound and voice. Likewise, the Terminator could derive a great range of

100

information regarding his surroundings, including data on individuals and potential threats, thanks to an augmented reality feature that enhanced his perception.

In television, the character Geordi La Forge in Star Trek gathered otherwise invisible information through the use of a wearable device. Born blind, La Forge was equipped with a

VISOR (an acronym for “visual instrument and sensory organ replacement”). More human than the Terminator or RoboCop, La Forge nonetheless gained his abilities through configuration with a wearable device augmenting in this case absent sight. Resulting from this configuration was knowledge regarding other characters’ moods, electromagnetic waves, and information otherwise invisible or unavailable to his Enterprise shipmates. La Forge’s appeal and value to the

Enterprise centered on his ability to immediately recall such information, resulting several times in saving the lives of his crewmates.

Together with technical developments and marketing imperatives already discussed, these imaginings form the basis of current efforts to further produce digital mobility as an omniscient perception of the world. Unlike Superman’s x-ray vision (which is only available to him due to his extraterrestrial origins) and cyborgs’ specially crafted and exclusive equipment,

Google Glass embodies a dream of democratized and popularized omniscience. This is the dream of empiricism embodied—that, with this device, anyone can have complete knowledge of anything. Such knowledge is individualized in that it is presented only to the wearer of the device.

Google Glass was envisioned early on not as a replacement of humanity or a simple inert servant of humanity, but as an “augmented version,” recalling the configurational thinking typical of digital mobility.4 Distinctions between devices and people are thus unclear while devices are promoted as the means to achieve such augmentation. Always being connected to a

101

device and network, according to CEO Eric Schmidt, would eliminate loneliness while allowing humans to achieve things never before possible. Based on Google’s advancement in search, geolocation, and social networking, the technical bricks had been laid for this type of feature.5

The development of the device was wrapped within the technological mystery and intrigue of what was known cryptically as “Project Glass.” In late 2011 rumors began to spread about activities within the Google X lab, a top-secret facility located in the Bay Area of

California.6 In the lab, roboticists, electrical engineers, neuroscientists, and other researchers collaborate on projects ranging from driverless cars and space elevators to Internet-connected coffee makers and light bulbs. Google Glass was one such project leaked to bloggers and the general press in December of 2011. The device was described as “Terminator-style,” a reference to the 1984 sci-fi action movie in which a cyborg is equipped with glasses that provide visual reads of its surroundings.7 In secret fashion, Google representatives refused to comment on

“rumors and speculation.”

By early 2012 rumors surrounding Google Glass began circulating heavily among blogs and news organizations thanks in part to leaks by Google employees. Reports of a new $120 million facility that would be used, in part, to test “innovative optical coatings” provided a boost to the frenzy.8 The involvement of an engineer central to the development of the Google mapping software known as “Latitude” indicated that location information would be integrated with the device.9 Other reports focused on the ability to receive information on their surroundings in real-time. Such data would be recorded by Google, which could in turn send targeted advertisements and gather information regarding “the whole world as you see it.”10

Soon predictions emerged that Google would begin selling ad-supported augmented reality glasses by the year’s end.11

102

In spring of 2012 Google began publicizing Project Glass. A promotional video produced by Google demonstrates how the Google Glass works while recalling a common theme of miniaturizing capabilities.12 In the case of Google Glass, the miniaturization of omniscience is a key appeal. By wearing the glasses, objects dissolve. What becomes important is not what one sees, but what one knows about what one sees. Information regarding objects is available only to the wearer who in the video is placed at the center of effectivity.

While a host of capabilities are miniaturized, they derive from the ability to access information regarding objects at will, and sometimes without initiation by the user. Information about the weather is displayed when the wearer looks out his window. Locative knowledge becomes available when he requests walking directions to a bookstore. Using voice command, the wearer of the glasses determines the exact location of his friend within a range measured in feet. Other information that does not rely on the command of the user is also instantly available.

A text message from a friend alerts the user to meet up at the bookstore. Upon entering a subway station, an alert notifies that service has been suspended. The user sets his own alerts to remind him to purchase tickets to a concert.

In these ways, Google Glass operates as an active object within specific configurations.

The shifting of one’s eyes or the sound of one’s voice initiates a number of feats ranging from retrieving directions and gathering information on a local restaurant to sending text messages and updating social networks. Not only does the user initiate actions through the glasses, but the glasses also display alerts and take action based on movements of the user. Google’s Schmidt also envisioned what he called “autonomous search,” which operates as a recursive agency. It allows the device to search the Internet without initiation by the user. For example, a person

103

walking down the street would receive information on her surroundings based on her past behavior rather than upon issuing a specific command to the device.13

It also operates as a transitive object and produces other objects as transitive as well.

Google Glass dissolves objects into what an individual wishes to know about them, thus producing a data-driven relationship. As rendered by Google Glass, what is important about objects is the information hidden within them, and such information becomes easily accessed by anyone wearing the glasses.

Kinetic Digital Mobilities and Microsoft Kinect

The ability of humans to conjure wondrous feats through the motion of their hands and bodies has long been celebrated and desired. One recalls not only the performances of Maurice

Francill in the 1920s and 1930s described in prior chapters, but also examples from religion, film, and literature. Human control over nature through the magical motion of the body has been an important part of religious faith extending into popular culture. Such control demonstrates the power of God, and not necessarily the human as intermediary. As an example, in the Book of

Exodus, God commands Moses to “raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground.”14 The parting of the

Red Sea was famously reenacted in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments wherein a bearded

Charlton Heston portrays Moses raising his staff and leading his tribe through the valley created by the mirrored waves. An Academy Award for Special Effects followed by contemporary references as among the “greatest movie moments” of all time evidence a broader secular fascination with the control of nature by the movement of one’s hand.15

104

Rather than exerting such command for a particular purpose, the cultural fascination with wizardry celebrates a generalized use. The Harry Potter series of books and movies demonstrates a form of wizardry through the use of proxy wands. From casting spells to use as a weapon, waving the wand produces a number of amazing feats. Both the cultural and commercial prominence of the Potter films is evidenced in the array of toys marketed to children, from Halloween costumes to replica brooms.16

Like perceptual digital mobilities, together with technical developments and marketing imperatives already discussed, these imaginings form the basis of current efforts to further produce digital mobility as kinetic control of the world. For example, the Nintendo Wii gaming console introduced in 2006 soon gained world-wide popularity. Its production of kinetic digital mobilities developed in new directions the dispersed agencies of transitive, active objects. Before the Wii, users manipulated the game by pressing buttons on a handheld controller. Nintendo’s new controller for the Wii contained buttons, but also incorporated a microchip that detected the movements of a player’s hand, wrist, and arm. As a result, players controlled images on the screen with the movement of a wireless controller detected by a sensor placed in front of the television. Plastic add-ons to the controller in the shapes of steering wheels, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and other replicas enhanced the sense of magical wizard-like manipulation.

The marketing strategy behind the Wii showcased the system as an inclusive, social device. Prior to release, the original name for the console was the Nintendo Revolution.

Nintendo decided to change the name in accordance with a marketing strategy aimed at emphasizing the social and kinetic aspects of the gaming system. The awkward name “Wii” was to be pronounced like the English collective pronoun and could be easily remembered phonetically by people of all languages.17 A public statement by Nintendo regarding the name

105

change emphasized their intent to expand market share by “break[ing] down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.”18 Expanding their market to a broader audience by rethinking the controller was an important means to this goal.

An early television commercial campaign for the system emphasized this social and globalized marketing strategy centered on inclusiveness. In the opening scene two Japanese men travel in a compact car to a home, knock on the door, and state to the residents, “Wii would like to play.” The men subsequently travel across the country knocking on doors and playing games with groups of people in their homes.19 Players in the commercial represent a wide range of ages and races. By depicting play always in a group, the game play in the ad highlights the social and inclusive features of the new system by virtue of a wand-like device. Such depictions correspond to the overall strategy by Nintendo and furthermore indicate an overt attempt to expand and democratize kinetic digital mobilities.

Reaction by journalists highlighted Nintendo’s place in the much heated “console wars.”20 Prior to its introduction, the company had recorded a 19 percent decline in annual profits.21 Despite largely negative reviews regarding the name change, journalists typically predicted that the Wii would mark a significant milestone in the battle among the other two big console manufacturers, Sony and Microsoft.22 Key to its potential victory would be the adoption by new gamers thanks to its non-intimidating, natural feel. As one review put it, “Nintendo set about making the gaming experience itself something even a grandmother might look forward to, and it does a great job right out of the box.”23 Indeed, by March of 2009 the Wii was outselling

Microsoft’s Xbox console nearly two-to-one thanks in large part to the Wii’s motion-sensing controller.24

106

As a rival to the Wii, the Microsoft Kinect was developed first as an add-on gaming device for the Xbox 360 console, but has since been positioned as a means of much broader use.

Its technical basis was laid through patent and company acquisition. To compete with the Wii,

Microsoft began maneuvering to acquire patents and companies involved with 3D cameras and sensing technology. Such technology would distinguish Microsoft by eliminating the handheld controller entirely, instead relying directly on movements of the user’s body. One major acquisition involved the Israeli firm 3DV Systems, which Microsoft purchased in early 2009 for a reported $35 million.25 The major impetus behind the purchase was 3DV’s development of what it called the ZCam, a video camera that allowed users to “control the game using body gestures alone.”26 Further acquisitions of 3D sensing and recognition technologies took place through the purchase of patents from PrimeSense, whose reference designs provided the model for the Kinect’s sensor.27

In a mode owing much to the performance-promotions of the early 1920s, the device’s public debut occurred in June 2009 at E3 (Electronics Exhibition Expo) in Los Angeles as

“Project Natal,” wowing insiders who described it as a “game-changer across the entire industry.”28 Science-fiction film director Steven Spielberg made an appearance on stage to promote Project Natal and the invisibility of interactive entertainment through a “technology that recognizes not only your thumbs and your wrist, but your entire being.”29 Such hyperbole was and continues to be indicative of the promotional strategy behind Project Natal and the Kinect.

By eliminating the proxy device, Microsoft promised greater intimacy of command by delivering unmitigated individual intention solely through the kinetic motions of the body. Journalists were allowed to preview the system, later writing of the “magic” of Natal’s skeletal mapping capabilities in which the user is scanned by an infrared projector that creates a 3D image of the

107

body.30 The initial expo of Project Natal led reporters to declare Microsoft the winner over

Nintendo for the future of motion-control gaming.31

As a transitive object, the Kinect disperses agencies across configurations of individuals, devices, and networks. Certain movements of the body correspond to any number of actions on a screen. Actions of the user are mimicked in a range of games, from Star Wars in which users pantomime a light saber battle to dance and fitness games in which avatars react to the gyrations of the body. Users also can select which movies to watch through the Internet by swiping their hand.

As an active object, not only does the user command action on the screen, but the Kinect system responds and initiates movements from the user. Much of this occurs during game play, wherein a character or situation on screen adjusts in coordination with the motion of the user’s body thereby prompting a range of potential reactions. Specific to the Kinect, however, is the way in which the system adjusts to the user’s body thanks to its 3D sensor. In order to produce seamless interaction between user and device, the 3D sensor continually measures depth, height, and motion of the body. Furthermore, user emotions and activity can be recorded and stored.

Recent patent applications indicate the Kinect will be active in collecting and disseminating this information to advertisers.32

The production of this kinetic agency through rhetorics of magic can be seen not only in the design of the system itself, but also in news reports, blogs, and product reviews. The appeal of the Kinect was, and is, in the ability of the user to transmit intention magically by rendering one’s own body as the wand. Indeed this was precisely the distinguishing characteristic that led reviewers to claim it to be the next generation of motion-control gaming. Upon its launch, several reviews made comparisons to the 2002 futuristic sci-fi film Minority Report in which the

108

lead character manipulates screens with the motion of his hands thanks to an interactive user interface.33 A USA Today review described the motion control as “surreal.”34 Another from the

New York Times described a “crazy, magical, omigosh rush the first time you try the Kinect.”35

Promotional videos for the Kinect continue to highlight the accomplishment of wondrous feats by rendering the body as magic wand. The range of individuals (from children to doctors) shown using Kinect suggests the popularization and implicit democratization of magical capabilities. Central to the appeal of the Kinect is a result of its being a transitive object. What is important is not what the device can do, but rather what the individual can do in configuration with the device. Such an appeal is produced through the same rhetoric of magic used by Francill decades earlier. As kinetic digital mobilities become generalized through the use of the Kinect system, more activities become available.

In opening scenes of a commercial titled “Kinect Effect” the motions of users’ bodies are shown to replace the conventional handheld controller.36 Two friends in a living room mimic the motions of swinging a tennis racket, while in another scene children jump and others turn the page of a book with their hand. However, as the commercial continues more feats become possible, thus indicating the widespread kinetic agencies made possible by the new device. A doctor analyzes x-rays with the rotation of his hand. Musicians mimic the motions of playing an instrument and in doing so produce actual sound. A child undergoing physical therapy uses game play to exercise his injured knee. And finally, a remote-controlled robot defuses a car bomb. In closing, a voice-over states “even though the world keeps asking us what we’ll do with Kinect next, we’re just as excited to ask the world the same thing.”

Like Google Glass and its efforts on behalf of perceptual agencies, the configuration that includes the Kinect seeks to democratize and popularize kinetic digital mobilities. Rhetorics of

109

magic are central to this extension as well. One such example underway labeled “the magic mirror” was born from the research and development labs of the New York Times. By replacing the standard bathroom mirror with a Kinect motion-sensing mirror/display, users can browse news stories, shop online, and perform any number of other feats while brushing their teeth.37 In a demonstration recalling Francill’s magical manipulation of automobiles, at the 2012 Chicago

Auto Show a digital marketing agency showcased the interior of the 2013 concept Nissan

Pathfinder by using the Kinect system. Auto show attendees were not permitted to sit in the

Pathfinder, but the Kinect system allowed its kinetic exploration as though attendees were inside the car. The motions of the exhibitor’s hands guided the panoramic shots of the interior displayed on a large screen. In the agency’s press release, an executive from Nissan expressed the expectation of auto show attendees to be “wowed.”38 The magical manipulation of the screen through kinetic motion acted as the allure directing audiences’ attention to the product. While different, these examples indicate the expansion of kinetic digital mobilities alongside transforming practices of consumption and promotion.

Emotional Digital Mobilities and Siri

The dream and hope of constant, authentic, and steady human relationships either as tireless servants or as soulmates persists in many forms, including those that involve non-human beings. One not only recalls Westinghouse’s Mr. and Miss Televox from the 1930s as discussed in prior chapters, but other examples from popular culture. While not all companions were presented as protagonists, they nonetheless reflected and produced a fascination with digital, computational devices that mimic human behavior and serve the wishes of their masters. Also shared is the recognition of the device as a sentient being capable of heroic or villainous acts.

110

Television has imagined a heroic device that acts alongside a human companion as a sidekick, recalling innumerable hero/sidekick pairings of living beings such as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Tarzan and Cheetah, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto. For example, KITT, the autonomous AI car from the 1980s series Knight Rider, maintained a personal bond with lead character Michael Knight. Lifelike interactions with Michael helped to produce KITT’s emotional appeal with audiences. Beyond KITT’s ability to hear, launch weapons, and tap into computer systems, its frivolous banter with Michael helped to establish the machine as more than a device, but a true companion. Moreover, in many instances KITT acted on its own to assist

Michael and emerged as the hero of the episode. The relationship between the two was reenacted several times following cancellation of the original television series, with subsequent movies and spin-off series throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

While Knight Rider showcased a positive relationship between individual and companion, other depictions imagine the potential consequences of a computational assistant turned evil, all of which owe a debt to Mary Shelley’s Romantic-era book Frankenstein; or, the

Modern Prometheus (1818). The 1968 novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey featured a computerized assistant-turned-villain named HAL 9000 that mimics a human personality. HAL was originally built as a computerized companion that could verbally provide essential information to astronauts aboard the Discovery One spacecraft. After providing incorrect information, astronauts on board decide to deactivate it. Learning of this, HAL turns violently against its master by disconnecting his oxygen hose and killing crewmembers on the spacecraft.

A major source of HAL’s evil and mystery derived from its reason, emotion, and having been originally designed in service of human masters. The American Film Institute recognized HAL’s popularity and significance in 2003 by ranking it 13th out of the top 50 villains in film.39

111

Like perceptual and kinetic digital mobilities, these imaginings together with technical bases and marketing imperatives form the basis of current efforts to further produce digital mobility as emotional support in the world. A project known as DARPA (an acronym for

“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency”) was funded through SRI International (Stanford

Research Institute), a non-profit research and development center that has conducted several projects for the government since the 1940s.40 Named CALO (an acronym for “cognitive assistant that learns and organizes”), the project involved universities across the United States and ran from 2003 to 2008. The project was well-capitalized, with estimates ranging from $150 to $200 million.41 Its original intent was to create a “personal assistant that learns” (known as a

“PAL”), which would help military commanders and staff manage information in a combat environment.42 Prototypes were tested in an office environment as a virtual office assistant.

SRI’s commercialization board was impressed with the idea of a mobile assistant and developed plans for a spinoff company. Initially dubbed HAL (after the AI computer from 2001: A Space

Odyssey) the newly formed startup settled on Siri as a tribute to SRI.

Siri, Inc. introduced the “virtual personal assistant” to Apple’s App Store in February

2010.43 After receiving much initial fanfare, and with over $24 million in venture capital, Siri soon got the attention of Apple.44 In April 2010, Apple spent a reported $200 million to purchase Siri, Inc.45 The aggressive purchase was reported as Apple’s initial incursion into the search market, a realm in which Google has remained dominant.46 This move was seen as the next leg of a race between Apple, Google, and Microsoft to determine which company would lead the transition to voice-enabled search.47

Analysts were impressed with Apple’s purchase. They focused on the combination of artificial intelligence and voice recognition as having a good possibility of edging out Google’s

112

exclusive grip on mobile search.48 Despite press reports staging a Google versus Apple battle,

Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated in an interview soon after the purchase “Siri is not a search company. They’re an AI company. We have no plans to enter the search business.”49 Such comments indicate not only the development of Siri, but the vision for it to expand beyond search to a portable assistant with a purported consciousness of its own.

As a transitive object, agencies are dispersed in configuration with the user, Siri, and networks. The dispersion of agency works through its miniaturization. Such agencies reduce a number of functions to the sound of one’s voice. In doing so, what becomes important about Siri is not the device itself, but how it disperses command from the user. One can set a reminder for an appointment by commanding Siri to add an event to the calendar. To send a message to a friend requires nothing more than the sound of the user’s voice. Likewise, checking email, the weather, conducting a web search, and several other practices become enacted through voice command.

The dispersion of agency also materializes through a recursive system of remote control.

As an active object, the Apple iPhone 4S with Siri connects with the Internet and performs a number of functions without initiation by the user. In doing so, agency originates not entirely from the user but flows throughout a configuration involving the user, device, and network. Siri learns and adjusts to the habits of its user through use over an extended period of time. This includes acclimating to accents in order to improve accuracy. Moreover, according to Apple, Siri retrieves “information from your contacts, music library, calendars, and reminders to better understand what you say.”50 In addition to actions related to voice recognition, Siri also retrieves location information to better respond to user requests for restaurant reviews, nearest places, and directions.

113

Rhetorics of companionship produce Siri’s agency not only in advertising campaigns, but in news reports as well. Whereas Google Glass demonstrates a perceptual agency thanks to the use of a transitive/active object that augments reality, Siri represents an emotional agency thanks to the configuration with a personified device. Siri was not endowed with a voice until its incorporation into the iPhone 4S. The personification of Siri as a smooth-talking, friendly companion in one’s pocket was promoted in a marketing strategy designed to build a deeper relationship between the user and Apple’s latest version of the iPhone.

Apple’s promotional campaigns emphasize Siri’s adaptability to varying situations and the versatility of her companionship. Upon its debut, one such commercial featured this relationship between user and device through a series of vignettes. A woman driving a carload of children says to Siri, “we have a flat tire,” another woman jogging sets a reminder to make a phone call by speaking into the attached earphones, and a man presumably traveling on business tells Siri to “tell my wife I’m gonna make it.”51 Scenes of people ranging from children to adults appear in near rapid-fire succession. A total of 12 scenarios are presented in less than 30 seconds, indicating not only Siri’s range of answers to commands, but the ease with which “she” processes and handles them. At the end, a close-up of the iPhone 4S displays Siri’s interface, and

“her” voice is heard for the first time when helping a woman locate a locksmith. The commercial, titled “Assistant,” established the relationship between the user and the device not as a novelty reserved for the most tech-savvy users, but for everyday people and everyday tasks.

Another set of advertisements focused on users’ relationships with Siri. In one titled

“Rock God,” a teenager begins by telling Siri, “I gotta get a guitar.”52 Subsequent scenes demonstrate Siri’s role in not only helping the teenager to locate a music store, but to learn songs and chords, record potential band names, and alert friends to a garage concert. Emphasizing the

114

bond between user and device, the ad closes with the new guitarist commanding Siri to call him

“Rock God.” In a similar commercial titled “Road Trip,” Siri provides information to several people on different journeys across the country.53 From finding restaurants to charting constellations, Siri proves herself as the quintessential travel companion.

A more recent campaign discussed in an earlier chapter shifts attention from everyday people to celebrities, and presents Siri as a reliable digital companion through interactions ranging from mundane to profound. In one commercial Siri helps actor Samuel L. Jackson plan a romantic dinner.54 Jackson’s interactions with Siri include simple commands such as “cancel golf today.” Yet they also include complex commands such as, “find me a store that sells organic mushrooms for my risotto.” Siri responds immediately with “this organic market looks pretty close to you.” In another commercial, actor John Malkovich sits pensively on a leather chair in the corner of a dimly lit room and sighs.55 “Life,” he says into his iPhone. Siri responds with a series of short tips such as “avoid eating fat,” “read a good book now and then,” and “get some walking in.” Siri then pivots to the more profound when she follows with, “try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.” Malkovich reacts intrigued and grateful, thanking Siri for the advice as if she has helped him through an existential dilemma.

News coverage and product reviews highlight as well this companionship between the user and Siri that is emphasized in Apple’s advertising campaigns. Wired magazine reviewed the new iPhone, touting “Siri is the best androgynous unpaid intern you’ll ever meet.”56 A CNN review highlighted Siri’s “especially dry sense of humor.”57 Billed as more than a search function, the Apple website promotes it stating, “talk to Siri as you would to a person […] Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back.”58

115

Not all coverage of the companionship enabled by Siri was positive. One YouTube parody featuring the digital companion turning on its masters gained over 3.5 million views.59

Titled “Siri: The Horror Movie,” the two-minute short film depicts the assistant on a murderous streak. With a mind of its own, Siri explodes a car, holds a girl hostage, and stabs another victim.

While indeed a dark take, it shares in common a sense of Siri as something more than merely a function or device, but something resembling a sentient being capable of good or evil.

Despite the early enthusiasm for Siri, excitement began to wane in late 2011, particularly regarding Siri’s inability to connect with users. Controversy emerged when bloggers testing the feature were given incomplete and inaccurate results when searching for reproductive health services.60 Critics voiced concern that Siri exhibited a purposive bias, while Apple responded by stating the omissions were not intentional and the feature was still in development.61 This initial controversy was part of a larger issue with Siri’s inability to decipher user commands. In March

2012 a class-action lawsuit was filed against Apple stating the company misrepresented Siri’s capabilities in advertisements.62 An example of the alleged misrepresentation was Siri’s inability to understand accents of non-U.S. English speakers.63 By May, in response to growing criticism, former Apple employees began lambasting the feature, making public statements that

“Steve [Jobs] would have lost his mind over Siri.”64 Bloggers began having fun with Siri, highlighting its deficiencies. In one example, when asked “which is the best cell phone ever,”

Siri replied the Nokia Lumia (a competitor’s phone).65

Conclusion

Perceptual, kinetic, and emotional agencies of digital mobility articulate with contemporary formations of consumer capitalism, which relies increasingly on the dispersion of

116

agency across configurations of individuals-devices-networks. Recent developments foreshadow future articulations among digital mobilities and a consumer capitalism reliant on such recursivity.

Perceptual digital mobilities as practiced by Google Glass facilitate the dispersion of user information by integrating a transitive, active object with the body. Advertising represents 96 percent of total revenue for Google.66 At the same time Google Glass promises the dream of personal knowledge, individual activities are subsumed within a recursive system whereby users produce the very information used to market to themselves. In June 2012 Google announced it would sell prototypes of Google Glass to programmers who could improve the product through bug fixes and application development.67 Dubbed the “Explorer Edition,” prototypes sell for

$1,500.68 Making the Explorer Edition available by early 2013 will, as Google hopes, allow a less expensive version to go on sale to consumers by early 2014.

Keeping in mind that nearly all of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, the market value of the glasses resides not in the device itself, but it how it facilitates the production and dispersion of user information. At a Google press event held in San Francisco in June 2012, much of the presentation centered on the ease of use. Lead Designer Isabelle Olsson told reporters an important part of the design was to “empower people to use this technology naturally.”69 During her presentation to the audience, she emphasized interacting with a virtual world while not being distracting from the real world.70 Journalists allowed to demo prototypes compared the weight to sunglasses.71 In this way, Google Glass marks an advancement in the flow of agency among humans, devices, and networks. Such flows occur by making more seamless the recursivity of command among the wearer, the device, and the network.

117

The next phase of Kinect indicates the further expansion of kinetic digital mobilities within contemporary formations of consumer capitalism. Reports in June 2012 indicated that

Microsoft is seeking patents to target advertisements based on Kinect users’ emotional states.72

Filed June 7, 2012, the patent titled “Targeting Advertisements Based on Emotion” has garnered much attention by industry watchers.73 The Kinect’s camera would study users’ speech patterns and body movements, and coupled with information from previous Internet searches, zip codes, and other demographics, would be able to customize messages to the individual user. Such a development highlights the mobilization of agency not only through kinetic means, but also through networked configurations. The motions of the user, along with other input, become repurposed in service of an expanding capitalism reliant on dispersion and recursivity. By simplifying and expanding the use of the device, collection of information relevant to advertisers also becomes easier. User activities are rendered productive in the creation of their own targeted advertisements.

Developments surrounding Siri unveiled in 2012 indicate the extension of emotional digital mobilities in service of generating more user information. At a conference in June 2012,

Apple announced a partnership between Siri and Yelp, a social-networking site consisting of local businesses and user reviews. Industry watchers characterized the move as another stage in the battle between Apple and Google over online search. The relationship would facilitate a greater array of search capabilities by Siri, and would thus position Apple more attractive to advertisers who “value these searches, which are closely linked to location, time and intent.”74

Individualized applications based on the Siri architecture mark the extension of this form of digital companionship to a variety of other contexts. “Lola” was developed beginning in 2006 through joint efforts by BBVA Compass and SRI International “after field research showed that

118

customers want more ‘simplicity and human reassurance’ when they bank.”75 As the first digital personal assistant designed for a specific application, Lola promises to facilitate even complex bank transactions. Reports of Lola highlight the ease of transferring funds thanks to the smart digital companion.76 Because SRI “owns ‘the core engine’” behind Lola, other industries are expected to develop their own digital companions. Popularizing and democratizing these agencies is a key imperative for Apple and a digital economy centered on user information. Thus setbacks in Siri’s ability to “understand” its users ignite a crisis not only for rhetorics of companionship, but for formations of consumer capitalism increasingly reliant on emotional digital mobilities.

In all these cases, the resulting articulations of digital mobility are ongoing assemblages with open possibilities. Substantial historical processes of very long duration brought into relation dreams, hopes, practices, institutions, and technical developments in exceedingly complex ways to form these assemblages, the general thrust of which has been reconstructed in the present study. How they continue to be articulated in the years to come remains shaped by present articulations, but ultimately as an open possibility.

119

Notes

1 Although they are a pair of glasses, the company retains the singular form of the noun in its name Google Glass, not “Google Glasses.”

2 Advertisement for “Slimline ‘X-Ray’ Specs,” Popular Science, April 1965, 55.

3 Justin Plourde, “12 Comic Book Ads that Taught Us to Be Cynical,” Cracked.com, May 25, 2008, http://www.cracked.com/article_16310_12-comic-book-ads-that-taught-us-to-be- cynical.html.

4 MG Siegler, “Google’s Schmidt: It’s a Bug that Cars were Invented Before Computers,” TechCrunch, September 28, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/28/schmidt-on- future.

5 Tony Bradley, “Google Autonomous Search: Proceed with Caution,” PCWorld, September 30, 2010, http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/206678/google_autonomous_search_proceed_wi th_caution.html.

6 Claire Cain Miller and Nick Bilton, ”Google’s Lab of Wildest Dreams,” New York Times, November 13, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/at-google-x-a-top- secret-lab-dreaming-up-the-future.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1.

7 Seth Weintraub, “Google X’s Wearable Technology isn’t an iPod Nano, but Rather a Heads Up Display (Glasses),” 9to5Google, December 19, 2011, http://9to5google.com/2011/12/19/google-xs-wearable-technology-isnt-an-ipod-nano-but-rather- a-heads-up-display-glasses.

8 Matt Warman, “Google ‘Plans Secret Lab’,” The Telegraph, February 13, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9079062/Google-plans-secret-lab.html.

9 Nick Bilton, “Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End,” New York Times, February 21, 2012, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/google-to-sell-terminator- style-glasses-by-years-end.

10 Matthew Shaer, “Google Glasses, Due this Year, Turn Seeing into Searching,” Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0223/Google-glasses-due-this-year-turn- seeing-into-searching.

11 Nick Bilton, “Behind the Google Goggles, Virtual Reality,” New York Times, February 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/technology/google-glasses-will-be- powered-by-android.html?_r=1.

120

12 “Project Glass: One day…,” YouTube video, 2:30, from a promotional video for Google Glasses, posted by “Google,” April 4, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4.

13 Clint Boulton, “Google CEO Schmidt Pitches Autonomous Search, Flirts with AI,” eWeek, September 28, 2010, http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-CEO-Schmidt- Pitches-Autonomous-Search-Flirts-with-AI-259984.

14 Exodus 14:16.

15 “Top 100 Movie Moments: #28 Parting the Red Sea,” IGN, accessed July 16, 2012, http://www.ign.com/top/movie-moments/28.

16 Julian E. Barnes, “Dragons and Flying Brooms: Mattel Shows Off Its Line of Harry Potter Toys,” New York Times, March 1, 2001, C1.

17 Parmy Olson, “Iwata’s Nintendo Lampooned for ‘Wii’,” Forbes, April 28, 2006, http://www.forbes.com/2006/04/28/nintendo-wii-console-cx_po_0428autofacescan08.html.

18 Jonathan Silverstein, “Nintendo’s ‘Revolution’ Gets a Name: ‘Wii’,” ABC News, April 27, 2006, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1897917&page=1#.UAR23fUs2So.

19 “Wii Commercials,” YouTube video, 2:01, a compilation of commercials for the Nintendo Wii, posted by “vermilion21,” November 18, 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2nEHqGWsYM.

20 Arik Hesseldahl, “Nintendo’s Wii Gets in Motion,” Business Week, May 8, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-05-08/nintendos-wii-gets-in-motion.

21 “Nintendo Sets Price Limit on Wii,” BBC News, May 25, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5016838.stm.

22 Chris Morris, “Nintendo Goes ‘Wii’…(not a typo),” CNN Money, April 27, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/27/commentary/game_over/nintendo/?cnn=yes.

23 Cliff Edwards, “Nintendo Wii: One Ferocious Underdog,” Businessweek, November 22, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-11-22/nintendo-wii-one-ferocious- underdogbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice.

24 Nick Wingfield, “Microsoft Swings at Wii with Videocam,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124215416209111679.html.

25 Dean Takahashi, “Microsoft’s Gesture-Based Game Control to Debut in 2010,” VentureBeat, May 12, 2009, http://venturebeat.com/2009/05/12/microsofts-gesture-based-game- control-to-debut-in-2010.

121

26 Guy Grimland, “Microsoft in Talks to Acquire Local Startup 3DV Systems,” Haaretz, February 17, 2009, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/business/microsoft-in-talks-to-acquire- local-startup-3dv-systems-1.270359.

27 Microsoft News Center, “PrimeSense Supplies 3-D-Sensing Technology to ‘Project Natal’ for Xbox 360,” March 31, 2010, http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/news/press/2010/mar10/03-31PrimeSensePR.aspx.

28 Claudine Beaumont, “E3 2009: Is Microsoft’s Natal System the Future of Gaming?,” The Telegraph, June 2, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/e3-2009/5429957/E3- 2009-Is-Microsofts-Natal-system-the-future-of-gaming.html.

29 “Steven Spielberg and Xbox Project Natal,” YouTube video, 1:18, from a live presentation at E3, posted by “xboxprojectnatal,” June 2, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh9plZmFIP4.

30 Warren Buckleitner, “Microsoft’s Project Natal Seeks Poetry in Motion,” New York Times, June 12, 2009, http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/microsofts-project-natal- seeks-poetry-in-motion.

31 Tom Hoggins, “E3 2009: Nintendo Overshadowed by Project Natal,” The Telegraph, June 3, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/e3-2009/5437861/E3-2009-Nintendo- overshadowed-by-Project-Natal.html.

32 Stephanie Mlot, “Microsoft Kinect Patent Hints and Emotion-Based Ads,” PC Magazine, June 12, 2012, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405678,00.asp.

33 Laura Sydell, “Microsoft’s Kinect Brings Gestures to a New Level,” National Public Radio, November 4, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131074438; Jonathan Silverstein, “Microsoft ‘Kinect,’ Controller-Free Gaming System, Senses Players’ Motions,” ABC News, June 14, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/microsoft-unveils- controller-free-gaming-world/story?id=10907707#.T-YkuPVuJqM; Lance Ulanoff, “Kinect and Move: A Motion-Controlled Death Match,” PC Magazine, June 17, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365197,00.asp.

34 Brett Molina, “Review: Microsoft Kinect Marks Big Leap for Motion Gaming,” USA Today, November 4, 2010, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/11/review-microsoft-kinect- marks-big-leap-for-motion-gaming/1#.T-YYbPVuJqM.

35 David Pogue, “Kinect Pushes Users into a Sweaty New Dimension,” New York Times, November 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/technology/personaltech/04pogue.html?_r=2&pagewanted =1&src=busln.

36 “Kinect Effect,” YouTube video, 1:16, from a commercial for Microsoft Kinect, posted by “xbox,” October 27, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_QLguHvACs.

122

37 Megan Garber, “Mirror, Mirror: The New York times Wants to Serve You Info as You Brush Your Teeth,” Nieman Journalism Lab, August 31, 2011, http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/mirror-mirror-the-new-york-times-wants-to-serve-you-info- as-youre-brushing-your-teeth.

38 Press release from Critical Mass and IdentityMine, “Critical Mass Uses Kinect for Windows to Give Chicago Auto Show Attendees a First-Hand Experience of the 2013 Nissan Pathfinder Concept,” February 9, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/09/idUS267605+09-Feb-2012+BW20120209.

39 “AFI’s 100 Years…100 Heroes & Villains,” American Film Institute, accessed July 17, 2012, http://www.afi.com/100Years/handv.aspx.

40 Wade Roush, “The Story of Siri, from Birth at SRI to Acquisition by Apple—Virtual Personal Assistants Go Mobile,” Xconomy, June 14, 2010, http://www.xconomy.com/san- francisco/2010/06/14/the-story-of-siri-from-birth-at-sri-to-acquisition-by-apple-virtual-personal- assistants-go-mobile/?single_page=true.

41 Dave Smith, “How Apple’s Future Revolves Around Siri,” International Business Times, December 19, 2011, http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/269509/20111219/apple-future-siri- iphone-ipad-tv.htm; Laura Hazard Owen, “My Own Private Internet,” paidContent.org, November 15, 2011, http://finance.yahoo.com/news/own-private-internet-050148633.html.

42 Roush, “The Story of Siri.”

43 Press release from SRI, Inc., “Siri Launches Personal Assistant for iPhone 3GS,” February 5, 2010, http://www.sri.com/news/releases/020510.html.

44 Timothy Hay, “Apple Moves Deeper Into Voice-Activated Search with Siri Buy,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2010, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/04/28/apple- moves-deeper-into-voice-activated-search-with-siri-buy.

45 Rik Fairlie, “Travel Bits: Apple Adds Mobile Search and HP Adds Palm,” PC Magazine, April 29, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363251,00.asp.

46 Jenna Wortham, “Apple Buys a Start-Up for Its Voice Technology,” New York Times, April 29, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/technology/29apple.html.

47 Alex Salkever, “Apple’s Siri Purchase Heats Up the Race Toward a Voice-Activated Feature,” AOL Daily Finance, April 29, 2010, http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/04/29/apples- siri-purchase-heats-up-the-race-toward-a-voice-activated.

48 Rik Fairlie, “The Mobile Travel Revolution,” PC Magazine, June 4, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364672,00.asp.

123

49 Christian Zibreg, “What You Need to Know about Steve Jobs’ Talk at D8,” geek.com, June 2, 2010, http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/what-you-need-to-know-about-steve-jobs-talk- at-d8-2010062.

50 Apple FAQ, “Learn More about Siri,” Apple, accessed July 17, 2012, http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri-faq.html.

51 “Assistant,” YouTube video, 0:30, from a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S, posted by “Apple,” October 20, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uS6d7fsPnM&feature=plcp.

52 “Rock God,” YouTube video, 0:31, from a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S, posted by “Apple,” February 9, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- G8fG1bKgQo&feature=plcp.

53 “Road Trip,” YouTube video, 0:31, from a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S, posted by “Apple,” February 9, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- UpmQN55q2g&feature=plcp.

54 “Date Night,” YouTube video, 0:31, from a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S, posted by “Apple,” April 17, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azBzUEFZIss&feature=context-chv.

55 “Life,” YouTube video, 0:31, from a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S, posted by “Apple,” May 23, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t- lsULa8ZM&feature=plcp.

56 Brian X. Chen, “Review: With Siri, iPhone Finds Its Voice,” Wired, October 11, 2011, http://www.wired.com/reviews/2011/10/iphone4s/all/1.

57 JP Mangalindan, “Review: Is the iPhone 4S a Siri-ous Disappointement?,” CNN Money, October 18, 2011, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/10/18/iphone-4s-review.

58 iPhone: Features. “Apple - iPhone 4S – Ask Siri to Help You Get Things Done,” Apple, accessed June 6, 2012, http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html.

59 “Siri: The Horror Movie,” YouTube video, 2:12, posted by “RoosterTeeth,” December 20, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KGSi0AoJYs.

60 Jenna Wortham, “Apple’s Siri Stumbles Over an Abortion Question,” November 29, 2011, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/siri-struggles-to-serve-up-certain-results.

61 Jenna Wortham, “Apple Says Siri’s Abortion Answers are a Glitch,” November 30, 2011, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/apple-says-siris-abortion-answers-are-a-glitch/#.

124

62 Josh Lowensohn, “Apple’s Siri not as Smart as She Looks, Lawsuit Charges,” CNET, March 12, 2012, http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-57395727-248/apples-siri-not-as-smart-as- she-looks-lawsuit-charges.

63 Ian Paul, “Apple Sued Over Siri’s Shortcomings,” PC World, March 13, 2012, http://www.pcworld.com/article/251752/apple_sued_over_siris_shortcomings.html.

64 Christina Bonnington, “Steve Jobs Would Have ‘Lost His Mind’ Over Siri, Former Employee Says,” Wired, May 25, 2012, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/apple-siri- disappointment.

65 Tim Worstall, “Apple’s Siri Says Nokia Windows Phone is Best Cell Phone Ever,” May 15, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/15/apples-siri-says-nokia- windows-phone-is-best-cell-phone-ever.

66 Press release from Google, “Google Announces First Quarter 2012 Results and Proposal for New Class of Stock,” Google Investor Relations, April 12, 2012, http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings.html.

67 Associated Press, “Google Provides Peek at Internet-Connected Glasses, Begins Selling Them to US Programmers,” Washington Post, June 27, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/google-provides-peek-at-internet-connected-glasses- begins-selling-them-to-us-programmers/2012/06/27/gJQAKul27V_story.html.

68 David Goldman, “Google Glasses are $1,500 – and You Can’t Have Them,” CNNMoney, June 27, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/27/technology/google-glasses.

69 Hayley Tsukayama, “Google I/O: Google Glass Detailed,” Washington Post, June 27, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-io-google-glass- detailed/2012/06/27/gJQAvZsF7V_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop.

70 Rafe Needleman, “I Try the Google Glasses. Sort of,” CNET, June 27, 2012, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57462202-93/i-try-the-google-glasses-sort- of/?tag=mncol;rvwBody.

71 Joanna Stern, “Google Glasses Designer Gives Us an Up Close Look,” ABC News, June 28, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/google-glass-close-designer- project/story?id=16666194#.T-yiGvUs2So; Alexei Oreskovic, “Google’s Digital Glasses Move out of Lab and Closer to Reality,” Reuters, June 28, 2012, http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/06/28/us-google-glasses-idINBRE85R02020120628.

72 Stephanie Mlot, “Microsoft Kinect Patent Hints and Emotion-Based Ads,” PC Magazine, June 12, 2012, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405678,00.asp.

73 United States patent application 0120143693, filed June 7, 2012, http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.h

125

tml&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220120143693%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20120143693&RS=DN/201 20143693.

74 Poornima Gupta, “Analysis: With Siri and New Alliances, Apple Takes on Google Search,” Reuters, June 21, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/us-apple-google- search-idUSBRE85K06620120621.

75 Wade Roush, “Meet Siri’s Little Sister, Lola. She’s Training for a Bank Job,” Xconomy, June 27, 2012, http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/06/27/meet-siris-little- sister-lola-shes-training-for-a-bank-job.

76 Anthony Ha, “The Latest Project from Siri-Creator SRI: Lola, an Intelligent Banking Assistant,” TechCrunch, June 26, 2012, http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/26/sri-lola-intelligent- banking-assistant.

126

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the organization and key contributions of this study. It does so first by noting the impetus of the study, including its theoretical approach, strategies of analysis, and research questions. Following a summary of previous chapters and how they addressed the research questions, this chapter suggests ways in which the study furthers inquiry into communication, technologies, and agency. Opportunities for future research are presented, followed by a summary statement of its key contribution and insight.

Impetus of the Study

This dissertation sought to characterize, explain, and assess digital mobility as a modern form of the dispersion of agency. Its impetus came from the rapid emergence of mobile phones in everyday life and the increasing centrality of the relation between individuals and networked devices in contemporary society. After reviewing existing literature regarding technological practice and the relation between individuals and devices, it became clear that new concepts were needed to address the integral fusion of elements often held as distinct. Enlightenment and empiricist conceptions of agency as the extension of individual intention onto an external world rely on an ontological distinction between humans and technologies. The resulting view of agency is that it is either inherent in the individual, or in the inverse as technological determinism, within the device. Where Enlightenment humanism places the self-contained, rational individual at the center of effectivity, functionalist approaches place the technological device at the center. Either way, the resulting directional, linear conceptions of effectivity fail to

127

grasp the complexities of the production and circulation of what needs to be recognized as a de- centered, nonidentical agency.1

A generally conceived materialist perspective was developed to explore a different way to understand issues of communications technology and agency. Theoretical positions of Deleuze and Guattari, Williams, and others provided an alternative lens through which to study the production of these agencies through relationships. The term “digital mobility” critiques

Enlightenment/empiricist conceptions of digital-media practice. It does so by reconceptualizing mobility as the dispersion of agencies rather than the movement of bodies across geographic space. Digital mobility refers then to digital computation and the networked devices that make use of it to produce dispersed agencies.

Chapter Summary

Three research questions guided this dissertation:

1. How is digital mobility produced and practiced?

2. In what particular modes of agency does digital mobility work?

3. What are the implications of theorizing and studying the effectivity of digital mobility?

The first chapter sought to theorize ways of conceptually overcoming the human/device divide. Chapters Two and Three sought to historicize the production of digital mobilities as dispersed agencies. Chapter Two, “From Miniatures to Miniaturization: Producing the Transitive

Object,” examined the production of objects as transitive—as a means of relationship rather than as self-contained wholes—through miniaturization. The trajectory of development was traced from objects called “miniatures” to the general process of miniaturization.

128

From their emergence, miniatures gained their significance due not to an intrinsic characteristic, but in their relation to a referent. They emerged in religious contexts as a means of orienting the reader toward God before becoming popularized and democratized as portable portraits and as toy models. By contrast, miniaturization as an industrial design ideal and process discarded the referent entirely, becoming instead a general process applicable in theory to anything and in service of greater rationalization and efficiency. It developed in military- industrial programs soon after becoming indispensible to the burgeoning consumer-electronics industry. The production of transitive objects through miniaturization became a key technical and practical component of digital mobility. Transitive objects of digital mobility compact agencies to the sound of one’s voice, the motion of one’s hand, or the tap of a finger.

Chapter Three, “Remote Control: Producing the Active Object,” examined the production of objects as active—rather than as passive and inert—and their production through remote control. The trajectory of this development was traced from forms of master-servant, to origin- proxy, to co-agent in assemblage. While controlling remotely has been a feature of human life since the earliest civilizations, explicitly named “remote control” through electronic means was introduced to the general public in the 1920s and 1930s by promoters such as Maurice Francill and robot proxy-servants such as Westinghouse’s Mr. and Miss Televox. Both celebrated a positive form of Lockean, Enlightenment rationality whereby intention centered in and exerted from an individual becomes manifest on an external object. The televox systems differed, however, in their use of a proxy servant that mimicked human rationality.

During the Cold War years, the sense of remote control as the reliable extension of centered human intention began to fracture. The progressive miniaturization of circuitry together with discoveries in cybernetics and artificial intelligence provided the technical basis for remote

129

control across digital networked space. This critical-historical process worked in tandem with the production of transitive objects through miniaturization. Just as miniaturization dissolved the referent while displacing agency, remote control dissolved the unitary, human agent as the origin of effectivity.

Examining the development of transitive and active objects laid the groundwork for

Chapter Four, “Digital Mobility as Dispersed Agencies.” The chapter proposes three modes of agency through which digital mobility works, while analyzing their technical, institutional, and cultural production. Perceptual digital mobilities and rhetorics of omniscience constitute the dispersed agency enabled in part by Google Glass. Kinetic digital mobilities and rhetorics of magic constitute the dispersed agency enabled in part by the Microsoft Xbox Kinect. Emotional digital mobilities and rhetorics of companionship constitute the dispersed agency enabled in part by Siri for the Apple iPhone 4S. These forms of digital mobility articulate with contemporary formations of consumer capitalism reliant on dispersion and recursivity.

Implications for Communication and Agency

Theorizing and studying digital mobility furthers inquiry into communication and agency. First, it underscores the value of expanding the definition of communication beyond the transmission of messages from a sender to a receiver. As demonstrated in this study, communication involves the very patterns and organizations that produce social life. Maping these relations requires researchers to become flexible enough to explore areas outside conventional disciplinary boundaries. Such an approach encourages communication scholars to draw upon fields ranging from history and philosophy to economics and engineering.

Second, regarding agency, an Enlightenment/empiricist ontology which treats objects as passive, inert wholes and agency as human-centered and identical limits as much as it

130

illuminates. Indeed, interviews, focus groups, surveys, and other interpersonal methods abound in studies of communication and agency. While such studies can illuminate how people construct identity and meaning through technological practice, they too often fail to see the broader conditions that produce these practices. By historicizing the production of agencies, the researcher is led in unanticipated directions – illuminated manuscripts, robots, and nuclear arms control as examples. The result is an expansion of strategies, materials, and eras that draws a broader map of the relations constitutive of contemporary practices.

Drawing from this dissertation, one sees the production of “excessive” internet use not only in constant texting, emailing, and social networking, but as a configuration of devices, knowledges, institutions, and formations that constitute these agencies more broadly. Fears of communication technologies have as long a pedigree as utopian hopes for them.2 Current, popular fears regarding the deleterious effects of internet addiction thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices include a July 2012 Newsweek cover story titled “iCrazy,” which synthesizes neurological research on “excessive” internet use.3 The alarmist subtitle, “Panic. Depression.

Psychosis. How Connection Addiction is Rewiring our Brains,” gives away much of the story.

An analogy of digital-media practices to drug addiction (where an external object infects an otherwise “normal” body) reinforces a conception of individuals, devices, and practices abstracted from their broader enabling conditions. By contrast to this and many other examples, a contribution of this present study is to see such issues in a historical context and with a broader scope.

131

Directions for Future Research

Insights from this study can be expanded into future research. Recognizing agencies as dispersed prompts further scholarship into digital production and consumption. Terms from

“prosumer” to “produsage” go some distance in merging concepts to see them at least as mutually constitutive.4 Yet, these terms do little to account for the complexities of contemporary practice. By centering effectivity in individual bloggers, tweeters, Wikipedians, and so on, these terms often valorize the individual who has ostensibly been liberated from the grips not only of technologies but also of dominant commercial interests. Such equivocation between user- generated content and audience liberation ignores the broader systems and networks within which these entities are embedded. A study that examines the historical production of crowdsourcing, for example, might discover its development across varying configurations, the contemporary iteration of which involving contradictions between democratic, alternative, and commercial imperatives.

The centrality of the military and consumer industries to the formation of digital mobilities stands as another area that deserves further inquiry. Miniaturization and remote control were and continue to be formed from the imperatives of a dominant military force and expanding consumer economy. Although a study could take the military and commercial industries as separate points of focus, one informed by the approach of this dissertation might explore their articulations with each other and the extent to which digital mobilities rely upon those contingent relations.

While this dissertation historicized miniaturization and remote control as constitutive of agencies of digital mobility, other forms could be identified to draw a larger map of this assemblage. For example, personal archiving and collecting dates back centuries. Its expansion

132

from a small number of heirlooms and keepsakes to a digital library of photos, music, messages, videos, and other materials could comprise a dissertation in itself. Likewise, piracy has undergone significant transitions. The emergence of digital forms marks a current site of debate, however opportunities exist to historicize digital piracy as an extension of crises over ownership, sharing, production, and consumption.

Critical research into the imperatives that produce digital mobility might also draw from the theoretical and methodological contributions of this dissertation. The production of information to be sold to advertisers marks a transition from previous models based on “mass communication” and “broadcasting.” Individualized advertisements become possible only through the consent and often enthusiasm of individuals who produce the very information used to sell to themselves. As corporations jockey for user information, devices are rendered active and transitive in how they facilitate both the production and distribution of such activity.

Studies extending this dissertation might also examine how agencies of digital mobility become produced and normalized rhetorically. The centrality of rhetoric to the production of digital mobilities was examined throughout this dissertation. Chapter Four examined rhetorics of omniscience, magic, and companionship as productive in the formation of particular digital mobilities. What is particularly interesting is how they extend across conventional boundaries of journalism, advertising, policy, and other realms often thought as distinct. Indeed, the expansion of digital practice from a realm of activity reserved for reclusive “computer geeks” and hackers to one celebrated and promoted by industrial, educational, and governmental institutions alike deserves more attention.

In sum, this study demonstrates the value of understanding capabilities and ourselves as integrated within and produced by a configuration of relations. To study this configuration

133

requires treating objects and their practice as entry points into analysis. This understanding is made more difficult in the face of contemporary democratic rhetoric surrounding digital media practice. A smartphone contains more processing power than the initial space mission to the moon, yet its relative affordability makes the device available to nearly anyone. Examining digital technology in everyday life requires attending to formations and logics of practice. Such a broadening of perspective allows us to envision cracks and fissures through which greater human potentials can emerge. While the specifics of those potentials remain up for debate, we might go forward acknowledging the interests, contradictions, worries, and dreams our digital lives embody.

134

Notes

1 Martin Jay, “The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Marxist Humanism,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 14-27.

2 Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Richard Popp, “Machine-Age Communication: Media, Transportation, and Contact in the Interwar United States,” Technology and Culture 52, no. 3 (2011): 459-484.

3 Tony Dokoupil, “iCrazy: Panic. Depression. Psychosis. How Connection Addiction is Rewiring our Brains,” Newsweek, July 14, 2012.

4 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980); Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

135

REFERENCES

“7 Dead in Kuwait as 6 Blasts Rock Sites Across City.” New York Times. December 13, 1983.

“A Metal Army of Varied Uniforms and Its Annual Fortunes.” New York Times. October 31, 1909.

Acosta-Alzuru, Carolina and Peggy J. Kreshel. “’I’m an American Girl…Whatever That Means’: Girls Consuming Pleasant Company’s American Girl Identity.” Journal of Communication 52 no. 1 (2002): 139-161.

Advertisement for “3rd Wisconsin Radio Exposition.” Milwaukee Journal. November 10, 1925.

Advertisement for “Beltone Hearing Glasses.” LIFE. March 5, 1956.

Advertisement for “Best & Co.” Town & Country. December 10, 1910.

Advertisement for “Building Blocks.” Ladies Home Journal. December 1891.

Advertisement for “Christmas Favors.” Harper’s Bazaar, December 1908.

Advertisement for “J. Stevenson, Limner, At Mr. Bower’s, Watch-Maker.” The South Carolina Gazette. October 5, 1773.

Advertisement for “Motorola Television,” LIFE. October 8, 1956.

Advertisement for “Mr. Mack: Miniature Painter.” Weekly Museum. August 31, 1793, 3.

Advertisement for “Philco Radio Phonographs.” LIFE. December 4, 1939.

Advertisement for “RCA Victor Globe Trotter Portable Radio.” LIFE. June 16, 1947.

Advertisement for “Slimline ‘X-Ray’ Specs.” Popular Science. April 1965.

Advertisement for “Sonotone Hearing Aid.” LIFE. April 2, 1956.

Advertisement for “Sonotone Hearing Aid.” LIFE. May 7, 1956.

Advertisement for “Studebaker ‘Junior’.” Life. December 7, 1905.

Advertisement for “The Constitution Free Cooking School.” Atlanta Constitution. February 24, 1930.

136

Advertisement for “Thermiodyne Remote Control Radio Tuning Unit.” Popular Mechanics. October 1927, 170.

Advertisement for “Zenith Long Distance Radio.” Atlanta Constitution. December 10, 1922.

Advertisement for RCA. Popular Science. December 1951.

Advertisements for “Miniature Toy Set” and “The ‘Little Wonder’ Steamboat.” The Youth’s Companion. October 25, 1877.

“Aerodrome Lit by Pilot’s Siren.” The Times. February 20, 1929.

“AFI’s 100 Years…100 Heroes & Villains.” American Film Institute. Accessed July 17, 2012. http://www.afi.com/100Years/handv.aspx.

Ágoston, Gábor and Bruce Masters. Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009.

Alexander, Jonathan J.G. Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

“America Loses Its Landlines: Cutting the Cord.” The Economist. August 13, 2009. http://www.economist.com/node/14214847.

Apple, Johnny. “Transistor’s Rise.” Wall Street Journal. November 29, 1956.

“Assistant,” YouTube video. 0:30. From a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S. Posted by “Apple.” October 20, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uS6d7fsPnM&feature=plcp.

Associated Press. “Google Provides Peek at Internet-Connected Glasses, Begins Selling Them to US Programmers.” Washington Post. June 27, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/google-provides-peek-at-internet-connected- glasses-begins-selling-them-to-us-programmers/2012/06/27/gJQAKul27V_story.html.

AT&T Technology Timeline. “1951: Microwave Radio-Relay Skyway.” Accessed August 26, 2012. http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/51microwave.html.

“Auto Demonstration Here Monday Night.” Gettysburg Times (Gettysburg, PA). October 20, 1934.

Bailey, Douglass Whitfield. Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Barnes, Julian E. “Dragons and Flying Brooms: Mattel Shows Off Its Line of Harry Potter Toys.” New York Times. March 1, 2001.

137

Beaumont, Claudine. “E3 2009: Is Microsoft’s Natal System the Future of Gaming?.” The Telegraph. June 2, 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/e3-2009/5429957/E3- 2009-Is-Microsofts-Natal-system-the-future-of-gaming.html.

Beecher, William. “Future Missiles: Defense Experts Weigh Many Ways to Lessen Weapons’ Vulnerability.” Wall Street Journal. June 25, 1964.

Bellamy, Robert V. Jr. and James Walker. Television and the Remote Control: Grazing on a Vast Wasteland. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996.

Bellamy, Robert. “Remote Control Device.” In Encyclopedia of Television, edited by Horace Newcomb, 1918-1920. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.

Bennett, Tony. “Theories of the Media, Theories of Society.” In Culture, Society and the Media, edited by Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott, 30-41. London: Routledge, 1988.

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. New York: H. Liveright, 1928.

Bilton, Nick. “Behind the Google Goggles, Virtual Reality.” New York Times. February 22, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/technology/google-glasses-will-be-powered- by-android.html?_r=1.

Bilton, Nick. “Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End.” New York Times. February 21, 2012. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/google-to-sell-terminator- style-glasses-by-years-end.

Bonnington, Christina. “Steve Jobs Would Have ‘Lost His Mind’ Over Siri, Former Employee Says.” Wired. May 25, 2012. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/apple-siri- disappointment.

Boulton, Clint. “Google CEO Schmidt Pitches Autonomous Search, Flirts with AI.” eWeek. September 28, 2010. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-CEO-Schmidt- Pitches-Autonomous-Search-Flirts-with-AI-259984.

Bounds, Jeff. “Wireless Wars.” Portfolio.com. February 9, 2010. http://www.portfolio.com/companies-executives/2010/02/09/verizon-leads-att-by- billions-in-infrastructure-spending/.

Boustany, Nora. “Lebanon’s New President Killed.” Washington Post. November 23, 1989.

Boustany, Nora. “Remote-Control Bomb Kills 8 in Beirut.” Washington Post. February 24, 1980.

Boyer, Peter J. “TV Turning to People Meters to Find Who Watches What.” New York Times. June 1, 1987.

Bradley, Tony. “Google Autonomous Search: Proceed with Caution.” PCWorld. September 30, 2010.

138

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/206678/google_autonomous_search_proc eed_with_caution.html.

Brown, Kenneth D. “Modelling for War? Toy Soldiers in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.” Journal of Social History 24, no. 2 (1990): 237-254.

Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

Buckleitner, Warren. “Microsoft’s Project Natal Seeks Poetry in Motion.” New York Times. June 12, 2009. http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/microsofts-project-natal- seeks-poetry-in-motion.

“By-Products: The Gentleman with a Vacuum Cleaner.” New York Times. February 26, 1928.

Calkins, Robert G. Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Carew, Sinead. “Verizon Profit Falls, Eyes 8,000 Job Cuts.” Reuters. July 22, 2009. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE56Q1JA20090727.

Carey, James. “The Chicago School and the History of Mass Communication Research.” In James Carey: A Critical Reader, edited by Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren, 14-33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Cashmore, Pete. “First iPad Commercial Airs During Oscars.” Mashable Tech. March 7, 2010. http://mashable.com/2010/03/07/ipad-oscars.

Castells, Manuel, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qui, and Araba Sey, editors. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

Chen, Brian X. “Review: With Siri, iPhone Finds Its Voice.” Wired. October 11, 2011. http://www.wired.com/reviews/2011/10/iphone4s/all/1.

Cheney, Margaret. Tesla: Man out of Time. New York: Touchtone, 1981.

Childs, Dan. “7 Surprising Ways Cell Phones Affect Your Health: Mobile Devices Can Pose Health Risks – and Not in the Way You Might Think.” ABC News. March 9, 2009. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/story?id=7017768&page=1.

Christian, Shirley. “Shultz Caravan is Bomb Target on Bolivia Visit.” New York Times. August 9, 1988.

“Cohort Study of Mobile Phone Use and Health.” COSMOS. Accessed April 2, 2011. http://www.ukcosmos.org.

“Consumer Electronics Show Gets Cool Review from Some Retailers.” Wall Street Journal. July 1, 1970.

139

Contadini, Anna. “The Manuscript as a Whole.” In Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, edited by Anna Contadini, 3-16. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2010.

Coonfield, Gordon. “Thinking Machinically, or, the Techno-Aesthetic of Jackie Chan: Toward a Deleuze-Guattarian Media Studies.” Critical Studies in Communication 23, no. 4 (2006): 285-301.

Curley, Michael J. “Introduction.” In Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore. Translated by Michael J. Curley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Czitrom, Daniel. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

“Date Night.” YouTube video. 0:31. From a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S. Posted by “Apple.” April 17, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azBzUEFZIss&feature=context-chv.

“Deadly Radio Waves Seen as Preventative of War by Francil (sic). ‘Radio Wizard’.” Atlanta Constitution. October 21, 1926.

“Dear Sophie.” YouTube video, 1:32, from a television commercial for Google Chrome. Posted by “googlechrome.” May 2, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.

Desmond, Marilynn Robin and Pamela Sheingorn. Myth, Montage, & Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

“DeSoto Car Run By Radio Waves.” Pittsburg Press. November 18, 1928.

Digital Nation. Produced and directed by Rachel Dretzin. 2010. Boston, MA: Public Broadcasting Service and WGBH Educational Foundation, 2010. DVD.

Dokoupil, Tony. “iCrazy: Panic. Depression. Psychosis. How Connection Addiction is Rewiring our Brains.” Newsweek. July 14, 2012.

Duffy, Eamon. Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

Edwards, Cliff. “Nintendo Wii: One Ferocious Underdog.” Businessweek. November 22, 2006. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-11-22/nintendo-wii-one-ferocious- underdogbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice.

140

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn. Edited by Guy De la Bédoyère. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 1995.

Exodus 14:16.

Fairlie, Rik. “The Mobile Travel Revolution.” PC Magazine. June 4, 2010. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364672,00.asp.

Fairlie, Rik. “Travel Bits: Apple Adds Mobile Search and HP Adds Palm.” PC Magazine. April 29, 2010. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363251,00.asp.

Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Foskett, Daphne. British Portrait Miniatures: A History. London: Methuen, 1963.

“Francill, Radio Wizard, Exhibits Radio Power over Two Automobiles.” Youngstown Vindicator. April 10, 1926.

Frank, Robin Jaffe. Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

Freeman, William. “Goods Outmoded, Rarely Worn Out.” New York Times. August 6, 1955.

Friedrichs, Günter and Adam Schaff, eds. Microelectronics and Society: For Better or Worse: A Report to the Club of Rome. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982.

Gall, Peter. “Lilliputian Circuits.” Wall Street Journal. April 1, 1964.

Ganapati, Priya. “Palm Pre Admaker Defends ‘Creepy’ TV Commercial.” Wired Gadget Lab. August 3, 2009. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/palm-pre-ad.

Ganaway, Bryan. Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871- 1918. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.

Ganz, Cheryl R. The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Garber, Megan. “Mirror, Mirror: The New York times Wants to Serve You Info as You Brush Your Teeth.” Nieman Journalism Lab. August 31, 2011. http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/mirror-mirror-the-new-york-times-wants-to-serve- you-info-as-youre-brushing-your-teeth.

Getler, Michael. “Haig Escapes Apparent Try on His Life.” Washington Post. June 26, 1979.

141

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

“Gives Command and Autos Obey.” Painesville Telegraph (Painesville, OH). August 23, 1930.

Gladstone, Bernard. “By the Clock: Timers Control Lawn Sprinkling Systems.” New York Times. August 4, 1963.

Goldman, David. “Google Glasses are $1,500 – and You Can’t Have Them.” CNNMoney. June 27, 2012. http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/27/technology/google-glasses.

Goldman, Russell and Matt Spector. “Cancer Controversy Causes Consumer Confusion: Will One Scientist’s Warning about a Cancer-Cell Phone Link Change Buyers’ Minds?.” ABC News. July 24, 2008. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5444572&page=1.

Gores, Steven J. Psychosocial Spaces: Verbal and Visual Readings of British Culture, 1750- 1820. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000.

“Green Lights.” YouTube video. 0:29. From a television commercial for Palm Pre. Posted by “modernistaboston.” August 5, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuXgirybf20&feature=plcp.

Grimland, Guy. “Microsoft in Talks to Acquire Local Startup 3DV Systems.” Haaretz. February 17, 2009. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/business/microsoft-in-talks-to-acquire- local-startup-3dv-systems-1.270359.

Gupta, Poornima. “Analysis: With Siri and New Alliances, Apple Takes on Google Search.” Reuters. June 21, 2012. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/us-apple-google- search-idUSBRE85K06620120621.

Ha, Anthony. “The Latest Project from Siri-Creator SRI: Lola, an Intelligent Banking Assistant.” TechCrunch. June 26, 2012. http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/26/sri-lola-intelligent- banking-assistant.

Hafner, Katie. “Texting May Be Taking a Toll.” New York Times. May 25, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/health/26teen.html?_r=1&8dpc.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Haseltine, Nate. “A-Test Victims Recovering, AEC Reports.” Washington Post and Times- Herald. July 31, 1954.

Hay, Timothy. “Apple Moves Deeper Into Voice-Activated Search with Siri Buy.” Wall Street Journal. April 28, 2010. http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/04/28/apple-moves- deeper-into-voice-activated-search-with-siri-buy.

142

Herbert, J.A. Illuminated Manuscripts. New York: Burt Franklin, 1911.

Hesseldahl, Arik. “Nintendo’s Wii Gets in Motion.” Business Week. May 8, 2006. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-05-08/nintendos-wii-gets-in-motion.

Hoggins, Tom. “E3 2009: Nintendo Overshadowed by Project Natal.” The Telegraph. June 3, 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/e3-2009/5437861/E3-2009-Nintendo- overshadowed-by-Project-Natal.html.

Holton, Kate and Georgina Prodhan. “Biggest Study on Cellphone Health Effects Launched.” Reuters. April 22, 2010. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63L1ZD20100422.

Holzmann, Gerard J. and Björn Pehrson. The Early History of Data Networks. Los Alamitos, CA, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995.

“Hoover Deplores Waste,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 1925, 15; “Industrial Management Leader Seeks Ways to Reduce Waste,” Christian Science Monitor, June 27, 1927, 2.

“How to Get Rich Quick.” Washington Post. September 26, 1928.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. A Digireads.com Book: Digireads.com Publishing, 2010. http://books.google.com/books?id=EEo5ombCkzwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=a+treatis e+of+human+nature&source=bl&ots=knFE7VZFx2&sig=nOptshnJgkOA3PQFP6X7fhz quas&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NVI- UK_FGYqI8QTm2oGACA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=a%20treatise%20of %20human%20nature&f=false.

Hume, Ivor Noël. A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969.

“Illuminated Manuscript, Artist Unknown, 18th or 19th Century.” Information placard, African Art Gallery, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, May 2, 2012.

“Interest Grows at American Legion Circus.” Warsaw Union (Warsaw, IN). February 12, 1926.

iPhone: Features. “Apple - iPhone 4S – Ask Siri to Help You Get Things Done.” Apple. Accessed June 6, 2012. http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html.

Jay, Martin. “The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Marxist Humanism.” In Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, 14-27. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Jones, Hanna. “Have Cell Phones Killed the Landline Telephone?.” TIME NewsFeed. December 22, 2010. http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/12/22/have-cell-phones-killed-the-landline- telephone/.

143

Jones, Ralph T. “’Televox,’ Mechanical Man, Gives Amazing Demonstration.” Atlanta Constitution. May 11, 1928.

Kaempffert, Waldemar. “Science Produces the ‘Electrical Man’.” New York Times. October 23, 1927.

Katz, Elihu and Paul Lazarsfeld. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955.

Katz, Elihu, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch. “Utilization of Mass Communication by the Individual.” In The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives of Gratifications Research, edited by Jay Blumler and Elihu Katz, 19-34. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1974.

Katz, James, ed. Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Katz, James, ed. Machines that Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003.

Kavoori, Andy and Noah Arceneaux, eds. The Cell Phone Reader: Essays in Social Transformation. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

Kennedy, T.R. Jr. “Tiny Radios Made by Armed Services.” New York Times. March 11, 1949.

Kincaid, Jason. “Eric Schmidt: Mobile is the Future and There’s No Such Thing as Communication Overload.” TechCrunch. April 12, 2010. http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/eric-schmidt-mobile-is-the-future-and-theres-no-such- thing-as-communication-overload/.

“Kinect Effect.” YouTube video. 1:16. From a commercial for Microsoft Kinect. Posted by “xbox.” October 27, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_QLguHvACs.

Kneale, Dennis. “MTV’s Game Show Tries to Be Dumb and Fully Succeeds.” Wall Street Journal. August 11, 1989.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005.

Lane, Alfred P. “Radio Aims at Remote Control.” Popular Science. November 1930.

Lawrence, W.H. “Eisenhower Wants Koreans to Bear Brunt of Fighting.” New York Times. October 3, 1952.

Leung, Louis and Ran Wei. “Who are the Mobile Phone Have-Nots?: Influences and Consequences.” New Media & Society 1, no. 2 (1999): 209-227.

144

“Life.” YouTube video. 0:31. From a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S. Posted by “Apple.” May 23, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t-lsULa8ZM&feature=plcp.

“Lighting by Televox.” Washington Post. February 20, 1929.

“limning, n.”. OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygsu- uga1.galileo.usg.edu/view/Entry/108510?result=1&rskey=kCsHt3& (accessed August 26, 2012).

Liversidge, M.J.H. “Virgil in art.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, edited by Charles Martindale, 91-104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Lord, Marshall. “Toy Soldiers to the Front.” Atlanta Constitution. February 18, 1900.

Lowensohn, Josh. “Apple’s Siri not as Smart as She Looks, Lawsuit Charges.” CNET. March 12, 2012. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-57395727-248/apples-siri-not-as-smart-as- she-looks-lawsuit-charges.

MacDonald, Dwight. “A Theory of Mass Culture.” In Mass Culture, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 59-73. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957.

“Machine Answers Telephone Inquiries and Obeys Orders.” Christian Science Monitor. October 15, 1927.

Mallon, Winifred. “Navy Discloses Radio Shell Fuze.” New York Times. September 21, 1945.

Manchester, Harland. “Coming _the Radio that Was Shot from a Gun.” Popular Science. March 1948.

Mangalindan, JP. “Review: Is the iPhone 4S a Siri-ous Disappointement?.” CNN Money. October 18, 2011. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/10/18/iphone-4s-review.

Martin, Robert E. “Mechanical Men Walk and Talk.” Popular Science. December 1928.

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Random House, 1973.

“Maurice Francill at Boston Show: Wireless Control Exhibition to be a Feature.” Christian Science Monitor. September 11, 1926.

McCartney, Robert J. “Terrorist Group Kills Executive Near Munich.” Washington Post. July 10, 1986.

McElheny, Victor K. “New Markets Are Sought for Miniaturized Computers.” New York Times. January 16, 1975.

145

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

“Mechanical Man Doesn’t Miss a Cue.” New York Times. February 23, 1928.

“Mechanical Man is Now Given the Gift of Speech.” Popular Mechanics. August 1928, 192.

Meehan, Bernard. The Book of Durrow: A Medieval Masterpiece at Trinity College Dublin. Dublin: Town House, 1996.

Meehan, Bernard. The Book of Kells: An Illustrated Introduction to the Manuscript in Trinity College Dublin. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994.

Microsoft News Center. “PrimeSense Supplies 3-D-Sensing Technology to ‘Project Natal’ for Xbox 360.” March 31, 2010. http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/news/press/2010/mar10/03-31PrimeSensePR.aspx.

“Midget Electronics.” Wall Street Journal. December 3, 1947.

Miller, Claire Cain and Nick Bilton. ”Google’s Lab of Wildest Dreams.” New York Times. November 13, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/at-google-x-a-top- secret-lab-dreaming-up-the-future.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1.

Mills, C. Wright. “The Mass Society.” In The Power Elite, 298-324. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

“Mind Reader.” YouTube video. 0:29. From a television commercial for Palm Pre. Posted by “modernistaboston.” August 5, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8_Q6WOfTz0&feature=plcp.

“Miniature Toy Collection from New York City Colonial Houses and Military Camps.” New- York Historical Society Museum and Library. Accessed April 26, 2012. https://www.nyhistory.org/node/35230.

Mlot, Stephanie. “Microsoft Kinect Patent Hints and Emotion-Based Ads.” PC Magazine. June 12, 2012. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405678,00.asp.

“mobility, n.1”. OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygsu- uga1.galileo.usg.edu/view/Entry/120494?rskey=ie4kFZ&result=1#eid (accessed August 26, 2012)

“mobility, n.2”. OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxygsu- uga1.galileo.usg.edu/view/Entry/120495?rskey=ie4kFZ&result=2&isAdvanced=false#ei d (accessed August 26, 2012).

146

Molina, Brett. “Review: Microsoft Kinect Marks Big Leap for Motion Gaming.” USA Today. November 4, 2010. http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/11/review-microsoft- kinect-marks-big-leap-for-motion-gaming/1#.T-YYbPVuJqM.

Montgomery, David. Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Moore, Gordon. “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” Electronics 38, no. 8 (1965): 114-117.

Morris, Chris. “Nintendo Goes ‘Wii’…(not a typo).” CNN Money. April 27, 2006. http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/27/commentary/game_over/nintendo/?cnn=yes.

Mosse, George L. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

“Mr. McQuhae Featured at Show Tonight: Henry Lane Mystifies Group with Radio-Controlled Train.” Christian Science Monitor. September 30, 1926.

“Mr. Televox Hears Call of Plane in Air and Illuminates Field for Night Landing.” Christian Science Monitor. February 19, 1929.

Muk, Alexander. “Consumers’ Intentions to Opt in to SMS Advertising: A Cross-National Study of Young Americans and Koreans.” International Journal of Advertising 26, no. 2 (2007): 177-198.

“Nash Stock Model Chosen for Radio Demonstration.” Atlanta Constitution. October 12, 1926.

National Academy of Sciences Panel on Thin-Film Microstructure Science and Technology. Microstructure Science, Engineering, and Technology. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1979.

“National Broadband Plan: Executive Summary.” Federal Communications Commission. Accessed April 2, 2011. http://www.broadband.gov/plan/executive-summary/.

“Navy Uses Robot Missiles Against Targets in Korea.” New York Times. September 18, 1952.

Needleman, Rafe. “I Try the Google Glasses. Sort of.” CNET. June 27, 2012. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57462202-93/i-try-the-google-glasses-sort- of/?tag=mncol;rvwBody.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Knoph, 1995.

“New Air Conditioner Has Remote Control.” New York Times. March 14, 1960.

“New Air Force Camera Has Remote Control.” Washington Post. July 10, 1951.

147

“New Book Tells of A-Arms Locks.” New York Times. February 26, 1969.

“New Hearing Aid Uses Transistor.” New York Times. December 30, 1952.

Newcome, Laurence. Unmanned Aviation: A Brief History of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004.

“Newest Engine of War an Ideal Weapon for Coast Defense.” The Washington Post. October 29, 1911.

“Nintendo Sets Price Limit on Wii.” BBC News. May 25, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5016838.stm.

“No Phone Zone,” accessed September 4, 2012, http://www.oprah.com/questionaire/ipledge.html?id=4.

Noble, David F. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. New York: Knopf, 1984.

“Noise-Induced Hearing Loss.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Adolescent and School Health. Accessed March 1, 2011. http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/noise/index.htm.

Noon, Patrick. “Miniatures on the Market.” In The English Miniature, edited by John Murdoch, 163-209. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

Nordheimer, Jon. “5 Killed in London as Bomb Explodes Outside Harrods.” New York Times. December 18, 1983.

Norris, John G. “Check on A-Weapon Use Developed.” Washington Post and Times-Herald. June 16, 1962.

O’Neill, John J. Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla. Hollywood, CA: Angriff Press, 1981.

Okamura, Sogo, ed. History of Electron Tubes. Tokyo: Ohmsha, 1994.

Olson, Parmy. “Iwata’s Nintendo Lampooned for ‘Wii’.” Forbes. April 28, 2006. http://www.forbes.com/2006/04/28/nintendo-wii-console- cx_po_0428autofacescan08.html.

“On Miniature Painting.” The New-York Weekly Magazine. June 1, 1796.

“Operate Electric Policeman by Sound of Voice.” Popular Mechanics. March 1929.

“Oranges Pay Tribute to Edison Today.” New York Times. October 16, 1929.

148

Oreskovic, Alexei. “Google’s Digital Glasses Move out of Lab and Closer to Reality.” Reuters. June 28, 2012. http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/06/28/us-google-glasses- idINBRE85R02020120628.

Owen, Laura Hazard. “My Own Private Internet.” paidContent.org. November 15, 2011. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/own-private-internet-050148633.html.

“Past Lives.” YouTube video, 0:30. From a television commercial for Palm Pre. Posted by “modernistaboston.” August 5, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X5pOa- si54&feature=plcp.

Paul, Ian. “Apple Sued Over Siri’s Shortcomings.” PC World. March 13, 2012. http://www.pcworld.com/article/251752/apple_sued_over_siris_shortcomings.html.

Penn, Stanley W. “Tomorrow’s Home: Robot Floor Scrubber, Remote-Control Stove, Dry Cleaner Studied.” Wall Street Journal. June 2 1959.

Pérez-Yuste, Antonio. “Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Early Developments of Wireless Remote Control: The Telekino of Torres-Quevedo.” Proceedings of the IEEE 96, no. 1 (2008): 186-190. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=04399975.

“Piping over Telephone, Distant Wife Can Cook.” Washington Post. October 14, 1927.

Plourde, Justin. “12 Comic Book Ads that Taught Us to Be Cynical.” Cracked.com. May 25, 2008. http://www.cracked.com/article_16310_12-comic-book-ads-that-taught-us-to-be- cynical.html.

Pogue, David. “Kinect Pushes Users into a Sweaty New Dimension.” New York Times. November 4, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/technology/personaltech/04pogue.html?_r=2&page wanted=1&src=busln.

Pooley, Jefferson. “The New History of Mass Communication Research.” In The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, edited by David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley, 43-70. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

Popp, Richard. “Machine-Age Communication: Media, Transportation, and Contact in the Interwar United States.” Technology and Culture 52, no. 3 (2011): 459-484.

Powell, Herbert F. “Machines that Think.” Popular Science. January 1928.

President Barack Obama. “Remarks by the President in State of Union Address, January 25, 2011.” The White House Office of the Press Secretary. Accessed April 2, 2011. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/remarks-president-state-union- address.

149

President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Eisenhower Farewell Address, January 17, 1961.” C-SPAN Video Library. Accessed September 3, 2012. http://www.c- spanvideo.org/program/15026-1.

Press release from Critical Mass and IdentityMine. “Critical Mass Uses Kinect for Windows to Give Chicago Auto Show Attendees a First-Hand Experience of the 2013 Nissan Pathfinder Concept.” February 9, 2012. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/09/idUS267605+09-Feb-2012+BW20120209.

Press release from Google. “Google Announces First Quarter 2012 Results and Proposal for New Class of Stock.” Google Investor Relations. April 12, 2012. http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings.html.

Press release from SRI, Inc. “Siri Launches Personal Assistant for iPhone 3GS.” February 5, 2010. http://www.sri.com/news/releases/020510.html.

“Project Glass: One day….” YouTube video. 2:30. From a promotional video for Google Glasses. Posted by “Google.” April 4, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4.

“Promoting Spectrum Policies that Serve the Public.” National Association of Broadcasters. Accessed April 2, 2011. http://www.nab.org/advocacy/issue.asp?id=2025&issueid=1011.

“Proper Food for Children will Mean Much to Nation.” Atlanta Constitution. February 24, 1930.

Protzman, Ferdinand. “Head of Top West German Bank is Killed in Bombing by Terrorists.” New York Times. December 1, 1989.

Quinn, Patrick. “Car Bomb Kills U.S. Naval Attaché in Athens.” Washington Post. June 29, 1988.

“Radio Control to be Shown: Chevrolet Autos to be Started and Driven by Maurice Francill.” Portsmouth Times (Portsmouth, OH). September 19, 1933.

“Rainy Day.” YouTube video. 0:30. From a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S. Posted by “Apple.” April 17, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5Dt0YlN2nM&feature=context-chv.

Randolph, Eleanor. “Network News Confronts Era of Limits.” Washington Post. February 9, 1987.

Raymond, Jack. “Plan for Missile on Rails Killed in Favor of Underground Sites.” New York Times. December 14 1961.

Raymond, Jack. “U.S. to Install Locks on Atomic Weapons as Extra Safeguard.” New York Times. July 6, 1962.

“RCA Division Introduces Low-Cost Microprocessor.” Wall Street Journal. March 9, 1976.

150

“RCA Says it Will Use Integrated Circuits in Some 1966 TV Sets.” Wall Street Journal. February 1, 1966.

Reid, T.R. The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution. New York: Random House, 1985.

“Remote Controls for Set Operation.” Popular Mechanics. March 1930.

“Remote-Control Machine Gun.” New York Times. February 22, 1951.

Reynolds, Graham. British Portrait Miniatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Richtel, Matt. “Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone is Risky.” New York Times. January 16, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/technology/17distracted.html.

“Road Trip.” YouTube video. 0:31. From a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S. Posted by “Apple.” February 9, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- UpmQN55q2g&feature=plcp.

Roberts, Johnnie L. “Homes Have More Remote-Control Gear, Bringing Both Ease and New Headaches.” Wall Street Journal. December 11, 1985.

Roche, Mary. “Remote Control for Home Wiring.” New York Times. May 12, 1948.

“Rock God.” YouTube video. 0:31. From a television commercial for Apple iPhone 4S. Posted by “Apple.” February 9, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- G8fG1bKgQo&feature=plcp.

Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd edition. New York: Free Press, 1983.

Roush, Wade. “Meet Siri’s Little Sister, Lola. She’s Training for a Bank Job.” Xconomy. June 27, 2012. http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/06/27/meet-siris-little-sister-lola- shes-training-for-a-bank-job.

Roush, Wade. “The Story of Siri, from Birth at SRI to Acquisition by Apple—Virtual Personal Assistants Go Mobile.” Xconomy. June 14, 2010. http://www.xconomy.com/san- francisco/2010/06/14/the-story-of-siri-from-birth-at-sri-to-acquisition-by-apple-virtual- personal-assistants-go-mobile/?single_page=true.

Salkever, Alex. “Apple’s Siri Purchase Heats Up the Race Toward a Voice-Activated Feature.” AOL Daily Finance. April 29, 2010. http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/04/29/apples- siri-purchase-heats-up-the-race-toward-a-voice-activated.

Savat, David. “(Dis)Connected: Deleuze’s Superject and the Internet.” In International Handbook of Internet Research, edited by Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, and Matthew Allen, 423-436. London: Springer, 2010.

151

Schaeffer, Derek K. and Thomas H. Lee. The Design and Implementation of Low-Power CMOS Radio Receivers. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1999.

Scott, Sharon M. Toys and American Culture: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC- CLIO, 2010.

Scott-Stokes, Charity. Women’s Books of Hours in Medieval England. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2012.

Scott-Warren, Jason. “Reconstructing Manuscript Networks: The Textual Transactions of Sir Stephen Powle.” In Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, edited by Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, 18-37. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Seifer, Marc J. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nicola Tesla: Biography of a Genius. New York: Citadel Press, 1998.

Shaer, Matthew. “Google Glasses, Due this Year, Turn Seeing into Searching.” Christian Science Monitor. February 23, 2012. http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0223/Google-glasses-due-this- year-turn-seeing-into-searching.

Sheumaker, Helen. Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Shuster, Alvin. “Missile Runs Wild and is Lost in Test on Atlantic Range.” New York Times. December 7, 1956.

Siegler, MG. “Google’s Schmidt: It’s a Bug that Cars were Invented Before Computers.” TechCrunch. September 28, 2010. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/28/schmidt-on-future.

“Sight.” Vimeo video. 7:50. From a graduation project from Bezaleal Academy of Arts (Israel). Posted by “Sight Systems.” July 24, 2012. http://vimeo.com/46304267.

Silverstein, Jonathan. “Microsoft ‘Kinect,’ Controller-Free Gaming System, Senses Players’ Motions.” ABC News. June 14, 2010. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/microsoft- unveils-controller-free-gaming-world/story?id=10907707#.T-YkuPVuJqM.

Silverstein, Jonathan. “Nintendo’s ‘Revolution’ Gets a Name: ‘Wii’.” ABC News. April 27, 2006. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1897917&page=1#.UAR23fUs2So.

Siouris, George M. Missile Guidance and Control Systems. New York: Springer, 2004.

Siri FAQ. “Learn More about Siri.” Apple. Accessed July 17, 2012. http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri-faq.html.

“Siri: The Horror Movie.” YouTube video. 2:12. Posted by “RoosterTeeth.” December 20, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KGSi0AoJYs.

152

Slack, Jennifer Daryl and J. Macgregor Wise. “Articulation and Assemblage.” In Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York City: Peter Lang, 2005.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl and J. Macgregor Wise. “Cultural Studies and Communication Technology.” In Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, edited by Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone, 141-162. London: Sage, 2002.

Sloop, John M. and Joshua Gunn. “Status Control: An Admonition Concerning the Publicized Privacy of Social Networking.” The Communication Review 13, no. 4 (2010): 289-308.

“Small Radios, Rocketed 4,000 Miles an Hour to the Moon, Could Transmit Signals to Earth, Westinghouse Electric Corp. Scientist Predicts.” Wall Street Journal. August 28, 1946.

Smith, Aaron. “Gadget Ownership.” Pew Internet & American Life Project. October 14, 2010. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1763/americans-and-their-gadgets-technology-devices.

Smith, Aaron. “Nearly Half of American Adults are Smartphone Owners.” Pew Internet & American Life Project. March 1, 2012. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone- Update-2012.aspx.

Smith, Dave. “How Apple’s Future Revolves Around Siri.” International Business Times. December 19, 2011. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/269509/20111219/apple-future-siri- iphone-ipad-tv.htm.

Smith, Gene. “Pinhead-Size Solid Circuits Spur Electronics Revolution.” New York Times. December 6, 1964.

“Speaking Robot to Man Cars Shown to Trolley Delegates.” New York Times. September 25, 1928.

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Stelter, Brian and Jenna Wortham. “Effort to Widen U.S. Internet Access Sets Up Battle.” New York Times. March 12, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/business/media/13fcc.html.

Stern, Joanna. “Google Glasses Designer Gives Us an Up Close Look.” ABC News. June 28, 2012. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/google-glass-close-designer- project/story?id=16666194#.T-yiGvUs2So.

“Steven Spielberg and Xbox Project Natal.” YouTube video. 1:18. From a live presentation at E3. Posted by “xboxprojectnatal.” June 2, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh9plZmFIP4.

Sydell, Laura. “Microsoft’s Kinect Brings Gestures to a New Level.” National Public Radio. November 4, 2010. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131074438.

153

Takahashi, Dean. “Microsoft’s Gesture-Based Game Control to Debut in 2010.” VentureBeat. May 12, 2009. http://venturebeat.com/2009/05/12/microsofts-gesture-based-game- control-to-debut-in-2010.

Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911.

“Televox in Pulpit Gives Pastor Sermon’s Text.” The Washington Post. October 27, 1928.

“Televox Lights Port at Call from Plane.” New York Times. February 19, 1929.

“Televox, the Mechanical Man.” Milwaukee Journal. February 23, 1928.

Tesla, Nicola. U.S. Patent No. 613,809. Issued Nov. 8, 1898. http://www.google.com/patents/US613809.

“The Drogo Sacramentary.” World Digital Library. Accessed April 25, 2012. http://www.wdl.org/en/item/590/.

“The House that’s Run by Pushbuttons.” Popular Mechanics. November 1946.

“The Library of the Medieval Institute: The Sacramentary of Metz.” University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries. Accessed April 25, 2012. http://medieval.library.nd.edu/facsimiles/litfacs/metz.html.

“The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection.” Exhibit of the Birmingham Museum of Art. Birmingham AL. February 7 – June 12, 2012.

“The Perfect Bridge Partner.” New York Times. July 1, 1928.

Thompson, E.P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. London: Merlin Press, 1977.

“Tiniest Tube Paves Way for Wrist-Watch Radio.” Popular Science. November 1947.

Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York: Morrow, 1980.

“Top 100 Movie Moments: #28 Parting the Red Sea.” IGN. Accessed July 16, 2012. http://www.ign.com/top/movie-moments/28.

“Transistors Galore.” Christian Science Monitor. April 12, 1956.

Tsukayama, Hayley. “Google I/O: Google Glass Detailed.” Washington Post. June 27, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-io-google-glass- detailed/2012/06/27/gJQAvZsF7V_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop.

Turing, Alan. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433-460.

154

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending: Data for the Nation, New York City, and Boston.” May 2006. http://www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/report991.pdf.

“U.S. Wireless Quick Facts.” CTIA. Accessed April 23, 2012. http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/index.cfm/AID/10323.

Ulanoff, Lance. “Kinect and Move: A Motion-Controlled Death Match.” PC Magazine. June 17, 2010. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365197,00.asp.

United States patent application 0120143693. Filed June 7, 2012. http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrc hnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220120143693%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20120143693 &RS=DN/20120143693.

Vinocur, John. “Gen. Haig Unhurt as Car is Target of Bomb on Road to NATO Office.” New York Times. June 26, 1979.

“Wants No Toy Soldiers.” New York Times. April 21, 1907.

“Warfare ‘Myths’ Worry Brucker.” New York Times. February 2, 1956.

Warman, Matt. “Google ‘Plans Secret Lab’.” The Telegraph. February 13, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9079062/Google-plans-secret-lab.html.

“We Interview Mr. Televox, Mechanical Man.” Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators 28, no. 1 (1929): 6.

Weintraub, Seth. “Google X’s Wearable Technology isn’t an iPod Nano, but Rather a Heads Up Display (Glasses).” 9to5Google. December 19, 2011. http://9to5google.com/2011/12/19/google-xs-wearable-technology-isnt-an-ipod-nano- but-rather-a-heads-up-display-glasses.

Werrell, Kenneth P. The Evolution of the Cruise Missile. Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1985.

Wheatcroft, J. Holli. “Classical Ideology in the Medieval Bestiary.” In The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, edited by Debra Hassig, 141-162. New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999.

“Where Toys Come From.” Washington Post. January 2, 1910.

“White House Seeking $23.3 Million to Use for A-Weapon ‘Locks’.” Wall Street Journal. July 6 1962.

Whitney, Lance. “Cell Phone Subscriptions to Hit 5 Billion Globally.” CNET. February 16, 2010. http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-10454065-78.html.

155

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948.

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1950.

“Wii Commercials.” YouTube video. 2:01. A compilation of commercials for the Nintendo Wii. Posted by “vermilion21.” November 18, 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2nEHqGWsYM.

Wiley, Stephen B. Crofts and Jeremy Packer. “Introduction: Rethinking Communication After the Mobilities Turn.” The Communication Review 13, no. 4 (2010): 263-268.

“Will Fry Eggs by Radio.” Toledo News-Bee. November 25, 1925.

Williams, John. “Introduction,” In Imaging the Early Medieval Bible, edited by John Williams, 1-8. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” In Problems in Materialism and Culture, 31-49. London: Verso, 1980.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York, Oxford University Press, 1976.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana, 1974.

Wingfield, Nick. “Microsoft Swings at Wii with Videocam.” Wall Street Journal. May 13, 2009. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124215416209111679.html.

Winston, Brian. Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Wise, J. Macgregor. “Assemblage.” In Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, edited by Charles J. Stivale, 77-87. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.

“Wizard Francill to Visit Atlanta.” Atlanta Constitution. April 22, 1923.

“Wizard will Operate Auto Using Radio.” Telegraph-Herald and Times-Journal (Dubuque, IA), June 27, 1927.

Worstall, Tim. “Apple’s Siri Says Nokia Windows Phone is Best Cell Phone Ever.” May 15, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/15/apples-siri-says-nokia- windows-phone-is-best-cell-phone-ever.

Wortham, Jenna. “Apple Buys a Start-Up for Its Voice Technology.” New York Times. April 29, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/technology/29apple.html.

156

Wortham, Jenna. “Apple Says Siri’s Abortion Answers are a Glitch.” November 30, 2011. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/apple-says-siris-abortion-answers-are-a- glitch/#.

Wortham, Jenna. “Apple’s Siri Stumbles Over an Abortion Question.” November 29, 2011. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/siri-struggles-to-serve-up-certain-results.

Young, William H. and Nancy K. Young. “Toys.” In The Great Depression in America: A Cultural Encyclopedia, Volume 1, 549-552. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007.

Zibreg, Christian. “What You Need to Know about Steve Jobs’ Talk at D8.” geek.com. June 2, 2010. http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/what-you-need-to-know-about-steve-jobs-talk- at-d8-2010062.

157