New Media and Popular Imagination Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States

This pathbreaking book offers a highly original account of the ways in which successive media of electronic communication--radio, television, and digital media--have been anticipated, debated, and taken up in the twentieth-century United States. Intended as an intervention in the emerging scholarly and policy debates around contemporary digital culture, the book analyzes popular responses to earlier moments of technological innovation in the twentieth-century. Successive electronic media have challenged the borders between private and public, disturbed notions of national identity, and disrupted the gendered routines and spaces of the private home. Illuminating both the continuities and disjunctions between old media and new, New Media and Popular Imagination offers new insights into the relationship between technological change and cultural form.

William Boddy is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and Co-Ordinator of the Film Studies Program at the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York.