Feeling Mediated
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Feeling Mediated

A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America

Brenton J. Malin

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eBook - ePub

Feeling Mediated

A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America

Brenton J. Malin

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About This Book

New technologies, whether text message or telegraph,inevitably raise questions about emotion. New forms of communication bring withthem both fear and hope, on one hand allowing us deeper emotional connectionsand the ability to forge global communities, while on the other promptinganxieties about isolation and over-stimulation. FeelingMediated investigates the larger context of such concerns, considering bothhow media technologies intersect with our emotional lives and how our ideasabout these intersections influence how we think about and experience emotionand technology themselves.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Brenton J. Malin exploresthe historical roots of much of our recent understanding of mediated feelings,showing how earlier ideas about the telegraph, phonograph, radio, motionpictures, and other once-new technologies continue to inform our contemporarythinking. With insightful analysis, FeelingMediated explores a series of fascinating arguments about technology andemotion that became especially heated during the early 20th century. These debates, which carried forward andtransformed earlier discussions of technology and emotion, culminated in a setof ideas that became institutionalized in the structures of American mediaproduction, advertising, social research, and policy, leaving a lasting impact onour everyday lives.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2014
ISBN
9780814760208

1

Conflicting Feelings

Technology and Emotions from Colonial America to the New Age of Communication
Benjamin Franklin was one of the first American media theorists. A printer, newspaper publisher, and postmaster, Franklin produced and thought about a range of media forms. In his frequent discussions of “communication,” however, he primarily had something else in mind. In explaining an experiment with electricity, Franklin instructed his readers to “place a thick piece of glass under the rubbing cushion to cut off the communication of electrical fire from the floor to the cushion.”1 Similarly, in an explanation of a rudimentary battery made from a bottle, Franklin wrote that “the Equilibrium cannot be restored in the Bottle by inward Communication, or Contact of the Parts.”2 In a discussion of how the lightning rod he designed could help a church, Franklin offered that “a sufficient metallic communication between the roof of the church and the ground” needed to be established.3 For Franklin, communication was primarily an electrical interaction between physical objects rather than an exchange between people.
Franklin’s use of the term “communication” reflected a common sense of the word in his time, though one that was even then beginning to change. As John Peters has explained, “The concept of communication as we know it originates from an application of physical processes such as magnetism, convection, and gravitation to occurrences between minds.”4 The seventeenth-century fascination with electricity of which Franklin was an important part created a like interest in various other kinds of connectivity. If metal objects could develop a magnetic attraction to each other, then what about human beings? The fact that we can still speak of a person’s “magnetic” personality testifies to this earlier understanding of communication as electrical attraction. Our sense of communication is rooted in an idea of powerful electrical impulses drawing one body to another.
The concern with technology and emotion that developed in the early twentieth century owed much to this earlier idea of communication. The modern concept of communication as sharing of information or meaning matured alongside a range of technologies that themselves connected bodies via electricity. In harnessing electricity as it did, Morse’s telegraph—patented in 1837, not quite fifty years after Franklin’s death—embodied and magnified the magnetism of the new age of communication. If in Socrates’s time the alphabet had caused concerns about emotional stimulation and both connection and disconnection, the electrical alphabet of Morse’s code would seem to transmit emotion itself. The telegraph carried the magnetism of one body to another, via its own magnetic wires.
In exploring this early history, I will argue that, at least in the American context, the rhetoric of the technological sublime and the history of emotion need to be read as parallel parts of a larger rhetorical ecology. The presumed power of electrical technologies, especially the telegraph, evoked great interest in and concern about emotion. In the nineteenth century, a number of commentators celebrated the telegraph as a great emotional unifier—a national heart. The more its wires multiplied, however, the more people worried that it was causing a form of emotional overstimulation. These ideas moved hand in hand. The more powerful and omnipresent communication technologies such as the telegraph seemed to be, the more the emotion they seemed to transmit was imagined as a set of electrical impulses in need of control. The more emotions were seen as electrical impulses in need of control, the more powerful these communication technologies seemed to be. This circular logic eventually culminated in the early twentieth-century position that I call media physicalism.
This chapter traces the history of this developing logic from the founding of the country to the early twentieth-century period that grounds the next several chapters. In comparison to later periods, early Americans saw emotional life as a social and public good. Feelings were to be expressed publicly, and they formed an important component of people’s bonds to one another. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, the continual growth of communication technologies, combined with an increasingly urban life, created a range of anxieties about the speed and amount of stimulation—emotional, informational, and otherwise—that a person could handle and called into question the earlier, more public conception of emotion. Not only telegraphs and radios, but such new technologies as the automobile created what many saw as a new era of hyperemotional stimulation and “speed mania.” This linkage between technological development and emotional stimulation created a central anxiety for thinkers of the period: What did civilization mean if the very technologies that advanced it also created emotions that were dangerous to its development? This apparent paradox weighed heavy on a whole range of arguments about the place of technology and emotion in human life, suggesting that technologies were both the causes of—and solutions to—emotional overstimulation; enforcing the need for administrative experts to guide the technological needs of the public; and depicting the average citizen as an overwhelmed, hyped-up addict of the era’s technological emotions.

God’s Lightning and the National Heart

For nineteenth-century Americans, perhaps nothing embodied the powerful combination of technology and emotion quite as strongly as the telegraph. The first stanza of a poem by Elizabeth Barnard entitled “The Atlantic Telegraph,” published in 1883, imagined the telegraph’s wires as a great emotional unifier:
Peerless theme of glad emotion
Linking national hearts in one;
Through this nerve across the ocean
Thrills the triumph newly won!5
Massachusetts senator George F. Hoar likewise celebrated the shared sentiment made possible by the telegraph. In one public address, Hoar observed that “every speaker and every auditor knows how an emotion is multiplied by the size of the audience that feels it.” Someone might tell a joke to a neighbor “which will hardly create a smile.” However, “say the same thing to a great audience of three or four thousand people, and in every man’s heart that feeling is multiplied and intensified by the knowledge that the same feeling is experienced by every other person.” Addressing the assassination of President Garfield, Hoar claimed that “science, the telegraph and the press enabled the emotion of human sorrow, at the time of Garfield’s funeral, to be felt over the entire civilized world.” Because of the sharing of emotion made possible by the telegraph, with Garfield’s assassination, “a poor, feeble fiend shot off his feeble bolt; a single human life was stricken down; and, lo, a throb of Divine love thrills a planet!”6
This same telegraphic sharing of feelings created worry as well. According to a letter in the Philadelphia Medical Times from 1883, the emotional stimulation of the telegraph could do harm to the human body:
All day long there is the telegraph boy with his sharp summons and the emotion which is inseparable from the nature of the message sent. When a man only got his letters in the morning he was pretty safe from surprises for the rest of the day; but with the telegraph he has no remission from anxiety and is on the tenter-hooks all day long. … What chance have the assimilative organs, so intimately related with the emotions, of preserving their even way amidst such tumult and disturbance?7
In a like vein, an article entitled “Intellectual Effects of Electricity” argued that the telegraph’s “constant excitements of feeling unjustified by fact … must in the end, one would think, deteriorate the intelligence of all to whom the telegraph appeals.”8 Still another writer suggested that the telegraph had potentially harmful effects on people’s emotions, in that it “searches every nook and corner of the world every day, dragging into light, not only every crime that is committed, but every disagreeable feature of human society.”9
Summing up some of these contradictory positions, a poem that celebrated the telegraph as both “grandly and simply sublime” and a “sensitive link” binding people in mutual feeling also warned of the potential dangers of these connections:
But ye must watch it in good sooth
lest false fever it swerve
touch it in tenderest truth
as the world’s exquisite nerve.10
Exquisite nerve and national heart, the telegraph embodied for these commentators a particularly powerful—and contradictory—technological emotion.
These contrasting positions on the value of the telegraph’s emotional unification make sense in the context of America’s larger histories of technology and emotion. As Leo Marx has explained, early American confrontations with technology were dominated by what he terms, following the historian Perry Miller, “the rhetoric of the technological sublime.”11 Because of its vast, uncultivated land areas, Marx argues, from the beginning of the age of discovery America seemed the perfect setting for the classic “Virgilian mode.” In this archetypal formula, a good shepherd would “withdraw from the great world and begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape.”12 The mythic American frontier proved for many a powerful counterpoint to the supposed civilizing influences of Europe and suggested a mode of sublimity unique to the new continent. Hawthorne’s Sleepy Hollow, Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Jefferson’s pure and innocent Virginia, and a myriad of other literary and political images on which Marx draws seemed to celebrate a pure American landscape untouched by modern life. Influenced in various ways by the European aesthetics they were presumably escaping, however, even as these new settlers praised the American wilderness, they fantasized its transformation into the more cultivated, civilized “middle-landscape” of the garden. Jefferson’s ideal citizen was the yeoman farmer or “husbandman” who turned the chaotic wilderness into a more ordered, productive space for the cultivation of crops. The ideal landscape assumed a middle ground between some primitive, untouched nature and a more cultured, civilized one.
The example of the locomotive provides Marx with a strong example of this general rhetoric. Although such writers as Hawthorne and Emerson initially decried the railroad for the ways that it disturbed the bucolic American prairie, with increasing frequency, people eventually began to celebrate its technological mediation of the landscape. “There is a special affinity between the machine and the new republic,” Marx observes, because “the raw landscape is an ideal setting for technological progress.”13 Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes a similar ambivalence in the European reception of the railroad. While those people accustomed to the slower travel of the horse-drawn carriage were often critical of the train’s rapid movement through the landscape, others began to champion the uniquely technological view of the prairie made possible by locomotion. These spectators did not see “a picturesque landscape destroyed by the railroad.” For them, the train had created a new landscape, to be taken in through a series of high-velocity “glances.”14 Americans moved still more quickly to this more celebratory view of railroad travel. However disturbing the railroad might have seemed to the presumably pristine American landscape, in its raw power to consume the countryside it also appeared to many as a natural symbol of a developing ideology of technological progress.
In discussing the technological sublime, Marx, like Miller before him, tends to employ the term “sublime” in a fairly mundane sense—as, say, wonder or excitement—using it primarily to describe various celebrations of technology. However, the ambivalence that greeted both the telegraph and the railroad suggests that a notion of sublimity drawn more clearly from the work of Edmund Burke or Immanuel Kant might be more appropriate. In his classic eighteenth-century discussion, Burke argued that a person experienced the sublime when faced with something that evoked a sense of vastness, magnificence, power, infinity, terror, or another sensation of astonishment. For him, “delightful horror” was “the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime.”15 Kant likewise explained that when someone experiences a sublime object, “the mind is not simply attracted by the object, but is also alternatively repelled thereby.” As a result, “the delight in the sublime does not so much involve positive pleasure as admiration or respect, i.e., merits the name of a negative pleasure.”16 The sublime, as understood by Burke, Kant, and many of their eighteenth-century counterparts, was a feeling of fearful wonder that resulted from the confrontation with some terrifyingly awesome object.
That the telegraph could be both celebrated as a “peerless theme of glad emotion” and condemned for its “constant excitements of feeling unjustified by fact” suggests that it was greeted with just this sense of delightful horror. This grew in part from its status as electrical communication, electricity itself being met with its own powerful rhetoric of sublimity. Edmund Burke had early on suggested that attending to “the last extreme of littleness” could evoke a sublime experience. When humans considered objects of a “diminishing scale of existence,” they would “become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness.”17 Electricity had just this sense of wonder. In 1874, one minister claimed that “since electricity has become known (in part), it furnishes a far more forcible symbol of spirit, and even of divine power.” In fact, he contended, “it has many of the attributes of those spirits which the Almighty makes his messengers, the flame of fire which he makes his ministers.”18 Still another writer argued that “from electricity, which is the invisible body of God, have emanated all the visible substances that constitute globes, and from the fullness of his spirit have emanated all life, form, and motion.”19 The sublime power of electricity was one with the sublime power of God.20
By harnessing electricity for the purpose of communication, the telegraph seemed to give the human voice a godlike reach. In an early history, Charles Briggs and August Maverick called the telegraph “a perpetual miracle, which no familiarity can render commonplace.” Given the telegraph’s miraculous character, they asked, “For what is the end to be accomplished, but the most spiritual ever possible? Not the modification or transportation of matter, but the transmission of thought.”21 An article describing how the telegraph was used to spread information about crimes claimed that “God’s lightning pursuing murder has become a true and active thing.”22 According to James Carey, whose own concept of the “rhetoric of the electrical sublime” built upon Marx’s ideas, the telegraph entered “American discussions not as a mundane fact but as divinely inspired for the purpose of spreading the Christian message farther and faster, eclipsing time and transcending space, saving the heathen, bringing closer and making more probable the day of salvation.”23 Owing to this mysterious, transcendent understanding, the telegraph also became attached to a range of psychic practices such as spiritualism and mesmerism.24 The mysterious power of the telegraph promised, in the words of Gardner Spring, “a spiritual harvest because thought now travels by steam and magnetic wires.”25
That not just thought, but emotion could be carried by the telegraph was a central component of its apparently sublime power. The train was delightfully horrifying for how it travelled the vast American landscape, “annihilatin...

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