Wireless Futures - (Technicities) by Erik Born (Hardcover)

About the Book

Offers a new history and theory of wireless beyond 'the wireless', exploring sociotechnical imaginaries of media change. Proposes new directions for media philosophy and 'speculative media theory', conducting close readings and interdiscursive analysis.

Book Synopsis

What will wireless media be like in the future? How might they change people and societies? Will the future differ significantly from the past? Wireless Futures argues that meaningful answers to these century-old questions depend equally on markets, technical limits, and sociotechnical imaginaries of media change. Before wireless came to mean 'Wi-Fi, ' before 'the wireless' meant 'radio, ' even before the first trials in radiotelegraphy, it was a central object of financial and theoretical speculation. Wireless Futures unpacks the speculative media question for the case of German modernity. Interrogating the materiality, temporality, and contingency of wireless, this critical project contributes to media philosophy, modernism & modernity studies, and German literary & cultural studies. Wireless Futures models an approach to speculative media based on testing out the limits of media knowledge and questioning the limits of limit-thinking. It shows how the present continuously remakes connections between the past.

Review Quotes

Wireless Futures draws signals from noise by thinking through media. No longer bound to copper wires or material conduits, these signals permeate the spaces around and within us. Born's book challenges us to reconsider the medium specificity at the heart of our historical visions of the future.--Florian Sprenger, Ruhr-University Bochum

In Wireless Futures Professor Born has assembled a remarkable archive and combined it with incisive critical readings, reminding us just how much our present moment of ubiquitous wireless connectivity owes not just to connections made but even more to those not. Here, finally, is a study up to the challenges of meeting our wireless present directly.--Timothy Campbell, Cornell University