"Sconce has written an important book that lets us tune in to some of the more disturbed and disturbing frequencies on the media-technological spectrum. It will be influential in media studies, and beyond that, in the wider effort to understand what all these devices are doing to us."

- Ben Kafka, Bookforum

"A robust and multidimensional reminder of the complexity of human consciousness. . . . One impressive feature of the study is how deftly Sconce weaves together case studies, literary source material, court cases, and popular media."

- Amy Ione, Leonardo Reviews

"Few recent works of media scholarship could be said to be, even occasionally, laugh-out-loud hilarious. But alongside evenhanded appraisals of delicate subjects such as mental illness and conspiracy theories, Sconce manages to deliver his salient points with comedic flair, frequently punctuating his analyses with unexpected jokes."

- Leo Goldsmith, Film Quarterly

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"<i>The Technical Delusion</i> is the first comprehensive study of what psychotic visions have contributed to shared perceptions of technology. Sconce has assembled a remarkable array of evidence and stitched it together into a compelling narrative about the imaginary history of technology over the past two centuries."

- Geoff Shullenberger, The New Atlantis

"A striking, ambitious, and demanding book…. It should appeal to a wide audience, from historians of technology to media theorists and cultural studies theorists, from historians of psychiatry and psychoanalysis to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts themeslves."

- Nicolas Henckes, Technology and Culture

Delusions of electronic persecution have been a preeminent symptom of psychosis for over two hundred years. In The Technical Delusion Jeffrey Sconce traces the history and continuing proliferation of this phenomenon from its origins in Enlightenment anatomy to our era of global interconnectivity. While psychiatrists have typically dismissed such delusions of electronic control as arbitrary or as mere reflections of modern life, Sconce demonstrates a more complex and interdependent history of electronics, power, and insanity. Drawing on a wide array of psychological case studies, literature, court cases, and popular media, Sconce analyzes the material and social processes that have shaped historical delusions of electronic contamination, implantation, telepathy, surveillance, and immersion. From the age of telegraphy to contemporary digitality, the media emerged within such delusions to become the privileged site for imagining the merger of electronic and political power, serving as a paranoid conduit between the body and the body politic. Looking to the future, Sconce argues that this symptom will become increasingly difficult to isolate, especially as remote and often secretive powers work to further integrate bodies, electronics, and information.  
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Jeffrey Sconce traces the history and continuing proliferation of psychological delusions that center on suspicions that electronic media seek to control us from the Enlightenment to the present, showing how such delusions illuminate the historical and intrinsic relationship between electronics, power, modernity, and insanity.
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Acknowledgments  ix Introduction: On the Spectrums  1 1. The Technical Delusion  21 2.Chipnapped  82 3. The Will to (Invisible) Power  117 4. The System  175 5. Targeted Individuals  237 Epilogue: The Matrix Defense  285 Notes  301 Bibliography  387 Index  419
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“Delusions arrive as visions, sounds, images, rays, and waves—they arrive by way of media apparatuses, which are one condition of existence of the historical ways in which we constantly and inescapably go mad. Jeffrey Sconce's outstanding book is the essential media theoretical guide that does not merely map how we go off the rails, but how and what kind of rails were constructed in the first place.”
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781478001065
Publisert
2019-02-08
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
612 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, UP, 06, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter

Om bidragsyterne

Jeffrey Sconce is Associate Professor of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University, author of Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, and editor of Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, both also published by Duke University Press.