Lexington Books
Pages: 280
•
Trim: 6½ x 9¼
978-0-7391-9875-9 • Hardback • July 2015 • $128.00 • (£98.00)
978-0-7391-9876-6 • eBook • July 2015 • $121.50 • (£94.00)
Robert C. MacDougall is professor of communication and media studies at Curry College.
Chapter 1: A Brief History of Communication and Control in Humans and Machines.
Robert C. MacDougall
Chapter 2: Four Dimensions of Control.
Robert C. MacDougall
Chapter 3: Panic Button: Thinking Historically about Danger, Interfaces, and Control-at-a-Distance.
Rachel Plotnick
Chapter 4: A Waiting Room Without Walls: Paging, Pagers, and the Future of Mobile Communication.
Benjamin Morton
Chapter 5: Chained to the Dialer, or Frederick Taylor Reaches Out and Touches Someone
Brett Lunceford
Chapter 6: Chatbots in the Metropolis: Turing and the Communicative Labor of the Multitude
Kevin Cummings and Cameron Kunzelman
Chapter 7: Remote Control from the C-Suite: Chief Knowledge Officers, Chief Learning Officers, and Globalized Corporate Noopower.
Robert Gehl
Chapter 8: So Many Choices, So Little Choice: Streaming media, artificial intelligence, and the Illusion of Control.
Matthew Pittman and Ryan Eanes
Chapter 9: Educational Policy and Political Action as Mechanisms of Remote Control.
Zeke Kimball and Karla Loya
Chapter 10: Mobile geospatial search and the limits of knowledge: linking application design and use in time and space.
Jim Thatcher
Chapter 11: Reflections on the Nature of Organization, Control and Resilience in Sociotechnical Systems.
Vincenzo DeFlorio
Chapter 12: Mediascape as Battlefield: Infrastructure Convergence and Smart War.
Kathleen Oswald
Chapter 13: Remotely Piloted Vehicles, Ubiquitous Networks, and new manifestations of Control in Open Society National Security Environments.
R.E. Burnett
Chapter 14: Remotely Human: The ‘Remote-Me’ and the Emergence of the Companion-Head. Madhusudan Raman
The shift from analog to digital is about much more than efficiency, precision, and progress. As MacDougall points out, it is a dramatic shift in what it is to be human and how we relate to the world. Computers are enveloping areas of expertise that were once the sole domain of human creativity and are transforming the relationship of humans to those domains. Such a shift is difficult to see and discuss, but MacDougall gets the conversation started.
— Michael Wesch, Kansas State University
Almost no part of life stays untouched by technology and media. Yet our everyday understanding of technological systems, media dynamics, and data networks is still relatively low-key in comparison. This powerful collection of essays comes to offer timely guidance by creatively and critically mapping the media ecologies of a rich array of systems, networks, and fields. A must-read for anyone who wants to probe the extent to which “control” controls.
— Yoni Van Den Eede, Free University of Brussels
MacDougall has assembled a satisfying spectrum of voices to track how the pulsing, global spray of electrons we stubbornly call "media" continues to transform us. From theory to case study, Communication and Control is truly cutting-edge stuff that will put you in the feedback loop.
— Roger Stahl, University of Georgia
This fine edited volume covers a broad spectrum of theoretical and applied topics. For the theorist, there are stimulating reinterpretations of Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan. For those more intrigued by case studies, behold the chapters on push buttons, pagers, call centers, and chatbots. By consolidating so much varied work on emerging communication systems, this collection does exactly what a good anthology is supposed to do.
— Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture