Sublime Communication Technologies

ROD GIBLETT is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, School of Communications and Contemporary Arts, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He is the author of Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (1996) and Living with the Earth: Mastery to Mutuality (2004).

'An engagement with the history of the future immediately aligns [this] book and its project with the wider issues of our time: interdisciplinarity, ecological responsibility, and environmental sustainability. This is a book with a global agenda... rich, stimulating and rewarding' - Lelia Green, Australian Journal of Communication 'Sublime Communication Technologies is a lively read and a useful contribution to theorising media, space and body and bringing together a range of diverse theorists and "-ospheres" examples.' - Mark Balnaves, Media International Australia 'This is a trenchantly argued and important book whose arguments deserve to be widely read and taken very seriously. Giblett convincingly shows his readers that if we unthinkingly take for granted what might be at stake in the existence of modern communications technologies we are likely to overlook some of the most important political, social, and intellectual challenges posed by recent history and by the contemporary world.' - Ian James, University of Cambridge, UK

• Preface Acknowledgements Flow along a Channel: Communication and its Technologies  Crude Conqueror of Nature: Steam Railways  Mind over Matter: Electrical Telegraphy    Shooting the Event: The Camera is a Gun, Photography is a Shot The Hell of Images: Cinema Paradiso   Magician's Bower and Monstrous Mechanical: The Car as Communication Technology  The Magical in the Modern: Ethereal Radio  Disciplinary and Flânerie: The Panopticon and Panorama of Television  Orbiting in the Sublime Company of Heavenly Bodies: Satellites from Cold War to Gulf War  The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace and the Slimy Swamps of War: Computers and the Internet Blue Sky Mining: Spectrum and Space References Index