William Boddy – författare

New Media and Popular Imagination offers a highly original account of the ways in which successive media of electronic communication - radio, television, and digital media - have been anticipated, debated, and taken up in the twentieth-century United States. Intended as an intervention in the emerging scholarly and policy debates around contemporary digital culture, the book analyses popular responses to earlier moments of technological innovation in the twentieth-century. Successive electronic media have challenged the borders between private and public, disturbed notions of national identity, and disrupted the gendered routines and spaces of the private home. Illuminating both the continuities and disjunctions between old media and new, New Media and Popular Imagination offers new insights into the relationship between technological change and cultural form.

New Media and Popular Imagination places the current technological upheaval in audio-visual culture in the context of previous periods of twentieth-century media innovation. Examining popular and industry responses to the introduction of radio, television, and digital media into the home, the book underscores the continuities and disjunctions in the ways in which electronic media have been anticipated, promoted, and resisted in twentieth-century America.

William Boddy provides a wide-ranging, rigorous analysis of the fledging American television industry during the period of its greatest economic growth, programming changes, and critical controversy. He traces the medium's development from the experimental era through the regulatory battles of the 1940s and the network programming wars of the 1950s.