First of all, I am deeply honored and incredibly humbled to be given this extraordinary honor. I have been coming to SHOT meetings on and off for 32 years—and it shows—and I never, ever dreamed that I would receive an award bestowed on the likes of Tom Hughes, Carroll Pursell, Hugh Aitken, Roe Smith, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, David Nye, David Hounshell, and so many other amazing scholars. And I’ll say my thank yous at the banquet, but I do want to note that I would not be here without the exemplary guidance and support of Hunter Dupree, Pat Malone, and Hugh Aitken.

Now, when the chair of the da Vinci committee calls you with the extraordinary news, you also learn very quickly that you must sing for your supper. So here goes.

How do new things happen? This was the deceptively simple question Hugh Aitken asked when laying out what we do in our field. It also implies, of course, the question “How do new things not happen?” But the question— How do new things happen?—opens up everything—the role of inventors, scientists, engineers, businesses, corporations, the state, regulations, and, of course, users and consumers—in shaping the emergence and uses of technologies. So today I offer one possibly idiosyncratic view of how we have thought about this question over time, and what our approaches have meant.

As you know, my main work in the field has been on communications technologies, and particularly on radio. The trends and debates I want to reflect on today are the rise of social constructivism, my own oscillations around technological determinism, insurgent uses of technologies by everyday people, technology and gender, and what I’ve come to see as the irony of technology. When I began studying the history of technology as a young scholar back in the 1970s, the field was in the process of overthrowing the “Eureka” school of invention—you know, the dime novel, movie version in which the lone, heroic inventor, hunched over in his lab, suddenly has an instantaneous, blazing insight and invents the lightbulb or the telephone. There was also a move to overthrow the “whig history” of technology, as laid out by John Staudenmaier, in which there was some ineluctable, teleological move toward the ever-better; the interrogation of the myth of progress.

Instead, scholars began to emphasize the evolutionary and collaborative nature of invention, the importance of failures and false starts, and, following the work of Tom Hughes, Hunter Dupree, the entire team at the Edison Papers, and others, began focusing on technological systems as opposed to singular devices. The full-bore attack on internalist history was on. Also in the crosshairs? Technological determinism. In my own area, media studies, Marshall McLuhan, following the lead of Harold Innes, wrote an entire book, Understanding Media, based on hard-core technological determinism in which each medium, and the properties that inhered in it, revolutionized the world. In his classic 1967 article “Do Machines Make History?” Robert Heilbroner argued for a soft determinism in which machines did not make history entirely on their own but did powerfully shape—and were shaped by—the socioeconomic and political systems of which they were part, bringing forth particular forms of labor and ways to organize that labor and, indeed, everyday life. What about people? Did they have no agency here? As Elting Morison showed in his seminal work, Men, Machines and Modern Times, people did resist what seemed like technological progress, sometimes vehemently.

So here was the contradictory brew that surrounded us in the 1970s. There was the rediscovery of Marxism, with its emphasis on the importance of studying power, and also on resurrecting the importance of working-class culture and history. Thus there was also the new social history with its bottom-up emphasis on families, workers, immigrants, women, and African Americans. There was the new notion of culture as “a whole way of life,” as Raymond Williams put it, ripping the concept away from its elite perch as referring only to the arts, literature, and other forms of high culture. There was a move away from the notion of technological revolution to evolution. There were questions about whether machines did make history, and if so, how. And there were questions about how much power people had—on the shop floor, on the assembly line, in R&D labs, as users and consumers—to influence the course of technological change.

It was into this brew that the social construction of technology emerged as a crucial turn and new force in the field. I still remember Carroll Pursell taking me aside after hearing one of my early papers at SHOT and insisting enthusiastically—you know how Carroll is—that I had to, had to read this important new article by Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch on the social construction of the bicycle. Which I did. Social constructivism transformed my work, but I also hope I added to the elements of the approach.

Bijker and Pinch emphasized the role of struggle, negotiation, rejection, and subsequent new directions as inventors, companies, and everyday users interacted and competed over what final form the bicycle would take. Each of these social groups—who attach the same set of meanings to an artifact—might have different technical goals or see different technical problems and wrestle with them until “closure” is achieved. Thus there is no predetermined, natural, or inevitable way for devices or machines to evolve; rather, through this process some technical variants survive and flourish while others disappear. It was our job as historians to figure out why. I had many of these same tales of struggle in my dissertation, but as I worked it into a book, I was now armed with a framework and language for thinking about and analyzing these struggles.

Having said that, I saw another crucial actor, or social group, that played an absolutely pivotal role in the rise of wireless telegraphy and its evolution into radio: the press. Here I sought to add something to the social construction rubric: the role of ideology, by which I mean the prevailing and evolving common sense about a technology, as consolidated through media frameworks. Marconi did not operate in a vacuum as he sought to market wireless telegraphy. Like Edison—and maybe learning from him?— Marconi was a master PR guy and appreciated, deeply, the role of the press in anointing inventor-heroes. It was his exclusive contract with the New York Herald to cover the hugely popular yacht races in New York harbor that introduced him to the American public and the press. What this meant was that I had to look at all of the press coverage, from the scientific and technical journals to the popular press, from 1896 through 1924, to see how radio was covered, discussed, promoted, denounced, and, thus, socially constructed in the print media. What this also meant, then, is that I had to build my own archives of all this material, and—this is an important aside to the younger scholars in the room—never underestimate the importance of tracking down every archive you can, and building your own when you have to. Because the ones you build may indeed have the bottom up perspective that state- or business-controlled archives, usually top-down collections, may not. For me, press coverage of wireless and then radio was crucial to the social construction process, so I hope one contribution to the field has been to examine how media coverage of technologies—often deeply contradictory and incoherent, by the way—can shape their dissemination and uses.

I was also lucky enough to have an identifiable and discrete cohort of everyday people at what Ruth Schwartz Cowan would call the “consumption junction”—the ham radio operators. Their story had not been told in detail in previous histories of radio, yet they played a pivotal role in the invention’s evolution and use. There were thousands of them in the U.S. by 1910. And they challenged the dirty little secret about Marconi’s vision: he really wanted a wireless telegraph, one that sent messages from point A to point B and nowhere else. Well, unfortunately, that’s not how radio waves behave. The hams, on the other hand, loved the broadcast aspect of radio waves; they embraced broadcast and pushed it. Thus it was the hams who began broadcasting voice and music in the early 1920s and the hams who formed the incipient broadcast network. They were a subaltern subculture who used radio in insurgent ways. So that is something else various of us in the field have studied and what remains crucial to keep in our purview— how have subcultures, some of them with minimal political, economic, or social power, used technologies in unanticipated, even insurgent ways that alter the course of history?

Finally, I sought to pay attention to gender, at a time when gender typically meant women. It was simply a given that, with various exceptions that Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Judy McGaw, and others made clear, technology was a male province. So the connections between technology and masculinity were barely noticed or commented upon. But why? What pleasures and alternative forms of masculinity and mastery did technology afford men and boys? Why should considerations of gender remain invisible and unspoken when it’s men but not women we’re talking about? Just as men and boys constituted radio, so did their activities with radio constitute them and new, recombinant, acceptable forms of twentieth-century masculinity. This seemed important to me.

In Inventing American Broadcasting, then, I fully embraced the social constructivism approach and veered far away from technological determinism. Radio had certain inherent properties, but Marconi—and others—had sought to work around them, even subvert them in the service of a particular business model, sending point-to-point messages. So it was how others—especially the ham operators and a few inventors like Lee De Forest—sought to accept and then exploit radio on its own terms that made it what it was.

However, by the time I got to my next radio book, Listening In, I had had some second thoughts about social constructivism, as much as I embraced and valued it. In our insistence on including all actors and all struggles, had we at times constructed a playing field that was artificially level? Had we underemphasized the role of power—state power, corporate power—in privileging some technical forms over others? And what about this notion of closure? Radio, as an artifact, in the spatial locations of its use, and with the kind of content it produced and generated, changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century and beyond; when, exactly, was the true moment of closure? And closure implies that group interaction with and contests over certain devices stops, when if it did, we’d never have rap music or YouTube.

Also, social constructivism did not consider the role or process of legitimation. As different groups vie over technical development, which ones have their goals and achievements legitimated in the larger public sphere and which ones do not? Under what circumstances does such legitimation influence who gets to control the technology? And by emphasizing, and I think rightly, how the final form and uses of technologies are the result of contest and negotiation, had we deprived the technology itself of any force, any agency in history? As Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith pointed out in 1994, even if technology is demoted from the primary agent of historical change to an agent whose effects are determined by socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces, the fact remains that technology may still powerfully direct the course of events. Thus, they redefined technological determinism: “it now refers to the human tendency to create the kind of society that invests technologies with enough power to drive history.”1

Thomas Misa also advanced his “middle-level theory” of technological determinism. Misa noted that those who adopt a more “macro” view of history and society tend to give technology a much more causal role, while scholars doing more “micro-level” analyses, who examine the multiple and often contingent factors shaping technological innovation and diffusion, tend to give technology itself minimal agency. “Middle-level theory” seeks to find an intermediate level of analysis in which technology is seen as both socially constructed and as society-shaping.2 These were important interventions.

So here’s what I was confronted by with Listening In. First, I discovered that no one had written a history of radio that pondered, for a minute, what it meant to have a communications and entertainment technology that denies sight to its audience. What did it mean, in the visually saturated culture of the 1920s—with mass magazines, billboards, colored ads, tabloids, movies—for a people to have to return to listening, really listening? And what might the impact have been on American society and culture? In other words, certain technical properties do inhere in radio. And, if you’re thinking about a technology that raises the primacy of listening, don’t you then have to think about technology and cognition? Don’t you have to ponder which technologies address or privilege which human senses over others?

When I was a beginning graduate student, because I was interested in the media I of course had to read Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. And of course I hated it because it was one extended exercise in hard-core technological determinism. Each new communications technology produced instant and revolutionary change. McLuhan also argued, in his famous aphorism “the media is the message,” that the content of various media was irrelevant; what mattered was the inherent properties of the medium. As someone who thought content mattered crucially, I hated this assertion too. McLuhan’s mechanistic determinism seemed simplistic and, well, historically and sociologically inaccurate. And his dismissal of media content also seemed politically naive, what with the rise of ideology studies in the 1970s. And indeed, by the mid-1970s McLuhan was utterly out of favor for these and other reasons.

But in recent years, and particularly with the rise of radio studies and the impact of email and the internet, some scholars, myself included, reconsidered McLuhan’s insistence that particular media have different consequences than other media because of the inherent properties of that medium. And McLuhan became the “patron saint” of Wired magazine precisely because of his vision of a technologically enabled global village and his notions about how new media cannibalize and repurpose existing media, rendering some aspects of them obsolete while amplifying others. At first the internet’s web-based structure and many-to-many information-exchange capabilities seemed to ensure a flattening of hierarchies; new, potentially more democratic relationships could result from the technology itself, it was hoped. So it is not surprising that McLuhan began to enjoy a revived following in the 1990s.

So some of us began rethinking our wholesale rejection of technological determinism. And what has emerged is a new attention to what are now called technological affordances, a much better term, and what Ian Hutchby called communicative affordances—what do certain technologies privilege and permit that others don’t, and what does that mean?

So, what consequences did I think radio’s nonvisual, oral address had? When 40 million people listened to Jack Benny, or the fireside chats, or a Joe Louis boxing match in the 1930s, they had to do a very particular kind of cognitive work, imagining Benny’s vault, the president’s office, the moves around a boxing ring. But they also knew, without necessarily ever articulating it, that millions were also doing the same kind of cognitive work at the same time. So it was the simultaneity of listening—not just of hearing the same things at the same time, but of doing the same cognitive work at the same time—that I believe allowed radio to play such a major role in forging both a national imagined community as well as regional and local ones at a crucial and very unstable moment in our history.

And again, I was interested in radio’s special address to men—how it made music appreciation more acceptable for men. How its comedies and dramas in the 1930s, through their use of linguistic slapstick, metaphorically opened up, addressed, and then managed deep anxieties about the biggest crisis to hit patriarchal masculinity in the country’s history. How, in its address to men who felt disenfranchised in the 1970s and beyond, it gave voice and rise to male hysterics like Rush Limbaugh.

And radio—precisely because it denied sight to its listeners—became from the 1920s on the most important turnstile between white and black culture of all the media, producing racist fare, yes, but also bringing African American music and slang to white audiences in a way that helped constitute the very identities of white people. It was invisibility, listening, and sounds that did this.

Recently the areas of radio studies, and especially sound studies, have been pioneered by various people in SHOT. Those of us interested in the role of sound in history insist that listening and hearing matter, and not just to cultural history. What role has hearing played when mechanics or engineers tinker with and listen to their machines, when scientists run their experiments, or when doctors listen for symptoms? How have different modes of listening evolved over time, been extended and cultivated by science and technology, and created knowledge? Can we develop a history and taxonomy of such modes of listening? In Listening In, I really sought to put the importance of such questions, and of listening, on the table to develop an archaeology of listening. So I hope that I have played some small role in promoting sound studies and in getting us to recognize that our overwhelming emphasis on the visual may be, ironically, blinding us to the importance of sound in the history of technology.

In the wake of 9/11, I thought about technological affordances again. On the nightly network news, where one would have expected, after the attacks, much more of a focus on international news, after a brief spurt of coverage of “the Arab streets” and the like, attention paid to the rest of the world was fleeting, with the exception of the war in Iraq. After a precipitous decline in celebrity and lifestyle news in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, a year later the percentages of these stories in the nightly network news were back to where they had been pre-9/11. In 2004, despite the war, the percentage of stories about foreign affairs on the commercial nightly news broadcasts was lower than it had been in 1997.3 In entertainment programming, reality TV proliferated wildly after 9/11, which transported viewers into private realms—apartments, houses, resorts, or made-for-TV camps set up on remote islands—where dramas about relationships, personal behavior, and people’s “confessions” urged viewers to look inward, not outward.

With all of the talk about globalization—a word so overused it has become nearly evacuated of meaning—another McLuhan aphorism has returned with a vengeance: supposedly we are now part of a “global village.” All these technologies constitute a new, electronic nervous system that radiates out around the world, connecting people and cultures in unprecedented and more intimate ways. McLuhan argued that this new sensory linkage, these “extensions of man” were destined to bind the world together. And this had, embedded in it, assumptions about the emergence of a new subject position, one enabled by technology, in which people possessed (and welcomed) a more curious and empathetic global awareness of other cultures and people.

But if you were a resident of the United States in the early twenty-first century, did television, for example, with its technically enabled global reach and instantaneity, hail you as a member of this so-called global village? Is the subject position this webwork of satellites, videophones, cameras, and cables seeks to constitute a globally empathetic one?

Because McLuhan was a technological determinist, he envisioned only a one-way trajectory for the media, independent of economic or corporate constraints. He failed to anticipate that technologies that enable us to look out beyond our borders can also encourage us to gaze at our navels, and it has turned out that one use is more profitable and cost effective than the other. So I began to think about how all communications technologies are scopic technologies: as instruments of viewing, listening, and observing, they can slide our perceptions outward or inward. But they do not—they cannot—do so on their own. It is their scopic capabilities, their ability to zoom in or zoom out, interacting with corporate exigencies and consumer desires, that can at times produce effects quite contrary to what pundits and the public initially thought they were likely to produce.

So where I’ve come to is that communication technologies do have particular, intrinsic properties; they are simply not unidirectional. Thus, we need to consider how the technological affordances of various technologies interact with corporate imperatives, producing often ironic and unintended consequences.

There is much evidence to refute or at least seriously undermine the teleological conceit that increasingly sophisticated media technology have led automatically to increased awareness of and sympathy for other cultures. On the contrary, one could argue that the great irony of all these media extensions—satellite transmission, cable, video technology, even the internet—is that they have instead promoted even more isolationist and ethnocentric views. Indeed, these communications technologies, or, more accurately, the uses they have been put to, have enabled a turn within in the U.S. We can see how portability, miniaturization, low cost, the proliferation of media outlets, and speed of transmission, which indeed could have promoted the “extensions of man,” have instead led to the “implosion of culture.” Any cursory review of the various National Geographic surveys on geographic knowledge shows American youth to be geographic illiterates, way beyond young people in other societies. The turn within has this and other consequences.

This leads us to one of the conditions on which such a turn within rests: the irony of technology. What does this mean? While each communication technology does have its own individual properties, especially regarding which of the human senses it privileges and which ones it ignores, that can shape the transmission and reception of content in particular ways, the economic and political system in which the device is embedded almost always trumps technological possibilities and imperatives.

Thus, communications technologies can often have the exact opposite consequences of what we think and hope they might be. The great irony of our time is that just when a globe-encircling grid of communications systems indeed makes it possible for Americans to see and learn more than ever about the rest of the world, Americans have been more isolated and less informed about global politics. Two historical moments stand out as absolute exemplars of this irony. The first is in the 1980s, when the refinement of satellite, cable, and video technology came together to make McLuhan’s “extensions of man” a technical reality but a corporate problem. The second was after 9/11, when these “extensions of man” were most needed but had their capabilities inverted. As a result, our media are not primarily telescopes, searching outward, as McLuhan insisted. They have become primarily microscopes, trained inside.

In the 1970s, a series of technological advances, most notably the expanded use of geosynchronous satellites to transmit television signals and the replacement of film with video, meant that news and events from around the world could be broadcast as they were happening, live, into people’s homes in real time. It was this “liveness,” this “you are there” immediacy, that fueled visions of the global village and the more attuned, empathetic subject position it was seen to cultivate.

But we should also consider what the new communications technologies of the 1970s and beyond, technologies that were faster, that brought “liveness” to us, laid before Americans in our living rooms and dens.4 The irony of technology points to the profound contradiction between the technical capabilities of these space-eradicating technologies and the news values and routines that have guided their use. For example, in the U.S. newsworthiness is defined first and foremost by conflict or disaster. Thus, with a few notable exceptions, since the coming together especially of all these technologies in the late 1970s—which meant that international news could be covered and transmitted live into people’s living rooms—what American viewers have had laid before their feet are famine, floods, hijackings, bloody military coups, terrorist attacks, civil wars, and genocide. Americans saw tragedy, defeat, hostility, and difference. Hardly the elements of a global village.

In addition, just as these outward-reaching media technologies continued to proliferate in the 1980s and beyond, the three broadcast networks, facing competition from the cable networks and pressure to increase their profit margins, spun off their news divisions from their entertainment divisions (which had previously partially subsidized the news), insisted that news divisions become profitable and support themselves, and, thus, downsized them. So, at the very same time that the convergence of new media technologies meant that the war in the Falklands, for example, could be brought to viewers around the globe live via CNN, the broadcast networks began cutting costs in their news divisions. All the networks scaled back on international reporting and eliminated a host of foreign news bureaus. International news was replaced by less expensive entertainment news, mayhem news, lifestyle and other human-interest stories, celebrity journalism, and news about health and fitness. During the Iraq war, news routines interacting with increasingly orchestrated and rigid government news management and the battle for ratings powerfully governed the scopic range of what communications technologies could show people— and thus, in fact, blunted what these technologies could permit people to see and feel. While those on the right and the left continue to fight over whether the news is dominated by a liberal or conservative bias, few have emphasized that the greatest bias in the news today that emerged from these decisions is the narcissism bias (and the laziness bias).

At the same time that industry decisions were blunting the “global village” capabilities of communications technologies, other industrial imperatives began to privilege their narcissistic and domestic surveillance capabilities. Two dominant media trends in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the juggernaut of reality TV between 2000 and 2005 and the explosion in celebrity-based entertainment and journalism, magnified the importance of personality, the interpersonal, surveillance of behavior and the body, and an even more insistent consumerism. By January 2003, “one-seventh of all programming on ABC was reality based.”5 Here, small, portable video cameras and microphones were trained inside, on the home, on bad childrearing and heroic nannies, on seven twenty-somethings planted in a swank apartment, on a bachelor sampling the wares of twenty-five women while deciding which one he likes the best. Reality TV is much cheaper to produce than scripted programming, and many of the shows have been hits, so it has been quite profitable to deploy these technologies in this way. And the preferred discourse of reality TV is one that celebrates a determined isolationism, a luxuriant self-absorption. It was the discourse of reality TV in particular that legitimated, after the initial aftermath of 9/11, a preference for the microscopic rather than the telescopic properties of communications technologies.

In this era in which the word “globalization” is used so constantly, and profligately, and is linked to an automatic assumption that communications technologies undergird the shrinking of the world, we need to address the scopic capabilities of these devices and analyze which political and economic structures encourage their microscopic versus their telescopic capabilities. This calls, in part, for more policy analysis on our parts, and for more attention to political economy. And the way state-corporate systems interact with scopic technologies changes over time, so historicizing these relationships is key. Communications technologies do have some inherent capabilities that privilege some senses—and thus some cognitive and behavioral processes—over others. As we in SHOT consider the mutual impacts between technology and society in the digital age, we need to examine how these inherent capabilities are enhanced or thwarted by the institutional structures that regulate, profit from, or are even surprised and destabilized by scopic technologies.

So we must also keep in mind that the uses and effects of communications technologies are not pat; they are often, as Claude Fischer reminds us in his terrific book about the telephone, America Calling, contradictory. To cite just one example, the telephone allowed for the invasion of people’s privacy from the outside, which many hated; it also allowed for more immediate contact with friends and family, especially important in emergencies, which people embraced.6

Media coverage of new communications technologies either suggests some unilinear trajectory or lapses into a utopian-versus-dystopian framework (the internet will produce a thriving new public sphere; the internet will allow child pornographers to stalk our kids). As we in SHOT struggle ourselves with the multiple, contradictory consequences of the digital revolution, and with the rapid but unequal global diffusion of communications technologies, we must always remember the irony of technology, and the ongoing gaps and tensions between technological capabilities on the one hand, and the not insignificant power of ideological frameworks and corporate-state interests on the other.

So I do think we need to give up on the notion of closure—although, of course, in the digital age, with things emerging and morphing at the speed of light, most of us have. But we should not give up on social constructivism’s main point about the centrality of struggle, competition, and negotiation to the invention and diffusion process. We need to remember, borrowing from Raymond Williams, that there are always dominant, emergent, and residual technologies, and different forms of the same technology, in any society. While they come to be controlled by powerful, corporate forces—given capitalism’s amazing absorptive power—there are often insurgent, subaltern groups seeking to take technologies in new directions. So yes, we saw Napster thwarted and the subsequent conquest of iTunes. And we see the horrid, shallow nightly network news, but we also see rebellion against that all over, on websites, in blogs, on YouTube. The pattern I have seen in my own work is one of insurgent technologies, or uses of technologies, eventually being co-opted by corporate interests and evacuated of their spirit and rebellion. But that doesn’t mean the insurgencies didn’t or don’t matter—they do, as they get folded in, alter, and even enrich the status quo. It is this contestation between technological affordances (including cognitive ones), institutional structures, and technological insurgencies that has constituted the mess of the history I’ve tried to untangle. And you too.

I remember that in his da Vinci speech, Tom Hughes took special note to celebrate the especially messy areas of history, as that’s where the fun and the intellectual excitement are. So I feel that as the recipient of this extraordinary honor, I should have some grand theory to present, some clear path through the mess. But alas, I don’t. How do new things happen? Through original insights; competing, sometimes mutually hostile ideas about design and use; through the inherent affordances of the device or system itself; through corporate co-optation and technological insurgency; through legitimation processes in which ideological frameworks favor some uses over others; and through the irony of technology, when a device’s intended or obvious capabilities are turned upside down. It is an ongoing, dialectical process between the margins and the center, between rebellion and containment. Power matters here—and it usually wins, as these are typically, or eventually, asymmetrical, uneven struggles. But the insurgencies matter, and the properties of the devices themselves, while hardly making history on their own, matter too. So we need to continue to study—and possibly increase our attention to—dominant and subordinate groups, race, class, gender, and youth cultures.

It is all of these struggles that so many of us have sought to unpack and make sense of in our work. Indeed, many of us came to SHOT because we ourselves were dissidents—from mainstream history, or American studies, or sociology, or other fields—and so we knew a bit firsthand about being on the margins or trying something new. And through all that work we made a thriving, important, internationally based field of knowledge and research. And for that I want to express my enormous admiration for the ongoing and amazing work in this field, and for how your work has charted out entire new areas of inquiry and knowledge, and to thank SHOT for providing an always welcoming, supportive, and intellectually sustaining home to my own. If my work has had any merit at all, it is because of the interactions, questions, proddings, and ideas I have exchanged with so many of you over these thirty-two years. Thank you.

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1. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), xiv.

2. Thomas J. Misa, “Retrieving Sociotechnical Change from Technological Determinism,” in Marx and Smith, 115–41.

3. “The State of the News Media 2005,” Project for Excellence in Journalism, available at http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2005/ (accessed 14 January 2010).

4. Robert Stam, “Television News and Its Spectator,” in Film and Theory, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (New York, 2000).

5. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, eds., Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York, 2004), 3–4.

6. Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).

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Susan J. Douglas is Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. This talk was presented at SHOT’s 2009 annual meeting in Pittsburgh during a plenary session honoring her as the recipient of the 2009 Leonardo da Vinci Medal.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.