A conventional narrative in many historical accounts about the arrival of new media technologies is that media technologies have oftentimes made possible forms of communication in which physical co-presence is less and less necessary. Early media technologies like print allowed for unprecedented communication across distance, albeit with a time lag. But as time has gone on, mediated communication at a distance has become increasingly instantaneous. These kinds of narratives feed into a popular imaginary of media technologies progressively disconnecting us from localities or places. In this episode, we explore an alternative way to think about this: for sure, media technologies radically alter how we experience time, space and distance. Yet when we look a little closer, we can see that media technologies – in how we encounter them, in their sheer materiality – always depend on local circumstances.

Thinkers discussed: Harold Innis (The Bias of Communication); Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Myth); Doreen Massey and David Harvey (briefly); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); David Morley (Communications and Mobility); John Thompson (The Media and Modernity); Kate Maddalena and Jeremy Packer (The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network); Jonathan Sterne (Thinking with James Carey); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form).