Flesh experiments
Reading this: Two friends who wished to converse at a distance proceeded thus: A piece of skin was cut from the arm or breast of each, and those fragments were “transplanted,” so that either party had a portion of the…
Life on Mars
Both fantasies of communication with intelligent aliens at interplanetary distances and fantasies of global communication titillated the collective capacity for imagining the social limits of new media. They likewise instructed collective imagination to explore the possibility of dramatic shifts in…
“When Old Technologies were New”
Discomfort with the menace of electrical technology was elsewhere manifested in apocalyptic theories of disaster. One of the most popular was that excess charge accumulating in the world posed a growing danger to man and nature. “What would that class…