Emily Thompson: The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (2002)

“In this history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century America, Emily Thompson charts dramatic transformations in what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. By examining the technologies that produced this sound, as well as the culture that enthusiastically consumed it, Thompson recovers a lost dimension of the Machine Age and deepens our understanding of the experience of change that characterized the era.

Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston’s Symphony Hall, New York’s office skyscrapers, and the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern America began to sound alike as a universal new sound predominated. Although this sound—clear, direct, efficient, and nonreverberant—had little to say about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes about the culture that created it. By listening to it, Thompson constructs a compelling new account of the experience of modernity in America.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2002
ISBN 0262201380, 9780262201384
510 pages

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PDF (33 MB, updated on 2017-5-15)

Laurie Ouellette: Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People (2002)

How “public” is public television if only a small percentage of the American people tune in on a regular basis? When public television addresses “viewers like you,” just who are you? Despite the current of frustration with commercial television that runs through American life, most TV viewers bypass the redemptive “oasis of the wasteland” represented by PBS and turn to the sitcoms, soap operas, music videos, game shows, weekly dramas, and popular news programs produced by the culture industries. Viewers Like You? traces the history of public broadcasting in the United States, questions its priorities, and argues that public TV’s tendency to reject popular culture has undermined its capacity to serve the people it claims to represent. Drawing from archival research and cultural theory, the book shows that public television’s perception of what the public needs is constrained by unquestioned cultural assumptions rooted in the politics of class, gender, and race.

Publisher Columbia University Press, 2002
ISBN 0231119437, 9780231119436
288 pages

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2013-3-28)

Rebooting America. Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age (2008)

The Personal Democracy Forum presents an anthology of forty-four essays brimming with the hopes of reenergizing, reorganizing, and reorienting our government for the Internet Age. How would completely reorganizing our system of representation work? Is it possible to redesign our government with open doors and see-through walls? How can we leverage the exponential power of many-to-many deliberation for the common good?

Edited by Allison Fine, Micah L. Sifry, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy.
Published by Personal Democracy Press, 2008
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
ISBN 978-0-9817509-0-3

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