Remote Control

by Caetlin Benson-Allott, Ian Bogost (Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Editor)

Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

While we all use remote controls, we understand little about their history or their impact on our daily lives. Caetlin Benson-Allot looks back on the remote control's material and cultural history to explain how such an innocuous media accessory has changed the way we occupy our houses, interact with our families, and experience the world. From the first wired radio remotes of the 1920s to infrared universal remotes, from the homemade TV controllers to the Apple Remote, remote controls shape our media devices and how we live with them.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623563110
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/03/2015
Series:	Object Lessons
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (2013) and of a column on film and new media in Film Quarterly.

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Table of Contents

Introduction: What a Mess!
Chapter 1: Changing Volume
Chapter 2: Switching Channels
Chapter 3: Comprehensive Control
Conclusion: Material Literacy
Index

Editorial Reviews

The remote control encourages us to take it for granted. It's ubiquitous but easy to misplace. An essential convenience but still an overly complicated nuisance. But in this compelling history, Caetlin Benson-Allott places remote controls at the center of our media universe, demonstrating how profoundly these devices shape contemporary media practices and our everyday lives. You'll never surf the same way again.” —Jason Mittell, Professor of Film & Media Culture, Middlebury College, USA, and author of Television and American Culture

“While promising control, the remote often fails to recognize commands or deliver our desires. Caetlin Benson-Allott shows how the history of the remote, including its affordances and burdensome proliferations, can help us better understand contemporary media technologies.” —Michele White, Associate Professor of Communication, Tulane University, USA, and author of Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay

“Caetlin Benson-Allott offers an analysis of 'remote control' as a 'technology and a cultural fantasy.' …What was once a fantasy, a thing of the imagination, becomes instead an instrument, but by that instantiation it scrambles and reduces the myriad imaginative uses it once anchored - realizes some, sends others packing, or separates them out.” —Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books

From the Publisher

While promising control, the remote often fails to recognize commands or deliver our desires. Caetlin Benson-Allott shows how the history of the remote, including its affordances and burdensome proliferations, can help us better understand contemporary media technologies.

Michele White

The remote control encourages us to take it for granted. It's ubiquitous but easy to misplace. An essential convenience but still an overly complicated nuisance. But in this compelling history, Caetlin Benson-Allott places remote controls at the center of our media universe, demonstrating how profoundly these devices shape contemporary media practices and our everyday lives. You'll never surf the same way again.

Jason Mittell