Marconi's Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology

by Aaron Toscano

Overview

This book examines the discourse surrounding the wireless, created by the Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The wireless excited early twentieth-century audiences before it even became a viable black box technology. The wireless adhered to modernist values—speed, efficiency, militarization, and progress. Language surrounding the wireless is a form of technical communication, overlooked by today’s practitioners. This book establishes a broader definition for technical communication by examining a selection of the discourse surrounding Marconi's wireless. The book’s main themes are the following: 1) technical communication is all discourse surrounding technology, 2) the field of technical communication (or technical writing) should incorporate analyses of discourse surrounding technologies into its epistemology, 3) the wireless is a product of the society from which it comes (early twentieth-century Western civilization), and 4) the discourse surrounding the wireless is infused with tropes of progress—speed, efficiency, evolution, and ahistoricity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789400739765
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	02/09/2012
Series:	SpringerBriefs in Sociology
Edition description:	2012
Pages:	145
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.01(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- Chapter 1. The Rhetoric of Technical Communication.-  Chapter 2. Analyzing Technology to Uncover Social Values, Attitudes, and Practices.- Chapter 3. Marconi's Representations of the Wireless.- Chapter 4. Popular Press Representations of Marconi's Wireless.- Chapter 5. Tropes of Progress in F.T. Marinetti's Early Futurist Texts.- Conclusion.- Notes.- References.