The idea that communication technology can be bad for us is a well-worn groove in Western culture, one whose invocation can be so expected that we fail to note when it happens. With a historian’s flair for the telling detail, D. Travers Scott’s Pathology & Technology expertly sidesteps the traps awaiting anyone traversing the history of communication technology and its invitation to all order of determinisms and faulty assumptions. Scott relies on historical evidence and direct engagement with persons to present a narrative not about technologies per se, but about disease discourses as they have been applied to technology. This requires some tight methodological and theoretical maneuvering, and Scott is up to the task. The result is a book that accomplishes something remarkable: Pathology & Technology is a definitive, user-centered history of how pathologization comes to order our understanding of communication technology.”—David W. Park, Professor of Communication, Lake Forest College
“Pathology & Technology is a fresh and original book—a deeply researched study of how (some) tech users are demonized as diseased. D. Travers Scott traces the media and popular discourses that label some technologies—or really their users—as ‘sick’. Mixing history, focus group interviews, and discourse analysis, the book is a rich investigation of how ‘technopathologies’ emerge and circulate. Pathology & Technology is ultimately a book about invisible politics—about how medicalized tech talk renders and then contains ‘bad users.’”—Jeff Pooley, Muhlenberg College; Author of James W. Carey and Communication Research: Reputation at the University’s Margins
“Eloquent and incisive, D. Travers Scott’s Pathology & Technology: Killer Apps & Sick Users examines the complex history of pathologizing discourses surrounding new technologies. His historically grounded, theoretically nimble study suggests that our current obsession with technology-generated sicknesses may reveal more about our cultural anxieties surrounding gender, sexuality, and power than technology or illness. Provocative and ground-breaking, this project reframes questions of technology, illness, and agency in a productive and compelling fashion.”—Jennifer Natalya Fink, Associate Professor, Department of English, Georgetown University
“How did ‘sick’ become the new normal? How do the stories we tell about disordered, degenerate, and abnormal media users reveal reflections of ourselves? From anthrax to viruses, from neurasthenia to schizophrenia, technopathologies, in D. Travers Scott’s able hands, reveal more than technical conditions: they reveal our many humanities. Drawing together diverse cultural, sociological, political, and critical theoretical sources, this lively cultural historical account enriches scholarly understanding of how modern communication, and its makers, police and pathologize the technical limits of human behavior. Confident in the face of critical difference and evenhanded in its analysis, Scott has opened a new chapter on the medical-moral panics, the scapegoating thrills, and unease we rediscover in every new disease. A vital read.”—Ben Peters, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Henry Kendall College of Arts & Sciences, University of Tulsa
