How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Sign, Storage, Transmission)

"In How Machines Came to Speak Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens."--Page 4 of cover "How Machines Came to Speak argues that the development of new media technologies-from the phonograph, film, and radio in the early twentieth century to computer code and algorithms today-has been integral to legal conceptions of free speech in the U.S. Traditional histories of free speech and the First Amendment focus on court cases with clear moral and political stakes in regulating speech, including cases that established worker picketing, criticism of war, and freedom of the press as aspects of free speech. Yet, according to Jennifer Petersen, the outcomes of these cases have often been determined by earlier legal precedent around how we define speech itself. Offering what she calls "a media history of free speech," Petersen shows that over the course of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court's definition of speech grew to include everything from symbols and gestures (like saluting the flag) to messages without a clear speaker (like opinions broadcast over the radio) to corporate messages (like commercials and donations). As algorithms increasingly determine which news and culture we consume, Petersen argues that technology and discourse on communication are still central to how the Courts conceptualize free speech, and legal decisions concerning the parameters of speech are bound up in concerns about the constitution of personhood that have been shaped and reshaped by the role of technology as a mediator of social relations and identity"-- Provided by publisher What does it mean for speech to be free? This rigorous, counterintuitive history reveals how changes in media technologies have transformed our answers to that question in the law and well beyond. As it shows, media technologies dont just deliver speech. They model it. And when they do, they change the categories of thought and action through which we live our lives. Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties At the intersection of legal studies, cultural history, and media history, Jennifer A. Petersens book is a brilliant and groundbreaking study of the ways that modern First Amendment law has been shaped by judicial and cultural responses to the advent of new media technologies. Samantha Barbas, Professor of Law, University at Buffalo School of Law Cover 1 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction. The “Speech” in Freedom of Speech 12 1. Moving Images and Early Twentieth-Century Public Opinion 35 2. “ A Primitive but Effective Means of Conveying Ideas”: Gesture and Image as Speech 68 3. Transmitters, Relays, and Messages: Decentering the Speaker in Midcentury Speech Law 98 4. Speech without Speakers: How Speech Became Information 130 5. Speaking Machines: The Uncertain Subjects of Computer Communication 168 Conclusion. The Past and Future of Speech 201 Appendix on Methods 216 Notes 218 Bibliography 268 Index 282 A 282 B 283 C 283 D 286 E 286 F 287 G 288 H 289 I 289 J 290 K 290 L 290 M 291 N 292 O 293 P 293 R 295 S 296 T 298 U 298 V 299 W 299 Y 299 Z 299