The prison house of the circuit : politics of control from analog to digital

Has society ceded its self-governance to technogovernance? The Prison House of the Circuit presents a history of digital media using circuits and circuitry to understand how power operates in the contemporary era. Through the conceptual vocabulary of the circuit, it offers a provocative model for thinking about governance and media. The authors, writing as a collective, provide a model for collective research and a genealogical framework that interrogates the rise of digital society through the lens of Foucault’s ideas of governance, circulation, and power. The book includes five in-depth case studies investigating the transition from analog media to electronic and digital forms: military telegraphy and human–machine incorporation, the establishment of national electronic biopolitical governance in World War I, media as the means of extending spatial and temporal policing, automobility as the mechanism uniting mobility and media, and visual augmentation from Middle Ages spectacles to digital heads-up displays. The Prison House of the Circuit ultimately demonstrates how contemporary media came to create frictionless circulation to maximize control, efficacy, and state power. Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface: About the Writing of This Book An Introduction to the Circuit Chapter 1. How to Make a Soldier into a Medium: Docile Bodies in the Signaling Circuit Chapter 2. Soldiers in the Circuit: Media and Medicine in the First World War Chapter 3. Police Circuits: Render Automatic All the Mechanisms of Society Chapter 4. Circuitous Maximus: Automobility, Flow, and Driverless Futures Chapter 5. How We All Were Committed: Automating Medial Madness from Eyeglasses to Google Glass Chapter 6. Media Genealogical Method Notes Index About the Author "Through the conceptual vocabulary of the circuit, The Prison House of the Circuit presents a history of digital media as well as a provocative model for thinking about governance and media. The authors ultimately demonstrate how contemporary media came to be mechanisms that create frictionless circulation to maximize control, efficacy, and state power"-- Provided by publisher