Seeing Through Rocks: Rare Earth Elements in Media History

• In Event: States of Matter/Matters of State: Amphibious Scholars in Technoscientific Space

Abstract

Since Welsbach's incandescent gas mantle in the 1880s, which illuminated households and city streets both before and after the proliferation of Edison bulbs, rare earth minerals have maintained pivotal roles in shaping and conditioning how we see and hear the world. And as our media consumption has become more personal, our relationships to rare earths have become more and more pronounced. Rare earths have afforded and enabled many of the transformations in modern media technology, yet thus far have elided significant mention in the annals of media history. A proper empirical history of rare earth minerals in media has yet to be written, and this study hopes to fill that crucial gap. Since 2010, it has become relatively widely known that, to a large extent, rare earths power our digital world; Yet, these enigmatic metals have long played key roles in shaping our relationship to mediated sight, sound, and information. This paper will explore the journey of rare earths through media in the 20th century, from carbon arc lamps in cinema projectors and coated optical glass, to europium phosphors in cathode-ray tubes for color TVs, and samarium magnets in the original Sony Walkman. Through this endeavor, I seek to better understand how modern media technologies have developed alongside and within changing regimes of mineral extraction, mapping this media history onto shifting political hegemonies of rare earth exploitation - from India, to the United States, to China - to show how resource politics are inextricably entangled with media futures.

Author

• Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication