Promiscuous Concepts: Histories of Forward-Looking Technology, Ideas, and Institutions

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Communication scholars have focused on the movement of ideas, explaining the process variously as diffusion, media ecologies, cultural imperialism, hegemony, and, more recently, data visualization, or even memology. As scholars grapple with the fluidity of ideas in public life, the lines often blur between cultural, legal, political, and business history. This panel explores how ideas have traveled in and through people--unconventional intellectuals like technologists, self-styled cyberneticists, engineers, lawyers, and McLuhan-quoting ad men--as the vernacular intellectuals themselves have traveled between business, academia, government and other sites, with accretions and adaptations along the way. Though each of the panel's papers tells a distinctive story of tech ideas in transit, together they furnish a multi-stranded account of ideas-in-motion about information, technology and the future.

Each paper intervenes in this panel’s account of how ideas and intellectuals surrounding technology, broadly read, travel through time and in turn reorganize the traditions concerning the tools we keep. Listed chronologically, Jennifer Petersen tracks ideas about information as they are adopted and used in the law in the 1940s and beyond. Jeff Pooley’s paper traces the rise and fall, and rise again, of media scholar Marshall McLuhan, from 1960s oracle of televisual salvation to Silicon Valley's "patron saint," as a case study in the making and remaking of intellectual celebrity. Fenwick McKelvey maps evolving ideas in the 1960s about networking as they are integrated in telephonics and computing. Finally, Stephanie Schulte charts the evolution of “the startup” from a business model in the 1970s to a set of values to a framework renovating the federal government in the 2010s. Each of these papers takes seriously the roles that public discourse and institutions have in shaping the prognostic visions surrounding technology. Among other synthetic connections, Pooley and Schulte critique the hagiographic record of celebrity oracles in popular technology talk; Schulte and Petersen share a common concern about potentially exploitative institutions that help consolidate computing culture; and McKelvey, Petersen and Pooley scrutinize how tech discourse--theorists and techniques alike--embraced the for-profit language of prophecy, quantification, and prediction. Instead of imagining ideas about technology as forward-looking, this panel suggests what we may call circulable (or recyclable) media and technology history.

Sub Unit

• Communication History

Individual Presentations

• The Cybernetic History of Corporate Speech - Jennifer Petersen, U of Virginia

• How to Become a Famous Media Scholar: The Case of Marshall McLuhan - Jefferson D. Pooley, Muhlenberg College

• A New Kind of Network: Donald Davies and Nonsynchronous Communication - Fenwick McKelvey, Concordia U

• Obama’s Startup and the Roots of Productive Failure - Stephanie Schulte, University of Arkansas

Respondent

• Fred Turner, Stanford U