The Mediated Mind

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a mass media revolution in the widespread explosion of print; this book shows how the habits of consuming printed ephemera are still with us, even as pixels supersede paper. Trivial, disposable printed items, from temperance medals and cigarette cards to cartoons and even novels tell us much about nineteenth-century mediated experience, and our own. For a fresh perspective on media consumption, the book examines affect, a dynamic quality of human mind and body that links emotion to cognition, self to other, and self to environment. Affect shows how mass-mediated material began to dwell in the mind – less so the rational mind of egoistic cognition, than the embodied mind of daydreaming, reverie, and feeling. In such fugitive spaces, the sovereign individual gives way to community and inter-subjectivity as he or she recreates the social body. The book makes visible an array of positions, habitable by people of different classes, genders, ages, and sexualities, such as the mass live audience member, the enchanted viewer, the information “addict,” the self-fashioner, the collector, and the re-player of experience. These positions characterize an earlier moment in a genealogy of media consumption that endures today. The book describes them by putting disposable print forms into conversation with performance, visual culture, literary fantasy, and media theories. Demonstrating the recursive relations between affects and mass media, it reveals the cultural and psychological contours of ephemeral experience.