And now for an academic entry.
Another one-off piece has appeared: “Transportation and Communication: Together as You’ve Always Wanted Them,” in Thinking With James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History, eds. Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson, 117-35. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. I haven’t done a run-through for typos but I will say that the layout is beautifully done and the book as a whole looks great. So nice job, Peter Lang. Especially interesting is a 2-part interview of Carey by Larry Grossberg, which has Carey laying some interesting things out in public for the first time — his relationship with other faculty at the Institute of Communications Research (hint — he has unkind things to say about Herb Schiller), the emergence of “cultural studies” as a term and concept in the 60s US, long before it was known in humanities departments, and his reading of McLuhan’s Understanding Media while it was still a report to the Department of Education, to name three. I would say it’s a “must read” for people interested in the intellectual history of Communication Studies in North America.
Today and tomorrow, I have the pleasure of hosting Fred Turner, who’s here to give a lecture to a combined HPS and AHCS audience. His new book on the roots of the digerati in the Whole Earth Catalog, is forthcoming from U of Chicago Press.
That sounds like a book I’d be interested in (digerati and Whole Earth). From a famous-men-of-history perspective, Stewart Brand seemed a crucial figure … from near-Prankster to Whole Earth Guy to computers made a lot of sense at the time. My memory fails me, but I think it was Steven Levy’s Hackers that first made the connection for the general public between the psychedelic pioneers of the 60s and the, well, hackers of later years.
Fred’s book is called From Counterculture to Cyberculture and will be out in August 2006. He spent hours and hours interviewing Brand and everyone in Brand’s social network. He’s even read Brand’s diary. I read the penultimate draft and it’s a rich cultural history. There’s always the danger when you get into STS and social network theory of the “great man” histories but I think Fred walks the tightrope carefully.