Remote Control

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Remote Control
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Caetlin Benson-Allott
SeriesObject Lessons
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:184
Dimensions(mm): Height 165,Width 121
Category/GenreEngineering - general
ISBN/Barcode 9781623563110
ClassificationsDewey:306.46
Audience
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations 25 halftones

Publishing Details

Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic USA
Publication Date 29 January 2015
Publication Country United States

Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. While we all use remote controls, we understand little about their history or their impact on our daily lives. Caetlin Benson-Allot looks back on the remote control's material and cultural history to explain how such an innocuous media accessory has changed the way we occupy our houses, interact with our families, and experience the world. From the first wired radio remotes of the 1920s to infrared universal remotes, from the homemade TV controllers to the Apple Remote, remote controls shape our media devices and how we live with them. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Author Biography

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, USA. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (University of California Press, 2013) and of a column on film and new media in Film Quarterly.

Reviews

The remote control encourages us to take it for granted. It's ubiquitous but easy to misplace. An essential convenience but still an overly complicated nuisance. But in this compelling history, Caetlin Benson-Allott places remote controls at the center of our media universe, demonstrating how profoundly these devices shape contemporary media practices and our everyday lives. You'll never surf the same way again. * Jason Mittell, Professor of Film & Media Culture, Middlebury College, USA, and author of Television and American Culture * While promising control, the remote often fails to recognize commands or deliver our desires. Caetlin Benson-Allott shows how the history of the remote, including its affordances and burdensome proliferations, can help us better understand contemporary media technologies. * Michele White, Associate Professor of Communication, Tulane University, USA, and author of Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay * Caetlin Benson-Allott offers an analysis of 'remote control' as a 'technology and a cultural fantasy.' ...What was once a fantasy, a thing of the imagination, becomes instead an instrument, but by that instantiation it scrambles and reduces the myriad imaginative uses it once anchored - realizes some, sends others packing, or separates them out. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *