Introduction

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today

Understanding media archaeology

Understanding media archaeolog

Photography and communication media in the nineteenth century

The increasing interest in media history within the academic world has not yet resulted in an intensive examination of the relationship between photography and communications media. This article seeks to begin to address this lacuna by examining photography's insertion into the so-called revolution of communication in middle-nineteenth-century America. The first section of the present study links photography to the introduction of telegraphy, the development of the railway and the expansion of the postal system. The second section examines aspects of the reception of photography in nineteenth-century America and argues this is related to improvements in communication and transportation technologies. The conclusion calls for a broader consideration of the links between the history of photography and the history of media

There are no old media

Despite its recent ubiquity in scholarly and popular publications, relatively little attempts have been made to interrogate the meanings and implications of the notion of “old media.” This article discusses this notion in the context of theoretical debates within media and communication studies. Defining old media as artefacts, technologies, or in terms of their social use is problematic, since media constantly change, resisting clear-cut definitions related to age. The article therefore proposes to treat new media as a relational concept: not an attribute characterizing media as such, but an element of how people perceive and imagine them. Rhetoric, everyday experience, and emotions are key contexts where new ground can be found to redefine the concept of “old media.

A mirror with wings: Photography and the new era of communications

Simone Natale’s chapter, “A Mirror with Wings: Photography and the New Era of Communications,” questions how and to what extent photography participated in the transformations of the ways communication was conceived, administered, and used in middle-nineteenth century United States. Examining aspects of the medium’s reception of the period, he argues that this was related to improvements in communication and transportation technologies, and that photography was conceived, from the very beginning, as a medium of communication in the strictest sense of this term: a tool for putting images in movement in order to be carried, marketed, and transported

The invisible made visible

This article focuses on the early history of X-rays. It argues that, during the first years after their discovery in 1895 by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, they were regarded as a technological attraction and a visual medium. While their application in medical practice was not yet fully established, the possibility of seeing into the realm of the invisible encouraged pioneers of this technology to actively exploit their visual powers. By using a media-history framework, and relying on primary and secondary sources in English, German, French, and Italian, the article takes into account three aspects of the rays' early display: its character of technological attraction; its association with photography; and its connection to beliefs in the supernatural and the occult

If software is narrative: Joseph Weizenbaum, artificial intelligence, and the biographies of ELIZA

Software is usually studied in terms of the changes triggered by its operations in the material world. Yet, to understand its social and cultural impact, one needs to examine also the different narratives that circulate about it. Software’s opacity, in fact, makes it prone to being translated into a plurality of narratives that help people make sense of its functioning and presence. Drawing from the case of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, widely considered the first chatbot ever created, this paper proposes a theoretical framework based on the concept of “biographies of media” to illuminate the dynamics and implications of software’s discursive life. The case of ELIZA is particularly relevant in this regard because it became the center of competing narratives, whose trajectories transcended the actual functioning of this program and shaped key controversies about the implications of computing and AI

The medium on the stage: trance and performance in nineteenth-century spiritualism

While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has been given to the fact that spirit communication was also a matter of visual spectacle. This article aims to analyse spiritualist séances as a form of spectacular entertainment. Relying on a wide array of spiritualist sources, it argues that séances were meant not only as moments of religious and scientific inquiry, but also as a brilliant amusement where theatrical effects embellished an exciting shared experience. The intermingling of religion and entertainment can thus be seen as one of the defining characteristics of the spiritualist experience. After sketching the history of the presence of spiritualist mediums on the stage and discussing the involvement of professionalism in mediumship, the article will then focus on the trance as a specific performance strategy. It will examine how the trance combined issues of automatism, theatricality and absorption, and contributed to the coexistence in spirit seances of spectacular features and claims of authenticity

Unveiling the biographies of media: on the role of narratives, anecdotes and storytelling in the construction of new media’s histories

The article proposes the notion of "biographies of media” to address the complex ways through which media change is the subject of narration and storytelling. This concept provides theoretical tools to unveil how different narratives contribute to shape media’s identities and to carry particular representations of their roles in our society and everyday life. Relying on theoretical approaches to storytelling and to the biographical genre, as well as on a range of examples from media history, the article shows that narratives are not only key elements in the content of media texts, but also ways through which the impact of media on society and everyday life is represented and negotiated within the public sphere

A cosmology of invisible fluids: wireless, x rays and psychical research around 1900

On December 28, 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen disclosed his discovery of X-rays to the public. Just a few months later, Guglielmo Marconi successfully demonstrated his wireless system at Salisbury Plain, England. This article traces the relations between the early histories of wireless and X-ray technology. It does so by highlighting the role played by psychic research to open the connections between different technologies and knowledges. The disclosure of occult connections between these two technologies helps to locate the cultural reception of wireless around 1900 in a wider cosmology of rays and invisible forces