This book explores the imaginative construction of a cultural history of the media in a series of essays that draw on various artistic and intellectual narratives of Western societies and trace incidental encounters with the means of social communication in cultural and political settings.

1. Introduction: Cultural Constructions of Communication 2. The Gaze of the Artist: American Newspapers in an Urban Setting 3. Revolutionary Reportage: Constructing the New Soviet Journalism 4. Negotiated Images: The Rise of Photojournalism in Weimar Germany 5. Radio and Kultur: On the Social Uses of German Broadcasting 6. Fictional Journalists: News Work in American Novels 7. Billboards of the Dream: Walker Evans on 1930s U.S. Advertising 8. Wireless Pleasure: Locating Radio in the American Home 9. Pierced Memories: On the Rhetoric of a Bayoneted Photograph