This lively new study is a critical cultural history of communication technologies, from railways and telegraphy to computers and the Internet, in which Rod Giblett argues that these technologies play a pivotal role in the cultural history of modernity and its project of the sublime.

Preface Acknowledgements Flow along a Channel: Communication and its Technologies  Crude Conqueror of Nature: Steam Railways  Mind over Matter: Electrical Telegraphy    Shooting the Event: The Camera is a Gun, Photography is a Shot The Hell of Images: Cinema Paradiso   Magician's Bower and Monstrous Mechanical: The Car as Communication Technology  The Magical in the Modern: Ethereal Radio  Disciplinary and Flânerie: The Panopticon and Panorama of Television  Orbiting in the Sublime Company of Heavenly Bodies: Satellites from Cold War to Gulf War  The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace and the Slimy Swamps of War: Computers and the Internet Blue Sky Mining: Spectrum and Space References Index

ROD GIBLETT is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, School of Communications and Contemporary Arts, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He is the author of Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (1996) and Living with the Earth: Mastery to Mutuality (2004).