Remote Control (Object Lessons)

Caetlin Benson-Allott

ISBN 10: 1623563119 / ISBN 13: 9781623563110

Published by Bloomsbury Academic 2015-01-29, 2015

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-HCE-9781623563110

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Remote Control (Object Lessons)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic 2015-01-29
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1623563119
• ISBN 13: 9781623563110
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Authors

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

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.