Carolyn Marvin

The body of the text: Literacy's corporeal constant

The role of bodily routines and practices as an essential component in the study of literacy is considered. The author examines an unusual but not unknown practice by physicians in the late ninetee...

Telecommunications Policy and the Pleasure Principle

Most serious discussion of telecommunications policy is governed by a utilitarian framework in which the success of communications networks is measured by some criterion of productivity. This exclusive emphasis creates undesirable rigidities in large communications systems upon which industrialized societies are so dependent. An analysis of productivity constraints on the social flexibility of existing networks is offered in support of an argument for deliberately building playfulness, in line with certain modest proposals, into the organization of emerging networks of communication.

Your smart phones are hot pockets to us: Context collapse in a mobilized age

A key guarantor of social trust and a necessary feature of democratic societies is a stable sense of social distance. Social distance is the cultural imaginary within which an individual’s coordinates of social status and contingent social location allow or inhibit contact with similarly and dissimilarly located others. The rearrangement of customary social distances by new communication technologies is a source of considerable social anxiety. In mobile communication, this context collapse is instigated by a distinctive combination of affordances: deep connectivity, the accelerated speed and volume of communicative exchange, enhanced social legibility and asymmetric communicative transparency. Robust and effective levels of social trust depend on a political will to build strong democratic accountability and civil rights guarantees into emerging mobile architectures. Identifying specific recalibrations of familiar social distances by regimes of mobile communication and assessing the effects of these recalibrations in democratic terms is a central task of mobile research.

Fresh Blood, Public Meat Rituals of Totem Regeneration in the 1992 Presidential Race

An election campaign serves ritual functions for the American political system, beyond its manifest functions of determining which persons and interests will govern the country. The campaign ritual is analyzed in terms of Durkheims concept of the totem, including its regeneration and sacrifice. The dirty campaign is a sacrificial feast that establishes conditions for a proper mating between the candidate and the electorate. Voters declare their fidelity to the totem victor and receive a sacrificial promise in return.

Theorizing the flagbody: Symbolic dimensions of the flag desecration debate, or, why the bill of rights does not fly in the ballpark

This paper analyzes American flag symbolism in public debate about the Supreme Courts flagburning decisions in 1989 and 1990, and in related flag events. The connotated flag is systematically represented by champions of flag protection laws as a sacrificial body contrasted both to the bodiless text and the profane body of flagburning. What is at stake in the flagburning debate is a cultural fight between the body and the text, and a notion of the sanctifying drama of the American holy family.

Voting alone: the decline of bodily mass communication and public sensationalism in presidential elections

The congregational crowd was a powerful mode of political communication in the nineteenth-century US until banished by the imposition of literate modes on popular electoral politics by Progressive reformers. We examine its major channels of expression, bodily mass communication and public sensationalism, within a framework of class-based struggle, observing that the practice of live bodily assembly created broad points of entry into political life, socialized the young, and successfully conveyed the importance of voting. A text-based normative model of the informed deliberative voter, we argue, offers too narrow a conception of participation compared to a more spaciously conceived democratic community.

CONSTRUCTED AND RECONSTRUCTED DISCOURSE Inscription and Talk in the History of Literacy

This article considers a theoretical problem at the center of historical research on literacy, the solution to which has implications for studies of contemporary literacies as well. Four models of literacy are identified. The (1) traditionally received skills model still flourishes in educational policy, but is increasingly rejected by literacy scholars who employ either (2) a functional model of literacy as an instrument of power relations or (3) a semiotic “marker” model of literacy. While traditional communications history has evinced little interest in historical studies of literacy, (4) a highly visible grand theory model of literacy associated with McLuhan, Innis, and Ong has its origins in the received model. Where the received model is optimistic about the long-term social and political effects of literacy, however, the grand theory model is pessimistic. Although a growing body of scholars has argued that the definition of any literacy must be located in its actual practices, and although many scholars now believe that oral-literate dichotomies are overly simple historical categories, this article takes that thinking farther and argues that literacy does not merely coexist or interact with oral practices and skills, but includes them. That is, the definition of literacy consists in the written and oral practices organized around texts in a particular culture. Support for this argument is taken from pertinent evidence in the history of literacy.

Religion and Realpolitik: Reflections on Sacrifice

Abstract Enduring groups that seek to preserve themselves, as sacred communities do, face a structural contradiction between the interests of individual group members and the survival interests of the group. In addressing existential threats, sacred communities rely on a spectrum of coercive and violent actions that resolve this contradiction in favor of solidarity. Despite different histories, this article argues, nationalism and religiosity are most powerfully organized as sacred communities in which sacred violence is extracted as sacrifice from community members. The exception is enduring groups that are able to rely on the protection of other violence practicing groups. The argument rejects functionalist claims that sacrifice guarantees solidarity or survival, since sacrificing groups regularly fail. In a rereading of Durkheims totem taboo, it is argued that sacred communities cannot survive a permanent loss of sacrificial assent on the part of members. Producing this assent is the work of ritual socialization. The deployment of sacrificial violence on behalf of group survival, though deeply sobering, is best constrained by recognizing how violence holds sacred communities in thrall rather than by denying the links between them.

When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century

This book describes how two newly invented communications technologies - the telephone and the electric light - were publicly envisioned, in specialized engineering trade journals as well as in more popular media, at the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the focus is on the telephone, particularly how it disrupted established social relations (people did not know how to to respond to its use or impact) and how society tried to bring it under a carefully prescribed pattern of proper usage. While the emphasis is on the way professionals in the electronics field tried to control the new media, their broader social impact is also discussed.