Jeremy Packer
Biographic Data
| ID | 3692927 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeremy Packer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeremy |
| FAMILY NAME | Packer |
| SIGNATURE | PACKER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Pulp to Plutonium
This essay argues that media systems are not passive instruments of military power but active infrastructures that shape how war is conceived, executed, and sustained. Building on Harold Innis’s staples theory and the materialist traditions in media scholarship, we analyze three case studies—the U.S. Civil War, World War I, and the ongoing conflict over rare-earth minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo—to demonstrate how media-specific dema…
JDP Network 1999/2009/2019
This article provides an archaeology of John Durham Peters’ historiographic methods and strategies by comparing three distinct approaches that the author names JDP1999, JDP2009, and JDP2019. For each of these three JDPs, one key theoretical figure functions as a historiographical guide. Walter Benjamin leads the way for JDP1999. Friedrich Kittler guides JDP 2009. Harold Innis hovers, Google Earth-like, above JDP 2019. The dominant forms of histor…
AI and the Automation of Warfare
On June 16, 2021, Fenwick McKelvey met with Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves (2020) to discuss their work, including their recently co-authored book Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine. McKelvey’s (2018) work focuses on algorithmic media and its implications for communication, including his book Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed. Packer’s (2008) work is generally concerned with the use of automated, military, and mobile media for pur…
Space Media
This article proposes the notion of space media as a way of defining media that connect humans with outer space. It is suggested that six areas related to contemporary media theory are particularly relevant to understanding space media: epistemology, anthropogenesis, planetary mediums, infrastructure, imaginaries, and remains. The article further suggests that the field of media studies needs to take account of outer space and, as a result, alter…
Making enemies with media
This article examines the role of media technology in determining preconstitutive enemies of the political order. To do so, it analyzes how discipline-specific methods of enemy detection, analysis, and neutralization correspond to different media environments. Media have a diagnostic and prescriptive significance: not only do they locate enemies that conform to their own unique standards of measurement, they also offer reprogramming resources tha…
Killer Apps
C arey, J ames
James Carey was a communication scholar who became best known for his ritual model of communication. He lived from 1934 to 2006 and spent most of his academic career at the University of Illinois and at Columbia University. His work has widely influenced scholars in the areas of cultural studies, communication history and technology, journalism, and communication theory. His intellectual forerunners include Harold Innis, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford…
The Digital Body
This article considers the use of flag telegraphy by the US Signal Corps during the Civil War as it functioned as a proto-technical medium that preceded wire telegraphy as a military communications technology. Not only was flag telegraphy a historical step towards contemporary technical media, it was also an early iteration of the digitization of communication. Our treatment ties together three main theoretical threads as a way of seeing 'the dig…
Romancing the Drone
This article provides an historical account of the U.S. military’s creation of and reliance upon Earth observation media to orient their ability to conduct first the Cold War and then the War on Terror. Two technological case studies are provided: 1) an account of the development of the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) system developed to automate the surveillance necessary for anti-nuclear bomber defence; and 2) a brief history of drone …
Epistemology Not Ideology or Why We Need New Germans”
This article argues for a shift away from ideology critique as the primary focus of critical communication and media studies. Instead, the author suggests enlisting the work of German Media theorist Friedrich Kittler's Foucault-inspired approach to the epistemological dimensions of media. This focus is relevant to digital media in terms of the selection, storage, and processing of data that are the fundamental concerns of Kittler's media studies.…
Screens in the sky
This essay investigates the centrality of the U.S. Military in the process of automating the labor of surveillance. The creation of Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an anti-nuclear defense system developed in the 1950s, marked the computerization of the perceptual, mnemonic, and epistemological labor that is necessary for surveillance and is emblematic of screening technologies. The essay situates SAGE in a long history of military surve…
Communication Matters
Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuz…
Police Media
The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communicatio…
The Conditions of Media's Possibility
This chapter integrates Michel Foucault's historiographic approach with media history. After describing how Foucault's work has traditionally been used and understood by media historians, four areas of work are used as examples for establishing a more holistic account of the value of Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods of historical enquiry. They are (1) the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, (2) the Stanford School o…
Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality
Strategies for Materializing Communication
Automobility and apparatuses
From Windscreen to Widescreen
This article suggests that studies of mobile media need to be more attentive to the history of screening technologies. The development of screening technologies is examined by identifying six characteristics—storage and access, interactivity, mobility, control, informationalization, and convergence/translation—through the context of automobility. A brief history of the informationalization of driving, mobile entertainment in the car, and networke…
What is an Archive
The author argues for a new methodology for investigating the history of communications and media. Media and communications processes and technologies need to be examined as elements of apparatuses. The author examines the theoretical underpinnings of such an approach by first outlining Michel Foucault's writing on the topic and then investigating the recent use of the term by Giorgio Agamben. Taking an apparatus approach demands more broadly con…
Mobility without Mayhem
Homeland Subjectivity
War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace
Becoming Bombs
Hoggingthe road
This essay examines how aesthetic, corporate and cultural formations have radically altered. motorcycling and its image over the past two decades as a means to highlight more general changes in cultural politics, citizenship and governing through culture. The essay begins with the Guggenheim's The Art of the Motorcycle exhibit, treated. as a means for shaping and governing thought and conduct about and on motorcycles. The essay then addresses num…
Police Media
The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communicatio…
Communication Matters
Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuz…
Epistemology Not Ideology or Why We Need New Germans”
This article argues for a shift away from ideology critique as the primary focus of critical communication and media studies. Instead, the author suggests enlisting the work of German Media theorist Friedrich Kittler's Foucault-inspired approach to the epistemological dimensions of media. This focus is relevant to digital media in terms of the selection, storage, and processing of data that are the fundamental concerns of Kittler's media studies.…
What is an Archive
The author argues for a new methodology for investigating the history of communications and media. Media and communications processes and technologies need to be examined as elements of apparatuses. The author examines the theoretical underpinnings of such an approach by first outlining Michel Foucault's writing on the topic and then investigating the recent use of the term by Giorgio Agamben. Taking an apparatus approach demands more broadly con…
The Digital Body
This article considers the use of flag telegraphy by the US Signal Corps during the Civil War as it functioned as a proto-technical medium that preceded wire telegraphy as a military communications technology. Not only was flag telegraphy a historical step towards contemporary technical media, it was also an early iteration of the digitization of communication. Our treatment ties together three main theoretical threads as a way of seeing 'the dig…
Screens in the sky
This essay investigates the centrality of the U.S. Military in the process of automating the labor of surveillance. The creation of Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an anti-nuclear defense system developed in the 1950s, marked the computerization of the perceptual, mnemonic, and epistemological labor that is necessary for surveillance and is emblematic of screening technologies. The essay situates SAGE in a long history of military surve…
From Windscreen to Widescreen
This article suggests that studies of mobile media need to be more attentive to the history of screening technologies. The development of screening technologies is examined by identifying six characteristics—storage and access, interactivity, mobility, control, informationalization, and convergence/translation—through the context of automobility. A brief history of the informationalization of driving, mobile entertainment in the car, and networke…
Homeland Subjectivity
War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace
Strategies for Materializing Communication
Hoggingthe road
This essay examines how aesthetic, corporate and cultural formations have radically altered. motorcycling and its image over the past two decades as a means to highlight more general changes in cultural politics, citizenship and governing through culture. The essay begins with the Guggenheim's The Art of the Motorcycle exhibit, treated. as a means for shaping and governing thought and conduct about and on motorcycles. The essay then addresses num…
Hoggingthe road
This essay examines how aesthetic, corporate and cultural formations have radically altered. motorcycling and its image over the past two decades as a means to highlight more general changes in cultural politics, citizenship and governing through culture. The essay begins with the Guggenheim's The Art of the Motorcycle exhibit, treated. as a means for shaping and governing thought and conduct about and on motorcycles. The essay then addresses num…
Becoming Bombs
Mobility without Mayhem
Homeland Subjectivity
War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace
Automobility and apparatuses
From Windscreen to Widescreen
This article suggests that studies of mobile media need to be more attentive to the history of screening technologies. The development of screening technologies is examined by identifying six characteristics—storage and access, interactivity, mobility, control, informationalization, and convergence/translation—through the context of automobility. A brief history of the informationalization of driving, mobile entertainment in the car, and networke…
What is an Archive
The author argues for a new methodology for investigating the history of communications and media. Media and communications processes and technologies need to be examined as elements of apparatuses. The author examines the theoretical underpinnings of such an approach by first outlining Michel Foucault's writing on the topic and then investigating the recent use of the term by Giorgio Agamben. Taking an apparatus approach demands more broadly con…
The Conditions of Media's Possibility
This chapter integrates Michel Foucault's historiographic approach with media history. After describing how Foucault's work has traditionally been used and understood by media historians, four areas of work are used as examples for establishing a more holistic account of the value of Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods of historical enquiry. They are (1) the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, (2) the Stanford School o…
Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality
Strategies for Materializing Communication
Romancing the Drone
This article provides an historical account of the U.S. military’s creation of and reliance upon Earth observation media to orient their ability to conduct first the Cold War and then the War on Terror. Two technological case studies are provided: 1) an account of the development of the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) system developed to automate the surveillance necessary for anti-nuclear bomber defence; and 2) a brief history of drone …
Epistemology Not Ideology or Why We Need New Germans”
This article argues for a shift away from ideology critique as the primary focus of critical communication and media studies. Instead, the author suggests enlisting the work of German Media theorist Friedrich Kittler's Foucault-inspired approach to the epistemological dimensions of media. This focus is relevant to digital media in terms of the selection, storage, and processing of data that are the fundamental concerns of Kittler's media studies.…
Screens in the sky
This essay investigates the centrality of the U.S. Military in the process of automating the labor of surveillance. The creation of Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an anti-nuclear defense system developed in the 1950s, marked the computerization of the perceptual, mnemonic, and epistemological labor that is necessary for surveillance and is emblematic of screening technologies. The essay situates SAGE in a long history of military surve…
Communication Matters
Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuz…
Police Media
The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communicatio…
The Digital Body
This article considers the use of flag telegraphy by the US Signal Corps during the Civil War as it functioned as a proto-technical medium that preceded wire telegraphy as a military communications technology. Not only was flag telegraphy a historical step towards contemporary technical media, it was also an early iteration of the digitization of communication. Our treatment ties together three main theoretical threads as a way of seeing 'the dig…
C arey, J ames
James Carey was a communication scholar who became best known for his ritual model of communication. He lived from 1934 to 2006 and spent most of his academic career at the University of Illinois and at Columbia University. His work has widely influenced scholars in the areas of cultural studies, communication history and technology, journalism, and communication theory. His intellectual forerunners include Harold Innis, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford…
Making enemies with media
This article examines the role of media technology in determining preconstitutive enemies of the political order. To do so, it analyzes how discipline-specific methods of enemy detection, analysis, and neutralization correspond to different media environments. Media have a diagnostic and prescriptive significance: not only do they locate enemies that conform to their own unique standards of measurement, they also offer reprogramming resources tha…
Killer Apps
Space Media
This article proposes the notion of space media as a way of defining media that connect humans with outer space. It is suggested that six areas related to contemporary media theory are particularly relevant to understanding space media: epistemology, anthropogenesis, planetary mediums, infrastructure, imaginaries, and remains. The article further suggests that the field of media studies needs to take account of outer space and, as a result, alter…
JDP Network 1999/2009/2019
This article provides an archaeology of John Durham Peters’ historiographic methods and strategies by comparing three distinct approaches that the author names JDP1999, JDP2009, and JDP2019. For each of these three JDPs, one key theoretical figure functions as a historiographical guide. Walter Benjamin leads the way for JDP1999. Friedrich Kittler guides JDP 2009. Harold Innis hovers, Google Earth-like, above JDP 2019. The dominant forms of histor…
AI and the Automation of Warfare
On June 16, 2021, Fenwick McKelvey met with Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves (2020) to discuss their work, including their recently co-authored book Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine. McKelvey’s (2018) work focuses on algorithmic media and its implications for communication, including his book Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed. Packer’s (2008) work is generally concerned with the use of automated, military, and mobile media for pur…
Pulp to Plutonium
This essay argues that media systems are not passive instruments of military power but active infrastructures that shape how war is conceived, executed, and sustained. Building on Harold Innis’s staples theory and the materialist traditions in media scholarship, we analyze three case studies—the U.S. Civil War, World War I, and the ongoing conflict over rare-earth minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo—to demonstrate how media-specific dema…
Sociology (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Philosophy (6 works)