John Durham Peters
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 217346 |
|---|---|
| NOME | John Durham Peters |
| PRENOMES | John Durham |
| SOBRENOME | Peters |
| ASSINATURA | PETERS J D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4474-1543 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 51 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 413 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1987 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Thaddeus of Warsaw and the Book of Mormon
Spirometer, Whale, Slave
Spirometer, Whale, Slave:Breathing Emergencies, c. 1850 John Durham Peters (bio) Breath dramatically starts with a slap at birth and ceases with death and yet we typically ignore it until it is under duress. Unlike marine mammals such as whales and dolphins who can never fully automate breathing—they sleep one brain hemisphere at a time so as to keep conscious watch, like yogis, over their respiration—we humans are mostly somnambulists with regar…
A History of the Idea of Speaking into the Air
The following is a conversation that took place between John Durham Peters (JDP) and the editors of this special issue, Chris Russill (CR), Hannah Dick (HD), and Liam Cole Young (LCY) on November 18, 2021. The conversation transcript has been edited for clarity
Bees Casting Shadows on a Cloudy Day
In this afterword, the author of Speaking into the Air engages in correspondence with some of its critics. Rather than dialogues with the dead these are letters to the living. As acts of writing in hopes of connection, they are enactments and enhancements of the book’s arguments
Media
This article develops the new concept of environing media against the case of Mexico’s complex history over the past five centuries. To do this, it stakes out a theoretical development consisting in a shift in understanding from media as content-delivery systems to data processors, combining it with a processual understanding of environment as an ongoing and historical process of environing. In addition, the article discusses examples of indigeno…
Assembly Codes
The Distance Cure
Psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud's treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, starting with Freud's treatments by mail, psychotherapy has operated through multiple communication technologies and media. These have included advice columns, radio broadcas…
Semblanza absolutamente exacta
Josiah Royce, the American idealist philosopher (1855-1916), is best known to readers of Borges in connection with a recursive map-within-a-map drawn upon the soil of England. Indeed, Borges ranks "el mapa de Royce" side-by-side with his beloved Zeno ́ ́ ́ s paradox in “Otro poema de los dones” (336), a Whitmanesque catalog of a few of his favorite things. Borges appreciated Royce as a fellow-wanderer through the late nineteenth-century thickets …
Babel et Babble chez Benjamin et Burke
S’appuyant sur les travaux de Walter Benjamin et Kenneth Burke, cet essai soutient que les conditions et les conclusions philosophiques de la rhétorique et de la traduction coïncident : toutes les deux trouvent leur origine dans la chute primitive de la langue, que ce soit après la chute d’Éden ou la malédiction de Babel, et toutes les deux trouvent leurs horizons dans un motif linguistique ultime qui, curieusement, caractérise l’usage ordinaire …
O que não é um meio
Entrevista com o pensador norte-americano John Durham Peters, apresentando sua contribuição teórica para os estudos de mídia e comunicação
Memorable Equinox
In the later 1950s and 1960s, the American neurologist John Cunningham Lilly (1915–2001) undertook an unorthodox set of experiments on bottlenose dolphins (tursiops truncatus). The centerpiece of this research was their bioacoustic practices, including hearing and phonation. Lilly’s work sits at the crossroads of many vectors in postwar American culture: the birth of the counterculture from the spirit of Cold War militarized science; the cybernet…
My ancestors welling in me
The Salt Lake (or Mormon) Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah has been the object of religious, scientific, and cultural fascination since its construction in the 1860s. To this day, visitors are treated to a pin-drop performance that demonstrates the building's unique acoustic properties. The building, whose history stretches from pioneer auditorium to broadcasting facility, has anchored a cross-generational soundscape that is at once architectur…
Reading over McLuhan’s Shoulder
Background This article1 presents a reworked keynote address given at the “Many McLuhans” conference held at the University of Toronto in September 2018 on the occasion of UNESCO recognizing Marshall McLuhan’s library as part of its Memory of the World program.Analysis The article explores McLuhan as a reader and suggests that his greatest work might have been what he read rather than what he wrote. Conclusion and implications The library, as a g…
Looking for the Horizon
O que você diz de toda a minha falácia está errado”
The essay reflects on the so-called technological determinism, discussing it as a “fallacy” and a pejorative word used by academics to criticize their opponents. It shows the intellectual origins of the concept and its developments, concluding that, at the present time, continuing the denunciation of technological determinism is to risk committing a more serious error than giving agency to devices – or to give up criticism. At a time when the mea…
You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong
This essay offers both a genealogy of the concept of technological determinism and a metacritique of the ways academic accusations of fallaciousness risk stopping difficult but essential kinds of inquiry. To call someone a technological determinist is to claim all the moral force on your side without answering the question of what we are to do with these devices that infest our lives
Recording beyond the Grave
Mass Communication
Autism and new media
This article explores the elective affinities between autism and new media. Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) provides a uniquely apt case for considering the conceptual link between mental disability and media technology. Tracing the history of the disorder through its various media connections and connotations, we propose a narrative of the transition from impaired sociability in person to fluent social media by network. New media introduce new …
Remembering Bruce Gronbeck
The Marvelous Clouds
Writing
The introduction of writing in its diverse forms and practices has had enormous cultural consequences. Although it generally plays a secondary role in media histories, it should be looked upon as the mother of all media. Always material and worldly, writing has assumed many forms. This chapter distinguishes semasiography from logography, notes the distinction between logographic and alphabetic scripts, and argues that phonetic practices exist in …
Doors
April 01 2012 Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic Bernhard Siegert, Bernhard Siegert Bernhard Siegert is Professor of Theory and History of Cultural Techniques in the Faculty of Media at the Bauhaus University Weimar and Director of the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) at Weimar. He is the author of Passagiere und Papiere: Schreibakte auf der Schwelle zwischen Spanien und Amerika (Fink & NZZlibr…
McLuhan’s Grammatical Theology
This article offers one more assessment of the work of Marshall McLuhan, using his recently published dissertation on the trivium as a window for reading his later, more media-focused works. Seeing McLuhan as a grammatical theologian casts fresh light on several well-known themes in his thought: his encyclopedic method with its surrealist juxtapositions, his insistence on medium specificity, his trouble with mathematics, his love of conceptual in…
Charity and chilliness
This article discusses the five contributions to the special issue on Roger Silverstone’s work, focusing specifically on the interplay between Judeo-Christian and Stoic themes
The Marvelous Clouds
Witnessing
Witnessing is a common but rarely examined term in both the professional performance and academic analysis of media events. This article explores the practice of witnessing in general to clarify such problems in media studies as veracity, reliability, liveness, responsibility and historicity. The long history of puzzlement and prescription about proper witnessing that developed in oral and print cultures is a rich resource for reflection about so…
Distrust of representation
L'A. analyse la theorie de la communication de masse de Jurgen Habermas et de l'Ecole de Francfort. Il etudie les traits principaux de la theorie d'Habermas, en particulier la notion de « sphere publique », et replace ses travaux dans la problematique actuelle de la communication
The Only Proper Scale of Representation
This essay explores the political resonances of quantitative methods in a reading of American discourse surrounding their social functions and virtues. Key texts are drawn from three periods: the founding period, the late nineteenth century, and social psychology in the mid-twentieth century. It is shown that the idea of quantification is closely associated with democratic ideals. In adopting these methods, scholars cloak themselves in the image …
You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong
This essay offers both a genealogy of the concept of technological determinism and a metacritique of the ways academic accusations of fallaciousness risk stopping difficult but essential kinds of inquiry. To call someone a technological determinist is to claim all the moral force on your side without answering the question of what we are to do with these devices that infest our lives
John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication
Communication is a product of a particular historical epoch and set of social conditions. The concept emerges in classic liberalism and presupposes a society in which individuals are thought of as free from external constraints of society, others, history, and language, and are seen as holders of private property in both material goods and consciousness. John Locke's linguistic and political theories illustrate the birth of communication and the …
Information
Doors
April 01 2012 Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic Bernhard Siegert, Bernhard Siegert Bernhard Siegert is Professor of Theory and History of Cultural Techniques in the Faculty of Media at the Bauhaus University Weimar and Director of the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) at Weimar. He is the author of Passagiere und Papiere: Schreibakte auf der Schwelle zwischen Spanien und Amerika (Fink & NZZlibr…
Autism and new media
This article explores the elective affinities between autism and new media. Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) provides a uniquely apt case for considering the conceptual link between mental disability and media technology. Tracing the history of the disorder through its various media connections and connotations, we propose a narrative of the transition from impaired sociability in person to fluent social media by network. New media introduce new …
The Part Played by Gentiles in the Flow of Mass Communications
Personal Influence is not only a landmark study within the sociological literature on networks, influence, and decision making. It is also an allegory of Jewish-ethnic identity in mid-twentieth-century America and a side-ways commentary on modern Jewish involvement in communications. The book participates in a utopian imagination of society in which Jews and Gentiles alike would be centrally involved in the flow of communications. It turns from G…
Media
This article develops the new concept of environing media against the case of Mexico’s complex history over the past five centuries. To do this, it stakes out a theoretical development consisting in a shift in understanding from media as content-delivery systems to data processors, combining it with a processual understanding of environment as an ongoing and historical process of environing. In addition, the article discusses examples of indigeno…
Recording beyond the Grave
The Uncanniness of Mass Communication in Interwar Social Thought
Journal Article The Uncanniness of Mass Communication in Interwar Social Thought Get access John Durham Peters John Durham Peters 1John Durham Peters is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He wishes to thank Allison McCracken, John Streck, Lilias Green, Hsin-i Liu, Heather Wessely, Steve Wurtzler, Barbara Welch Breder, Eric Rothenbuhler, Rick Altman, and Peter Simonson for helpful comments …
Rhetoric's Revival, Positivism's Persistence
Labour market deregulation and the decline of labour power in North America and Western Europe
The goal of this article is to provide a critical evaluation of what has happened to organized labour and labour markets since 1980. It examines the impacts of labour market deregulation on wage share and pay standardization. It also explores how recent economic changes have weakened organized labour and eroded wage setting and social corporatism. The argument is made that contemporary institutional and ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ perspectives on l…
My ancestors welling in me
The Salt Lake (or Mormon) Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah has been the object of religious, scientific, and cultural fascination since its construction in the 1860s. To this day, visitors are treated to a pin-drop performance that demonstrates the building's unique acoustic properties. The building, whose history stretches from pioneer auditorium to broadcasting facility, has anchored a cross-generational soundscape that is at once architectur…
Speaking Into the iPhone
Conducted by media scholar, Carolyn L. Kane, this interview was recorded on Saturday morning of April 25, 2009, in an empty classroom at MIT, during the MIT6 Media in Transition conference, using Ms. Kane’s iPhone. The morning before, John Durham Peters gave his lecture, “What Ever Happened to Loneliness?” The interview also occurs in honor of the 10th anniversary of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, a text that bridg…
Broadcasting and schizophrenia
Santa Fe, New Mexico to put a temporary restraining order on the television talk show host David Letterman that would require him to stay at least three yards from her at all times. She blamed Letterman for mental cruelty and for causing her sleep deprivation and bankruptcy over a 10-year period. As Nestler explained in a somewhat disordered statement, she began sending him ‘thoughts of love ’ when his show moved to CBS in 1993, and he responded …
Space and Social Theory
List of Plates. List of Figures. List of Contributors. Preface. Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity and the Social Sciences (Georges Benko). Part I Reasons, Texts and Debates Around Postmodernism. Postmodern Bloodlines (Michael Dear). Social Theory, Postmodernism, and the Critique of Development (Richard Peet). Shelf Length Zero: The Disappearance of the Geographical Text (Michael Curry). Part II Writing Space, Forming Identities. Re--Presenti…
Publicity and Pain
Other| September 01 1995 Publicity and Pain: Self-Abstraction in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments John Durham Peters John Durham Peters Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1995) 7 (3): 657–675. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7-3-657 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Durham Peters; Publicity and Pain: Self-Abstraction in Adam Smith'…
The control of information
THE CONTROL REVOLUTION: TECHNOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY by James R. Beniger Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 493 pp., $25.00
The control of information
THE CONTROL REVOLUTION: TECHNOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY by James R. Beniger Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 493 pp., $25.00
Information
Satan and savior
This essay probes the contradictory philosophical reception of mass communication in the social thought of progressives such as Cooley, Dewey, Park, and Royce. Mass communication served as a focus for larger anxieties about social order, social evolution, the future of American democracy, and the integrity of the public sphere. The theoretical grapplings of these thinkers with the symbolic mediation of society, however inadequate they are, show u…
John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication
Communication is a product of a particular historical epoch and set of social conditions. The concept emerges in classic liberalism and presupposes a society in which individuals are thought of as free from external constraints of society, others, history, and language, and are seen as holders of private property in both material goods and consciousness. John Locke's linguistic and political theories illustrate the birth of communication and the …
Rhetoric's Revival, Positivism's Persistence
Genealogical Notes on “The Field”
Journal Article Genealogical Notes on “The Field” Get access John Durham Peters John Durham Peters 1John Durham Peters is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 43, Issue 4, December 1993, Pages 132–139, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01313.x Published: 07 February 2006
Distrust of representation
L'A. analyse la theorie de la communication de masse de Jurgen Habermas et de l'Ecole de Francfort. Il etudie les traits principaux de la theorie d'Habermas, en particulier la notion de « sphere publique », et replace ses travaux dans la problematique actuelle de la communication
The gaps of which communication is made 1
Mass communication, as typically defined, is an oxymoron: communication without interaction. The distance between dissemination and reception has usually been understood as making mass communication inferior to face‐to‐face interaction and as resulting from twentieth‐century technology. Instead, I argue that the gap between transmission and reception is fundamental to almost all forms of communication, such that mass communication may be the more…
Au-delà de la peur des images
Stemming from a reflexion on the distrust or denigration of images that characterizes many philosophical or religious doctrines, from Moses' and Plato's condemnations, to empirist doctrines (Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Hume), this paper proposes a general theoretical argument about the nature of communication and discourse about it. The argument is motivated by some issues in media studies, but is not limited to them. In fact, we suggest that the media…
The Curious Reception of Pragmatism Examined--and Exemplified
Publicity and Pain
Other| September 01 1995 Publicity and Pain: Self-Abstraction in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments John Durham Peters John Durham Peters Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1995) 7 (3): 657–675. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7-3-657 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Durham Peters; Publicity and Pain: Self-Abstraction in Adam Smith'…
Tangled Legacies
Journal Article Tangled Legacies Get access John Durham Peters John Durham Peters 1University of Iowa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 46, Issue 3, September 1996, Pages 85–87, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1996.tb01490.x Published: 07 February 2006
Sharing of thoughts or recognizing otherness? Reply to Logue and miller
(1996). Sharing of thoughts or recognizing otherness? Reply to Logue and miller. Critical Studies in Mass Communication: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 373-380
The Uncanniness of Mass Communication in Interwar Social Thought
Journal Article The Uncanniness of Mass Communication in Interwar Social Thought Get access John Durham Peters John Durham Peters 1John Durham Peters is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He wishes to thank Allison McCracken, John Streck, Lilias Green, Hsin-i Liu, Heather Wessely, Steve Wurtzler, Barbara Welch Breder, Eric Rothenbuhler, Rick Altman, and Peter Simonson for helpful comments …
Space and Social Theory
List of Plates. List of Figures. List of Contributors. Preface. Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity and the Social Sciences (Georges Benko). Part I Reasons, Texts and Debates Around Postmodernism. Postmodern Bloodlines (Michael Dear). Social Theory, Postmodernism, and the Critique of Development (Richard Peet). Shelf Length Zero: The Disappearance of the Geographical Text (Michael Curry). Part II Writing Space, Forming Identities. Re--Presenti…
Speaking into the Air
Witnessing
Witnessing is a common but rarely examined term in both the professional performance and academic analysis of media events. This article explores the practice of witnessing in general to clarify such problems in media studies as veracity, reliability, liveness, responsibility and historicity. The long history of puzzlement and prescription about proper witnessing that developed in oral and print cultures is a rich resource for reflection about so…
The Only Proper Scale of Representation
This essay explores the political resonances of quantitative methods in a reading of American discourse surrounding their social functions and virtues. Key texts are drawn from three periods: the founding period, the late nineteenth century, and social psychology in the mid-twentieth century. It is shown that the idea of quantification is closely associated with democratic ideals. In adopting these methods, scholars cloak themselves in the image …
The Culture Industry Revisited
Space, Time, and Communication Theory
This plenary address to the Laurier conference extends the fundamental insight of Innis and McLuhan that communication studies concerns time and space by inviting scholars to consider the very large and the very small, the very old and the very far, as outer limits to communication theory. Specifically, it explores geology, astronomy, and cosmology as inquiries into media that span deep time and deep space. It suggests that communication studies …
La terreur spectacle
The Part Played by Gentiles in the Flow of Mass Communications
Personal Influence is not only a landmark study within the sociological literature on networks, influence, and decision making. It is also an allegory of Jewish-ethnic identity in mid-twentieth-century America and a side-ways commentary on modern Jewish involvement in communications. The book participates in a utopian imagination of society in which Jews and Gentiles alike would be centrally involved in the flow of communications. It turns from G…
Labour market deregulation and the decline of labour power in North America and Western Europe
The goal of this article is to provide a critical evaluation of what has happened to organized labour and labour markets since 1980. It examines the impacts of labour market deregulation on wage share and pay standardization. It also explores how recent economic changes have weakened organized labour and eroded wage setting and social corporatism. The argument is made that contemporary institutional and ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ perspectives on l…
Witnessing
Witnessing is a common but rarely examined term in both the professional performance and academic analysis of media events. Media institutions have enthusiastically adopted its rhetoric, especially for nonfiction genres such as news, sports, and documentary. Such titles as Eyewitness News, See it Now, Live at Five, or As it Happens advertise their program’s privileged proximity to events. Media personae such as correspondents and newsreaders can …
Speaking Into the iPhone
Conducted by media scholar, Carolyn L. Kane, this interview was recorded on Saturday morning of April 25, 2009, in an empty classroom at MIT, during the MIT6 Media in Transition conference, using Ms. Kane’s iPhone. The morning before, John Durham Peters gave his lecture, “What Ever Happened to Loneliness?” The interview also occurs in honor of the 10th anniversary of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, a text that bridg…
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