ABSTRACT
This chapter puts the spotlight on Mark Twain’s short story “A Telephonic Conversation,” originally printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1880, and a series of advertisements published by AT&T in the periodical press in the early twentieth century to analyze the impact of the telephone on imaginaries of mediated communication. Like many texts of the era – and beyond – “A Telephonic Conversation” articulates anxieties regarding social and political change as increasingly bound up in media change. I argue that, next to signaling such responses to novel technologies, Twain’s text and the advertisements themselves make their respective transmedial entanglement explicit as a means to carve out their own roles in the changing media ecologies and media economies of the Progressive Era. They conceive of themselves not only as entangled, but ultimately as competing with other forms and technologies of media communication. It is, therefore, my contention that transmediality should also be taken to encompass a medium’s explicit awareness of its entanglement with other media. I consider this use of transmediality less a critique of the more conventional use of transmedia storytelling than a shifting of the emphasis away from media specificity to media entanglement and what might be termed transmedia competition.
