ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Media is a nineteenth-century invention. Yet what the term media obscures is media history, not only the exponential explosion of print in the nineteenth century but also the massive proliferation of a wide variety of popular mechanical devices, from the kaleidoscope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, and kinetoscope to the stereograph, photograph, telegraph, typewriter, player piano, telephone, phonograph, and early film. After a century of innovative encounters between industrial technology and the communicative imperative, media emerged in the early twentieth century as a modern myth. Media as a channel of communication, a material for art and literature, and a process of mediation, also became a social practice. An understanding of media as social practice allowed for the recognition of the skilled labor of art while preserving it from its conditions of production.
