Media and Materiality

Over the past decade, a wave of scholarship in infrastructure studies has emphasized the sheer materiality of communication, showing how an array of things – scrapbooks, undersea cables, satellites, and more – shaped communication industries. Running parallel to this has been a new literature stressing the physicality of capital accumulation, which depended on a constellation of interrelated objects as seemingly different as bullwhips and fountain pens. Bridging these lines of scholarship, the papers on this panel argue that things mattered to the business of communication not only for reasons of transmission, but because they were mediums of transmutation through which the traffic in words, images, sounds, and ideas could be converted into more substantive forms of capital – crops, toll tickets, and real estate – that carried weight in the commercial cultures of the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century US. In her paper on nineteenth-century catalog sales, Marina Moskowitz explores how the exchange values attached to seeds emerged out of the dynamic interaction of the cultivated landscape readers physically inhabited and the imaginative landscapes that appeared before them on the printed page. Shifting the focus to turn-of-the-century telephone operators, Josh Lauer examines the record-keeping practices through which calls and conversations were manually transformed into the documentation that provided a basis for the Bell System’s complex architecture of tariffs and charges. Finally, Richard Popp explores how the rubble piles and construction sites of interwar Manhattan offered a field of legitimation for the entertainment industry among business elites, otherwise wary of mass culture, as media corporations became major forces in the Midtown real estate market. David Suisman will provide comments on each paper. As a whole, then, the panel offers a new perspective on capital formation by showing how it has often rested on the reinvention of messages into things.