Abstract: My dissertation is a media history of that alternately functional and fictional device, the gadget. I argue that while gadgets are often passed over as trivial outliers in material culture, they are in fact central to understanding how media emerge from imaginative relationships between tools and their users. Though the word gadget serves as an empty container for any object whatsoever, I show that the shape of that container changes drastically from its origins in mid 19th-century nautical jargon to its current association with portable electronics. My work charts a dynamically evolving genre of tools that spans a range of social, technical, and literary histories in order to argue that “medium” is an open category through which users negotiate a range of real and imagined capabilities.
The gadget is an object of study that, by its very nature, calls for an interdisciplinary approach that is able to place a range of technical, social, and literary histories into conversation. My dissertation engages with works of criticism on science fiction, media theory, design, narrative theory, and the history of science and technology. Being interdisciplinary doesn’t mean, however, that one simply maintains a diverse list of primary and secondary sources. It means holding one’s methodologies up to the lens of critical inquiry.
In order to construct a more accurate chronological framework, part of my dissertation research has involved building an etymological database of the word “gadget.” This digital scholarship has allowed me to collaborate with programmers, librarians, and lexicographers who have challenged me to recast the assumptions of the project in new ways. Thus my work provides a model for how theories of technology and cultural form might engage with the explanatory power of digital resources.
1. From Marlinspike to Mobile Media: On the Etymology of Gadget
Fictional Devices
2. [On Imaginary Media]
3. The Shape of Media to Come
Functional Devices
4. ’The trouble with arm-chair-and-push-button Utopias…’
5. The Space Between Objects and Affordances
6. Toward an Intellectual History of American Media Theory
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