WORK IN PROGRESS
Story, Technology, and Experience: An Interpretive History of Twentieth Century Culture


The purpose of this work is to bring together the study of popular culture and entertainment, the history of communications technology, and phenomenology--the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the description of human experience. The controlling question of this study is: to what extent are the mythic foundations of stories and the forms of human experience modified by the changes that have taken place in communication technology and entertainment during the past 150 years or so? The study is organized according to the ways in which media culture interacts with various forms of perception, for example, the perception of the human voice as it relates to radio transmission; the television vis-a-vis the concept of space; temporal experience as it is shaped by popular music. These perceptual areas are then brought together in a consideration of the relationships between culture, narrative form, perception, and technology.

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