Letters, Postcards, Email

Technologies of Presence

Esther Milne

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
03 February 2010

Communication studies; Humanities; Cultural studies; Media studies

Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

In this original study, Milne moves between close readings of letters, postcards and emails, and investigations of the material, technological infrastructures of these forms, to answer the question: How does presence function as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy within networked communication practices? As her work reveals, the relation between old and new communication systems is more complex than allowed in much contemporary media theory.

Although the correspondents of letters, postcards and emails are not, usually, present to one another as they write and read their exchanges, this does not necessarily inhibit affective communication. Indeed, this study demonstrates how physical absence may, in some instances, provide correspondents with intense intimacy and a spiritual, almost telepathic, sense of the other's presence. While corresponding by letter, postcard or email, readers construe an imaginary, incorporeal body for their correspondents that, in turn, reworks their interlocutor's self-presentation. In this regard the fantasy of presence reveals a key paradox of cultural communication, namely that material signifiers can be used to produce the experience of incorporeal presence.

By: Esther Milne
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Volume: v. 24
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 680g
ISBN: 9780415993289
ISBN 10: 0415993288
Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
Pages: 262
Publication Date: 03 February 2010
Audience: College/higher education , Primary , A / AS level
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Esther Milne is Lecturer, Department of Media and Communications, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia.