Public readings of technology : film, aviation, and passenger liners in Britain and Germany, 1890s to early 1930s
This thesis explores how, as part of wider negotiations of modernity, British and German societies created cultural environments conducive to technological innovation - and this despite deeply ambiguous attitudes to technology between the 1890s and the early 1930s. Drawing on pictorial and textual evidence, this comparative analysis approaches public debates about technological change as productions of knowledge which ascribed meanings to artefacts whose workings most contemporaries were unable to understand. Hinging on ambivalent narratives of aviation, passenger shipping and film as ~modern wonders,~ public negotiations of technological ignorance were torn between technophobia and euphoria. This ambivalent stance gave rise to statements articulating fears of technological change. Anxieties particularly surfaced after aerial and naval accidents. Moreover, contemporaries revealed concerns about the ~cultural health~ of the British and German nations in passionate debates about film. With its ability to lure ~mass~ audiences into fictional worlds, cinema was seen to blur the lines between ~reality~ and ~fantasy~, thus allegedly subverting the moral standards of the ~masses.~ Although public debate displayed
Rieger, Bernhard Wolfgang
History
Public readings of technology : film, aviation, and passenger liners in Britain and Germany, 1890s to early 1930s. This thesis explores how, as part of wider negotiations of modernity, British and German societies created cultural environments conducive to technological innovation - and this despite deeply ambiguous attitudes to technology between the 1890s and the early 1930s. Drawing on pictorial and textual evidence, this comparative analysis approaches public debates about technological change as productions of knowledge which ascribed meanings to artefacts whose workings most contemporaries were unable to understand. Hinging on ambivalent narratives of aviation, passenger shipping and film as ~modern wonders,~ public negotiations of technological ignorance were torn between technophobia and euphoria. This ambivalent stance gave rise to statements articulating fears of technological change. Anxieties particularly surfaced after aerial and naval accidents. Moreover, contemporaries revealed concerns about the ~cultural health~ of the British and German nations in passionate debates about film. With its ability to lure ~mass~ audiences into fictional worlds, cinema was seen to blur the lines between ~reality~ and ~fantasy~, thus allegedly subverting the moral standards of the ~masses.~ Although public debate displayed
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