The Prison House of the CircuitKathleen Oswald Jeremy Packer Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio Kate Maddalena Joshua Reeves Alexander MoneaLabel: University of Minnesota PressDescription: Has society ceded its self-governance to technogovernance?The Prison House of the Circuit presents a history of digital media using circuits and circuitry to understand how power operates in the contemporary era. Through the conceptual vocabulary of the circuit it offers a provocative model for thinking about governance and media.The authors writing as a collective provide a model for collective research and a genealogical framework that interrogates the rise of digital society through the lens of Foucault’s ideas of governance circulation and power. The book includes five in-depth case studies investigating the transition from analog media to electronic and digital forms: military telegraphy and human–machine incorporation the establishment of national electronic biopolitical governance in World War I media as the means of extending spatial and temporal policing automobility as the mechanism uniting mobility and media and visual augmentation from Middle Ages spectacles to digital heads-up displays. The Prison House of the Circuit ultimately demonstrates how contemporary media came to create frictionless circulation to maximize control efficacy and state power.
