Pathology and Technology

Killer Apps and Sick Users

By: D. Travers Scott

Write A Review

eBook | 27 September 2022 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

ePUB
288 Pages

eBook

RRP $122.52

$110.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $27.75 with

Instant Digital Delivery to your Kobo Reader App

Pathology & Technology is the first comprehensive look at "technopathologies." Since the days of the telegraph, electric communication technologies have been associated with causing or worsening mental and physical illnesses. Today, news reports warn of Pokemon Go deaths and women made vulnerable to sexual assault from wearing headphones. Drawing on an archive of hundreds of cases found across news, entertainment, and other sources over 150 years, this book investigates the intersection of technology and disease through original cultural historiography, focus groups, and discourse analysis, documenting a previously unexplored phenomenon in communication and media. Technopathologies occur with new and old media, the book argues, and are ultimately about people—not machines. They help define users as normal or abnormal, in ways that often align with existing social stereotypes. Courses on technological history, medical humanities, science and technology studies, and medical history will find much here to debate, in a style written to appeal to scholarly as well as popular readers.

Industry Reviews

"How did 'sick' become the new normal? How do the stories we tell about disordered, degenerate, and abnormal media users reveal reflections of ourselves? From anthrax to viruses, from neurasthenia to schizophrenia, technopathologies, in D. Travers Scott's able hands, reveal more than technical conditions: they reveal our many humanities. Drawing together diverse cultural, sociological, political, and critical theoretical sources, this lively cultural historical account enriches scholarly understanding of how modern communication, and its makers, police and pathologize the technical limits of human behavior. Confident in the face of critical difference and evenhanded in its analysis, Scott has opened a new chapter on the medical-moral panics, the scapegoating thrills, and unease we rediscover in every new disease. A vital read."-Ben Peters, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Henry Kendall College of Arts & Sciences, University of Tulsa