Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America by Brenton J. Malin (review)

Can machines feel? This is one of the several intriguing questions that Malin explores in this thoughtful and informative cultural history of the social-scientific investigation of human emotion in the twentieth-century United States. Malin’s topic is broad; to render it manageable, he zooms in on examples of human–machine interaction that are of particular interest to media scholars. The social-scientific investigation of photography, of sound recording, of radio, and of motion pictures each gets a separate chapter. Medical imaging is treated only in passing; lie detectors are ignored. Although Malin has interesting things to say about various topics, including the changing character of love letters, the ethics of neuroscience, and the history of emotions, his primary quarry is the experimental tradition in corporate-funded “administrative research” that flourished in several U. S. universities in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Among the key figures in this tradition were psychologists Seashore and Ruckmick at Iowa and Scripture at Yale.¹ Their research program predated by several decades Lazarsfeld’s empirical investigation of radio audiences at Columbia University, a project that is often regarded as the opening chapter in communications research in the United States.²

As has become customary for media scholars, Malin carefully investigates the rhetoric that his subjects deployed and the arguments that they made. Thankfully, his interests extend beyond mere discourse. Researchers, Malin laments, did not ask “tough questions” about ethics (32). As a consequence, their investigations were shaped by “media physicalism,” which he defines as the presumption that researchers can answer basic philosophical and moral questions about human emotion by devising instruments to monitor the physiological response of an audience to a specific stimulus.

Like art historian Crary, Malin is much more interested in assumptions about reception than about reception itself.³ Media physicalism presupposed a mechanistic “transmission model” of the communicative process, a concept that Malin borrows from Carey (31).⁴ This model favored the movement of information over its content, a bias with origins that lie in the wider society: “The rhetoric of media physicalism was an emerging blend of cross-disciplinary academic perspectives, the promotional claims of commercial media producers, and larger public discussions of technology and emotion” (27).

Although Malin’s main focus is on social science, he notes in passing how media physicalism has shaped a variety of media-related phenomena. The Communications Act of 1934 was a victory of nationally oriented broadcasters wielding a “rhetoric of technological sublimity” over localistic champions of a more diverse media ecology: “A good media system was one that transmitted meanings in an effective manner” (19). The preference of radio broadcasters for an emotionally restrained, and invariably masculine, “cool” presentation style drew from research documenting the “supposedly hyperemotional, primitive, exotic speech of indigenous peoples and women” (154).

Administrative research, Malin concludes, “generally eschewed questions about the history, politics, and economics in favor of more limited questions about the bodies’ immediate physiology or behavior” (214). Malin is not the first communications scholar to question the priorities of what has long been an influential tradition in the field; this critique, as his notes reveal, is almost as old as the field itself. Yet by locating administrative research in a broad cultural setting, and, in particular, by characterizing it in a novel way as “media physicalism,” he helps to explain how an influential tradition in American communications studies took the form that it did.