Perseus Academic: Turning the Century by Carol Stabile

The essays in Turning the Century make a significant contribution to our understanding of America's love affairs with novelty and the mass media. The essays also show that neither the current communications revolution nor the response to it is unprecedented. Through this book, Carol Stabile provides a historical context within which scholars and students of American culture can interpret and understand end-of-the-millennium-fever —particularly, the claims of politicians, pundits, and even cultural studies scholars who maintain that recent information technology innovations make the present moment unique. Contemporary studies of mass media and popular culture reflect a similar emphasis on what is new, distinct, and therefore specific to contemporary culture. Claims of millennial transformation, however, are only possible insofar as the history of mass media can be forgotten or ignored. In Turning the Century, Carol Stabile analyzes those hidden, and now all but forgotten, conditions and relations of production that continue to shape and inform contemporary culture.

Carol Stabile is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix, and she has published essays on feminist theory, media studies, and postmodernism in Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, and Monthly Review.