List of Illustrations – Acknowledgments – Introduction: Pathological Technoculture: Sick Users and Reinforced Stereotypes – Pathology Shapes Subjects: Gendering and Normalizing – Audiences and Users: A False Dichotomy of Entangled Subjects – Not So Crazy: Electrical Logics of Technopathologies – The Electrical Banal: Anderson, SC, "The Electric City" – Not So New: Historic Continuity and the Pathologization of Users – Technopathologies as Social Disease: Reproducing Good and Bad Users – Technopathologies as Outbreaks: Carriers and Demonized Collectivity – Conclusion: All Users Are Sick: The Normalization of Disease – Index.
D. Travers Scott is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Clemson University, South Carolina. He holds a PhD in communication from Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, a Master of Communication in Digital Media from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“Pathology & Technology is a fresh and original book—a deeply
researched study of how (some) tech users are demonized as
diseased. D. Travers Scott traces the media and popular discourses
that label some technologies—or really their users—as ‘sick’.
Mixing history, focus group interviews, and discourse analysis, the
book is a rich investigation of how ‘technopathologies’ emerge and
circulate. Pathology & Technology is ultimately a book about
invisible politics—about how medicalized tech talk renders and then
contains ‘bad users.’”—Jeff Pooley, Muhlenberg College; Author of
James W. Carey and Communication Research: Reputation at the
University’s Margins
“Eloquent and incisive, D. Travers Scott’s Pathology & Technology:
Killer Apps & Sick Users examines the complex history of
pathologizing discourses surrounding new technologies. His
historically grounded, theoretically nimble study suggests that our
current obsession with technology-generated sicknesses may reveal
more about our cultural anxieties surrounding gender, sexuality,
and power than technology or illness. Provocative and
ground-breaking, this project reframes questions of technology,
illness, and agency in a productive and compelling
fashion.”—Jennifer Natalya Fink, Associate Professor, Department of
English, Georgetown University
“The idea that communication technology can be bad for us is a
well-worn groove in Western culture, one whose invocation can be so
expected that we fail to note when it happens. With a historian’s
flair for the telling detail, D. Travers Scott’s Pathology &
Technology expertly sidesteps the traps awaiting anyone traversing
the history of communication technology and its invitation to all
order of determinisms and faulty assumptions. Scott relies on
historical evidence and direct engagement with persons to present a
narrative not about technologies per se, but about disease
discourses as they have been applied to technology. This requires
some tight methodological and theoretical maneuvering, and Scott is
up to the task. The result is a book that accomplishes something
remarkable: Pathology & Technology is a definitive, user-centered
history of how pathologization comes to order our understanding of
communication technology.”—David W. Park, Professor of
Communication, Lake Forest College
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