Abstract
This chapter demonstrates how favorable popular press articles re-presented Marconi’s wireless to audiences in American periodicals. Many journalists reconstructed the wireless rhetorically by emphasizing the technology’s industrial value and profitable potential. The rhetoric the authors employed closely follows the topoi Marconi used in his presentations to technical and scientific audiences. The articles promote the wireless’s efficiency, profitability, and usefulness by using progress markers. The popular press also portrayed the wireless as a technology marking human evolution. The re-presentations suggest how positive accounts of the wireless fit the cultural values and attitudes concerning technology in the early twentieth century. Progressive ideology of the early twentieth century is entwined with these favorable representations. These positive popular press accounts heralded Marconi’s wireless as a monumental invention from the turn of the last century.
The development of some varieties of municipal engineering is absolutely dependent upon the development of public opinion and must proceed with it. The matter of street cleaning is largely a question of an improved public taste in the matter of street paving. Unless streets are well paved they cannot be well cleaned except at a prohibitive cost. To jump from one degree of cleanliness in this respect, to another, without a supporting public opinion, may be enough to wreck an administration and to set the tide of civic improvement running in the opposite direction. The newspaper is a great educator in these matters today.
(Cooke 1915/1999, p. 61)
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Toscano, A.A. (2012). Popular Press Representations of Marconi’s Wireless. In: Marconi's Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology. SpringerBriefs in Sociology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3977-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3977-2_4
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