“Love at First Site”

Abstract

New media are often taken up through older discourses. The Internet is no exception. Discourses on the emerging World Wide Web of the early 1990s could at times be strikingly similar to the cosmopolitan utopianism roused by silent cinema’s global networks in the 1910s. For instance, we can detect compelling echoes of Andreyev’s “Miraculous Cinema” which brought the “spheres of souls” nearer and united humanity in a “single stream” (Reeves 2003, 3) in the much-quoted¹ 1997 “Anthem” commercial for MCI, which grandly proclaimed, “People can communicate mind to mind. There is no race. There are no genders. There is no age. There are no infirmities. There are only minds. Utopia? No, the Internet.” Underlying the sense of optimistic novelty and cutting-edge provocation this commercial displays about a relatively new mode of communication are some of the same fears and fascinations that haunted both international cinematic animation and postnational television animation.