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This book offers a plea to take the materiality of media technologies and the sensorial and tacit dimensions of media use into account in the writing of the histories of media and technology. In short, it is a bold attempt to question media history from the perspective of an experimental media archaeology approach. It offers a systematic reflection on the value and function of hands-on experimentation in research and teaching. Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory is the twin volume to Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice, authored by Tim van der Heijden and Aleksander Kolkowski.

Over the last few years, 'media archaeology' has evolved from a marginal topic to an academic approach en vogue. In large part, media archaeology has been a history of discourse-oriented analysis. While this tradition has produced interesting studies focusing on the discursive construction and symbolic meaning of different media technologies, the materiality of media technologies and the practices have lacked academic attention. These volumes aim at taking the materiality of past media devices seriously and explore the heuristic possibilities of an experimental study of these devices. In short, to systematically develop a hands-on approach to experimental media archaeology. So far, experimental media archaeology was lacking practical experiments and systematic reflections on the methodological underpinnings of this new approach. In a unique format, the twoe volumes of "Doing Experimental Media Archaeology (DEMA): Theory & Practice" offer both a sophisticated reflection on the epistemological and heuristic potential of hands-on media historical research and describe a series of basic, media-technological and performative media archaeological experiments with great detail, as such exploring the potential of hands-on media experiments for media education in universities and museums. The hands-on and experimental approach of DEMA offers the unique opportunity to 'grasp' media and communication technologies in their concrete materiality and tangibility and to (re)-sensitize historians and communication scholars for the material qualities and performative dimension of past media devices and practices.

Since the early years of telegraphy, modernity at large generated and has depended upon technologies of electrical/electronic communication and information circulation: from telephone, radio, and television to the internet. This volume reveals these connecting technologies’ geopolitical importance and their crucial relationships with culture, commerce, and communities. Also the authors critically examine their spatial dimensions and transnational implications – as material objects with particular qualities, as elements in institutional complexes, and as ‘vehicles’ carrying complex symbolic meanings. Through in-depth assessments of critical, as well as mundane, events in the history of communications and information, these analyses will significantly alter conventional perspectives both on communications and on modern European history.

This book emphasizes the important role of broadcasting during the Cold War as a central actor in the creation of a transnational and European communication space. Its methodological design links the study of the circulation and appropriation of cultural performances with awareness for the crucial role of broadcast technologies as mediators and catalysts of cultural transfers. The book describes and analyzes different transmission and reception technologies and questions their specific contribution to the medial construction of a transnational communication space in constantly changing political and cultural environments. It enlarges an understanding of the role of civil and institutional actors in the creation of transnational communities and European networks. It also addresses media historians, as well as historians of international relations, especially regarding the Cold War and European integration--

Am Beispiel der gescheiterten Bemühungen, in Europa einen einheitlichen Farbfernsehstandard auszuhandeln, thematisiert diese interdisziplinär angelegte Studie die Komplexität internationaler Standardisierungsprozesse. Gleichzeitig leistet sie einen innovativen Beitrag zu einer politischen Kulturgeschichte der Technik. Technik wird als historisch gewachsene, sozial konstruierte und symbolisch aufgeladene Kulturleistung verstanden. Der historische Vergleich zwischen den beiden Hauptakteuren der Farbfernsehkontroverse Mitte der sechziger Jahre bietet einen erfrischenden Blick auf die Geschichte der deutsch-französischen Beziehungen im Kontext europäischer Technikentwicklung.