Media are not only used to tell stories. Sometimes they are the subject of the story themselves.

This collection of public domain texts covers over a hundred years of authors exploring the incredible anxieties and impossible desires of media.

Some stay close to the realm of the domestic world, exploring the way that love is expressed and mediated through technical apparatuses. Others imagine near-future conditions where current trajectories of communication are amplified. Still more reflect on discoveries in science and technology in order to ask fundamental questions: What is communication? What is consciousness? What has been gained with modern media? And what has it minimized, substituted, or erased?

These texts have been collected together in a single space to allow for readers of all kinds to reflect on the changes in the way that we think about media, as well as the historical continuities between them. §