How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and the First Amendment

FAIN: FT-62072-14

Jennifer Petersen
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)

To date, histories of free speech have focused on the political and legal factors propelling the expansion of rights associated with speech--a history of the "free" in free speech. "How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and the First Amendment" adds to this history by unearthing the ways that the expansion of our speech rights has depended on changes in the very definition of speech within the law. It provides a history of the "speech" of free speech. This story focuses on the impact of new media technologies and ideas about communication on the law. Such a history not only helps us better understand the constitution of core rights and visions of citizenship, but also highlights the impact of ideas about agency, perception, and the human on the law.

Associated Products

Regulating Film, Regulating Emotion: The Emotional History of Public Opinion (Article)
Title: Regulating Film, Regulating Emotion: The Emotional History of Public Opinion
Author: Petersen, J.
Abstract: The article argues that the legal about face in 1950s law in which film was granted First Amendment protection was driven in part by a change in the “emotional regimes” of US democracy, or emotions/performances of emotion that are part of legitimate political culture. The legal understanding of how film does or does not contribute to democratic political culture tracks historical shifts in these emotional regimes. In the teens, elites feared the activation of the masses, as crowds, in political uprisings. By 1950, elite fears had turned to passive audiences, “narcotized” masses that might easily be seduced by totalitarian demagogues.
Year: 2016
Access Model: 10.1080/15295036.2016.1225966
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Critical Studies in Media and Communication

How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Book)
Title: How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech
Author: Jennifer Petersen
Abstract: n How Machines Came to Speak Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/how-machines-came-to-speak
Primary URL Description: Publishers website
Secondary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-machines-came-to-speak-media-technologies-and-freedom-of-speech/oclc/1260291851&referer=brief_results
Secondary URL Description: worldcat
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4780-145
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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