The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America

In the early 1960s, young bohemians swayed together under the swirling lights of psychedelic slide shows, surrounded by walls of amplified sound, in dance halls and art galleries from Greenwich Village to San Francisco. For a generation of historians, their tribal rites have long represented a sharp break with a vastly more conservative early cold war media culture. This talk makes a very different case. It first returns to World War II, to explore the widespread fear that mass media technologies might turn Americans into authoritarians. It then recounts how, as the fighting began, American social scientists and Bauhaus refugees collaborated to produce new multimedia environments with which to turn the senses of their fellow citizens in explicitly democratic directions. The talk shows that this turn became the basis of both two decades of cold war American propaganda and the multimedia utopianism of the 1960s. As it traces this history, the presentation reconnects the immersive, multi-mediated environments of the 1960s to those of the decades that preceded them.
Fred Turner is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. His books include the widely acclaimed From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism; and most recently, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for Information Technology and Society and the Machines, People, and Politics RFG.