How did we arrive at our contemporary consumer media economy? Why are we now fixated on screens, imbibing information that constantly expires, and longing for more direct or authentic kinds of experience? The Mediated Mind answers these questions by revisiting a previous media revolution, the nineteenth-century explosion of mass print. Like our own smartphone screens, printed paper and imprinted objects touched the most intimate regions of nineteenth-century life. The rise of this printed ephemera, and its new information economy, generated modern consumer experiences such as voracious collecting and curating, fantasies of disembodied mental travel, and information addiction. Susan Zieger demonstrates how the nineteenth century established affective, psychological, social, and cultural habits of media consumption that we still experience, even as pixels supersede paper. Revealing the history of our own moment, The Mediated Mind challenges the commonplace assumption that our own new media lack a past, or that our own experiences are unprecedented.

Illuminates the ways in which "dreaming" through print media fostered unplanned identifications, intersubjectivity, and unexpected social changes.

Contributor: Susan Zieger Susan Zieger is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature.

Zieger’s brilliant analysis of ink’s centrality to globalization raises parallel questions about the planetary roots and routes of other resources featured in this study as underwriting the new scale of mass mediation, such as the tobacco that provided the dreamy smoke screen for seductions of information, or the paper that supplied the transition from pipes to cigarettes... Like so many stimulants, it is tremendously satisfying while waking the reader’s mind to seek more. --- At first glance, our culture’s consumption of mass media—with our twenty-four-hour news cycle, social media, and love of iPhones—may not seem to have much in common with the nineteenth century. Susan Zieger’s The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century, however, argues otherwise. By examining the close relationship between consumers and goods in nineteenth-century Britain, Zieger presents ephemeral items and the conversations they sparked as prefigurations of twenty-first century forms of mass media. --- Zieger's notion of "the mediated mind" is not the flattened, homogenized mentality often implied by discussions of mass communications; she documents and explores these changes with far more detail and finesse than an informal commentary can convey. --- An astoundingly rich and wonderfully diverse account of the experience of mass media in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. The Mediated Mind provocatively and sensitively expands the very notion of mass media beyond the audio-visual parameters in which it is conventionally considered and explores the varied ways in which print and printed ephemera shapes nineteenth-century British culture.---John Lurz, Tufts University