[Commlist] New book: How Machines Came to Speak

We would like to announce a new publication from Duke University Press, 
which we hope will be of interest.

*How Machines Came to Speak***

Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech

*Jennifer Petersen***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478014522/how-machines-came-to-speak/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478014522/how-machines-came-to-speak/>_**__***

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*CSLS2022*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 31^st December 2022. Discount only applies to 
the CAP website.

“At the intersection of legal studies, cultural history, and media 
history, Jennifer Petersen’s book is a brilliant and groundbreaking 
study of the ways that modern First Amendment law has been shaped by 
judicial and cultural responses to the advent of new media 
technologies.” *- Samantha Barbas, Professor of Law, University at 
Buffalo School of Law *

“What does it mean for speech to be free? This rigorous, 
counterintuitive history reveals how changes in media technologies have 
transformed our answers to that question in the law and well beyond. As 
it shows, media technologies don’t just deliver speech; they model it. 
And when they do, they change the categories of thought and action 
through which we live our lives.” *- Fred Turner, author of **/The 
Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War 
II to the Psychedelic Sixties/*

In /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.

*Jennifer Petersen*is Associate Professor of Communication in the 
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of 
Southern California and author of /Murder, the Media, and the Politics 
of Public Feelings: Remembering Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr/.



*Duke University Press**| Sign, Storage, Transmission | April 2022 | 
304pp | 9781478014522 | PB | £22.99**

*Price subject to change.

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