Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Cropping up everywhere, whether steel latticework or tapered monopoles, encrusted with fiberglass antennas, cell towers raise up high into the air the communications equipment that channels our calls, texts, and downloads. For security reasons, their locations are never advertised. But it’s our romantic notions of connectivity that hide them in plain sight. We want the network to be invisible, ethereal, and ubiquitous. The cell tower stands as a challenge to these desires. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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9781501348815

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Reviews

As Steven E. Jones observes, we imagine that our mobile devices connect us to each other, and to a certain version of the world, in a manner that's invisible and ethereal. But in fact, this illusion depends on a great multiplicity of 200-foot-tall structures that we see, or decline to see, wherever we go: cell towers. Briskly deconstructing these enablers of our digital lives as physical objects, and as quasi-magical connectors of the immaterial, Jones reveals them as secret object-icons of our time. Once you've read this, you won't be able to stop seeing--and thinking about--the cell phone tower. * Rob Walker, author of The Art of Noticing (2019) *

As Steven E. Jones observes, we imagine that our mobile devices connect us to each other, and to a certain version of the world, in a manner that’s invisible and ethereal. But in fact, this illusion depends on a great multiplicity of 200-foot-tall structures that we see, or decline to see, wherever we go: cell towers. Briskly deconstructing these enablers of our digital lives as physical objects, and as quasi-magical connectors of the immaterial, Jones reveals them as secret object-icons of our time. Once you’ve read this, you won’t be able to stop seeing--and thinking about--the cell phone tower. * Rob Walker, author of The Art of Noticing (2019) *

As Steven E. Jones observes, we imagine that our mobile devices connect us to each other, and to a certain version of the world, in a manner that's invisible and ethereal. But in fact, this illusion depends on a great multiplicity of 200-foot-tall structures that we see, or decline to see, wherever we go: cell towers. Briskly deconstructing these enablers of our digital lives as physical objects, and as quasi-magical connectors of the immaterial, Johnson reveals them as secret object-icons of our time. Once you've read this, you won't be able to stop seeing--and thinking about--the cell phone tower. * Rob Walker, author of The Art of Noticing (2019) *

Author Information

Steven E. Jones is DeBartolo Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the University of South Florida, USA. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014).

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