Alarm

(Object Lessons)

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 12 Jan 2023 | Archive Date 12 Feb 2023

Talking about this book? Use #Alarm #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

How a simple technological invention has shaped our social and cultural worlds.

Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention, and force us to attend to things we prefer to ignore. But alarms also allow us to feel secure, to sleep, and to retreat from alertness. They take vigilance on our behalf. In this book, historian Alice Bennett takes a close look at alarms in art, media, and culture to try to understand the meanings they carry and the conventions we construct around them.

From hilltop fire beacons to air-raid sirens and smart phone alerts, the history of alarms is also the history of work, security, technology, and emotion. Alarm responds to culture’s most urgent calls to attention by examining all kinds of alarms, from the restless presence of the alarm clock in modernist art to police sirens in classic hip hop. More than just bells and whistles, alarms are objects that define sleeping and waking, safety and danger, and they have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the modern mind and its capacity for attention.

This book is the latest in the Object Lessons series. Published in association with The Atlantic, it explores the hidden lives of ordinary things and what they can teach us about ourselves and the modern world.

How a simple technological invention has shaped our social and cultural worlds.

Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention, and force us to attend to things we prefer to ignore. But...


Advance Praise

“A pleasurable and soothing book. From burglary to belatedness, from house fires to climate change, this exemplary collaboration between literary studies and the social sciences sheds a reflexive, nuanced and joyful light on our darker anxieties. A most accessible, elegant, and important lesson in attention ecology.”—Yves Citton, author of The Ecology of Attention

“A pleasurable and soothing book. From burglary to belatedness, from house fires to climate change, this exemplary collaboration between literary studies and the social sciences sheds a reflexive...


Available Editions

EDITION Paperback
ISBN 9781501375576
PRICE $14.95 (USD)
PAGES 152

Available on NetGalley

NetGalley Shelf App (PDF)
Send to Kindle (PDF)
Download (PDF)

Average rating from 12 members


Readers who liked this book also liked: