Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (review)

was “unnatural, perverted, or ugly” (204). Despite its strengths, the book contains several weaknesses. The arst is its lack of a clear thesis. Although the careful typology of critiques of luxury and waste draws subtle and valuable distinctions, the book does not contain an overarching theme other than the unsurprising view that American radicals distrusted luxury and waste. Moreover, the author is forced to point out that luxury and waste did not lie at the center of the thinking of a number of the radicals whose thought he examines. Finally, despite pointing out divergences within the critiques of luxury and wealth, the book mentions, but does not stress, the degree to which American radicals like Edward Bellamy proposed a consumerist utopia as the solution to the nation’s deep social conoicts. This book gives short shrift to the American radical celebration of abundance—provided that such abundance be fairly distributed to those who produced it. In other words, if he had more fully included views about consumption, he would have found a greater degree of dissent among radicals and a point of departure for explaining their different economic, social, and moral visions. A stress on consumption would have undermined Riukulehto’s conclusion that “All the critics were of the same ilk regarding their main attitudes towards luxury and waste” (197). A second weakness is that the book’s prose is often awkward and unclear. As a case in point, “But we will return to this problematics more minutely in a later chapter” (141). Third, when the book strays from the texts, which Riukulehto examines with care, if not with original insight, it bogs down in pedestrian and, in some cases, dated summaries of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and of such social movements, as Populism, Socialism, and the Social Gospel. Moreover, the book does not situate radical thought within the context of speciac debates of the time; too often radical discourse is not connected to political and economic debates or, indeed, to the social strife that was characteristic of the period under examination.