Announcing a new book from Routledge: Esther Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence (Routledge, 2010). http://www.routledge.com/books/Letters-Postcards-Email-isbn9780415993289 Contemporary accounts of the impact of electronic, digitally networked cultures often construct an apocalyptic narrative of decisive shifts and abrupt breaks: the new technology arrives, it seems, out of nowhere, sweeping away the old and ushering in the new. In response to such accounts, Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence argues that the relation between old and new communication systems is more complex than allowed in current media theory. Narratives of change are dramatically complicated by the striking continuities between different communication systems. In this original study, Esther Milne focuses on one of these continuities, specifically a fantasy of presence that, she argues, pervades the socio-technical representations of letters, postcards and emails. What are the enabling conditions for presence to function as a technological and rhetorical strategy across distributed communication platforms? To address this question Milne explores historically the symbolic and material representations of presence through three media sites: a networked postal community of nineteenth-century letter writers; postcard correspondence of First World War soldiers; and a contemporary email discussion list. Although a number of writers have productively historicised the socio-critical formulations of presence, telepresence and co-presence, these phenomena have usually been confined to representations within electronic media. (eg Coyne, 2001; Glotz et al, 2005; Goldberg 2000; Hjorth, 2005, 2007; Ito, 2005; Lombard and Ditton, 1997; Mitchell, 1999; Murphy, 2000; Ryan, 1999; Sconce, 2000; Sheridan, 1992; Sobchack, 1994). What remains under-examined is the extent to which older technologies, such as the postal service, also enable an experience of intimacy, immediacy, immersion and presence. Furthermore, when epistolary scholars have investigated the production of presence through literary or aesthetic formations, they have limited the focus to a discrete site: either the letter as a ‘real’, historical artefact (eg Decker, 1998) or the letter’s representational deployment through fiction and art (eg Kauffman, 1992) . In contrast, Milne traces the affective configuration of presence through empirical data; material bases; and rhetorical structures, to demonstrate the interrelation between imagined presence and notions of intimacy, privacy and disembodiment. Although the correspondents of letters, postcards and emails are not, usually, present to one another as they write and read their exchanges, this does not necessarily inhibit affective communication. Indeed, this study demonstrates how physical absence may, in some instances, provide correspondents with intense intimacy and a spiritual, almost telepathic, sense of the other’s presence. While corresponding by letter, postcard or email, readers construe an imaginary, incorporeal body for their correspondents that, in turn, reworks their interlocutor’s self-presentation. In this regard the fantasy of presence reveals a key paradox of cultural communication, namely that material signifiers can be used to produce the experience of incorporeal presence. Contents: List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1: "The Conscious Presence of a Central Intellect": British Postal History 2: "The simple transcripts of natural feeling": Signifiers of Presence in Epistolary Practice 3: "Ghosts of all my impertinent letters": Presence in Crisis 4: "The Self-conscious air of the reproduced": Postcard History 5: "A photo of the ship that I am now on": Signifiers of Presence, Intimacy and Privacy in Postcard Correspondence 6: A Brief History of Electronic Mail 7: "In my sickness": Constructing Presence on the Cybermind Discussion Group Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index About the Author: Esther Milne teaches in the Department of Media and Communications, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia. She researches the history of networked postal communication systems and celebrity production within the socio-regulatory contexts of law. http://www.routledge.com/books/Letters-Postcards-Email-isbn9780415993289 bit.ly/cOMdEh