Swift Viewing

“A comprehensive and compelling archaeology of the dream of invisible influence through media, this is a much-needed and frighteningly contemporary history.” - Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture

“Making an important intervention in media and cultural history, Charles R. Acland examines how a seemingly ‘fringe’ technological practice became a lightning rod for public anxiety about the power of the media. As he argues, the idea of subliminal influence is still very much with us. It may have been scientifically refuted, but it is clearly of continuing relevance in popular suspicions about the relationship between media, information, and consciousness.” - Jeffrey Sconce, author of Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television

“[An] excellent history of the idea of subliminal influence. Those events have been described by several previous writers, but one of the many virtues of Acland’s book is that he gives us the most carefully documented account to date." - Paul Messaris, International Journal of Communication

“Acland . . . offers an exquisitely detailed and subtle accounting of the scientific, cultural and political context for Vicary’s famous announcement and its consequences, focusing most tightly on the 1950s and ’60s." - Julie Sedivy, Literary Review of Canada

“The scale of Swift Viewing is evident in the book’s broad historical sweep which unfolds with the fluidity and accessibility of a popular history, but without sacrificing theoretical and critical rigour. . . . Swift Viewing refuses the theoretician’s claim to a monopoly on ‘the everyday lived nature of cultural life, which cannot be reduced to brute economic explanations nor textualist acrobatics’ (33), insisting instead on a need to respect the critical value of the nuances, dead-ends, insights and assumptions of the people’s own media critique.” - Nicholas Holm, Reviews in Cultural Theory