From Linear to Acoustic Space. New Media Environments and New Modernist Forms

From the second half of the nineteenth century, new electric media started to redefine not only the world-environment, but also the way individuals related to it, having a complex impact on their psycho-sensorial dynamics and attitudes. The world-phenomenon of the ‘global village,’ as theorised by critics in the second half of the twentieth century, begins with the organisation of the first electric forms of communication (second half of the nineteenth century) and ends with the new world-wide-web; the first electric medium triggered an irreversible change in terms of the individual’s sensibility and sensorium that later media simply fastened and consolidated. The works of Modernist writers and artists stand in the middle between the first explorations in communication and the twentieth-century technological explosion; this essay proves that they can be approached as interesting probes to observe the impact of new media on society in its whole.