How did we arrive at our contemporary consumer media economy? Why are we now fixated on screens, imbibing information that constantly expires, and longing for more direct or authentic kinds of experience? This book answers these questions by revisiting a previous media revolution, the nineteenth-century explosion of mass print. Like our own smartphone screens, printed paper and imprinted objects touched the most intimate regions of nineteenth-century life. The rise of this printed ephemera, and its new information economy, generated modern consumer experiences such as voracious collecting and curating, fantasies of disembodied mental travel, and information addiction. To understand them, this book illuminates their affects - their embodied, emotional, mental, and intersubjective dimensions. How did consumers incorporate mass culture, remaking it and themselves, in material and psychological practices? Building on literary studies, media history, social history, and affect studies, it shows how we got our own ideas about the mediated life of the mind. The goal of this book is to demonstrate how the nineteenth century established affective, psychological, social, and cultural habits of media consumption that we still experience, even as pixels supersede paper. Readers who wish to understand our current moment of digital addiction, social media obsession, and online absorption can learn about their prehistories here. Revealing the history of our own moment, this book challenges the commonplace assumption that our own new media lack a past, or that our own experiences are unprecedented.

Attending to reverie, absorption, feelings of presence, and self-making, it expands a critical conversation that has narrowly interpreted nineteenth-century media use through Lacanian psychoanalysis, and a monolithic notion of reading.