Mainstream canonisation of Hip Hop history in the Netherlands has mainly focused on the country’s West, and often relegates anglophone rap to a footnote in favour of Dutch-language rap. I offer an alternative reading by approaching the Netherlands’ early Hip Hop history rhizomatically. I examine Hip Hop group Zombi Squad from Groningen, a province in the country’s periphery, to elucidate two key characteristics of the development of the Dutch Hip Hop scene that have been underappreciated. Firstly, I show that the practice-oriented interconnectedness of the Dutch scene across country was integral to the general scene’s development. Secondly, I argue that a national approach to culture obfuscates the creolizing dynamic of Dutch Hip Hop history and how this is inextricably bound with colonial history. Hip Hop as such, provides an entry point to explore how these influences manifest locally to re/present Europe in a way that adequately reflects its inhabitants.

In the mid-1950s, the Gothenburg-based photographer Andrej Gavrjusjov constructed a microfilm reading device called Biblioscope, intended for hospital patients with physical impairments. Throughout the following years, reading devices and microfilmed books were distributed to hospital libraries across Sweden, but in the mid-1960s, the Biblioscope was taken out of distribution. By analysing this now largely forgotten technology, the article makes several contributions to the field of disability media studies. With a focus on material and economic factors, and intermedial relations, the article analyses the construction and institutionalisation of the Biblioscope. Although the Biblioscope was mainly aimed at hospital patients with physical impairments, the article highlights speculations about its future potential for a wider set of users, anticipating today’s reading of digital books on portable screens. In conclusion, the analysis shows how media technologies, which today seem self-evident, often have forerunners that were developed for individuals with disabilities.

Disability representations are never divorced from their complex cultural and political contexts. This article argues that a culturally specific understanding of disability in the 1930s sheds new light on the superficially problematic disability representation in popular 1939 Hollywood melodrama, Dark Victory. While Bette Davis’ disabled heroine dies, perpetuating eugenic understandings of disabled people as unworthy of life, she also fosters a vision of disability as a valuable embodiment of interdependence. This echoes the increasing conflict around ‘normalcy’ evident in the period’s popular cultural material. Rejecting the ableist idealisation of independence, popular disabled figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Helen Keller instead modelled interdependent lives. Contextualising Dark Victory’s representation of disability and friendship through archival material reveals multifaceted understandings of disability across the 1930s and highlights the crucial role of historical research in unearthing the nuances of cinematic disability representations.

Animals have been a part of television’s offerings since its inception. Yet animals are largely absent in television’s histories; indeed, animals are largely absent in most histories, with history itself a practice that reproduces anthropocentrism. But animal histories remain methodologically problematic, given the kinds of records usually understood as historical evidence are not those produced by non-humans. And recent attempts to widen television’s histories have adopted methods – such as oral histories – that inadvertently reinforce animal exclusion, given non-humans lack of access to human-centred notions of communication and speech. This paper begins rectifying this omission, through analysis of the BBC’s early output and the purposes to which animals were put during this period. It captures how animals were enmeshed within that early experimental broadcasting, when programme-makers were still conceptualising what television was for and what attractions it could offer its viewers. That animals were drawn on as part of this process indicates how non-humans are enmeshed in anthropocentric representational strategies: and that television histories have usually all but ignored animals indicates how history as a process functions to legitimise anthropocentrism.

This article examines the role that women’s activism and advocacy played in early Irish television and the opportunities for and representation of women in national broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). It focuses on two groups: RTÉ’s own Working Group on Women in Broadcasting, which reported in 1981, and the Women in Broadcasting Study Group of 1980, headed by Senator Gemma Hussey. Both investigated practices of employment of women and the roles that they undertook as well as the role of women in RTÉ programs and in television advertising on RTÉ. The article argues that, although there were tensions between the two groups and each group had different interests, different methodological approaches in their reports and were received in the public and by RTÉ very differently, they effectively worked together to compel RTÉ to implement their recommendations and take the issue of gender equality more seriously on a long-term basis.

Recent articles suggesting the late-1990s animatronic children’s toy, Furby, was promoted and perceived as true Artificial Intelligence in 1998-99 are not wholly accurate. In examining 130 North American news stories, Furby is often accurately described as only imitating machine learning. This paper analyses these articles from the perspective of mythmaking in technological culture. In the article, I analyse the media discourses at the time and provide their historical context within North American technological culture, containing events such as the Y2K bug, popular media representations, and the dotcom bubble. I also describe several potent emotional reactions to Furby. However, recent media discourses suggest Furby had been perceived as a panic-inducing new technology, similar to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast and silent cinema train effect, both of which historians have largely discounted. I contribute evidence to the contrary, while acknowledging emotional reactions, which are not necessarily indicators of utopian or dystopian cultural panics, but instead a technological banal. The contemporary mythmaking about Furby is situated as comparable to Foucault’s analysis of myths of Victorian prudishness and silence around sexuality. Retroactive mythmaking risks supporting uncritical perspectives in the present, warranting interrogation of myths about AI as it develops and expands.

Between 1950 and 1980, television in the Netherlands became a mass medium, which attracted a large audience, in part by broadcasting football matches and news. Scholars have theorised how the rise of a new medium creates anxiety and feelings of rivalry with established media as they are confronted with a new competitor. This paper focuses on this premise by examining to what extent and how such feelings of rivalry between television and newspapers are part of the metadiscourse on football and television within the ranks of Dutch dailies between 1950 and 1980. Based on the results of this qualitative discourse analysis, this paper argues that newspapers certainly discussed the rise of football coverage on television, but did not show any signs of being afraid that television would offer a harmful competition. Much rather, in defending the right to free news gathering as well as the interests of the audience, newspapers positioned themselves by and large as great supporters of football coverage on television.

This article re-examines the historiography of telephony in Bogotá, Colombia, focusing on the semi-public phones known as telemonederos. It challenges the conventional mono-medial and mono-usage narratives of telephony by highlighting the diverse and multifaceted use of phones in the context of urban informality. The research explores how telemonederos emerged as a creative response to Bogotá’s socio-economic and technological dynamics, embodying accessible technology and entrepreneurial spirit. These devices, evolving within electronic bazaars and informal economies, became integral to the city’s communication landscape, influencing the delivery of mobile services. The study also draws parallels between the development of telemonederos and auto-construction practices in urban environments, underscoring the role of community-driven initiatives in the modernisation of Bogotá. This approach offers a nuanced view of Bogotá as a media city, where informal networks and innovations significantly shape its technological and social evolution.

Public lectures were a typical social event to nineteenth and twentieth century audiences in the Netherlands. Among these, the so-called Nutslezingen were particularly well-known, eliciting praise, criticism, and mockery. The wide use of term Nutslezing is confirmed by its inclusion in the Van Dale dictionary with defines it as “lecture for a department of ‘t Nut.” The Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen, Society for the Common Benefit, was established in the Netherlands in 1784, and the Nutslezingen were one of their earliest and certainly the most recognizable of their activities. In 1900, by becoming a member of the recently founded Vereeniging tot het houden van Voordrachten met Lichtbeelden, Association for the Organization of Illustrated Lectures, the departments of ‘t Nut gained access to a collection of slide-sets and readings which they could use for their lectures. Using Frank Kessler’s concept of the educational magic lantern dispositif, this article will examine how the projection of lantern slides was incorporated in the Nutslezingen and how the historical stakeholders, audiences, speakers, local board members, and the national administration of ‘t Nut engaged with the technology, in theory and in practice.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the introduction of ETV into classrooms was supported by ongoing experiments regarding the medium’s affordances and technological design: educators and financing bodies experimented with televisual forms that embraced non-commercial broadcasting, national and regional programming, and even transmissions by planes. Analysing educational television in the USA, this paper focuses on one specific dispositif, namely the televisual closed-circuit (CCTV). While the closed-circuit projects have been widely documented in the postwar period and have received some attention from television and media historians, the analytical focus has remained on educational CCTV. This paper suggests a shift in perspective that embeds the educational closed-circuit within a broader history of televisual CCTV. In addition to serving school reforms, postwar CCTV systems were frequently used in military and industrial settings, where they fostered automation, surveillance, and tele-command. The analysis of educational television through the lens of closed-circuits brings to the fore such military-industrial entanglements and their links with the educational sector, and shines a new light on the history of educational TV overall.