In How Machines Came to Speak Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of "speech" have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies-such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code-were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens.

In How Machines Came to Speak Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech� have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens.

In 1998, the horrific murders of Matthew Shepard -- a gay man living inLaramie, Wyoming -- and James Byrd Jr. -- an African American man dragged to hisdeath in Jasper, Texas -- provoked a passionate public outrage. The intense mediacoverage of the murders made moments of violence based in racism and homophobiahighly visible and which eventually led to the passage of The Matthew Shepard andJames Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009. The role the media played incultivating, shaping, and directing the collective emotional response toward thesecrimes is the subject of this gripping new book by Jennifer Petersen. Tracing theemotional exchange from news stories to the creation of law, Petersen calls for anapproach to media and democratic politics that takes into account the role of affectin the political and legal life of the nation.