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Background: Through a close reading of the four issues of The Bowater Papers, this article aims to understand the rise of a paper modernity and to reinsert it--as material and infrastructure-- into media studies. Analysis: Producing wood paper is a strain on the landscape and the environment. The Bowater Papers showcases the histories and material possibilities of paper media products. A paper-dependent modernity can be understood as an infrastructural assemblage of harvesting, production, circulation, and consumption. Conclusion and implications: Paper calls for a natural history and geography of media. Thinking about the mediations from tree to paper through the encompassing notion of "xylomedia" is a way of articulating the intersection of the material, environmental, and infrastructural in media studies. Today is still a paper world, one that is also the age of lignin, package, and Amazon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, American newspapers enjoyed high circulations while presenting readers with diverse and plentiful content. After 1920, radio broadcasting made even more information available for public consumption, giving audience members an abundant range of media choices. During a time of plenty for readers and listeners, companies in the business of media struggled with the opposite problem: scarcity. As the amount of media content proliferated, the practical ability to disseminate it was determined by the access to scarce resources, and this was true for both radio broadcasting and newspaper publishing. In many respects, the history of the American mass media in the early twentieth century might best be told as a tale of two scarcities, one—the electromagnetic spectrum—defined by absolute limits and the other—the newsprint—defined by access to markets for a particular material, the supply of which often fluctuated in availability and price. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

'Escape from the Dead Letter Office: Smuggled Birds and the Paperless Body in the Americas' brings together Eduardo Galeano's Century of the Wind, Carolina Maria de Jesus' Child of the Dark and Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the scrivener' in an analysis of dead letters. The essay suggests the metonymic relationship between textual and physical bodies. It traces a motif of paper - recycled newspapers, stolen archives, incinerated codices, paper money, letter-writing campaigns - in order to investigate the ways in which marginalized communities are exiled from the world of letters. This 'paperlessness' serves as a prophecy for more terrifying disappearances, and the theoretical contributions of Jacques Derrida, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Karl Marx, Roberto González Echevarría, and Lisa Sánchez González inform the analysis. The article itself commits to paper the resourcefulness of individuals and organizations in procuring paper for communities under siege. It seeks to bring the material aspect of literacy into clearer focus by investigating the ways in which paper circulates and is robbed of circulation, how paper is consumed literally and figuratively, and why the weight of paper can be the measure of its value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper derives applications of an observation about how fears are constructed by people in their daily lives in order to expand upon developments and critiques in constructionist analyses of scares in the news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]