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.

Jennifer Petersen is Associate Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and author of Murder, the Media, and the Politics of Public Feelings: Remembering Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. The “Speech” in Freedom of Speech  1
1. Moving Images and Early Twentieth-Century Public Opinion  24
2. “A Primitive but Effective Means of Conveying Ideas”: Gesture and Image as Speech  57
3. Transmitters, Relays, and Messages: Decentering the Speaker in Midcentury Speech Law  87
4. Speech without Speakers: How Speech Became Information  119
5. Speaking Machines: The Uncertain Subjects of Computer Communication  157
Conclusion. The Past and Future of Speech  190
Appendix on Methods  205
Notes  207
Bibliography  257
Index  271