Alarm

How a simple technological invention has shaped our social and cultural worlds.

Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention, and force us to attend to things we prefer to ignore. But alarms also allow us to feel secure, to sleep, and to retreat from alertness. They take vigilance on our behalf. In this book, historian Alice Bennett takes a close look at alarms in art, media, and culture to try to understand the meanings they carry and the conventions we construct around them.

From hilltop fire beacons to air-raid sirens and smart phone alerts, the history of alarms is also the history of work, security, technology, and emotion. Alarm responds to culture’s most urgent calls to attention by examining all kinds of alarms, from the restless presence of the alarm clock in modernist art to police sirens in classic hip hop. More than just bells and whistles, alarms are objects that define sleeping and waking, safety and danger, and they have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the modern mind and its capacity for attention.

This book is the latest in the Object Lessons series. Published in association with The Atlantic, it explores the hidden lives of ordinary things and what they can teach us about ourselves and the modern world.