Lists are important because they travel across media networks and historical ways of knowing. They operate at a layer that is not often studied: formats, paperwork, and cultural techniques. Listing activities inscribe distinctions that have material effects on the composition of populations, knowledge formations, and temporal operations. Lists show us how media networks function and change. They even offer a space for imagining alternate possibilities— not just for media and technological development, but for social and political life. Modern listing activities trend towards oppression and control. A deeper history of the form shows that there are other kinds of lists. These offer a glimmer of ways we might make our administrative and calculative techniques more just. The point is not to escape or ignore bad political trajectories by retreating into aesthetics. It is to demonstrate poetic techniques and traditions that clear a space for thinking about alternative political realities.

Because listing is a cultural technique that processes distinctions foundational to social and imaginative life, it cannot be easily dismissed or endorsed. It is not enough to say lists are good or bad. They endure in our thoughts, texts, and programs because they negotiate tensions and paradoxes that have confounded us for centuries: fear and desire, wonder and horror, entropy and order. What other quotidian forms can teach us such lessons? What other ontical operations silently enframe our thoughts and activities? I hope my collection of case studies may generate further research into such questions.

But this book is not only about lists. In using approaches from media materialism to capture a protean form, I sought to show how these approaches can enrich not only media and communication studies, but the humanities more broadly. Media archaeology, associated theories of cultural techniques, actor-network theory, and logistical media studies complement well-established analytic approaches because they take into account more than the institutions, texts, and audiences that have historically been the focus of the humanities. A demonstration of the importance of listing techniques to the history of human thought and action is a concrete example of what media materialism brings to the table. Such approaches help to fill gaps in methodologies and debates that are better-established, such as the ongoing clash between ‘political economy’ and ‘cultural studies’.