Andreas Kitzmann:
Saved from oblivion. Documenting the daily
from diaries to web cams
Introduction
The place of the media
Aim of book
MEDIA PLACE
Avoiding technological
determinism
PRIVATE PLACE
REAL PLACE
The actual, physical, material, and experiemental
conditions of a particular media technology.
The physiology of the media technology.
Place cannot be reduced to a sign system, but is
something that is experienced, lived, negotiated,
constantly in flux.
Identify autobiographical use of media technology.
Our desire to preserve the presence for future times –
saving ourselves from the amnesia oblivion brings.
Exploring the relationship between media technology
and material and embodied existence and experience.
The various places are dynamically embedded.
The page, the camera, the network
> Poster’s four levels of “technological inscription”:
1. The constraints of the medium, its material
limits.
2. The pretechnological conditions for the
introduction of the medium; perceived needs that
inspire innovations.
3. The general cultural determinations of the
medium; for ex. the difference between the
introduction of print in Europe and in China.
4. The determinations of the medium through
practices; that is, how people symbolize their
experience with the medium.
Kitzmann adds to this, the question of the medium as a
place: to highlight the medium as a temporal and
material environment in which human beings live out
various experiences or forms of being.
The culturally important but often contradictory
constructions of the private and the public.
 Pure privacy: conventions of privacy
 Public privacy: how media culture has influenced
practices of self-documentation.
 Connected privacy: the influence of web-based
media technology on the cultural practices of the
public and the private.
The constructs of authenticity and reality. The function
of the real in places of self-documentation.
 Positive reality: the role of specific media places
in the construction and representation of the real.

TIME PLACE
Negative reality: the claim that the real no longer
matters in the same way. The realness of the
simulated and the virtual.
 Returned reality: The real as a fetish and
consumer object. The mediatization of the real.
The relationship between the social construction of time
and the various media places used to enact selfdocumentation.
 Still time: especially as it applies to the medium
of print.
 Future time: discourses of modernity are infused
with a commitment to the march of progress.
Time is always portrayed in forward motion.
 Real time: immediate time, when there are no
gaps between the moment of representation and
perception.
MEDIA PLACE / The place of the page
The demands of writing
The practice of selfwriting
Orality
Literacy
Derrida: critique of
writing
The diary
On our body, our subject.
Relatively recent phenomenon, begins within the
historical and cultural context of modern print culture.
Requires shared presence between producer and
receiver. Performance. Walter Ong/ mnemonic
techniques.
Makes possible a separation of producer and receiver.
Text as permanent, authoritive, stable, linear, organized.
Typical of modern subjectivity.
Logocentrism and difference, highlights how Western
thought is predicated on the logic of binary logic. Literal
imprisonoment of thought.
A place within which the self is expressed and
constructed.
“The place of the page is a place within which to
construct and implicitly celebrate the centered,
enlightened, and self-aware individual.
MEDIA PLACE / The place of the camera
Early photography history
Carte de visite
Detective cameras
Personalization of
photography
Consumption
From complex technology to Kodak moments
The emergence of a definable economy of images.
Reproducible visibility became a dominant form of selfdocumentation. Indicative for the shift to post-linguistic
mimesis.
The implied freedom of the portable camera. Capturing
the reality as it happens. The discourse of the object
camera – representing and rendering reality.
The emergence of the photography into the realm of
everyday life. The camera within domestic life – typical
indicator of the modern consumer culture.
The shoebox-phenomenon.
Digital photography
Michel Maffesoli
Katherine Hayles
Consumers have more control with the entire production
process. Distribution on the web as an example. “Thus
one does not passively consume images but rather
actively interacts with them in an increasingly complex
and technologically dependent matter” (45).
“Neo-tribalism”: the emergence of emotional and
symbolic groupings that lack permanence. Create
meaningful bonds between often disparate individuals.
Aesthetic ambience.
“Liberal post-humanism”: Temporary zones of
interaction between humans and technology.
MEDIA PLACE / The place of the network
Network society
1. Compression and
extension of space
2. The virtualization of
time
3. Ubiquitous pluralism
4. The virtualization of
direct interaction
Represents real changes in the spatial and temporal
conditions of human society.
Which also applies to most other media.
Schoback: demand different ways of being in the world.
The place of the network should be perceived as an
extension of the material world.
Immediacy. There is nothing but presence.
The hypertextual nature of the network. The network as
constantly changing. Plurality. The vanity of trying to
map the Internet.
“Second-order reality”.
PRIVATE PLACE: Posture two