Draft Article:
“AND LEAD US NOT INTO THINKING THE NEW IS NEW:
WHAT HISTORY HAS TO OFFER NEW MEDIA STUDIES”
Submitted for Review to
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY
By
Benjamin Peters
Doctoral Candidate, Communications
Columbia University
540 W 112 St Apt 1C
New York NY 10025
Bjp2108@columbia.edu
Bjpeters@gmail.com
c. 347-426-8236
Short biographical note: Benjamin Peters studies new media history, critical information studies,
and Eastern European area studies as a doctoral candidate in Communications at Columbia
University; his dissertation work traces a transatlantic history of the idea of information from
cybernetics to the present-day, and previous publications range topics from Russian literature to
search engines. He holds an MA from Stanford University and a BA from Brigham Young
University and is currently a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Possible Referee: (Advisor) Michael Schudson, ms3035@columbia.edu
May 1, 2008
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AND LEAD US NOT INTO THINKING THE NEW IS NEW:
WHAT HISTORY HAS TO OFFER THE STUDY OF NEW MEDIA
Abstract: Perhaps the only thing new about the idea of new media is the rising stakes of the term
itself. This critical rereading of select studies in media history and new media studies, from
McLuhan to Manovich and beyond, proposes that new media are importantly historically
contingent phenomena, and not synonymous with digital media. Too concerned with claims that
new media is now and history is past, some media scholars have overlooked the counter-intuitive
corollary: that the concept of new media is usefully ancient and history writing is importantly
now. In a sweeping literature review meant to demonstrate that how many media historians are
already grappling with new media understood as emerging, socially unsure phenomena, this
case for new media history attempts to do just what new media tend to do: make present what
was already there but rarely noticed. A self-reflective conception of novelty helps historians reimagine and reassert the enterprise of new media scholarship.
Keywords: new media history, novelty, digital media, media studies, literature review, word,
language, historiography.
What Does the Problem of New Media Solve for Media History?
Few media historians will be surprised by the assertion that the history of new media is
conceptually underdeveloped; on nearly every corner of the field, students and scholars alike
encounter the at first sight counterintuitive but by now commonsense assumption that the idea of
new media is actually very old. The historical record dates back the human interest in the latest
technological development to the point where the medium of writing that made autochthonous
record keeping possible was itself the subject of interest. The issue of new media however
continues to press on the present: and I argue there is much to gain from thinking through how
historians write and think about new media conceptually. Instead of looking to enumerate the
many potential problems digital media may cause for media historians—such as, What happens
to the historical record when historians rely on online databases?—I prefer to ask initially, What
does the problem of new media solve for media history?
One possible answer: a historically reinvigorated sense of the term new media may help
dull the axes conventional media historians have to grind with the wash of attention the term is
receiving in contemporary scholarship and the press. It is a running joke among the students in
my doctoral program that landing the ideal position—in industry and university alike—will no
doubt depend on our working the term new media into the elevator pitch of our scholarly
interests. This joke, like most, is an uncomfortable half-truth. Those already working on
supposedly new media-related topics smile and nod knowingly, while those less inclined to study
cutting edge issues of computer mediated communication, information and communication
technologies, and digital media alternate between giggling nervously and outright grumbling. I
believe the mistake lies not with those interested in new media per se but in a shared failure of
historical imagination. With a little conceptual attuning, the term new media contains rich and
fertile seeds for rethinking the whole enterprise of media history—in its strong sense, the idea of
new media belong primarily to the media historians. Media historians should be seizing upon,
and certainly not begrudging, our field’s recent discovery of new media. At the most, the
historical study of social novelty of media helps reinvigorate, elongate, and reconceptualize the
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enterprise of media history itself. The idea of novelty has the potential to do as much for the
whole enterprise of media history as it does for new media history in particular.
The term new media is a problem for both the present- and historically-minded. It is a
very recent term, historically speaking—and so much the worse for sound historiography. The
Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first use of the term new media history to that master
wordsmith and showman, Marshall McLuhan in a 1960 issue of the Journal of Economic
History. To quote in full, he writes: “The decision maker who must deal with globally gathered
information, moved at electronic speeds, is impelled to acquire a more interrelated and overall
type of knowledge concerning the operations in which he is involved. The new media, in
management that is to say, have been directly responsible for the rise of management training
centers.” This quote avails itself to many of the complaints one may be leverage against new
media studies in general: the critic might ask, What is McLuhan’s awkward qualifier “in
management that is to say” doing in the most often cited coining of the term? Does he mean to
locate new media incidentally or importantly among the managerial classes that have dominated
much of the digital media discussion since? In fact, as the rise of cyber law and cyber business in
digital media debates can attest, McLuhan’s slip expands on Elihu Katz’ famous observation: if
it’s true that God gave television to the social sciences and film to the humanities, then how did
lawyers and economists get new media? (And what end of the birthright bargain have historians
received?)
We might note McLuhan’s coining associates new media with a technical, not historical,
definition, which whose characteristics like “electronic information gathering” and a “global
reach”—though novel at the time—seem almost thoroughly mundane fifty years later in 2008.
The increase of scale and degree of transmission is important but it is certainly not new. As a
result, the term new media has an awkwardness about it worse than in McLuhan’s invocation:
Most Anglophone students of new and old media use “new media” not incorrectly as a vague
umbrella term for emerging information and communication technologies. In turn, self-declared
new media scholars, for the most part, define and use the English term almost singularly to refer
to a set of electronic mass and peer-to-peer communication technologies. To this the historian
must protest: The word “new” has nothing to do with the technical constitution of a medium; it
does not describe material or structural characteristics; and “new” does not mean “digital.”
Yoking new media scholarship to digital media scholarship speeds the term—and the work that
relies on it—toward conceptual obsolescence.
It happens to the best of us. Consider Roger Silverstone’s (1999) otherwise
characteristically compelling introductory remarks in the 1999 inaugural issue of the leading new
media studies journal New Media & Society. In response to the question “what’s new about new
media,” he writes “the new is new. The technologies that have emerged in recent years,
principally but not exclusively digital technologies, are new. They do new things. They give us
new powers. They create new consequence for us as human beings. They bend minds. They
transform institutions. They liberate. They oppress…. Novelty,” Silverstone (1999) observes, “is,
at this point, our problem.” Of course, Silverstone’s flourish is in part importantly right: digital
media do these things, and there is an undeniable urgency to study contemporary digital media.
We are awash in them (Gitlin, 2003). But five years later in her 2004 introduction to New Media
& Society, Leah Leivrouw (2004) responds to the prompt “what’s changed about new media,”
with the following: “If there is a single difference between the ‘what’s new’ collection in 1999
and the present ‘what’s changed’ collection, it is that the earlier hesitation about the role and
significance of new media has given way to much more confidence.” She continues later
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“virtually every piece [in this journal issue] remarks on what might be called the
‘mainstreaming’ of new media.” The internet has become “banal” and “computer-mediated
communication is ‘slouching toward the ordinary’” (Lievrouw 2004). What was new then is no
longer: the (digital) media identified as new in 1999 are already ordinary, intelligible, and more
than less understood by 2004. In short, defining new media by a particular set of technologies
cannot be good for either sustained debate or historical scrutiny—what should fascinate us
longterm turns too ordinary too fast. The first five years of the journal New Media & Society
have demonstrated how to improve on Silverstone’s fine phrase: novelty is at all points of
history—not only this one—our problem.
Whether or not we admit it, most of new media studies as it is presently conducted will
be footnote in history in a fortnight. New media scholars in general may as well start talking as if
that were true. If we mean digital media, we should say so; if we mean media emerging in a
particular period (present or past), then we should saying. And certainly, following the lead of
this special issue, we should make the historical concept of novelty in media a starting point for
discussion.
But starting points are rarely static for historians: for they can often be pushed back and
rethought. For instance, it appears the previously cited use of the term new media in 1960 was
not the first time McLuhan invoked the term. He used the term in 1953 in a enchanted
overstatement about Harold Innis, “technology, [Innis] saw, had solved the problem of
production of commodities and had already turned to the packaging of information. And the
penetrative powers of the pricing system were as nothing beside the power of the new media of
communication to penetrate and transform all existing institutions and patterns of thought” and
later concludes on a related note, “once he [Innis] had crossed that bridge to the network of
information and ideas he never turned back to the merely economic network. Classical
economics had ceased to exist for him except as an historical phenomenon” (McLuhan, 1953:
385, 393). Here McLuhan uses new media to refer to unspecified technologies that package and
transform thought into networks of information and ideas. The mixed virtues of the 1953
McLuhan quote—its however vague reference to the information packaging, networked world,
and transformational power—should seem altogether familiar and mundane to readers 55 years
later.
Not only is does McLuhan remind us yesterday’s new media are today’s ordinary media,
the caveat is a central insight to building solid conceptual ground on which to study constantly
changing forms of mediation. Conceived historically, new media are objects of study as rich as
the human interest in novelty is ancient. Moreover, since all media were new before they were
old, the history of new media is older than the history of old media. This paradox attests to the
stubborn durability of the topic; in the beginning there was novelty and only then did history
came tumbling after. For the historian, there may be no better ground on which to rest studies of
media change and collision over time than the tectonic plate of novelty—and since the concept
of novelty shifts much more slowly than the day-to-day designation of what things are actually
new, steady traditions of new media history should be built on the former, not the latter.
In other words, the assertion that what is new is important especially now is always true,
and thus is an unsatisfying and insufficient start. A small shift in emphasis helps however: it is
rather that the assertion what is new is important now is especially always true. Change is a rare
constant. In other words, the simplified instinct of the historian—that because change is constant,
things past and present can be related—is reaffirmed and vivified by placing emphasis on the
concept of novelty, rather than the new things themselves, as a starting point for historical work.
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The Idea of New Media in Media History: Toward a Literature Review
The “new” in new media may not only be a common source of confusion but what makes the
term work for the historian. Before investigating how a number of profound scholars have
worked on the question of media novelty, I offer a provisional definition of new media as
emerging communication or information technologies undergoing a historical process of
contestation, negotiation, and institutionalization. Here of course, communication or information
technologies intentionally flips the common digital media term, information and communication
technologies (ICT) to refer to any socially constructed medium used to transmit or relay
information, while the terms contestation, negotiation, and institutionalization refer the periods
of innovative and institutional uncertainty that mark every medium’s arc from obscurity to
novelty, to obviousness, to obsolescence. Whatever its problems, the definition invites new
media study in scaleable, context-specific senses. Roughly speaking, the more uncomfortable,
the more new a medium is—the typewriter can be as new to me as is the PDA, which bears study
on generational shifts in answering the question for whom which media are new. A given
medium is new perhaps only for those specific groups that struggle to classify, name, and codify
them. Perhaps Rasmus Nielsen put the point best: the English term new media in a historical
sense should be for talking about media that we do not otherwise know how to talk about. In all,
the definition of new media as a historical phenomena embedded in social-material complexes
enables conceptual strategies for subjecting contemporary debates on cutting-edge technology to
historical and comparative scrutiny.
It turns out, of course, that historians have been doing this for centuries. If unwittingly,
most media historians are already new media historians. Nearly every society accessible to
historian, anthropologist, and sociologist tells their own new media history—a topic which raises
ancient, if urgent, issues of ways for expressing cultural curiosity about what lies outside one’s
own social world. Essential questions of the philosophy of science undergird the experience of
novelty: how humans organize, coordinate, and experiment upon the world through sensory
experience co-varies with epistemological questions with what is already known and not yet
discovered—in a word, with what is new.
Examples of unconsciously new media history are legion. Lev Manovich’s fascinating
and popular work The Language of New Media misses much of its own value in relying on a
technical definition of new media. A leading new media scholar in cinema and visual arts,
Manovich defines new media as computing and cinema technologies that share five
characteristics: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding,
writing at one point “a new media object can be described formally (mathematically)” (2001:
27). His approach has serious virtues: his elegant though short history traces these characteristics
back to Charles Babbage’s analytical engine and Daguerre’s daguerreotype in the 1830s and
makes substantial contributions to digital media scholarship along the way. He cautions against
technoeuphoric and techno-dystopian thought, argues that digital media are neither inherently
interactive nor open code, nor do they necessarily entail a loss of authenticity. He also sees in the
almost two centuries of digital media a spellspinding shift in the structure of information from
narrative to database form. The recent rash of concern about the construction and future of
narrative, he suggests, may be a result of the fact that for a first time we can observe narrative
from outside it (Manovich 2001).
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Yet whatever its brilliance, Manovich’s historical work wholly mistakes digital visual
media for new media. This leaves too little room for questions of how socially understood
historical media may be expressing themselves in new institutions. Surely numerical
representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding do not capture the essence of
nineteenth century innovations in radio, magnetism, mesmerism, artificial intelligence, and
acoustics. Manovich’s work can also be taken as a synecdoche to the dominance of the eye as the
subject and tool for studying new media in cinema and visual arts. Stimulating work by Siegfred
Zielenski (2006) and Jonathan Crary (1992) take important steps toward a multisensory, if still
heavily visual, study of the arts. While in Manovich’s case, the eye may rightfully rule visual
arts, media studies need not cling to that sensory experience as its dominant paradigm.
Media history’s reliance upon anatomy and physics makes a case for drawing upon
emerging sound studies (Millard, 1995 and Thompson, 2002) as well as developing research of
touch, taste, smell, heat, pain, location, balance, and other sensory experiences (Taussig, 1993).
Of particular note is Jonathan Sterne’s (2003) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction which provides historical and philosophical foundations for rethinking the place of
sound in modern life. Although sound is more of a technical than a historical lens of analysis, it
should be noted Sterne’s book succeds in demonstrating how the overlapping wave and fields of
acoustical physics helps rethink communication and the Ensoninment (instead of the
Enlightenment) as an act of the many, rather than the single, isolated individual. In all, it seems
clear that American media scholars and students too often overlook how media operate on
interactions between physical forces (e.g., sound, light, the electromagnetic spectrum) and the
human physique (i.e., sensory experience). With a laser-like focus on the visual, Anglophone
media studies and communications neglects the fields of physics, anatomy, and physiology.
However even recognizing the importance of such fields can help make sense of a longer history
of ideas behind media. The physics and the physique, the cosmos and our sensory experience
prefigure much of our undiscovered new media history.
While technically driven treatments of media like Manovich’s tend to neglect the richness
of the social and historical experience of emerging media, technical items have long made useful,
if problematic, analytical lenses through which to focus media experience. Consider Lewis
Mumford’s Technics and Civilizations (1934) which sets a high standard for those inclined to
sweeping Western histories of technological influence. In combining "wishes, habits, ideas,
goals" with "industrial processes" and technologies, he saw in technics the shadows of much
larger trends. Consider clock, mining, and glass: For Mumford, the early clock helped reorient
Europe’s temporal relationship with deity from an eternal cosmology to a fungible unidirectional
timeline (see also Anderson, 1996; Galison 2003 and 1987; Fleck 1981)—and historians have
been struggling to balance the direction time as, on the one hand, an arrow pointing forward with
present moments passing into chronological record and, on the other hand, an arrow pointing
toward the past and moving our back to the future. Second, Mumford saw mine’s dirt, smoke,
and danger leading to industrial society innovations such as ventilation, water pumps, furnaces,
air conditioning, and train cars, as well as to the first instance of free workers giving into slave
wage-labor; also as a midwife to Marxism, early mining delivered labor value abstraction into
the world. Industrial society sprung from—as a kind of aboveground reflection of—the earliest
forms of mining in central German. Third, for Mumford glass in Renaissance Europe
transformed indoor life as well as the study of the outside natural world. Windows let in the first
indoor light in the winter, led to more interest in domestic cleanliness, personal hygiene, and a
mentality friendly to scientific sterilization; glass spectacles lengthened literate life; non-
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conducive glass beakers, test tubes, flasks, thermometers, lenses, prisms, and slides cleaned up
and clarified the study of chemistry, biology, astronomy, and microbiology. Glass stewarded a
culture tolerant of demands for external evidence. Of course, Mumford, have been faulted with
Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Friedrich Kittler for relying too heavily on the intrinsic
logics of technologies. Still there’s no denying the proper balance new media history must find
value in studying the structures of stuff.
If there is an emerging tradition of openly self-reflexive new media history—one that
looks to the co-evolution media and their publics—its classic is probably Carolyn Marvin’s
(1988) first book When Old Technologies were New. (Other key works could include those by
Susan Douglas, Jonathan Crary, Michael Warner, Jonathan Sterne, among others.) In this book
Marvin examines the cultural reception and interpretations of electric technologies in the late
nineteenth century and demonstrates how the excited public record about electricity, especially
the telephone and (wonderfully) the electric light, reveals cultural tropes of sometimes
embarrassingly imperialist thought. Her conclusion on telephone broadcasting (akin to radio
programming) in early twentieth-century Budapest also offers a fascinating case study of the
unexpected media mergers that attend early media innovations. Often what is missing (e.g. why
are oven-microwave combinations no longer available, why did telephone broadcast
programming never catch on, etc.) may give us insight into the present.
As John Peters (2004) argues, the novelty of media often comes in employing and
combining new configurations of what already existed but what was never present before.
Consider how early cinema merged the daguerreotype (early photography), magic laterns (early
slideshow projectors), and kinetoscopes (an early individual movie projector using perforated
sequential images and a high-speed shutter); the first newspapers in Germany combined the
stagnant industries of printing press with daily circulations; and innovation on telegraphy has a
surprisingly long history: “In a historical sense,” writes Carolyn Marvin, “the computer is no
more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory…all the communications
inventions since have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work” (1988, 3).
Alexander Graham Bell too thought of his telephone as an “improvement in telegraphy.” The
radio was first experimented upon as “ethereal telegraphy.” The original telegraphic work was,
of course, to write across distances, a task it adopted from optical telegraphy, itself a medium for
communicating between windmill-like towers through a basic form of sign language.
If the history of telegraphy spans from the aboriginal gesture to the most recent computer,
it will surprise few to consider that telegraphy has even wider effect than even James W. Carey’s
(1988) seminal essay “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph” on the
standardization of time zones and trade in the US. Tracing broader horizons of the idea of
distance writing, Peters (2006) points out that a larger nineteenth century complex of optical,
magnetic, physiological, chemical, acoustic, and electromagnetic telegraphic technologies helped
rethink body-machine metaphors (wired nerves and organic networks), prepare the way for
process-switching computing, imagine microscopic and astronomical periods of time, and lead to
Einsteinian insights on relativity. The media history of telegraphy is both ancient and spreading.
In her smart Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, Lisa
Gitelman analyzes the gendered economy of Edison phonograph in juxtaposition with how
scientists in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency fixed a digital document with units
that change over time, and in the process distinguishes between media as technologies (like the
phonograph) and as institutions (like Universal Studios) as two ways to understand media in the
process of media history. In particular we tend to forget the messy process of new media
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formation (a combination of both technologies and institutions), she argues, the moment society
accepts a particular use for a medium as obvious. Her forcible call is to read media back onto
their histories thus making them freshly intelligible. Media history challenge complacencies and
emphasizes the contingent nature of life.
The idea of medium is the oldest form of its novelty: while institutions clothe a medium in
new outside forms, the idea of a medium connects it back through history. (Institutions make
new media new; ideas make new media old.) The idea of distance writing, for instance,
permeates both post and telegraphy; distance seeing, the telescope and television; mathematical
calculation, the abacus and computer; the letter, literacy; the mouth, oral speech; etc. Again like
texts, media are conduits whose technical constraints invite social interpretation and shape
human interaction in a physical world. New media, then, can be understood as historical
institutions, driven by ideas, whose the hard, breakable things undergo series and cycles of
appropriations, innovations, reconstructions.
That media die is obvious only in a very limited sense. While the husks of forgotten
technologies certainly constitute the archival matter new media historians must explore, there is
also insight to found in renewability of the core ideas and institutions of all media. Media cannot
and do not die, for they do not live: rather like ideas they morph and molt old institutional skins.
More like grammatical units, they blur old forms of syntax and incorporate other languages.
Deadmedia.org gives the splendid report of one such supposed dead medium, the US post-office
1959 initiative to deliver post by missile: “on June 8, 1959, in a move a postal official heralded
as ‘of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world,’ the Navy submarine U.S.S.
Barbero fired a guided missile carrying 3,000 letters at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in
Mayport, Florida.”
While the initiative has passed on, the idea behind it has assumed multiple forms since
then. Since Sputnik in 1957, the position of satellites (and later missile-detecting satellites) in the
mid-twentieth century took instants, not hours, to send messages across the world. In this sense,
the Post Office prediction that “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within
hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles” was in
fact too slow. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis as a kind of postal package on the USA’s
doorstep—in fact the whole Cold War nuclear escalation conflict could be read as a pantomime
conversation carried out in undelivered missile post. Also, NASA has since given unexpected
form to missile post by launching time capsules into space carrying messages for extraterrestrial
life. Star-gazers and science fiction writers have long imagined the idea behind missile post—
communication with the alien territories: in sum, the US Post Office, the Cold War, and NASA
have given recent institutional forms to an inveterate idea of communication.
Media are not necessarily in zero-sum game composition for survival. Media undergo
constant cycles of flux, absorption, combination, and re-circulation. Orality displaced—not
replaced—gesture, which lives on in everyday communication, the international expansion of
sign languages, in optical semaphore sign systems such as international maritime signal flagging,
railway signaling, and traffic lights. Modern multimedia, some argue, may be displacing textual
literacy, and merging into a hybrid concern about multimedia literacy, an extension of textual
literacy to multiple media at once. Since the television dethroned the radio as the king of
American broadcasting in the 1940s and 1950s, radio technology has filled static space in
automobiles, computers, kitchens (in both microwave and on-the-counter music box varieties),
satellites, and operating table. Handwriting, a medium whose record dates back to at least the art
of cave drawings, has flourished (if sloppily) in the literal gaps of the white space on the paper
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pages the printing press brought about. Perhaps more important than any content, the printing
press publicized paper itself. Ever since, handwriting has filled book margins, circled newspaper
ads, and scribbled down grocery lists.
This insight helps complicate the chronological character of novelty. Namely, it is not
necessarily true that a medium need be new only once: media are renewable, and they tend to
renew themselves in the gaps, silences, and white spaces left by the media that displaced them.
While it is true that all media were once new before they were old (i.e., widely diffused,
mainstream, standardized, no longer contested), it is also possible for a later incarnation of the
communication form of the medium to appear as new, if not newer, than the first. Again, media
do not die for they do not live; they molt, transform, and, as Gitelman puts it, achieve
“commonsense intelligibility” many times over.
Many media histories address a period when the media was first new—and are in a strict sense
already new media histories. For instance, Susan Douglas (1989) in Inventing American
Broadcasting gives radio’s prehistory from 1899 to 1922 as it passed through invention,
innovation, and regulation, literally when radio was first new. However, it should be noted the
basic communicative form of radio—wireless broadcasting—has renewed itself many times
since then in forms such as AM and FM technologies, maritime navigation, the RADAR (RAdio
Detecting And Ranging), the microwave oven, low-power broadcasting, and mobile telephony.
The same telegraphic idea that drove Marconi to experiment with sending Morse code signals
across early radio signals continues—many iterations later—to inspire developments in satellite
and WiFi networks, methods for sealing broken blood vessels in surgery, for melting metal
casting, and even for spacecraft propulsion (still in theory). In other words, the basic novel
potential of radio has never ceased; it has simply sought new and different forms. In a strong
sense, media history as an enterprise has focused too much on the first time media were new and
has not paid enough attention to the later novel histories of media. Most media historians are
already new media historians—interested scholars and students alike need only to recognize this
before we can begin improving our role as such.
The gambit of recent media histories to focus on once new media histories could range
from the work of Friedrich Kittler to Paul Starr, to Daniel Czitrom. With very different methods,
each author takes a different approach to new media institutionalization. A close and immensely
creative reader of technical detail, Kittler (1999) spells out in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
(Writing Science) counter-intuitive stories buried in the early twentieth-century media history,
from the weaponry implicit in cameras to the feminine gender of typewriters. Starr’s (2005)
encyclopedic The Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of Modern Communication works
on the post-office, the press, and the telegraph as “constitutive moments” for rethinking the
importance of political action in the American media history. Lastly, Czitrom’s (1983) Media
and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan surveys the early periods of telegraph, radio,
and film in America backed of cultural Chicago School theory and ritual notions of
communication. Thanks to their many differences, such works should help dissuade any hope for
a single template for panoramic new media histories.
To flag a few more histories of when mass media were recognizably new for the first
time, there is notable work on the printing press (Andersen, 1991; Eisenstein, 2005; Johns, 1998;
Ong, 1982), the post office (Henkin, 2007; John, 1998; Siegert, 1999), the railway
(Schivelbusch, 1986), the telegraph (Carey, 1988; Downey, 2002; Peters, 2006; Standage, 1999),
the radio (Douglas, 1989 and 1999; Smulyan 1994), and the telephone (Fischer, 1994; Levin,
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1995; Martin, 1991). Two literature streams in Science and Technology Studies seem
particularly noteworthy: a first stream includes classic works on the historical social construction
of technologies such as Wiebe Bijker’s key works (1987 and 2001; see also Fulk, 1993), James
Beniger’s seminal book on the origins of the information society (1986), and Leo Marx and
Robert Heilbroner’s fine essays (however an uncomfortable pairing on the question of
determinism) on the history of the idea of technology (Heilbroner, 1967; Marx, 1994 and 1997).
A second stream of STS literature, namely the social construction of computers (Abbate, 1999;
Aune, 1996; Trogermann et. al., 2001; Wyatt 2000), cybernetics (Hayles, 1999; Edwards, 1996;
Gerovitch, 2004), and digitized media (Boczkowski, 2004; Mosco, 2004) also speaks to presentday new media historians.
Despite whatever lasting contributions to questions of postmodern prognostication (Bell,
1973; Drucker, 1969; Harvey, 1989; McLuhan, 1964; Nye, 1996), the philosophy and politics of
technology (Ellul, 1962; Feenberg, 1999; Winner, 1978 and 1986), and complications to the term
new media itself (Bolter, 1984 and 1999; Chun and Kennan, 2005; Hansen 2000 and 2006;
Schwartz 1973), much—but not all—of this literature engages new media either as a given set of
usually digital technologies or through a particular period of society. An overemphasis on French
postmodern theory bogs down a subset of these works (Ellul, 1962; Bolter, 1984 and 1999;
Hansen 2000 and 2006) which, while good for provoking metaphorical thought, fails altogether
to ground theory in the evidentiary bases of contestable propositions about places, people,
events, or things. While the approach to new media history draws strength from the circularity of
ideas, it is also clear that interpreters of technology need to distinguish historical fact from a
figment of imagination.
New media history can avoid that fate of the postmodern muddle, I suggest, by analyzing
and parsing the different phrases and stages of media circulation for closer historical
investigation. Rudolph Stöber (2004), Eric Von Hipple (1990 and 2005), Joseph Schumpeter
(1937), Everett Rogers (1995) and Norbert Wiener (1993) have begun this work, and I posit
here—leaving further elaboration for another day—that media may cycle through overlapping
though the roughly chronological five stages: (1) technical invention, (2) cultural innovation, (3)
legal regulation, (4) economic distribution, and arriving finally at (5) widespread social
diffusion, when the medium has become ordinary for most of society. Then historical
circumstances shift until the process repeats itself. Wash, rinse, repeat. Whatever the problems,
these categories focus lenses through which to engage concrete sets of historical actors,
influences, and institutions.
Much of the above literature’s treatment provides rich base for piquing, honing, and
broadening intellectual curiosity about new media history. However much of it also depends on
computer processing power as the defining trait of new media and most of it treats only one
period (usually the first) when media were new. Each of these works in its own way pushes back
the prehistory of the medium, and helps signal little more than a beginner’s literature in new
media history. As the telephone brought both vocal intonations and the crackle of static where
the telegraph had not, new media history as outlined here is meant to emphasize the silent places
and white spaces in media history, meant to stir further research. But much like the historical
topic itself, this review of new media history is meant not to invoke a new topic but rather to
recognize, to rename, and to defend a tradition of media history already long in the make.
11
Conclusion: What History Has to Offer the Study of New Media
In what will surely sound like an optimists account, consider the following: one, the
history of media novelty inoculates the “new” part of new media against near instant
obsolescence in a world of torrential technological change, and in its place offers a conceptual
base upon which to elongate, narrow, and chart media change, convergence, and continuity over
time. Two, history offers a refreshed sense of the actor, analyst, and author in the writing of new
media scholarship. It is the historian’s special responsibility to recognize that their writing takes
place in the present and can thus help make explicit and disable arguments informed by presentday interests. History refers to the past but is importantly written in the present. We are only the
stewards of modern terms, issues, and questions for—and future historians will likely appreciate
the candors an author can give his audience. Three, history provides a set of lenses through
which to complicate the process through which new media become ordinary. This includes not
only passing suggestions about the cycles through which media renew themselves (technical
invention, cultural innovation, legal regulation, economic distribution, and widespread social
diffusion) but also refreshes master metaphors for thinking through the social construction and
constitution of media.
One such metaphor includes thinking through media as words, or units identifiable to
those fluent in the circumstances of its use. Questions of how both media and words matter and
change over times invites the diachronic study of the interchangeable construction of part idea,
part technique, part practice. The Polish linguist Jerzy Kurylowicz taught the word to spill meant
to kill four centuries ago but, with the rise of the word to kill, has since assumed a secondary but
related meaning preserved in the phrase to shed blood (Peters, 1980). In the same way, new
media displace old media from primary into secondary meanings. Also like linguistic units,
media express themselves particular constellations of technologies and institutions through
particular sets of inventors, innovators, regulators, users, and reformers—and then, through
complications of historical circumstances, media—like words—emerge anew once again. With
the metaphor’s suggestion to take seriously the idea of linguistics and philosophers of language,
scholars may do well to consider applying Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance to media.
The historical range of media may best be grouped not by exacting categories but rather by in
useful overlaps in the numerous similarities between media. Perhaps it is not tighter definitions
but a fuller canvassing of the interplay between old and new media—and thus an enriched sense
of historical imagination—that the study of new media needs most.
Whatever its virtues, it is cautious history has only ambiguous arguments, but not
answers, to offer the study of media, and the future-focused new media in particular. Here the
historian’s eye for fact and interpretative imagination that combine in the weaving of historical
narrative can be held distinct: while historical argument requires slow and careful aggregation of
evidence—often in archives far removed from the conveniences of new media—there is also a
certain freedom of mind that precedes that stage, in which the historian is required to imagine the
hypothetical limits of the subject at hand. Both the imagination of possibility and the caution of
uncertain and incomplete evidence are the lot of the new media historian, if we will take it.
As a final example, imagine a new media history of the steam locomotive informing the
construction of Shanghai’s high-speed Maglev train. At its core is a simple idea of moving from
a place (literally, loco-, as in location, plus motive, as in motion) embodied in a hard piece of
technology: a horizontally-mounted, fire-tube steam boiler that converts fuel fed in one end into
mechanical motion out the other end. Of course, studying the boiler alone or ascribing away the
ways in which the locomotive changed the world entirely to either idea or technology would be
12
folly. Instead, an historically enriched sense of the imaginative limits of the locomotive as a
medium could prompt the media scholar to chart how technical, cultural, legal, or economic,
actors in nineteenth-century adopted, adapted, and reincorporated boiler-enabled transportation
into whole networks of stations, yards, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, signal systems, stock and
track; or how regulation standardized time zones, negotiated market arbitrage, and responded
with intellectual property to the unprecedented circulation of information, goods, and people by
locomotion; or how corporate businesses supported fuel and freight industries, connected cultural
economies, and demanded specialized work force. Nor can we forget in this breathless list the
humanistic spirit of the locomotive in the Machine Age: what about the locomotive was
thinkable? How has the definition of high-speed train and the public reaction to it changed, if at
all? What does Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina reveal about the then contemporary devastating
understanding of the locomotive? What triggered Monet’s inspiration for his 1877 Train Station
in St. Lazare? Or, usually seen counterfactually, how has such an imagination lived on today?
How would Harry Porter get to Hogwarts if not by locomotive? What would New York City
look like without the influence of the subway’s predecessor? The provenance of new media is a
technological garden rich in the harvest of human imagination—and the historically-minded
stand ready to become both its gatekeeper and custodian.
Even in its flights of imagination, history is an engagement with, not an escape from, the
present; with Walter Benjamin we can note how history reanimates the present as today’s version
of the past. New media must be understood as (necessarily) historical phenomena especially (not
even) if we are discussing the present, for without historical perspective, scholar analysis is
sapped of a tremendous diachronic opportunity for comparative, self-checking, or sufficiently
critical work.
Of course, it is often the case that historical investigation complicates and weakens the
force of normative arguments: the uncertainties of history combine as a negative check on the
future. Perhaps best understood as a defensive maneuver, a strategy for defusing the powder kegs
of prediction, history cannot teach us to avoid past mistakes: instead it carries warnings about the
impossibility of certain prognostication as well as open treasure chests packed with uncertain
insight into the past. It is not, as George Santayana said, that those who forget the past are
condemned to repeat it but that those who do history well are condemned to admit its ambiguity.
In fact a craft of drafts, which gets rewritten—according to late historian Ken Cmiel at least—
every 20 years or so, history gives us no assurances about avoiding repeating the past. A
historian’s confidence interval—a measure of certain uncertainty, or knowing how little one
knows—is her greatest tool. It may be at best a tool for telling us how little we know about
ourselves.
Backlit by our positions, interests, and politics, there may be no better historical argument
to make than the one that disables itself. The best self-critical arguments—historical work that
doubt the historian’s own modes and motives of inquiry—need can spring from a pointed sense
of humility that overwhelms the historian before the vast troves of the past as well as a
recognition of the sheer and awesome power of human imagination. Cautious arguments about
new media may end up telling us, if nothing else, something lasting about ourselves.
13
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