Gitelman’s Media History
Cody Reimer
New Media Studio, Prof. Blackmon
Spring 2012, Purdue
“This, then, is a book about the ways
scholars and critics do media history, but it
is more importantly about the ways that
people experience meaning, how they
perceive the world and communicate with
each other, and how they distinguish the
past and identify culture” (1).
Phonograph
“When media are new, when their protocols are still
emerging and the social, economic, and material
relationships they will eventually express are still in
formation, consumption and production can be
notably indistinct” (15).
“In short, the definition of new media depends
intricately on the whole social context within which
production and consumption get defined—and
defined as distinct—rather than merely on
producers and consumers themselves” (15).
White, male technologies
‘[A]t last we have succeeded in
making a true Record of a Lady’s
voice. No squeak, no blast; but
natural, clear, and human.’ (70).
“[F]ilm lighting historically normalized
white skins, making the filmic
reproduction of nonwhite
complexions the special or ‘abnormal
case’” (70).
“Nonwhite skins and women’s voices
became particularly potent indexes of
‘real’ or successful representation,
though of course success (like realism)
varies according to the social and
perceptual conditions of each
medium as well as contemporary
aesthetic norms” (71).
“I have been suggesting more generally that
media and their publics coevolve, and that one
of the evolutionary forces at stake might best be
described as a sociological tension between
users and publics, where publics are comprised
of users, but where users are not always
constitutive members of the public sphere” (86).
Publics & Personification
“The dictating machine was first
promoted as a businessman’s ‘ideal
amanuensis,’ gendered male. A few
years later, when women made up more
of the nation’s office workforce, the
cover of one National Phonograph
pamphlet made a simple equation by
picturing a phonograph beside the
words ‘Your Stenographer,’ while
corporate propaganda assured wives
that their businessmen husbands were
dictating to a phonograph, ‘instead of
talking to a giddy and unreliable young
lady stenographer’” (69).
“[M]any users potentially comprised ‘counterpublics,’ in
Michael Warner’s (2002) terms, instead of disaggregate
and nonideological ‘users’” (78).
“[P]honograph records frequently proved transgressive of
the very cultural categories that they helped to represent
as distinct or specific” (79).
“[P]honographs and phonograph records helped to
broach related questions about heterosociability and
social dancing as well as youth culture and interracial
mingling as aspects of public life in the United States”
(83).
ARPANET
“Like Edison’s Washingtons, Lincolns, and
Gladstones (1878), that is, or Project Gutenberg’s
Declaration of Independence (1971), and the
continual flogging of “opera” records by the earlycentury phonograph companies, the William Blake
Archive is helping to make a new medium
authoritative in a sense by co-opting cultural
authority, by entwining the new means and existing
subjects of public memory (as well as, of course, by
invoking the authority of institutions like IATH, its
sponsors, and the participating Blake repositories)”
(141).
“All digital objects contain data and metadata”
(142).
“Data and metadata are inseparable” (143).
“But the World Wide Web is more consistently a
text than a market” (145).
“[T]he Web [is] an interpretive space in which
interpretation is always already underway”
(147).
“Media aren’t the instruments of scholarship in the
humanities; they are the instruments of humanism at
large, dynamically engaged within and as part of the
socially realized protocols that define sites of
communication and sources of meaning” (153).
In what ways do more recent new media (e.g., video
games) display the bias of their “socially realized
protocols” like Phonographs and photography did?
If the definition of new media depends on how
production and consumption get defined within social
contexts, then it behooves us to devote special attention
to the social contexts surrounding production and
consumption of media.