Gitelman’s Media History

1. Gitelman’s Media History Cody Reimer New Media Studio, Prof. Blackmon Spring 2012, Purdue

2. “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).

3. Phonograph

5. “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).

7. 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]ilmlighting 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).

8. “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).

9. 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).

10. “[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).

11. ARPANET

13. “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 early-century 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).

15. “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).

16. “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.