In this book, Gitlamen looks at media as historical subjects. “[M]edia are historical at several different levels. First, media are themselves denizens of the past…But media are also historical because they are functionally integral to a sense of the past. Not only do people learn about the past by means of media representations – book, films, and so on – using media also involves implicit encounters with the past that produced the representations in question” (like a photograph representing the past but also existing in the present) (5). As she explains the process of the introduction to the acceptance of new media, Gitlamen “locate[s] new media at the intersection of authority and amnesia…[M]edia become authoritative as the social processes of their definition and dissemination are separated out an forgotten, and as the social processes of protocol formation and acceptance get ignored” (6-7).
Any version of “history comes freighted with a host of assumptions about what is important and what isn’t – about who is significant and who isn’t – as well as about the meanings of media, qualities of human communication, and causal mechanisms that account for historical change” (2). Giltamen argues that the prevailing history of media is “a tendency to naturalize or essentialize media – in short, to cede to them a history that is more powerfully theirs than ours” (2). Agency, then, is given to media (and technology) rather than to humans and social and economic systems. Instead, she wants us to attend to the ways that media and human (and their social and economic structures) shaped each other: “new media emerge into and engage their cultural and economic contexts [and] new media are shaped by and help to shape the semiotic, perceptual, and epistemic conditions that attend and prevail” (11).
“Media are so integral to a sense of what representation itself is, and what counts as adequate – and thereby commodifiable – representation...It’s not just that each new medium represents its predecessors…but rather,…new media provide new sites for the ongoing and vernacular experience of representation” (4). Media “mean[s] what it [does] because of the ways it might resemble and – particularly – because of the ways it might be distinguished from existing machines” (25). So, for instance, “the first phonographs were initially understood according to the practices of writing and reading, particularly in their relation to speaking, and not, for instance, according to the practices of commodification of musical notation, composition, and performance” (25). “[N]ew media emerge as local anomalies that are also deeply embedded within the ongoing discursive formations of their day, within that what, who, how and why of public memory, public knowledge, and public life” (29). “[M]edia and their publics coevolve, and…one of the evolutionary forces at stake might best be described as a sociological tensions between users and publics, where publics are comprised of users, but where users are not always constitutive members of the public sphere. More, “modern forms of mediation are in part defined by normative constructions of difference, whether gender, racial or other versions of difference” (84).
As new media emerge and integrated into social practices, terminology and metaphors shaped and are shaped by the new media. For instance, the term “record” originally meant “inscribed and factual embodiments of data important or potentially important to an abstract audience” (46); however, after the invention to the phonograph, record started to also be associated with the physical artifact that inscribes and plays back sounds and the inscription of sounds for playback.
Impetus for book: “I begin with the truism that all media were once new as well as the assumption, widely shared with others, that looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped” (1).
Chapter 1: “The earliest history of recorded sound points broadly to the coevolution of new media and media publics. The prephonograph media public in the United Sates was characterized by an increasingly diverse and mobile population, and by the dominance of print forms that were increasingly numerous and may have been increasingly uncertain in their significance for readers. As such, audiences experienced and helped to construct the logic of recorded sound, responding to specific material features of the new medium as well as the changing contexts of its introduction Relevant material features included things like tinfoil sheets and rubber hearing tubes, while relevant contexts rant the gamut from lyceum halls and barrooms to the existing organization of the local and national press, from the immediate circumstances of keeping tinfoil souvenirs to the abstractions of the public sphere, which located the kinds of things worth keeping at all” (57).
Chapter 2: “I have been suggesting that ‘inventing’ or ‘producing’ recorded sound cannot be narrowed to the activities of Edison and Berliner [i.e. the inventors], or the efforts of corporate entities invested in the manufacture, advertisement, or sale of phonographs and records at the turn of the twentieth century. To my mind, the medium of recorded sound provides an exemplary instance of cultural production snatched form the hands of putative producing agents…[T]his was a medium deeply defined by users and the changing conditions of use. Understanding its social construction suggestively complicates received notions of new media as purposeful outcomes of corporate strategizing at the same time that it provides an opportunity to think a little more broadly about the tangled intertexts of mass culture” (83-4)