By Lisa Gitelman - New Media, 1740-1915: 1st (first) Edition

by Lisa Gitelman

Reminding us that all media were once new, this book challenges the notion that to study new media is to study exclusively today's new media. Examining a variety of media in their historic contexts, it explores those moments of transition when new media were not yet fully defined and their significance was still in flux. Examples range from familiar devices such as the telephone and phonograph to unfamiliar curiosities such as the physiognotrace and the zograscope. Moving beyond the story of technological innovation, the book considers emergent media as sites of ongoing cultural exchange. It considers how habits and structures of communication can frame a collective sense of public and private and how they inform our apprehensions of the "real." By recovering different (and past) senses of media in transition, New Media, 1740-1915 promises to deepen our historical understanding of all media and thus to sharpen our critical awareness of how they acquire their meaning and power.

Genres: History

Unknown Binding

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

Lisa Gitelman is Professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture and Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era and the editor of "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron and New Media, 1740–1915.

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's nothing to dislike about the motivation for this book. In examining the lives of old media when they were new, it self-consciously puts itself in Carolyn Marvin's territory of historical scholarship. Some of the contributions hold up to this standard quite nicely, others don't successfully evoke the period as well as she does. Similarly, the theoretical bent of many of these essays sometimes seems overwrought. While most of the authors self-consciously avoid making inappropriate comparisons between old and new technologies, their theoretical reach is nonetheless marred by attempts to suggest that the contemporary significances of the technologies they write on. For instance, the suggestion that that the physiognotrace (actually a word) helped citizens to imagine themselves as Jeffersonian democratic subjects strikes me as absurd, and none of the archival evidence was significant enough to convince me otherwise. Essays by Lisa Gitelman, Paul Young, and Ellen Gruber Garvey (though the latter makes some uncomfortable comparisons between web browsers and scrapbooks) are worthwhile. Everything else I could take or leave.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engrossing collection of essays on various medias of communication. I read several chapters relating to early optical telegraphy as it relates to pedagogy, zograscopes and their use in polite society, and the rift caused in Menonite and Amish communities over the use of the telephone. Very fun historical reads, especially if you are interested in communication history. Can't vouch for all of the contributor's writing but the few I read were engrossing and the remaining chapters were tantalizing...Now, if only there were more time...

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

In their introduction, Gitelman and Pingree question the two "futurological tropes" related to modern media: 1) the idea of supersession, which believes that new media replace old media, and 2) the idea of increasing transparency, where it's believed that newer media mediate less (xiii).

In "Zograscopes, Virtual Reality, and the Mapping of Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century England," Erin C. Blake argues that zograscopes of the mid-18th century allowed for the creation of "a virtual space that was domestic and public at the same time," allowing "observers to imagine a new relationship with the nondomestic world around them"—a space that could be available and controlled, dynamic yet polite (5). The depictions created by zograscopes allowed for the commodification of space (14) and allowed the enjoyment of space within the private sphere of the home (20).

In "Heads of State: Profiles and Politics in Jeffersonian America," Wendy Bellion argues that the physiognotrace, which traced profiles, appealed to people because of their "actual representation, a period rhetoric that optimistically imagined political representation to be direct, particular, and true" (32).

In "Telegraphy's Corporeal Fictions," Katherine Stubbs historicizes anonymity online through the telegraph, which allowed for anonymity and masquerading (92). She focuses on the social drama around the technology, rather than the technology itself (93), and explores literature about telegraphy in the 19th century, which include tropes such as the "depiction of the female operator as a threat to the technology" (98), the suspicious of women as morally suspect and deceiving of men (98-99).

In "Scissoring and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating," Ellen Gruber Garvey explores the practices of scrapbooking in the 19th century, arguing that "A variety of technologies have long existed to assist readers in managing the confusing abundance of texts" (209). She writes, "The scrapbook asserted nondominant, if not subversive, readings" and that they were not original, but reused and recirculated material, "making the old continually new" (214). Scrabooking was also "an accession for domestic sociability" (220). We might understand scrapbooking in similar ways as the Web: bricolage, repurposing, and recirculating material (224).

[Pinar G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought to learn about Communication history when I bought this book. Disappointed but it still has interesting pieces, check out the articles first.