By Lisa Gitelman ( Author ) [ Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture By Sep-2008 Paperback

by Lisa Gitelman

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Research, Theory, Academia, Read For School, Historical

Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

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

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction to this little book is fascinating. Gitelman defines media as "socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where comunication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation (7)." This definition allows Gitelman to resist technologically determinist accounts (such as Kittler's) while rightly placing the agency back with people embedded in cultures and societies.

For Gitelman, to understand media we have to situate "new media" in the context of old media. For example, the phonograph was originally conceived of and understood as a dictation machine for mechanical writing. In this way, the story of the revolutionary impacts of new media are always achievements of history. And yet, we quickly develop a sort of cultural amnesia regarding the negotiation of the conditions of medial transparency (or the mythical separation of information from its technosocial substrates).

Gitelman's concern is particularly important in that she recognizes that media organize the "data of culture." At any given point in history, available methods of mediation determine just what and who and how history is recorded. More broadly, it determines "what counts as knowledge and what doesn't (22)." This, of course, presents problems for doing the history of media- new media prompts us to scour old media in news ways- aware of the limitations of our current tools, it gives us a sensitivity to "history as itself historically produced (150)."

My favorite part of Gitelman's account is her argument about how media entail a certain representation of a public with whom one communicates. In this way, the social and cultural stakes of defining new media are concurrent with the stakes surrounding inclusion or exclusion from what she construes as a Habermasian-ish "public." At the same time, Gitelman cleverly acknowledges that some users simply aren't represented in the constructed public. For example, black audiences were completely absent from the construction of the 1920s radio public. Gitelman calls this a continual tension between the sociology of users and of publics (whose representations are often constructed by corporations or commercial entities). Users, Gitelman shows, often have great impacts on the meaning and forms of emerging media. In this way, attending to both users and publics can help "bedevil the strict dichotomy of production and consumption (60)."

I think that's awesome. One major problem I had with Gitelman's discussion of the relationship between media and publics was the absence of advertising history. The "publics" being created were being done so in particular ways by particular people or companies for particular reasons. Constructed publics shouldn't be equated with "high society" in any facile way. This also suggests how the notion of a monolithic public could be challenged by attending to users, as Gitelman suggests, but also by removing the agency from abstract "publics" or "commerce" and situating it with the people and social activities that created these representations. Surely, given Gitelman's stance on agency, she would approve of this suggestion.

As for the content of her examples, the first two chapters can be thought of as a very good literature review of detailed historical studies of the phonograph and musical cultural in the U.S. As someone familiar with this literature I can say that Gitelman doesn't offer much new stuff, but she does a fine job of showing how this material relates to her analytic framework. As for chapters 3 and 4, I won't lie, I skimmed them. They focus a lot more on inscription and representation in the context of ARPANET and the Web, but they lack the historical relevance of her previous chapters. For example, her concern over users all but evaporates in these chapters. Her overall project seems to be to show how the new media is originally fully visible in its representation alongside "content" but later becomes invisible as we accept the social and cultural norms that have evolved surrounding its use.

Overall, this book is very worth your time if you care about media history, which Gitelman thinks you all should because it might just underlay all of the ways in which we are capable of archiving, organizing and even recognizing our cultural "data" as relevant information and not just noise.

[Keri Solaris · Rating 3 out of 5]

RTC

[Ed Summers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, mainly for the author's technique of exploring what media means in our culture by using two examples, separated in time: the phonograph and the Internet. She admits that in some ways this amounts to comparing apples to oranges, and there is definitely a creative tension in the book. Gitelman's emphasis is not that media technologies change society and culture, but that a technology is introduced and is in turn shaped by its particular social and historical context, which then reshapes society and culture.

I define media as socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation. As such, media are unique and complicated historical subjects.

It's tempting to talk about media technologies as if their ultimate use is somehow inevitable. For example, Gitelman discusses how the initial commercial placement of the phonograph centered largely around the idea that it would transform dictation and the office. Early demonstrations intended to increase sales of the device focused on recording and playback, rather than simply playback. They didn't initially see the market for recorded music, which would so transform the device. To some extent we've cynically come to expect this out of marketing and "evangelism" about media technologies all the time. But this mode of thinking is also present in purely technical discussions, which don't account for the placement of the technology in a particular social context.

Getting a sense of the social context you are in the middle of, as opposed to one you one you are historically removed from, presents some challenges. I think this difficulty is more evident in the second part of the book which focuses on the Internet and the World Wide Web against a backdrop of libraries and bibliography. Like many others I imagine, my knowledge of JCR Licklider's influence on the development of ARPAnet, and the Internet was largely culled from Where Wizards Stay Up Late. I had no idea, until reading Always Already New, that Licklider contracted with the Council on Library Resources (now Council on Library and Information Resources) to write a report Libraries of the Future on the topic of how computing would change libraries.

I enjoyed the discussion of the role that the Request for Comment (RFC) played on the Internet. How these documents that were initially shared via the post, helped bootstrap the technologies that would create the Internet that allowed them to be shared as electronic documents or text. I didn't know about the RFC-Online project that Jon Postel started right before his death, to recover the earliest RFCs that had been already lost. Gitelman's study of linking, citation and "publishing" on the Web was also really enjoyable, mainly because of her orientation to these topics:

I will argue that far from making history impossible, the interpretive space of the World Wide Web can prompt history in exciting new ways.

All this being said, I finished the book with the sneaking feeling that I needed to reread it. Gitelman's thesis was subtle enough that it was only when I got to the end that I felt like I understood it: the strange loop that thinking and media participate in, and how difficult (and yet fruitful) it is to talk about media and their social context. Maybe this was also partly the effect of reading it on a Kindle :-)

[Sally Sugarman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is talking about the nature of history. She says that trying to do media history raises many issues. She focuses on the development of the phonograph and the world wide web. She has a chapter about each that is detailed and focused on a narrow band of time. Then for each of these, she has another chapter that looks at the social implications. She says that the new media emerge or at least are thought of in terms of the old. That is a familiar idea. McLuhan says something like that in that we use new media initially in terms of the old. But she says that the phonograph was a way of inscribing speech. Edison saw it first as being a method for taking dictation. The author makes an interesting distinction in this section about producer and consumer. She maintains that the consumer is seen as not having agency. The producer of the phonograph is male and the consumer is female. However, she says it is more complicated since it is the consumer as agent who actually decides how the new medium will be used. So, it was the consumer that saw the phonograph as an amusement conveying music into the home and taking the place of the piano. Gitelman offers a detailed and fascinating history of the evolution of the phonograph that was soon to be replaced by the radio. She makes the point that social context is as important as the technology. The world was changing at that time and those changes effected the progress and development of the phonograph. She also makes the distinction between media and medium because she says the use of the word media is deceptive, suggesting that all of the media are one, rather than diversified. She challenges the idea of doing media history because the media is both object and process of such study. With the Internet, she makes the point that much of it is hidden because we do not see the process by which the messages are conveyed. There is a language underlying the language that we see. It is also constantly changing. It is information without intelligence. She gives some examples of this such as typing in instances of the Internet mentioned in the New York Times. The date of 1854 comes up because the computer mistakes internet and interest. She then talks about the OED as an example of 19th century scholarship that showed a history of the language because entries are dated. However, the Internet is changing so rapidly and is so instantaneous that history is lost. It is like looking at television series on DVDs or on TV Land long after they have been off the air. We don’t have a context, or the context is changed, because of our knowledge of what happened afterwards. This made me think of our history of television course which was altered as we looked at examples of old programs or looking at old movies in the light of new ones. She cites the quote from Chief Joseph, “I will fight no more forever.” Did he really say that? We can not know because we did not speak his language and it was written down and not recorded. . Another source has him saying, “I will fight no more.” Unlike clips on YouTube that can play tapes of Cheney referring to invading Iraq as a quagmire, we don’t have such evidence. She also talks about who decides what is history. Who collects the records? Which ones are saved? A question regularly asked by historians since the seventies. This is a most thought provoking discussion. I am sure I have only touched the surface of the issues that it raises through these very specific examples.

[Ben Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Always Already New is an enjoyable and stimulating read--a rare combination especially in the world of media history, which is exactly what Gitelman is reinvigorating with this book. I am personally indebted to her reconceptualization of new media as an inherently historical object, something she takes up squarely here and in New Media, 1740-1915. The basic idea--at least what I take from her look at an obviously historical medium (the phonograph in part I) and a less obviously historical medium (the digital document in part II)--is that media in history and new media share an ongoing tradition of "continued indeterminacy." Thus if one wants to understand what is new about any media, whether recent or ancient, look to the cultural currency that animates and appreciates it at a given time. Uncovering the disputes, debates, and economies of value, broadly read, that layer a medium's meaning constitutes what she and a group of European media theorists (led by Siegfried Zielinski) have recently called "media archaeology," a pragmatic approach to unearth the hidden histories of media. I'm not sure I am ready to take up that approach per se, but I am eager to credit Gitelman's work for inspiring whatever good may be in "And Lead Us Not into Thinking the New is New: A Bibliographic Case for New Media History" and related pieces.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gitelman's book, by making successful attempts to modernize (or at least re-figure through modern prejudices) old media (Part 1) and then give some historical precedent upon which to base our analyses of new media (Part 2) deserves more praise than I'll be able to render in the confines of a few hundred words. Her attentiveness to language, both her own as well as that of the critics and archives she explores, renders her careful analysis all the more intricate. Thus, whether she's writing about the portable phonograph or the personal computer, her treatment of these objects as ones that exist both in and through language at once allows her to effectively mobilize a sort of Foucauldian analysis of media while similarly prompting her to engage with the actual physical and social realities that surround such discourse. The result is a thoroughly realized portrait of the spaces that new media occupies that gives equal attention to the material and metaphorical aspects of meaning. And, as Gitelman makes clear in her epilogue, the potential of such a media history is vast: "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. Media history offers nothing less -- if also a great deal more -- than the material cultures of knowledge and information."

[Mjhancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gitelman's book juxtaposes two different moments in media history: the early development of the phonograph, and the early development of the Internet. I like the way the sections parallel each other, and it's clear that Gitelman is not just pursuing an errant connection, but drawing out a possible technique for examining a medium. On the other hand, the book does feel a little unfocused in the second half. In part, that's due to the immateriality of Internet as a medium, which is largely Gitelman's point, but it feels like her writing could use a little tightening. Overall, though, the book was engrossing and thought-provoking.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work that re-examines how media comes to be defined. You wouldn't think that early sound recordings 1878-1910s would have useful parallels for the digital age, but Gitelman finds a way. Really, though, this book is about understanding ways in which to perform media history, as well examining what counts as "facticity" and the relationship between social/cultural conditions of media and emergent publics. It may sound like a dry read, but it really isn't.

[モーリー · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book, but not only is it a chore to read, the author only "suggests" things rather than committing to conclusions and argument. It would have been much stronger and more convincing had she made a commitment to her positions.

[FJohn Rickert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does exactly what Media Archeology is suppose to be. It puts into context not just how we read certain media now, but how they were seen from their beginnings. It also ties theory to history in a way that makes both seem more meaningful.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our friend Lisa wrote this and it is completely brilliant, although I'm afraid it is taking me longer to read than it took her to write.

[Eva Rajher · Rating 2 out of 5]

did not read a single page of this book. however i did write a 1300 word review of it for uni so this feels fair. shoutout to the internet. this book was horrible in my opinion - tried reading a paragraph where a sentence just never ended and it really couldn’t have been more boring. this could be like a five page article at most, but def not a 200 page book.

[Jessica Gordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have never had such a visceral reaction to a piece of writing, ever. I truly hated the writing in the first half of this book. It made me angry. It made me curse. It made me write rude comments as marginalia.

I consider myself a good reader: yet, I could not, no matter how many times I read them, understand many of the sentences in the first two chapters (which constitute half the book). The sentences literally made no sense. Gittleman tried so hard to integrate research from so many vastly different fields that I often felt like there were end notes after every other sentence. And the sentences that contained the research, of course, went in vastly different directions, and without providing connections, background or context, Gitelman plunged forward ceaselessly. She literally refused to explain sentences that had no context yet appeared to be central to her argument, and then she would write like it all made perfect sense.

Her argument was weak. I don't mind that she merely suggests her notions, but I do mind that her main arguments were merely tacked on after the history, which regardless of what she says, was her main focus. The history was interesting but I wish she hadn't tried to make overly-profound statements about it. Some things are merely coincidence.

And then I began chapter 3. Chapters 3 and 4 (which are the second half of the book) read like they are written by a different author. While there are a handful of sentences reminiscent of the first two chapters, most of it makes fine sense--and is interesting. She still tries to make coincidences into profound theory, but seriously, either she write this years later or she intended to dramatically change her style.

This book frustrated me beyond belief. In terms of scholarly texts, the first half is simply bad writing. Bad, bad, bad writing. I wish I had a digital copy so I could copy and paste some of the sentences here so others could laugh--or if you appreciate the English language and enjoy research, more likely cry.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raises interesting questions.