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The Dead Media Notebook
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"Mutant media par excellence — part steampunk abstraction, part Dada art project, part random-access database, and part historico-technical archive. Long live dead media." Sean Matharoo, Science Fiction Studies Issue 128, March 2016
"An excellent resource for scholars and artists working across a wide spectrum of disciplines.... any one of these remarkable notes could be further developed or augmented, and the contributors have done a commendable job peppering their entries with secondary sources for future research. There is absolutely no reason not to download this timely compendium" Sean Matharoo, Science Fiction Studies Issue 128, March 2016
About this book
From Pigeon Post to Magic Lanterns to the Talking View-Master, this book is a compendium of dead and forgotten media formats.
In 1995, Bruce Sterling issued a challenge; “I'll personally offer a CRISP FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL for the first guy, gal, or combination thereof to write and publish THE DEAD MEDIA HANDBOOK.”
The handbook would be “a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media, dead media… a rich, witty, insightful, profusely illustrated, perfect bound, acid-free-paper coffee-table book... by some really with-it, cutting-edge early-21st century publisher. The kind of book that will appear in seventeen different sections of your local chain store: Political Affairs, Postmodern Theory, Computer Science, Popular Mechanics, Design Studies, the coffee table art book section, the remainder table.”
Bruce appealed for help collecting stories and notes about dead media, and over the next five years, notes and suggestions accumulated at deadmedia.org.
But the book never happened. The website has survived, gradually succumbing to link-rot as the Internet evolved and grew around it.
Twenty years later, Bruce’s idea is more relevant than ever. As Benedict Evans said “For the first time ever, the tech industry is selling not just to big corporations or middle-class families but to four fifths of all the adults on earth - it is selling to people who don’t have mains electricity or running water and substitute spending on cigarettes for mobile.”
This collection is not The Dead Media Handbook. It is a lightly edited collection of those nearly 500 notes and contributions. Inside, you’ll find lists of early mainframe computers, speculations about the multi-dimensional mental images created by Peruvian knotted-string books, details of Timothy Leary’s experiential typewriter and a lengthy analysis of the Viewmaster and it’s competitors.
"Mutant media par excellence — part steampunk abstraction, part Dada art project, part random-access database, and part historico-technical archive. Long live dead media." Sean Matharoo, Science Fiction Studies Issue 128, March 2016
"An excellent resource for scholars and artists working across a wide spectrum of disciplines.... any one of these remarkable notes could be further developed or augmented, and the contributors have done a commendable job peppering their entries with secondary sources for future research. There is absolutely no reason not to download this timely compendium" Sean Matharoo, Science Fiction Studies Issue 128, March 2016
About this book
From Pigeon Post to Magic Lanterns to the Talking View-Master, this book is a compendium of dead and forgotten media formats.
In 1995, Bruce Sterling issued a challenge; “I'll personally offer a CRISP FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL for the first guy, gal, or combination thereof to write and publish THE DEAD MEDIA HANDBOOK.”
The handbook would be “a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media, dead media… a rich, witty, insightful, profusely illustrated, perfect bound, acid-free-paper coffee-table book... by some really with-it, cutting-edge early-21st century publisher. The kind of book that will appear in seventeen different sections of your local chain store: Political Affairs, Postmodern Theory, Computer Science, Popular Mechanics, Design Studies, the coffee table art book section, the remainder table.”
Bruce appealed for help collecting stories and notes about dead media, and over the next five years, notes and suggestions accumulated at deadmedia.org.
But the book never happened. The website has survived, gradually succumbing to link-rot as the Internet evolved and grew around it.
Twenty years later, Bruce’s idea is more relevant than ever. As Benedict Evans said “For the first time ever, the tech industry is selling not just to big corporations or middle-class families but to four fifths of all the adults on earth - it is selling to people who don’t have mains electricity or running water and substitute spending on cigarettes for mobile.”
This collection is not The Dead Media Handbook. It is a lightly edited collection of those nearly 500 notes and contributions. Inside, you’ll find lists of early mainframe computers, speculations about the multi-dimensional mental images created by Peruvian knotted-string books, details of Timothy Leary’s experiential typewriter and a lengthy analysis of the Viewmaster and it’s competitors.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
921 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 6, 2015
29 people are currently reading
99 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Sterling
356 books1,202 followersBruce Sterling is an author, journalist, critic and a contributing editor of Wired magazine. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns and introductions to books by authors ranging from Ernst Jünger to Jules Verne. His non-fiction works include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2003) and Shaping Things (2005).
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 23, 2018
It is exactly what it says it is, a number of accounts of dead media.
While much of the content would be improved by pictures, it's hard to fault it for that.
An interesting read.
While much of the content would be improved by pictures, it's hard to fault it for that.
An interesting read.
March 29, 2019
This was a very interesting look at dead media, some of which I have witnessed and used through my lifetime. Introduced to many forms I had never before heard of. Great reference.
November 23, 2015
Sterling's notebook is a real treat. I have not read the entire book but dip in and out whenever I feel like it. Each time I discover a new curious technology, communication device. I think the notebook is free on Kindle. What are you waiting for?
Want to read
April 16, 2015Smashwords
July 15, 2015
very interesting catalog/assay of extinct forms of media.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews