Technology and Culture

Marcel O’Gorman

In the spring of 2007, the historic Capitol Theatre in Windsor, Ontario, was closed for good, due to a lack of interest in the performing arts. But before the windows were boarded up, the theater made one final attempt to boost support by scheduling an encore presentation of its most popular performance, Classic Albums Live (CAL): Led Zeppelin I. Note for note, cut for cut, the CAL troupe, dressed in plain jeans and black T-shirts, re-creates an entire album without all the kitschy glitter of a “tribute band.” Watching this performance—or listening to it with your eyes closed—is an uncanny experience. The musicians are paying tribute not to the band itself, but to the recording media, and their bodies serve only as a nostalgic gesture to a time when record albums told a story in ten tracks and vocal cords weren’t “corrected” with pitch-control devices. Of course, as Lisa Gitelman suggests in her rigorous monograph, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006, xiii+205, $36), there is nothing new about musical performers imitating the sounds of recording devices, and there is nothing rigorous about my anecdotal media-theorization of Classic Albums Live.

Four years ago I reviewed Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree’s New Media: 1740–1915 (2003). This diverse anthology established a new direction for media studies, away from the postmodernist theorization that seems to have characterized the field since its inception. As I wrote in that review, “New Media is an attempt by historians of technology to reclaim territory from the posthistorical theorizing common in new media studies” (Technology and Culture 45 [January 2004], p. 209). Gitelman takes this mission one step further in Always Already New, a title that hammers home the dictum that all media were once new media. But this monograph does not concern itself with making that argument once again as much as it does with correcting Marshall McLuhan’s dictum of “the medium is the message” and Friedrich Kittler’s dictum of “media determine our situation.” Gitelman’s approach to media history resists “thinking of media themselves as social and economic forces” and resists “the idea of an intrinsic technological logic” (p. 10). What matters then, beyond the materiality of media itself (which does matter a great deal to Gitelman, as it does to McLuhan and Kittler), is fleshing out the social and economic forces into which new media are born. This is a complex and daunting task, to be sure, but Gitelman handles it carefully by focusing on specific “case studies” and by limiting her investigation to two particular media phenomena: the phonograph and the web.

In the first section, “The Case of Phonographs,” Gitelman examines how this technology was received by “New Media Publics” in the 1870s as a sort of vaudeville apparatus, which evolved over the next couple of decades into a device for individual “New Media Users.” Whereas the traveling snake oil hawker of the early 1800s appealed to the docile bodies of skeptical crowds, Edison-sanctioned phonograph exhibits in the late 1870s served to give audiences a veritable out-of-body experience. Gitelman notes that after recording a snippet of their own voices and listening to it with uncanny pleasure, audience members would eagerly collect strips of foil from the cylinders, “authentication of actual sounds that had been shared” (p. 39). These strips of foil, each of which served as a material (though functionally useless) record of a precise event, tell us a great deal about the emergence of the phonograph in the newsprint-stained culture of the 1870s, just as the fonts used in J. C. R. Licklider’s Ph.D. dissertation tell us about the emergence of the web. Both of these technologies are about disembodiment, but they differ in important ways since, as Gitelman suggests, dematerialization “can only be experienced in relation to a preexisting sense of matter and materialization” (p. 86). This explains why her study focuses on newspapers and punch cards as well as wax cylinders and microchips. Gitelman’s work, after all, is about “records and documents” in general, with all of the etymological connotations that these words have accumulated.

The experience of reading Gitelman ’s history of the web in the second section of the book is, to borrow Janet Abbate’s description of using the ARPANET, “rather like taking a tank for a joyride” (p. 114). As Gitelman herself admits, the history of the web begins with the “paper cards and bureaucracy” that characterize cold war government-funded research (p. 86). But as her discussion of Licklider’s “self-writing” documents (pp. 98–107) waxes into a dissection of the Pentagon’s code-cluttered booklet “Scenarios for Using the ARPANET” (pp. 112–17), and then moves at last into the bracketed minutiae of the William Blake Archive’s cryptic revision history (pp. 141–45), an unsettling thought occurred to me: perhaps Gitelman’s well-disciplined and rigorous methodology, which eschews storytelling in the name of objectivity, is born of the same technobureaucratic ideology that gave us ARPANET. Always Already New, like much of the work in humanities computing today, struck me as the product of a higher education system that values data over aesthetics, lines of code over sonnets. And that is why this book left me longing for the visionary and unrigorous storytelling of both Friedrich Kittler and William Blake.

In the epilogue of Always Already New, Gitelman suggests that her version of media history offers “a methodological detour around the aesthetic” (p. 154). She also suggests that John Guillory employs a similar methodology in his book Cultural Capital (1993), which explores the crisis of the humanities in the late twentieth century. Ironically, Guillory himself notes in his study that an appeal to “rigor,” sponsored by the ruling technobureaucracy of universities, is precisely what led to the crisis of the humanities in the first place. The crisis was allayed momentarily in English departments when critical theory served to provide an “aura of rigor” to the humanities, but that time has passed. Today, humanities computing is attempting to be the rigorous savior of the humanities, and it should come as no surprise that the specialists in this area may soon be sharing the supercomputing power of the Pentagon. Given this situation, the second section of Gitelman’s book, both in method and content, serves not as an enlightening documentation of the past, but as a sobering harbinger of the anti-aesthetic, technocratic—and yes, perhaps posthuman—future of the humanities in a culture of data.

Gitelman concludes this coolly intelligent and rigorous study by noting that while she chose to focus on phonograph records and electronic documents, “one might think as well of draft cards, green cards, and other paperwork, for instance, or of missing minutes of audiotape, enigmatic assassination footage, or satellite images of suspected missile sites” (p. 155). I would hope that humanities scholars will indeed consider these topics very carefully, and that they will do so not only with a cold, technoscientific zeal for data, but also with the aesthetic enthusiasm and the subjective, risk-taking interest of a postmodern media critic or a William Blake.

Dr. O’Gorman is an associate professor in the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.