The title of Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New hammers home the idea 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 that “media determine our situation.” What matters to Gitelman, beyond the materiality of media itself, is fleshing out the social and economic forces into which new media are born.

“Although McLuhan’s name is no longer a buzzword in the popular vernacular—or even in the communication classroom—we are living in an era when [his] predictions . . . are in evidence all around us. His variety of technological determinism is instructive.”