Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (review)

What does it mean for this review to appear in both print and in digital media? What role does the medium play in the experience of what follows? How does the newsprint or hard drive on which this content has been inscribed shape the interpretation of the text as a document? Lisa Gitelman's Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture considers these kinds of queries in examining how new media "are experienced and studied as historical subjects" (1). Her answers provide a way into conceptualizing both new media and the practice of media history.

In her introduction, she notes the difficult task of doing media history without resorting to an essentializing that effectively accords media their own kind of power or conflates them with technologies. This project is further complicated by the fact that media are always already representing and constituting what counts as adequate representation as they mediate, especially with reference to the representation of the past. As such, media function in a kind of reflexive manner in both representing the past and being materially imbricated in an encounter with it. Gitelman argues that studying the emergence of a new medium enables insight into the ways in which its representation functions are constructed. However, media can also be taken for granted once their representation functions have been naturalized. Attending to media as historical subjects renders visible this naturalized transparency and raises the kinds of questions Gitelman explores here.

Given that Gitelman defines media "as socially realized structures of communication," she grapples with questions of agency, both individual and technological (7). With questions of agency come questions of potential determinism. Gitelman attempts to avoid these implicitly technological determinist positions by situating the newness of media within their respective social and economic contexts while emphasizing how the materiality of media can shape these communicatively constituted contexts. For her, "the social experience of meaning [is] a material fact" (18). Her specific focus invokes the narrow chronological periods in which the inscription media of the phonograph (in part 1) and the Internet (in part 2) arise, those media whose representation is both material and semiotic.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide the clearest defense of her thesis in examining how the inscriptions of the phonograph and their subsequent circulation shaped the construction of media publics and public life. Gitelman's exploration of how the first phonographs' inscriptions of sound on foil occurring at interactive phonograph exhibitions offers insight into how publics understood speech inscribed on paper. In addressing how the materiality of the medium would guide its meaning, Gitelman explains how the inscribed tinfoil that audiences would take home with them from these exhibitions served as the physical symbol of an authentic shared and culturally legitimated public experience in a manner different from print. Gitelman suggests these exhibitions furthered a feeling of national consensus as participating audiences became part of a technologically advanced, recorded public comprised of anonymous and distant members.

Chapter 2 addresses how the phonograph was appropriated in the social and economic context of American culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Where Edison initially intended the phonograph to serve as a dictation recording device, Gitelman explores how it came to be appropriated more popularly as a musical amusement machine. Gitelman's definition of medium grounds her methodology as she applies the idea that media technologies ought to be approached from the perspective of their users and not exclusively that of their producers. Those readers familiar with media studies scholarship may note some similarities in this approach to the audience-centric analyses offered by Janice Radway in her discussion of romance novel readers and Ien Ang in her study of Dallas fans. In avoiding a political economic perspective, Gitelman advocates the importance of seeing a new medium's function defined by its users rather than by those prescribing its specific use or even by the medium itself. In making this move, Gitelman successfully dislodges what she deems to be the...