New Media, 1740-1915 (review)

I dug into Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree's book while attending a conference at the University of Georgia. The weather was typically humid for June in Athens, and the cover left navy blue blotches on my perspiring fingertips. This irked me at first, but as I made my way through the essays, leaving fingerprints on page corners, I learned to appreciate this semipermanent, physical reminder of the materiality of print. Gitelman and Pingree's well-researched collection of ten essays is a fine prescription for anyone hoodwinked by the transparency of media technology—and that is everyone.

The introduction to New Media reads almost like a manifesto: "this collection challenges the notion that to study 'new media' is to study today's new media" (p. xii). As the authors note, the growing field of "new media studies" or "digital media studies" seems to focus exclusively on a revolution wrought by computer-mediated communication, as if the camera, gramophone, and telegraph (not to mention the physiognotrace, phenakistoscope, and phonogram) are not even blips on the screen. It would seem, then, that New Media is an attempt by historians of technology to reclaim territory from the posthistorical theorizing common in new media studies.

But even with a guiding maxim of "all media were once new media" (p. 12) this collection demonstrates that rigorous, historical research can share a party line with contemporary cultural theory. Erin C. Blake, for example, draws on Michel DeCerteau to demonstrate how, in the 1750s, the zograscope helped polite society navigate public space. And Patricia Crane's postcolonial, Foucauldian reading of nineteenth-century schoolhouse pedagogy sheds a whole new light on a seemingly recent and innocuous term, "instructional technology." In short, it is refreshing and enlightening to see terms such as "bricolage," "disembodiment," and "panoptical" mingling with the technologically savvy polite society of 1740-1915.

As a whole, these authors coerced me into questioning the validity of the term "new media studies." This collection, capable of inflicting a disciplinary identity crisis, has tempted me to revisit documents on my hard drive, delete the multiple instances of "new media" and replace them with . . . well, with what? That is the question. After all, if the zograscope was "new media" to the polite society of the 1750s, then digital images, web pages, and MP3 files can safely be called new media by contemporary (though admittedly less polite) society.

Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (2001)—against which New Media might be considered a bold counterstudy—defines new media as a recent development: "graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets of computer data. In short, media become new media" (p. 25). Is it possible to reconcile this understanding of new media with the historicized version proposed by Gitelman and Pingree? Maybe reconciliation is not the appropriate solution. There are two distinct definitions of the term "new" at work here, and they can exist concurrently. To Gitelman and Pingree, the "newness" lies in the novelty of technological innovations as they first interact within a given social milieu. To Manovich, "newness" is not so much novelty as it is renewal or transformation: computers turn media into "new media" through a process of electronic digitization. For example, through computer-generated special effects and nonlinear video editing, "cinema becomes a slave of the computer" (p. 25).

Rather than dwell on this semantic distinction, it might be more useful to suggest how these two visions of "new media" can interact in ways that strengthen our understanding of technology. For those in the burgeoning field of new media studies, Gitelman and Pingree's collection is a call for more historical perspective and a warning against "chronocentricity." For historians of technology, Manovich's work (which actually does engage in historicizing) and other new media studies texts, suggest how contemporary critical theory might help supplement and sustain the study...