Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (review)

Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. By Lisa Gitelman. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. viii+282. $49.50/$19.95.

Lisa Gitelman, who teaches English and media studies at the Catholic University of America, has written another of those books that attempt to "locate" technology amid a dynamic welter of cultural relationships and meanings. In this instance, the technologies in question all deal with the spoken or written word. Gitelman wants to show that late Victorians' conceptions of the written word influenced their technological innovations and that, in turn, their technologies changed the way they thought about texts. No simplistic "inventor/producer/consumer" mentality here.

Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines examines five "experiments and innovations in the area of inscription" (p. 2) between 1877 and 1914 that influenced (and were influenced by) the 1877 introduction of a phonographic device by Thomas Edison. These include the practice of shorthand, letters to Edison expressing public expectations of technological change, patent and copyright laws, the labeling of musical recordings and silent films as consumable performances, and the typewriter.

Gitelman's anticipated audience is "scholars of literature, linguistics and communication" (p. 8), and her goal is to "explore writing and reading as culturally and historically contingent experiences and, at the same time, to broaden the current widely held view of technology in its relation to textuality" (p. 1). It is this latter goal that will most interest historians of technology, for Gitelman makes the intriguing assertion that technologies take the form they do because of preexisting cultural assumptions, that is, that "technologies of inscription are materialized theories of language" (dust jacket).

Chapter 1 examines different methods of shorthand proposed in the last half of the nineteenth century. Like the phonograph, shorthand stores up words spoken in the past so that they can be reproduced in the present. Like the phonograph, it received much public attention because it offered much the same thing as a phonograph recording, a verbatim reproduction of a text. Thus, shorthand contributed to the evolution of a modern understanding of public and bureaucratic life, an understanding that emphasized the importance of text and the potential of objectivity.

Chapter 2 depicts different visions of the phonograph's future embedded in the culture's attitudes toward technology in general. Gitelman juxtaposes Edison's own imaginative anticipations for the invention with letters sent to him by ordinary people encouraging him to follow their technological visions. These visions turn out to be wide-ranging, and Gitelman's brief exegesis of some twenty thousand letters provides some of the more cogent and entertaining material in the book.

Chapter 3 examines the phonograph's accomplishments--storing and replaying sound--in the context of the patent system and copyright laws. Here Gitelman focuses attention on the myriad ways in which technical literature and commercial products, particularly early recordings, "exhibit a rhetoric of exclusion on the bases of class, race, and gender" (p. 121).

Chapter 4 investigates the phonograph's transition from invention to consumer product by an analysis of the label texts found on recordings and silent film reels. In particular, Gitelman focuses our attention on producers' efforts to define for their audiences the qualities that consumers should desire in these new technologies. This is an interesting case study in the turn-of-the-century development of market characteristics and definitions of product "quality."

Gitelman succinctly describes her goals for the fifth chapter: "I will demonstrate how the connections between psychology, spiritualism, and typing in the 1890s find resolution within the term automatic writing" (p. 186). What follows ranges from Edison and Christopher Sholes to Gertrude Stein and Bram Stoker's Dracula, with an emphasis on the notion that typing introduced modern conceptions of gendered labor and human/ machine interfaces. Mirroring her approach to technology, Gitelman's own presentation is "plural, decentered, indeterminate." None of the chapters ends in a satisfactory conclusion that...