New Media, 1740-1915 (review)

Over a quarter century after his death, Marshall McLuhan seems more than ever our contemporary. Modern historians and theorists of media may reject his technological determinism and his tone of breathless prophecy about the electronic convergence of humanity, but McLuhan's focus on the deep connections between cultures and their media resonates with our contemporary experiences of media transitions and cultural change. In scholarly terms, the historically informed study of media offers a powerful opportunity for charting the intersection of social discourse and social practice. Thinking about the cultural history of media—about how people stored and transmitted data and human expression, within particular cultural contexts—means thinking about the links between what people recorded or transmitted and the practical, material frameworks in which they could set it down or send it off.

Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree's New Media, 1740–1915 exemplifies the turn to media history in contemporary humanities scholarship. With its interdisciplinary mix of contributors, most of them comparatively junior, the collection suggests that media studies will continue to offer a point of intellectual convergence and concern even as our own new media become old. While only a fraction of the material in the book might qualify as "Victorian" in a technical sense—its half-dozen articles on mid- and late- nineteenth-century media tend to center on the United States—in fact the entire volume will fascinate Victorianists with any interest in media. Many of its media will not be new to scholars of the nineteenth century; for that matter, some of them were not new during the periods in which they are studied here. But on the whole, the essays amply realize Pingree and Gitelman's goal of examining a time in the history of a medium when "its meaning—its potential, its limitations, the publicly agreed upon sense of what it does, and for whom—has not yet been pinned down" (xv). The pieces provide historically specific, nuanced, and sometimes arresting accounts of the cultural history of an array of media, from familiar technologies (the telegraph, phonograph, telephone, early cinema) to vanished amusements (the zograscope), and to practices that we might not at first think of as media at all (silhouettes or scrapbooking).

After a brief introduction and a playful sequence of miscellaneous media- cultural "documents," New Media proceeds roughly chronologically, but different themes emerge as the essays progress. Its early articles explore a medium's ability to help its private users conceive of social or public life. Erin Blake's persuasive essay on the "zograscope" (a convex lens that gave printed illustrations a three-dimensional look) examines how mid-eighteenth-century Britons used the device to picture an evacuated urban space suited for polite, abstract sociability—in essence, to visualize Jürgen Habermas's public sphere. Wendy Bellion provides a fascinating cultural history of the "physiognotrace" (a device for tracing facial profiles) in early nineteenth-century America, although her claim that the instrument "enact[ed] a fantasy of Jeffersonian political subjectivity" seems a bit sketchier (31). Patricia Crain draws on Joseph Lancaster's educational appropriation of optical telegraphy to analyze the way in which his system disciplined Native American children into signifiers of acculturation into white society.

As the collection enters the age of technical media, its essays explore local episodes in the stories of more or less familiar nineteenth-century technologies. Katherine Stubbs examines the status of gender and sexuality in American telegraphic fiction, much of it written by telegraphers themselves at a moment when women were entering the field. Laura Burd Schiavo considers the mutable cultural meaning of the stereoscope as it changed from a scientific instrument meant to illustrate the unreliability of our eyes to a commercial product that promised perfect vision. Similarly, Diane Zimmerman Umble analyzes the "disputed meanings" awarded to the telephone by the Old Order Mennonites and Amish; such disputes intersected with concerns not only about communicating with outsiders, but also with internal conflicts concerning the practice...