In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • In This Issue

Susan J. Douglas's "Some Thoughts on the Question 'How Do New ThingsHappen?'" serves as a reminder of the Leonardo da Vinci awardee's potential to open our attention onto a wide and changing world of interpretation. At the same time, Douglas's pointed observations match the eloquence and moral passion heard in SHOT's Fiftieth-Anniversary Plenary Session (Thomas Hughes, Wiebe Bijker, Rebecca Herzig, and John Staudenmaier, July 2009). Apart from encouraging readers to take Susan's address to some quiet place which favors reading aloud, we offer a loosely organized selection of texts that caught the editor's attention for insight and wit.

"The hams, on the other hand, loved the broadcast aspect of radio waves; they embraced broadcast and pushed it. Thus it was the hams who began broadcasting voice and music in the early 1920s and the hams who formed the incipient broadcast network. They were a subaltern subculture who used radio in insurgent ways"

(p. 296).

"I had had some second thoughts about social constructivism, as much as I embraced and valued it. In our insistence on including all actors and all struggles, had we at times constructed a playing field that was artificially level? Had we under-emphasized the role of power . . .?"

(p. 296).

". . . no one had written a history of radio that pondered, for a minute, what it meant to have a communications and entertainment technology that denies sight to its audience. What did it mean, in the visually saturated culture of the 1920s—with mass magazines, billboards, colored ads, tabloids, movies—for a people to have to return to listening, really listening?"

(p. 297).

"Because McLuhan was a technological determinist, he envisioned only a one-way trajectory for the media, independent of economic or corporate constraints. He failed to anticipate that technologies that enable us to look out beyond our borders can also encourage us to gaze at our navels"

(p. 300).

". . . one could argue that the great irony of all these media extensions—satellite transmission, cable, video technology, even the internet—is that they have instead promoted even more isolationist and ethnocentric views. Indeed, these communications technologies . . . have led to the 'implosion of culture'"

(p. 300).

". . . our media are not primarily telescopes, searching outward, as McLuhan insisted. They have become primarily microscopes, trained inside"

(p. 301).

"So I do think we need to give up on the notion of closure—although, of course, in the digital age, with things emerging and morphing at the speed of light, most of us have. But we should not give up on social constructivism's main point about the centrality of struggle, competition, and negotiation to the invention and diffusion process. . . . It is this contestation between technological affordances (including cognitive ones), institutional structures, and technological insurgencies that has constituted the mess of history I've tried to untangle. And you too"

(pp. 303-4).

Henry Ford, for all his neurotic proclivities, had a feel for the sensuality of complex technologies. The Highland Park power house displayed its massive turbines behind twenty-five-foot-high plate glass windows, opening a shrine of gleaming brass and tile to passersby. In Greenfield Village two steamengines operated behind glass so he could watch their seamless mobile elegance as he passed. In "'Perfect Sound Forever': Innovation, Aesthetics, and the Re-making of Compact Disc Playback," Kieran Downes explores aesthetic [End Page a] motivations in user-technology relationships through the first two decades of compact disc sound reproduction. Early CD players evoked almostmetaphysical gloomamong the fractious but tightly knit community of high-end audiophiles. Early manufacturers promised eternally perfect digitized sound, a frozen anathema to audiophiles for whom no black box ever dulled the senses more cruelly than utterly uniform digital reproduction. The delicious vocabulary of audiophiles comparing sound-system qualities (one thinks of wine tasters for a comparable lexicon of subjective pleasure) signaled their passion for access to digitized sound's inner workings. Gradually, however, it became clear to many observers that the hope for perfectible sound systems lay in improvements and multiple recombinations of the analog components that mediated digital signals. Dedicated users of any complex technology, Downes argues, find their aesthetic joy in an asymptotic...

pdf

Share