@gitelmanMediaHistoricalSubjects2006
[!info] - Cite Key: @gitelmanMediaHistoricalSubjects2006 - Link: Gitelman.pdf
Annotations¶
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Imported on 2023-01-21 3:23 pm¶
Relevant / important¶
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight This book examines the ways that media—and particularly new media—are experienced and studied as historical subjects. It uses the examples of recorded sound ("new" between 1878 and 1910) and the World Wide Web, since the Web is a core instance or application of what are today familiarly and collectively referred to as "new media."
Thesis part 1
Page 1 [[2023-01-20#3:04 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight and thereby challenge readers to imagine what a meaningful history of today's new media might eventually look like as well as to think about how accounts of media in general should be written.
Asking the reader to think of something in todays world would change in the future
Page 1 [[2023-01-20#3:05 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight This, then, is a book about the ways scholars and critics do media history, but it is more importantly about the ways that people experience meaning, how they perceive the world and communicate with each other, and how they distinguish the past and identify culture. Different versions and styles of media history do make a difference.
Thesis part 2
Page 1 [[2023-01-20#3:04 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight accounts of media history offer a sequence of inventors and machines, others trace the development of ideas or epistemologies, and still others chart a changing set of social practices, while many combine elements of several such approaches.
Page 2 [[2023-01-20#3:04 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight It is a medium
Links to Jan 16 lecture about how medium is a carrier.
Page 2 [[2023-01-21#1:53 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight it mediates between our eyes and the sites of space that it helps us to experience as sights.
How it carries information from media to us
Page 2 [[2023-01-21#2:30 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy
In todays world we know what is going on all around the world but back in the old days the most relevent stuff was what was happening locally.
As the world digitilized people had access to all these different ideas and the western idea of how great democracy isPage 3 [[2023-01-20#3:30 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium
As media uses more and more digital mediums it will be impossible to classify mediums because the classifier has power and you cant control the internet
Page 3 [[2023-01-21#1:55 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight nlike radio signals, "con for instance, inscriptions are stable and savable. Inscriptions don't disappear into the air reset the way that broadcasts do
Picking a form of medium is more than just how you want to get a message across it is also imporant to consider the longevity of the message.
Page 6 [[2023-01-21#2:14 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight media become authoritative as the social processes of their definition and dis- the IA semination are separated out or forgotten, and as the social processes of protocol forma- orat
What he hear from the media has a higher impact the more we grow as a society.
Page 6 [[2023-01-21#2:21 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Media as Historical Subjects 7 tion and acceptance get ignored.
Page 7 [[2023-01-21#2:20 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Some seem to arrive sui generis, discrete and fully formed, while many, like digital genres, video rentals, and computer keyboards, emerge as complicated engagements among different media.
Complicated vs Complex
Page 8 [[2023-01-21#2:38 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Specificity is key. Rather than static, blunt, and unchanging technology, every medium involves a "sequence of displacements and obsolescences, part of the delirious operations of modernization,"
We cant just talk about the internet
There are so many different aspects of the internet that talking about it broadly loses a lot of what it is. Must be specific about time and place. An example of complex from the lecture, it has a lot of pieces to it but any one small thing can break like the rocket ship example.Page 8 [[2023-01-21#2:45 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight or this reason, the primary mode of this book is the case study
VERY IMPORTANT. this is the HOW
Page 8 [[2023-01-21#2:43 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight f meanings are imposed by industry, then policing media becomes a viable project: quashing violence on television and labeling offensive lyrics will protect minors from harm and lead to a decrease in violent crime.
JAN 16 lecture. The people who are governing the mediums (owners of these huge media websites) control what information gets out. An example is the acceptance of censoring brought upon by these ppl.
Page 9 [[2023-01-21#2:48 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight was a by-product of the attempt to optimize telephony and telegraphy by saving expensive copper cables." But Edison also "developed his phonograph in an attempt to improve the processing speed of the Morse telegraph beyond human limitations," Kittler notes, and he did so when "a Willis-type machine [for synthesizing sounds] gave him the idea" and "a Scott-type machine [for drawing sound waves] pushed him towards its realization"
It can be seen that a network of all these different peoples work helped form the invention of Edison's phonograph
Page 10 [[2023-01-21#3:05 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight That said, I have also resisted taking a reductively antideterministic position.
How do we know that the kind of media we have now alters our view of media from the past.
Page 10 [[2023-01-21#3:16 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The advantage of offering finely grained case studies is that it allows these complexities to emerge. I have worked within narrow chronological brackets, both in treating the case of phonographs and that of digital networks, and I have further limited my scope to the )9, cultural geography of the United States, with which I am most familiar. While such a perng spective has obvious shortcomings, the detail and specificity of each case permits an acto count that is exacting, and at the same time broadly suggestive of the ways that new media ler emerge into and engage their cultural and economic contexts as well as the ways that new he media are shaped by and
Narrowing the scope of
Page 11 [[2023-01-21#3:21 pm]]
Questions / confusion¶
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Forget that the word media is rightly plural, not singular. Media are.
Confused on what this means. Hopefully it becomes more clear later on in the text.
I think its to distinguish media vs medium. A medium is just an object/way while media is the actual information.Page 2 [[2023-01-20#3:25 pm]]
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight The present determines where, in the object from the past, that object's fore-history and afterhistory diverge so as to circumscribe its nucleus.
Confused on this
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[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight If media are sites for experiences of meaning critics have pondered to what degree are meaning and its experience determined or circumscribed by technological conditions?
Page 8 [[2023-01-21#2:46 pm]]
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight only to the extent that we fail to identify and challenge its real agencies?
is this saying that we fail to identify the true actions that produce media?
Page 9 [[2023-01-21#3:01 pm]]
Agree¶
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight It is a medium
It is a tool for media. Media are mediators; action and process occur.
Page 2 [[2023-01-20#3:23 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight the general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media" so that soon, "a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium
As more and more things become digitilized the meaning associated with different mediums will be lossed.
Page 3 [[2023-01-20#3:31 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Like old art, old media remain meaningful.
Old media has been given its own feeling
Page 4 [[2023-01-20#3:36 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight media are themselves denizens of the past
Media is an inhabitant of the past. Just because how we view media today is different doesnt mean it is fundamentally different than what is was in the past
Page 5 [[2023-01-20#3:40 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight ut it also stands uniquely as evidence, an index, because that photograph was caused in the moment of the past that it represents.
It is physical proof that the event happened at that moment. It represents a time of history that can be dated.
Page 5 [[2023-01-20#3:43 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Other encounters with the past can be less clear, less causal, and less indexical, as when the viewers of a television newscast are "taken live" to the outside of a building where something happened a little while ago, or when digital images recomplicate the notion of a photographic index altogether.
Not all forms of media representations are built equally. The live video thats happens after the fact will not have as big of an impact as a photo taken in the moment even though there is substanually more data in the video
Page 5 [[2023-01-20#3:48 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight They look through the instrument the way one looks through a telescope, without getting caught up in battles already won over whether and how it does the job.
I think it is getting at the fact of how people now adays just believe everything that is told to them.
Example would be metric vs imperial. Even though metric is scienficically more accurate ( based on natural stuff) some countrys still use the imperial system.Page 5 [[2023-01-21#1:57 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight As much as people may converse through a telephone and forget the telephone itself, the context of telephoning makes all kinds of difference to the things they say and the way they say them.
This is even more true for the internet. Think about how much time you spend each day connected to the internet. Even the act of listening to music has you connected in the network.
Page 7 [[2023-01-21#2:23 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight t makes no sense to think about "content" without attending to the medium that both communicates that content and represents or helps to set the limits of what that content can consist of.
We have to think about how information is presented to us to truly understand the content, for example a parody.
Page 7 [[2023-01-21#2:26 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Their histories must be social and cultural, not the stories of how one technology leads to another, or of isolated geniuses working their magic on the world.
Media is about the culture and how it accepts people not about what scientists say.
Page 7 [[2023-01-21#2:33 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight But if viewers and listeners themselves help variously, literally, to produce the meanings they enjoy, then policing media is pretty much beside the point.
If its the consumer that derives meaning then why would controlling what is said important. Are these media outlets trying to change how people think to benefit them?
Page 9 [[2023-01-21#2:50 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight s if media purposefully refashion each other and "do cultural work?'
The media is forced to evolve to please the consumer and to keep creating more pieces of media
Page 9 [[2023-01-21#2:54 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Bolter and Grusin have trimmed out any mention of human agents,
Interesting. Thinking that humans only shape their version of media.
Page 9 [[2023-01-21#2:57 pm]]
Definitions / concepts¶
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight oddly perennial newness of today's new media
Modern media has been around for a very long time, yet it still feels very new.
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[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight perennial
lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.
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[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight semiotic.
the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.
Page 6 [[2023-01-21#2:01 pm]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight I define media as socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation.
definition of media
Page 7 [[2023-01-21#2:27 pm]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight but it also includes both the QWERTY keyboards on which e-mail gets "typed" and the shared sense people have of what the e-mail genre is.
An example of Assemblage
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[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight sui generi
of its own kind
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[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight intrinsic.
essential/natural
Page 10 [[2023-01-21#3:15 pm]]
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