MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY

From Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture (2006). A bigger excerpt and (hopefully) full discussion can be found here.

Almost a decade ago, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling established what he calls the Dead Media Project. As his website explains, “The centralized, dinosaurian one-to-many media that roared and trampled through the twentieth century are poorly adapted to the postmodern technological environment.” Anticipating that some of these ‘dinosaurs’ were heading to the tar pits, he constructed a shrine to “the media that have died on the barbed wire of technological change.” His collection is astounding, including relics like “the phenakistoscope, the telharmonium, the Edison wax cylinder, the stereopticon… various species of magic lantern.”

Yet, history teaches us that old media never die- and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content- the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media scholars call delivery technologies. Most of what Sterling’s project lists falls under this category Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies.

To define media, let’s turn to historian Lisa Gitelman, who offers a model of media that works on two levels: on the first, a medium is a technology that enables communication; on the second, a medium is a set of associated “protocols” or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology. Delivery systems are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural systems. Delivery technologies come and go all the time, but media persist as layers within an even more complicated information and entertainment stratum.

A medium’s content may shift (as occurred when television displaced radio as a storytelling medium, freeing radio to become the primary showcase for rock and roll), its audience may change (as occurs when comics move from a mainstream medium in the 1950s to a niche medium today), and its social status may rise or fall (as occurs when theater moves from a popular form to an elite one), but once a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within the larger system of communication options. Once recorded sound becomes a possibility, we have continued to develop new and improved means of recording and playing back sound.Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media. That’s why convergence seems more plausible as a way of understanding the past several decades of media change than the old digital revolution paradigm had. Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies.

The implications of this distinction between media and delivery systems become clearer as Gitelman elaborates on what she means by ‘protocols’. She writes: “Protocols express a huge variety of social, economic, and material relationships. So telephony includes the salutation ‘Hello?’ (for English speakers, at least) and includes the monthly billing cycle and includes the wires and cables that materially connect our phones… Cinema includes everything from the sprocket holes that run along the sides of film to the widely shared sense of being able to wait and see ‘films’ at home on video. And protocols are far from static.” This book will have less to say about the technological dimension of media change than about the shifts in the protocols by which we are producing and consuming media.

I am struggling with the distinction between ‘media’ and ‘technology’. Gitelman helps, but convinces me further that I am interested in technology, and not the media.