Toward an Aesthetics of Transition
David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins
Against
Apocalypse
A change
has taken place in the human mind
. The conviction is already
not very far from being universal, that the times are pregnant
with change; and that [our era]
will be known to posterity
as the era of one of the greatest revolutions
in the human
mind, and in the whole constitution of human society
.
The first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is,
that it is an age of transition.
--John Stuart Mill, "The Spirit of the Age" (1831)1
Set aside
the nineteenth-century tonalities, and this passage could belong
to our own era. Its apocalyptic rhetoric and its self-conscious
awareness of change closely mirror the discourse of the so-called
digital revolution. Mill is responding to the vast transformations
that define the nascent Victorian age-the introduction of the
railroads, the emergence of powerful new manufacturing technologies,
fundamental alterations in the economic and political order
of English society, the expansion of a global empire.2
The advent of the computer also has generated visions of apocalyptic
transformation. In one recurring scenario, we stand on the cusp
of a technological utopia where emerging communications systems
foster participatory democracy and give all citizens access
to an infinite range of commercial services, audio-visual texts,
job training, libraries, and universities. The reverse of such
optimism envisions an on-line culture of chaos, instability
and greed in which pornographic images corrupt children and
challenge parental authority; information is commodified and
available only to those who can pay; political discourse is
balkanized by extremist special interests; and human experience
itself is "denatured" or displaced by the virtual
reality of the computer screen.3
Similar
utopian and dystopian visions were a notable feature of earlier
moments of cultural and technological transition-the advent
of the printing press, the development of still photography,
the mass media of the nineteenth century, the telegraph, the
telephone, the motion picture, broadcast television.4
In these and other instances of media in transition, the actual
relations between emerging technologies and their ancestor systems
proved to be more complex, often more congenial, and always
less suddenly disruptive than was dreamt of in the apocalyptic
philosophies that heralded their appearance.5
Across a range of examples, including the introduction of the
compass in the middle ages, the telegraph, radio, satellite
television, software, and digital music, Debora L. Spar argues
that technological change follows a cycle of innovation and
experimentation, commercialization and diffusion, creative anarchy
and institutionalization.6
During each phase, discourses proclaiming radical change may
locate stress points where emerging forms of wealth and power
appear to threaten established institutions.
In our current
moment of conceptual uncertainty and technological transition,
there is an urgent need for a pragmatic, historically informed
perspective that maps a sensible middle ground between the euphoria
and the panic surrounding new media, a perspective that aims
to understand the place of economic, political, legal, social
and cultural institutions in mediating and partly shaping technological
change.7 The essays
in this book represent an effort to achieve such an understanding
of emerging communication technologies. At once skeptical and
moderate, they conceive media change as an accretive, gradual
process, challenging the idea that new technologies displace
older systems with decisive suddenness.8
Some contemporary
doomsayers warn that the digital revolution signals the death
of the book and the end of cinema. In such simplified models
of media in transition, the new system essentially obliterates
its predecessors, taking on the functions of its ancestors,
and consigning the older form to the museum and the ash heap.
The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, for example, has
established a website devoted to "dead media," old
technologies that have outlived their usefulness.9
But this seems a narrowly technical idea of media. Specific
delivery technologies (the eight-track cassette, say, or the
wax cylinder) may become moribund; but the medium of recorded
sound survives. As many studies of older and recent periods
attest, the emergence of new media sets in motion a complicated,
unpredictable process in which established and infant systems
may co-exist for an extended period or in which older media
may develop new functions and find new audiences as the emerging
technology begins to occupy the cultural space of its ancestors.
Thus, traditional oral forms and practices outlast the advent
of writing and even the culture of print; the illuminated manuscript
survives for a time into the Gutenberg era; theater and the
novel co-exist with movies and television; radio reinvents itself
after TV displaces its entertainment and news-reporting role
in the national culture. Moreover, in many cases apparently
competing media may strengthen or reinforce one another, as
books inspire movies which in turn stimulate renewed book sales,
as television serves as a virtual museum for the history of
film, as newspapers,, television and movies today are discovering
a variety of strategies for extending and redefining themselves
on the World Wide Web.
As these
instances suggest, to focus exclusively on competition or tension
between media systems may impair our recognition of significant
hybrid or collaborative forms that often emerge during times
of media transition. For example, the Bayeux tapestry (c. 1067-1077)
combined both text and images, and was explicated in spoken
sermons-a multimedia bridge between the oral culture of the
peasants and the learned culture of the monasteries.10
Or consider the nineteenth-century practice of the painted photograph,
an aberrant oddity to recent generations who take for granted
the representational accuracy of mechanical reproduction in
relation to images drawn by hand. In its day, though, the painted
photograph-correcting photography's monochromy and its tendency
to fade over time-was understood within the centuries-old tradition
of portrait painting.11
As a final example, contemporary experiments in story-telling
are crossing and combining several media, exploiting computer
games or web-based environments that offer immersive and interactive
experiences that mobilize our familiarity with traditional narrative
genres drawn from books, movies and television.
Current
discussion about media convergence often implies a singular
process with a fixed end point: All media will converge; the
problem is simply to predict which media conglomerate or which
specific delivery system will emerge triumphant.12
But if we understand media convergence as a process instead
of a static termination, then we can recognize that such convergences
occur regularly in the history of communications and that they
are especially likely to occur when an emerging technology has
temporarily destabilized the relations among existing media.
On this view, convergence can be understood as a way to bridge
or join old and new technologies, formats and audiences. Such
cross-media joinings and borrowings may feel disruptive if we
assume that each medium has a defined range of characteristics
or predetermined mission. Medium-specific approaches risk simplifying
technological change to a zero-sum game in which one medium
gains at the expense of its rivals. A less reductive, comparative
approach would recognize the complex synergies that always prevail
among media systems, particularly during periods shaped by the
birth of a new medium of expression.
Self-conscious
Media
As our contemporary
experience demonstrates, a crucial, distinguishing feature of
periods of media change is an acute self-consciousness. McLuhan
argues that "media are often put out before they are thought
out."13 Yet the
introduction of a new technology always seems to provoke thoughtfulness,
reflection, and self-examination in the culture seeking to absorb
it. Sometimes this self-awareness takes the form of a reassessment
of established media forms, whose basic elements may now achieve
a new visibility, may become a source of historical research
and renewed theoretical speculation. What is felt to be endangered
and precarious becomes more visible and more highly valued.
In our time the most decisive instance of this process is the
multi-national scholarship devoted to the history of the book.14
As William Mitchell's suggestive essay in this volume implies,
the promise or threat of electronic books engenders a renewed
consciousness of the rare and durable qualities of printed books;
not least of which is their portability and their stability
across time. Compared to the short life of various electronic
and digital systems, including the operating systems of computers,
the printed book is a "platform" reassuringly stable
and secure.
Moreover,
a deep and even consuming self-consciousness is often a central
aspect of emerging media themselves. Aware of their novelty,
they engage in a process of self-discovery that seeks to define
and foreground the apparently unique attributes that distinguish
them from existing media forms.
Consider
this definitive instance of the profound self-reflexiveness
of which a new medium is capable. In the third chapter of Part
II of Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) the hero
consults with his squire Sancho Panza and the learned scholar
Sampson Carrasco, who is to report on the mysterious publication
of Part I of the novel. This volume has appeared as if "by
magic art," and much to Quixote's discomfort, even while
the blood
of the enemies he had slain was scarcely dry on his own sword-blade
. [I]f it were true that there was such a history, since it
was about a knight errant it must perforce be grandiloquent,
lofty, remarkable, magnificent and true. With this he was
somewhat consoled; but it disturbed him to think that its
author was a Moor, as that name of Cide suggested. For he
could hope for no truth of the Moors, since they are all cheats,
forgers, and schemers. He was afraid too that his love affairs
might have been treated with indelicacy. (J. M. Cohen translation;
Penguin Books, 1954)
The complex
unease suggested hereQuixote's
doubts about his chivalric enterprise encouraging the defensive
suspicion that Moors are untrustworthycontinues through
the whole of this chapter and the next, and makes a comic and
aesthetically complex contrast with Sancho's confident, even
aggressive loquaciousness. Repeatedly interrupting his learned
betters, Sancho directs our attention toward those elements
of their past adventures that are least Quixotic and most congruent
with the pragmatic earthiness of his sense of the world. Some
readers, Carrasco says, "would have been glad if the authors
had left out a few of the countless beatings" endured by
Quixote and his squire. The hero agrees, of course, but his
squire does not. "That's where the truth of the story comes
in," Sancho insists. This wonderful mixture of comic energy
and philosophic/ aesthetic argument is further enriched when
Carrasco inquires into an apparent inconsistency in the history.
"I don't know how to answer that," said Sancho. "All
I can say is that perhaps the history-writer was wrong, or it
may have been an error of the printer's."
This characteristic
moment is, of course, a disconcertingly bold way of reminding
us that the book we are reading is a physical object, a commodity
produced and perhaps altered by technicians who know nothing
of Dulcinea and probably do not care to know. It is appropriate,
even deeply significant that Quixote actually visits a printing
plant late in Part II, where he studies the physical processes
by which books are made and where he discourses on the difficulties
of translation, finally seeing a proofreader at work on the
spurious second part of the Quixote itself.
This insistence
on the limits of the book we hold in our hands, and especially
Cervantes' recurring tactic of allowing the novel's several
narrators to intrude into Quixote's story and to interrupt it,
deflects attention toward what has been called the drama of
the telling, a drama concerned not with the protagonist's adventures
themselves but with the problems and difficulties of writing
about them. The Quixote is, among other things, then, a book
about the making of books and the nature of story telling. Its
daring self-reflexive comedy is also a systematic exploration
of the special properties of the infant medium of the novel.15
As the example
of Don Quixote implies, often the most powerful explorations
of the features of a new medium occur in comedy.16
Many forms of self-reflexiveness are inherently skeptical, self-mocking,
hostile to pretension. The early television comedian Ernie Kovacs
regularly toyed with audience's expectations about the visual
bias of television, creating anarchic comedy in absurd synchronizations
of classical music with mundane activities (such as cracking
open eggs to the 1812 Overture). In one segment, Kovacs
places a portable radio in front of the camera while the radio
announcer's voice describes a woman in a revealing bathing suit.
Here as elsewhere Kovacs seems to wink at the audience, as if
to suggest that there are some things best enjoyed on television.
In another skit, Kovacs makes the soundtrack visible on screen,
exploring the possibility that even audio may have an arresting
visual component. Kovacs assumes that his viewers actively watch
television, fixated on the novelty of the image, in contrast
to some more recent television producers who have assumed that
spectators divide their attention between television and other
household tasks.
Early movies,
of course, are another immensely fertile space for experimentation.
Many early motion picture exhibitors, for example, used the
camera and projection technology to dramatize the shift from
still to moving pictures-either opening with a still image before
setting it into motion or projecting footage backwards to reverse
the sequence of action we've just seen, so that a wall that
had been destroyed as we watched is now magically rebuilt before
our eyes. As Tom Gunning has written, early cinema "directly
solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and
supplying pleasure through exciting spectacle."17
This cinema emphasized its "visibility," often calling
attention to its grand illusion by toying with the possibility
of transgressing the boundary between the audience and the world
projected on the screen. A similar degree of self-consciousness
emerged in the early sound era. Al Jolson's proclamation in
The Jazz Singer"You ain't heard nothing yet!"dramatically
emphasizes the spoken word, but not nearly so powerfully as
the sudden shift back to the conventions of silent cinema when
his father, the cantor, appears and demands "Silence!"18
In some
instances the earliest phase of a medium's life may be its most
artistically rich , as pioneering artists enjoy a freedom to
experiment that may be constrained by the conventions and routines
imposed when production methods are established. It is widely
argued, for example, that the most creative era in the history
of the American comic strip was its first decades, a period
in which artists controlled the layout of their own pages. Winsor
McCay's Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo
in Slumherland contained bold, surrealistic images of topsy-turvy
worlds and of figures stretched imaginatively out of proportion.
These strips also manipulated the shape and proportion of the
frame itself and even created frames within a frame, such that
characters inside the comic panel would read picture books that
in turn contained panels. Another early comic artist, George
Herriman, drew characters who interacted with the panels below
them and created images that burst free of the confines of the
frame, releasing havoc across the page. One of Herriman's early
strips included a second row of panels depicting the experiences
of mice beneath the floorboards of the depicted space. When
comic strips came to be distributed by national syndicates,
rigid formulas were imposed to insure that the panels could
be slotted into any newspaper page. Since the comic strip had
to have a preset number of panels in a fixed relationship to
each other, artists ceased to explore the complex formal properties
of this popular medium.19
Imitation,
Discovery, Remediation
If emerging
media are often experimental and self-reflexive, they are also
inevitably and centrally imitative, rooted in the past, in the
practices, formats and deep assumptions of their predecessors.
The first printed book, The Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455), contains
a stunning emblem of this unvarying law of media evolution.
For in what seems today a perverse failure to exploit the defining
feature of print as against scribal texts, Gutenberg's landmark
book has been elaborately and painstakingly illustrated by hand-artisans
in the established style of the medieval illuminated manuscript.
The striking if perverse continuity thus created was dramatized
in a recent exhibition by the Huntington Library, which juxtaposed
a copy of the Gutenberg, open to a richly illuminated page,
with the famous Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales (c. 1400), also beautifully illustrated by a scribal
artist (see fig. 1.1). The print revolution-the power to reproduce
a large number of identical texts-is latent but invisible here,
suppressed or ignored by an impulse of continuity, a need to
experience this new medium under the aspect of established ways
of reverence and of art.20
Such holdovers
of old practices and assumptions have shaped the introduction
of many new technologies and may be best illustrated by examples
from outside the realm of media history. The physical design
of early automobiles, as many have noted, embodied a version
of the same continuity principle. Why do the first cars look
like horse-drawn buggies, many of them preserving for as long
as twenty years such nostalgic and nonfunctional features as
dashboard whip sockets? Nothing in the technology of the internal
combustion engine requires these forms of obeisance to older
models of transportation. But, of course, invention itself is
shaped and constrained by history, by inherited forms of thought
and experience.
![](../photos/chaucer2.jpg) |
|
![](../photos/gutenberg2.jpg) |
Click
images for detailed view. |
Figure
1.1 A page from the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales (left) and a page from the first
printed book, the Gutenberg Bible, demonstrate the power
of continuity and tradition in media history. After being
printed, the Bible was illustrated by hand so as to resemble
its ancestral medium, the illuminated manuscript. Reprinted
with permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino,
California.
|
Yet another
instructive version of the power of traditional practices to
channel our understanding and use of new technologies is available
in Harold L. Platt's The Electric City, an account of
the emergence of the electric utility industry in Chicago at
the turn of the twentieth century.21
The key transition here is not technological so much as cognitive
or psychological, for according to this fascinating history,
a sustained campaign of political lobbying and consumer marketing
was needed to persuade home-owners and businesses to abandon
their individual power-generating systems and purchase their
energy from a central station or power plant. The idea that
energy supplies could be "outsourced" more efficiently
and economically than self-generation ran counter to centuries
of practice in which homes, farms, mills, businesses and factories
maintained their own systems of energy production. Does that
history of an earlier turning from reliance on privately owned,
home-based systems to centralized power-nodes anticipate contemporary
shifts, already discernible in much corporate computer use and
among many individual web surfers, from autonomous desk-top
computing to forms of data-sharing and outsourcing?
These examplesGutenberg,
the horseless buggy, the electric cityand many others
we've not mentioned illustrate how inherited forms and traditions
limit and inhibit, at least at the start, a full understanding
of the intrinsic or unique potential of emerging technologies.
But this continuity principle must not be conceived as merely
or essentially an impediment to the development of new media.
In Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's influential formulation,
all media engage in a complex and ongoing process of "remediation,"
in which the tactics, styles and content of rival media are
rehearsed, displayed, mimicked, extended, critiqued.22
We should be clear that not all forms of self-consciousness
are profound-some are simply trivial novelties, and not all
forms of continuity are constraining-some may quicken latent
possibilities in the emerging medium, while others, more simply,
may aim to help confused or disoriented consumers make the transition
into the unfamiliar terrain opened by the new medium. Self-reflexivity
and imitation are contrasting aspects of the same process by
which the new medium maps its emergent properties and defines
a space for itself in relation to its ancestors.
The novel,
for example, is born as an amalgam of older forms, which it
explicitly invokes and imitates-the romance, the picaresque
tale, certain forms of religious narrative such as Puritan autobiography,
and various forms of journalism and historical writing. At first
it combines these elements haphazardly and crudely. Then, nourished
by an enlarging audience that makes novel writing profitable,
this central story-form of the age of print begins to distinguish
itself clearly from its ancestors, to combine its inherited
elements more harmoniously, and to exploit the possibilities
for narrative that are uniquely available in the medium of print.23
As many
have argued, something of the same principle can be seen in
the history of the movies, which begin in a borrowing and restaging
of styles, formats and performances taken from a range of older
media such as theater, still photography, visual art, and prose
fiction. A second powerful source for early cinema was such
public attractions as carnivals, the circus, amusement parks,
vaudeville. Some film historians have argued that the defining
attribute of the birth of the movies was the contention between
a self-reflexive and populist "cinema of attractions,"
(to use Tom Gunning's helpful term) and a more respectable,
even middle-class tendency toward narrative as inspired by theater
and print.24 Such perspectives remind
us that the forms achieved by a "mature" medium do
not comprise some perfect fulfillment of its intrinsic potential
but represent instead both a range of limited possibilities
and promises unexplored, roads not taken.
Recent scholarship
has even suggested that the movies assumed and more fully achieved
some of the prime ambitions of its ancestors. The time of the
birth of a new medium, these histories remind us, is often ripe
with anticipation. Vanessa R. Schwartz, for example, suggests
that fin de siecle Paris was awash in visual spectacles
such as panoramas and wax museums offering an immersive reproduction
of the world that would be realized truly only by the movies.25
Lauren Rabinovitz has studied how the cinema took shape in the
context of amusement-park attractions.26
Erik Barnouw has shown how magicians prepared the ground for
the movies by introducing its technical marvels to the public.27
And in some cases, these expectations were frustrated by the
new medium: William Uricchio suggests, for example, that some
early critics were disappointed when cinema failed to realize
their expectation of simultaneous transmission of distance events.28
The story is not merely one of imitation and self-discovery,
then, but something more complicated. If movies were in some
sense replicating earlier media, those ancestor systems were
also aiming imperfectly and incompletely to satisfy expectations
that would ultimately give rise to the cinema.
As we suggested
earlier and as these examples indicate, medium-specific perspectives
may limit our understanding of the ways in which media interact,
shift and collude with one another. The evolution of new communications
systems is always immensely complicated by the rivalry of competing
media and by the economic structures that shape and support
them. In some cases, such as broadcasting where the same networks
dominated both radio and television, existing institutions simply
expand to absorb and appropriate emerging technologies.29
In other cases, as in the competition between nickelodeons and
legitimate theaters, emerging media may offer opportunities
for investment and upward mobility prohibited by the rigid infrastructure
of established systems.
To comprehend
the aesthetics of transition, we must resist notions of media
purity, recognizing that each medium is touched by and in turn
touches its neighbors and rivals. And we must also reject static
definitions of media, resisting the idea that a communications
system may adhere to a definitive form once the initial process
of experimentation and innovation yields to institutionalization
and standardization. In fact, as the history of cinema shows,
decisive changes follow upon improvements in technology (such
as the advent of sound, the development of lighter, more mobile
cameras and more sensitive film stock, the introduction of digital
special effects and editing systems); and seismic shifts in
the very nature of film, in its relation to its audience and
its society, occur with the birth of television.
No
Elegies for Gutenberg30
As the foregoing
implies, these processes of imitation, self-discovery, remediation
and transformation are recurring and inevitable, part of the
way in which cultures define and renew themselves. Old media
rarely die; their original functions are adapted and absorbed
by newer media; and they themselves may mutate into new cultural
niches and new purposes: The process of media transition is
always a mix of tradition and innovation, always declaring for
evolution, not revolution.
We citizens
and scholars do well to recognize such continuity principles
and to remain skeptical of apocalyptic projections of gloom
or glory. Is the printed book obsolete? Almost certainly not.
Will many of its noblest and most valuable functions-most forms
of scholarship and research, dictionaries, encyclopedias-migrate
to the computer? Yes, absolutely. This has already begun to
happen. Butas the poet Milton saysnothing is here
for tears. The crucial continuity involves not books but language
itself. Language is migratory across communications media and
will endure.
Notes
1.
Rpt. in George Levine, ed., The Emergence of Victorian Consciousness:
The Spirit of the Age (New York: Free Press, 1967), 71.
2.
The nineteenth century as the site of the emergence of a new
information culture and as a parallel to our own age of transitions
has received extensive consideration in recent years. See, for
example, James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, "The Mythos
of the Electronic Revolution," in James W. Carey, Communication
as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge,
1989); Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable
Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line
Pioneers (Berkeley: Berkeley Publications, 1999); Thomas
Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy
of Empire (London: Verso, 1996); Doron Swade, The Difference
Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer
(New York: Viking, 2001 ); Daniel R. Hendrick, When Information
Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason
and Revolution, 1700-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000); James W. Cortada, Before the Computer (Trenton:
Princeton University Press, 2000). For a fictional response
to this same topic, see William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The
Difference Engine (New York: Spectra, 1992).
3.
On the competing visions of the computer, see, for example,
Mark Stefik, Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
4.
On the rise of nineteenth-century technologies, see, in addition
to texts cited above, Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies
Were New: Thinking About Electronic Communications in the Late
Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing
Technology in Edison's Era (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000); Daniel Czitron, Media and the American Mind:
From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1983); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time
and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1983); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night:
The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
The Railroad Journey: The Industrialization of Time in the
Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997); Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Friedrich A.
Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1992); David E. Nye, The Technological
Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); David E. Nye,
Electrifying America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992);
Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the
Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994); M. Susan Barger and William B. White, The Daguerreotype:
Nineteenth-Century Technology and Modern Science (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Jonathan Crary, Techniques
of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
5.
Much of what follows has been inspired by Raymond Williams,
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken,
1977). There is also a growing body of literature on media transitions
or information revolutions. See, for example, Brian Wilson,
Media Technology and Society: From the Telegraph to the Internet
(New York: Routledge, 1998); Irving Fang, A History of Mass
Communications: Six Information Revolutions (New York: Focal,
1997); Alfred D. Chandler and James W Cortada, eds., A Nation
Transformed By Information: How Information Has Shaped the United
States from Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites,
and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995); Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman,
Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Neil Rhodes
and Jonathan Sawday, eds., The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge
Technology in the First Age of Print (New York: Routledge,
2000); Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology
Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (New York:
Basic, 1999); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
6.
Debora L. Spar, Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos,
and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet (New York: Harcourt,
2001).
7.
One possible model for such a discourse is represented by the
technological realists. See, for example, <http://www.technorealism.org/>.
8.
Paul Duguid, "Material Matters: Aspects of the Past and
Futurology of the Book" in The Future of the Book,
ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996). For other significant work on the impact of digital media
on the culture of print, see Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings:
Texts Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computers
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); James
Joseph O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Seely
Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000); David
M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in
The Digital Age (New York: Arcade, 2001 ); Sven Birkerts,
Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse (St. Paul:
Graywolf Press, 1996); Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck:
The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999).
9.
Bruce Sterling, Dead Media Project, <http://www.deadmedia.org>.
10.
See Wolfgang Grape, The Bayeux Tapestry: Monument to a Norman
Triumph (Munich: Prestel, 1994); Richard Gameson, ed.,
The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry (Rochester, NY: Boydell
Press, 1997); Suzanne Lewis, The Rhetoric of Power in the
Bayeux Tapestry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
11.
Heinz K. Henisch, The Painted Photograph 1839-1914: Origins,
Techniques, Aspirations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1996).
12.
For a fuller discussion of media convergence, see Henry Jenkins,
"Convergence? I Diverge," Technology Review
(June 2001); "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema,
Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture," in this
volume; Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman eds., Cinema Futures:
Cain, Abel, or Cabel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
1998); Dan Harries, ed., The New Media Book (London:
BFI, 2002).
13.
Marshall McLuhan, "The Playboy Interview," in The
Essential McLuhan, ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (New
York: Harper Collins, 1996).
14.
See, for example, David Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays on
the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1996); Robert Darnton, Literary Underground of the
Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985);
Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary
France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Roger Chartier, Order
of Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Lucien
Febvre, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800
(London: Verso, 1997); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing
Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations
in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980); Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the
Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Natalie Zemon
Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight
Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977).
15.
This material draws on David Thorburn, "Fiction and Imagination
in Don Quixote," Partisan Review XLII, no. 3 (1975):
431-443. See also Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel
as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1975).
16.
On comic self-reflexivity, see J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism:
Writings on Movies and Other Media (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1991).
17.
Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its
Spectator and the Avant Garde" in Early Cinema: Space,
Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London:
BFI, 1990). For other influential discussions of early cinema
(beyond those found in Elsaesser and Barker), see Charles Musser,
The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Charles Musser,
Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and The Edison Manufacturing
Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991);
Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story;
Style and Filmmaking, 1907-1913 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2002); Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theater
to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); John L. Fell, Film
Before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983);
Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
18.
For discussion of the coming of sound, see Donald Crafton, Talkies:
America Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999); Henry Jenkins, What
Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville
Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 ).
19.
On the richness of early comics, see Bill Waterson, "The
Cheapening of the Comics," The Comics Journal (October
27, 1989). On the emergence of comics, Robert C. Harvey, The
Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1994); John Canemaker, Winsor McCay:
His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987); Richard
Marschall, ed., Dreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Art
of Winsor McCay (Westlake Village, CA: Fantagraphics Books,
1988); David Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973).
20.
Scott D. N. Cook, "Technological Revolutions and the Gutenberg
Myth," in Mark Stefik, Internet Dreams: Archetypes,
Myths and Metaphors (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996): "The
same standards of craftsmanship and aesthetics associated with
manuscripts were applied to printed books for at least two generations
beyond the Gutenberg Bible" (71).
21.
Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and Growth Of
the Chicago Area, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991).
22.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000).
23.
Ian P Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1957); Michael McKeon, The Origins of
the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction:
A Political History of the Novel (Cambridge: Oxford University
Press, 1995); Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New
York: AMS Press, 1980). This paragraph and later sections of
this introduction draw extensively on David Thorburn, "Television
As an Aesthetic Medium," Critical Studies in Mass Communication
4 (1987): 168-169.
24.
Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and The Origins of American Narrative
Film (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994); David
Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Classical
Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema
and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001
); Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation
of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992); William Uricchio and
Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture (Trenton: Princeton
University Press, 1993).
25.
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture
in Fin-de-Siecle Paris (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999).
26.
Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and
Culture in Turn-of the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1998).
27.
Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (Cambridge:
Oxford University Press, 1981).
28.
William Uricchio, "Technologies of Time," in Allegories
of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital,
ed. J. Olsson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
29.
On the evolution of radio broadcasting, see Susan Douglas, Inventing
American Broadcasting 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997); Michele Hilmes, Radio Reader: Essays
in the Cultural History of Radio (New York: Routledge, 2001);
Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American
Broadcasting, 1920-1934 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute
Press, 1994). For considerations of cultural responses to the
introduction of television, see Lynn Spigel, Make Room For
TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1992); Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the
Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001); Cecelia Tichi, Electronic Hearth:
Creating an American Television Culture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic
Presence From Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000); Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture
and Public Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
30.
Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading
in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett, 1995) seeks to
defend the culture of the book against the emerging digital
culture.