ENGL 680M: New Media

Hey everyone,

I thought I would post some of my questions and concerns about Always Already New as a way to continue conversation after Friday's class. I'm still thinking about several of the themes we raised in class yesterday, namely the public/private split, the differences between constructions of via narratives and public/private memories, the Web as an historical subject, and a couple others that are explored below. Perhaps we can continue discussing, posting, questioning?

• I do not understand her rationale for separating her work from the related field of cultural studies (11).
• I am also intrigued by this idea of public/private, public memory/private memory, the constructions of memory in the public and the private spheres, but I’m not quite sure what to do with it: “all new media emerge into and help to reconstruct publics and public life, and that this in turn has broad implications for the operation of public memory, its mode and substance” (26); “the history of history, of what (and who) gets preserved—written down, printed up, recorded, filmed, taped, or scanned—and why” (26); “the early history of sound recording makes visible the ways in which new media emerge as local anomalies that are also deeply embedded within the ongoing discursive formations of their day, within the what, who, how, and why of public memory, public knowledge, and public life” (29); “media are unique and complicated historical subjects. Their histories must be social and cultural” (7).
• I am also intrigued by her ideas of the immediacy of the web versus the history of it (chapter 4). How can we study the Web as an historical subject, short of analyzing the Way Back Machine?
• I am confused about the way that agency acts upon “reflexive historical subjects,” AKA media (20).
• While I support her notion of inquiring into the history of a medium—and agree that it is an important endeavor—I wish she had gone into more detail about how to proceed (21).
• I also wish she had gone into more detail about the authority she assigns to the medium (141).
• Gitelman hit on a need (still evident in our culture) to possess something, even while not understanding the thing’s significance; example: the audience members who took home with them souvenir scraps of tinfoil (36, 38). It would seem that the need to possess these things speaks more to a need for participation more than for the possession of the thing.
• Throughout Gitelman’s text, she addressed the theme of preservability of knowledge. She suggests, on one hand, that knowledge when it is recorded or published (versus spoken) has more savability than a text that is spoken. Even if what is spoken is fiction, the permanence associated with an aural or written record seems privileged somehow (38). However, she also indicates that, at least in the late 1800s, writing was seen as artificial in comparison to speech (41). In a related vein, it seems like the more well-known something becomes—the more popularity it gains—the harder it becomes to locate real information about it. In a way, the thing becomes less authentic, less real, because it is harder to access information about it in its original state; there exist so many conflicting accounts of varying degrees of truth. In another related vein, Gitelman raises the issue of “doing history” (historiography?) in chapter four. In any situation of “putting together narratives” and “interpreting the ‘indexical survivals,’” there should exist conversations of interpretive advantages/disadvantages, privileged/marginalized voices, and other discussions involving positions of power (129).