Always Already New
Subtitle: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 221
ISBN-13: 9780262072717
Subjects: Cultural studies; Media Studies; Sociology; Mass media; Social Science; United States; General; Social Science / Media Studies; History; Communication and technology
Description: "In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies."--Jacket.