Residual Media

by Charles R. Acland (Editor)

In a society that breathlessly awaits “the new” in every medium, what happens to last year’s new? Ample critical energy has gone into the study of new media, genres, and communities. But what becomes of discarded media? In what manner do the products of technological change reappear as environmental problems, as “the new” in another part of the world, as collectibles, as memories, and as art?

Residual Media grapples with these questions and more in a wide-ranging and eclectic collection of essays. Beginning with how cultural change bumps along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts, the contributors examine how leftover artifacts can be rediscovered occupying space in storage sheds, traveling the globe, converting to alternative uses, and accumulating in landfills. By exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media, the essays here combine theoretical challenges to media history with ideas, technology, and uses that have been left behind.

From player pianos to vinyl records, and from the typewriter to the telephone, Residual Media is an innovative approach to the aging of culture and reveals that, ultimately, new cultural phenomena rely on encounters with the old.

Jennifer Adams, DePauw U; Jody Berland, York U; Sue Currell, U of Sussex; Maria DiCenzo, Wilfrid Laurier U; Kate Egan, U of Wales; Lisa Gitelman, Catholic U; Alison Griffiths, CUNY; James Hamilton, U of Georgia; James Hay, U of Illinois—Champaign-Urbana; Michelle Henning, U of the West of England; Lisa Parks, UC Santa Barbara; Hillegonda C. Rietveld, South Bank U; Leila Ryan, McMaster U; John Davis, Alfred U; Collette Snowden, U of South Australia; Jonathan Sterne, McGill U; JoAnne Stober, National Archives, Canada; Will Straw, McGill U; Haidee Wasson, Concordia U.

Charles R. Acland is Professor and holds the Concordia University Research Chair in communications studies at Concordia University, Montreal.

Genres: Film

432 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 2007

About the author

Charles R. Acland is Associate Professor of Communications Studies at Concordia University, Montreal.

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is both great and great looking. Its retro looking cover (complete with black and white typewriter) points to its effort to look closely at Raymond Williams category of "residual media." However, Williams is not the only theorist brought to bear on this edited collection. There is a great deal of attention given to McLuhan, Innis, Baudrillard, and Benjamin as the book's various contributors grapple with the social spaces and categories within which residual media reigns. I found the sections that bookend the collection ("Mechanics of Obsolescence" and "Training, Technology, and Modern Subjectivity") to be the most thought-provoking and theoretically-oriented, however for my own interests the selections on collecting were also of use. More generally, however, I was pleased to see the varying ways the contributors mobilized Williams' conception of residual media to serve their own interests in topics as well as to expand the field of media studies to include "old media." As Charles Acland puts it in his editor's introduction, "If there is a reigning myth of media, it is that technological change necessarily involves the 'new' and consists solely of rupture from the past. This preoccupation neglects the crucial role of continuity in historical processes as well as the accumulation and accommodation just described. It ignores the way the dynamics of culture bump along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts." As a corrective to such attitudes, this volume stands out.