Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture

by Lauren Rabinovitz (Editor), Abraham Geil (Editor)

Digital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to counter such ahistoricism, arguing for the need to understand digital culture—and its social, political, and ethical ramifications—in historical and philosophical context. Looking at a broad range of technologies, including photography, print and digital media, heat engines, stereographs, and medical imaging, the contributors present a number of different perspectives from which to reflect on the nature of media change. While foregrounding the challenges of drawing comparisons across varied media and eras, Memory Bytes explores how technologies have been integrated into society at different moments in time.These essays from scholars in the social sciences and humanities cover topics related to science and medicine, politics and war, mass communication, philosophy, film, photography, and art. Whether describing how the cultural and legal conflicts over player piano rolls prefigured controversies over the intellectual property status of digital technologies such as mp3 files; comparing the experiences of watching QuickTime movies to Joseph Cornell’s “boxed relic” sculptures of the 1930s and 1940s; or calling for a critical history of electricity from the Enlightenment to the present, Memory Bytes investigates the interplay of technology and culture. It relates the Information Age to larger and older political and cultural phenomena, analyzes how sensory effects have been technologically produced over time, considers how human subjectivity has been shaped by machines, and emphasizes the dependence of particular technologies on the material circumstances within which they were developed and used.

Contributors. Judith Babbitts, Scott Curtis, Ronald E. Day, David Depew, Abraham Geil, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, Lisa Gitelman, N. Katherine Hayles, John Durham Peters, Lauren Rabinovitz, Laura Rigal, Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Swiss

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of essays, and feel it must have been a welcome and needed addition to the discourse of media studies when it was published in 2004. Each essay does a nice job of situating our contemporary digital landscape within an historical context that accounts for both continuities and changes, and the broad range of technologies represented alongside the disciplinary differences that inform the scholarship of the selected contributors creates a wide-ranging book that is well-balanced by the rigor and research of the various writers contained within. John Durham Peters and Lisa Gitelman's selections are particularly provocative, each directly querying the relationship between media objects and subjects through their (respective) examinations of sound history and player piano paper rolls. The essays, themselves, may be too advanced for most undergraduates, but the introduction would be a useful addition to most media history syllabi as it does a nice job to characterizing the common tropes of media scholarship and explaining the key differences espoused by the scholarship in the collection.