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Draft Article:
“And Lead Us Not into Thinking the New is New:
What History Has to Offer New Media Studies”
Submitted for Review to
New Media & Society
By
Benjamin Peters
Doctoral Candidate, Communications
Columbia University
540 W 112 St Apt 1C
New York NY 10025
c. 347-426-8236
Short biographical note: Benjamin Peters studies new media history, critical information studies, and Eastern European area studies as a doctoral candidate in Communications at Columbia University; his dissertation work traces a transatlantic history of the idea of information from cybernetics to the present-day, and previous publications range topics from Russian literature to search engines. He holds an MA from Stanford University and a BA from Brigham Young University and is currently a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Possible Referee: (Advisor) Michael Schudson,
May 1, 2008
And Lead Us Not into Thinking the New is New:
What History Has to Offer the Study of New Media
Abstract: Perhaps the only thing new about the idea of new media is the rising stakes of the term itself. This critical rereading of select studies in media history and new media studies, from McLuhan to Manovich and beyond, proposes that new media are importantly historically contingent phenomena, and not synonymous with digital media. Too concerned with claims that new media is now and history is past, some media scholars have overlooked the counter-intuitive corollary: that the concept of new media is usefully ancient and history writing is importantly now. In a sweeping literature review meant to demonstrate that how many media historians are already grappling with new media understood as emerging, socially unsure phenomena, this case for new media history attempts to do just what new media tend to do: make present what was already there but rarely noticed. A self-reflective conception of novelty helps historians re-imagine and reassert the enterprise of new media scholarship.
Keywords: new media history, novelty, digital media, media studies, literature review, word, language, historiography.
What Does the Problem of New Media Solve for Media History?
Few media historians will be surprised by the assertion that the history of new media is conceptually underdeveloped; on nearly every corner of the field, students and scholars alike encounter the at first sight counterintuitive but by now commonsense assumption that the idea of new media is actually very old. The historical record dates back the human interest in the latest technological development to the point where the medium of writing that made autochthonous record keeping possible was itself the subject of interest. The issue of new media however continues to press on the present: and I argue there is much to gain from thinking through how historians write and think about new media conceptually. Instead of looking to enumerate the many potential problems digital media may cause for media historians—such as, What happens to the historical record when historians rely on online databases?—I prefer to ask initially, What does the problem of new media solve for media history?
One possible answer: a historically reinvigorated sense of the term new media may help dull the axes conventional media historians have to grind with the wash of attention the term is receiving in contemporary scholarship and the press. It is a running joke among the students in my doctoral program that landing the ideal position—in industry and university alike—will no doubt depend on our working the term new media into the elevator pitch of our scholarly interests. This joke, like most, is an uncomfortable half-truth. Those already working on supposedly new media-related topics smile and nod knowingly, while those less inclined to study cutting edge issues of computer mediated communication, information and communication technologies, and digital media alternate between giggling nervously and outright grumbling. I believe the mistake lies not with those interested in new media per se but in a shared failure of historical imagination. With a little conceptual attuning, the term new media contains rich and fertile seeds for rethinking the whole enterprise of media history—in its strong sense, the idea of new media belong primarily to the media historians. Media historians should be seizing upon, and certainly not begrudging, our field’s recent discovery of new media. At the most, the historical study of social novelty of media helps reinvigorate, elongate, and reconceptualize the enterprise of media history itself. The idea of novelty has the potential to do as much for the whole enterprise of media history as it does for new media history in particular.
The term new media is a problem for both the present- and historically-minded. It is a very recent term, historically speaking—and so much the worse for sound historiography. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first use of the term new media history to that master wordsmith and showman, Marshall McLuhan in a 1960 issue of the Journal of Economic History. To quote in full, he writes: “The decision maker who must deal with globally gathered information, moved at electronic speeds, is impelled to acquire a more interrelated and overall type of knowledge concerning the operations in which he is involved. The new media, in management that is to say, have been directly responsible for the rise of management training centers.” This quote avails itself to many of the complaints one may be leverage against new media studies in general: the critic might ask, What is McLuhan’s awkward qualifier “in management that is to say” doing in the most often cited coining of the term? Does he mean to locate new media incidentally or importantly among the managerial classes that have dominated much of the digital media discussion since? In fact, as the rise of cyber law and cyber business in digital media debates can attest, McLuhan’s slip expands on Elihu Katz’ famous observation: if it’s true that God gave television to the social sciences and film to the humanities, then how did lawyers and economists get new media? (And what end of the birthright bargain have historians received?)
We might note McLuhan’s coining associates new media with a technical, not historical, definition, which whose characteristics like “electronic information gathering” and a “global reach”—though novel at the time—seem almost thoroughly mundane fifty years later in 2008. The increase of scale and degree of transmission is important but it is certainly not new. As a result, the term new media has an awkwardness about it worse than in McLuhan’s invocation: Most Anglophone students of new and old media use “new media” not incorrectly as a vague umbrella term for emerging information and communication technologies. In turn, self-declared new media scholars, for the most part, define and use the English term almost singularly to refer to a set of electronic mass and peer-to-peer communication technologies. To this the historian must protest: The word “new” has nothing to do with the technical constitution of a medium; it does not describe material or structural characteristics; and “new” does not mean “digital.” Yoking new media scholarship to digital media scholarship speeds the term—and the work that relies on it—toward conceptual obsolescence.
It happens to the best of us. Consider Roger Silverstone’s (1999) otherwise characteristically compelling introductory remarks in the 1999 inaugural issue of the leading new media studies journal New Media & Society. In response to the question “what’s new about new media,” he writes “the new is new. The technologies that have emerged in recent years, principally but not exclusively digital technologies, are new. They do new things. They give us new powers. They create new consequence for us as human beings. They bend minds. They transform institutions. They liberate. They oppress…. Novelty,” Silverstone (1999) observes, “is, at this point, our problem.” Of course, Silverstone’s flourish is in part importantly right: digital media do these things, and there is an undeniable urgency to study contemporary digital media. We are awash in them (Gitlin, 2003). But five years later in her 2004 introduction to New Media & Society, Leah Leivrouw (2004) responds to the prompt “what’s changed about new media,” with the following: “If there is a single difference between the ‘what’s new’ collection in 1999 and the present ‘what’s changed’ collection, it is that the earlier hesitation about the role and significance of new media has given way to much more confidence.” She continues later “virtually every piece [in this journal issue] remarks on what might be called the ‘mainstreaming’ of new media.” The internet has become “banal” and “computer-mediated communication is ‘slouching toward the ordinary’” (Lievrouw 2004). What was new then is no longer: the (digital) media identified as new in 1999 are already ordinary, intelligible, and more than less understood by 2004. In short, defining new media by a particular set of technologies cannot be good for either sustained debate or historical scrutiny—what should fascinate us longterm turns too ordinary too fast. The first five years of the journal New Media & Society have demonstrated how to improve on Silverstone’s fine phrase: novelty is at all points of history—not only this one—our problem.
Whether or not we admit it, most of new media studies as it is presently conducted will be footnote in history in a fortnight. New media scholars in general may as well start talking as if that were true. If we mean digital media, we should say so; if we mean media emerging in a particular period (present or past), then we should saying. And certainly, following the lead of this special issue, we should make the historical concept of novelty in media a starting point for discussion.
But starting points are rarely static for historians: for they can often be pushed back and rethought. For instance, it appears the previously cited use of the term new media in 1960 was not the first time McLuhan invoked the term. He used the term in 1953 in a enchanted overstatement about Harold Innis, “technology, [Innis] saw, had solved the problem of production of commodities and had already turned to the packaging of information. And the penetrative powers of the pricing system were as nothing beside the power of the new media of communication to penetrate and transform all existing institutions and patterns of thought” and later concludes on a related note, “once he [Innis] had crossed that bridge to the network of information and ideas he never turned back to the merely economic network. Classical economics had ceased to exist for him except as an historical phenomenon” (McLuhan, 1953: 385, 393). Here McLuhan uses new media to refer to unspecified technologies that package and transform thought into networks of information and ideas. The mixed virtues of the 1953 McLuhan quote—its however vague reference to the information packaging, networked world, and transformational power—should seem altogether familiar and mundane to readers 55 years later.
Not only is does McLuhan remind us yesterday’s new media are today’s ordinary media, the caveat is a central insight to building solid conceptual ground on which to study constantly changing forms of mediation. Conceived historically, new media are objects of study as rich as the human interest in novelty is ancient. Moreover, since all media were new before they were old, the history of new media is older than the history of old media. This paradox attests to the stubborn durability of the topic; in the beginning there was novelty and only then did history came tumbling after. For the historian, there may be no better ground on which to rest studies of media change and collision over time than the tectonic plate of novelty—and since the concept of novelty shifts much more slowly than the day-to-day designation of what things are actually new, steady traditions of new media history should be built on the former, not the latter.
In other words, the assertion that what is new is important especially now is always true, and thus is an unsatisfying and insufficient start. A small shift in emphasis helps however: it is rather that the assertion what is new is important now is especially always true. Change is a rare constant. In other words, the simplified instinct of the historian—that because change is constant, things past and present can be related—is reaffirmed and vivified by placing emphasis on the concept of novelty, rather than the new things themselves, as a starting point for historical work.
The Idea of New Media in Media History: Toward a Literature Review
The “new” in new media may not only be a common source of confusion but what makes the term work for the historian. Before investigating how a number of profound scholars have worked on the question of media novelty, I offer a provisional definition of new media as emerging communication or information technologies undergoing a historical process of contestation, negotiation, and institutionalization. Here of course, communication or information technologies intentionally flips the common digital media term, information and communication technologies (ICT) to refer to any socially constructed medium used to transmit or relay information, while the terms contestation, negotiation, and institutionalization refer the periods of innovative and institutional uncertainty that mark every medium’s arc from obscurity to novelty, to obviousness, to obsolescence. Whatever its problems, the definition invites new media study in scaleable, context-specific senses. Roughly speaking, the more uncomfortable, the more new a medium is—the typewriter can be as new to me as is the PDA, which bears study on generational shifts in answering the question for whom which media are new. A given medium is new perhaps only for those specific groups that struggle to classify, name, and codify them. Perhaps Rasmus Nielsen put the point best: the English term new media in a historical sense should be for talking about media that we do not otherwise know how to talk about. In all, the definition of new media as a historical phenomena embedded in social-material complexes enables conceptual strategies for subjecting contemporary debates on cutting-edge technology to historical and comparative scrutiny.
It turns out, of course, that historians have been doing this for centuries. If unwittingly, most media historians are already new media historians. Nearly every society accessible to historian, anthropologist, and sociologist tells their own new media history—a topic which raises ancient, if urgent, issues of ways for expressing cultural curiosity about what lies outside one’s own social world. Essential questions of the philosophy of science undergird the experience of novelty: how humans organize, coordinate, and experiment upon the world through sensory experience co-varies with epistemological questions with what is already known and not yet discovered—in a word, with what is new.
Examples of unconsciously new media history are legion. Lev Manovich’s fascinating and popular work The Language of New Mediamisses much of its own value in relying on a technical definition of new media. A leading new media scholar in cinema and visual arts, Manovich defines new media as computing and cinema technologies that share five characteristics: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding, writing at one point “a new media object can be described formally (mathematically)” (2001: 27). His approach has serious virtues: his elegant though short history traces these characteristics back to Charles Babbage’s analytical engine and Daguerre’s daguerreotype in the 1830s and makes substantial contributions to digital media scholarship along the way. He cautions against technoeuphoric and techno-dystopian thought, argues that digital media are neither inherently interactive nor open code, nor do they necessarily entail a loss of authenticity. He also sees in the almost two centuries of digital media a spellspinding shift in the structure of information from narrative to database form. The recent rash of concern about the construction and future of narrative, he suggests, may be a result of the fact that for a first time we can observe narrative from outside it (Manovich 2001).
Yet whatever its brilliance, Manovich’s historical work wholly mistakes digital visual media for new media. This leaves too little room for questions of how socially understood historical media may be expressing themselves in new institutions. Surely numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding do not capture the essence of nineteenth century innovations in radio, magnetism, mesmerism, artificial intelligence, and acoustics. Manovich’s work can also be taken as a synecdoche to the dominance of the eye as the subject and tool for studying new media in cinema and visual arts. Stimulating work by Siegfred Zielenski (2006) and Jonathan Crary (1992) take important steps toward a multisensory, if still heavily visual, study of the arts. While in Manovich’s case, the eye may rightfully rule visual arts, media studies need not cling to that sensory experience as its dominant paradigm.