Memory Bytes

History, Technology, and Digital Culture

Lauren Rabinovitz, Abraham Geil, Lauren Rabinovitz, Abraham Geil

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780822332411, 9780822332282
• eBook ISBN: 9780822385691
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• LAUREN RABINOVITZ AND ABRAHAM GEIL Introduction
• PART I : Intellectual Histories of the Information Age
• LAURA RIGAL Imperial Attractions: Benjamin Franklin’s New Experiments of 1751
• DAVID DEPEW From Heat Engines to Digital Printouts: Machine Models of the Body from the Victorian Era to the Human GenomeProject
• RONALD E. DAY The Erasure and Construction of History for the Information Age: Positivism and Its Critics
• PART II : Visual Culture, Subjectivity, and the Education of the Senses
• LAUREN RABINOVITZ More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture through Hale’s Tours, imax, and Motion SimulationRides
• JUDITH BABBITTS Stereographs and the Construction of a Visual Culture in the United States
• SHARON GHAMARI-TABRIZI The Convergence of the Pentagon and Hollywood: The Next Generation of Military Training Simulations
• PART III : Materiality, Time, and the Reproduction of Sound and Motion
• JOHN DURHAM PETERS Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History
• LISA GITELMAN Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, The Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls
• SCOTT CURTIS Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics
• PART IV: Digital Aesthetics, Social Texts, and Art Objects
• N. KATHERINE HAYLES Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric Networks in New Media
• THOMAS SWISS Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions
• VIVIAN SOBCHACK Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index