New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader

by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Editor), Anna Watkins Fisher (Editor), Thomas Keenan (Editor)

Overview

New Media, Old Media examines the historical context of new media technologies. In this volume of original and classic essays, leading media and cultural theorists interrogate new media against the background of older media such as film, photography, and print in order to evaluate the multiple claims-political, social, ethical, and aesthetic-made about the radical difference of the digital age. Topics discussed include webcams, dotcom mania, Internet journalism, and race on the Web. This provocative collection promises to jolt new media theory out of its dogmatic slumber and serve as a foundational text for students of media across the disciplines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138021105
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/03/2015
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	752
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

Thomas W. Keenan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College. He is author of Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics, and coeditor of Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943 and Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media? Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Part I: The Archaeology of New Media

1. Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures? Thomas Elsaesser

2. Electricity Made Visible, Geoffrey Batchen

3. "Tones from out of Nowhere": Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archaeology of Synthetic Sound, Thomas Y. Levin

Part II: Archives

4. Memex Revisited, Vannevar Bush

5. Out of File, Out of Mind, Cornelia Vismann

6. Dis/continuities: Does the Archive Become Metephorical in Multi-Media Space? Wolfgang Ernst

7. Breaking Down: Godard's Histories, Richard Dienst

8. Ordering Law, Judging History: Deliberations on Court TV, Lynne Joyrich

Part III: Power-Code

9. The Style of Sources: Remarks on the Theory and History of Programming, Wolfgang Hagen

10. Science as Open Source Process, Friedrich Kittler

11. Cold War Networks or Kaiserstr. 2, Neubabelsberg, Friedrich Kittler

12. Protocol vs. Institutionalizaion, Alexander R. Galloway

13. Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web, Tara McPherson

14. Generation Flash, Lev Manovich

15. Viruses Are Good for You, Julian Dibbell

16. The Imaginary of the Artificial: Automata, Models, Machinics—On Promiscuous Modeling as Precondition for Poststructuralist Ontology, Anders Michelsen

Part IV: Network Events

17. Information, Crisis, Catastrophe, Mary Ann Doane

18. The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectural [version 3.0], McKenzie Wark

19. Imperceptible Perceptions in our Technological Modernity, Arvind Rajagopal

20. Deep Europe: A History of the Syndicate Network, Geert Lovink

21. The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines, Vicente L. Rafael

Part V: Theorizing "New" Media

22. Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Lisa Nakamura

23. Network Subjects: or, The Ghost is the Message, Nicholas Mirzoeff

24. Modes of Digital Identification: Virtual Technologies and Webcam Cultures, Ken Hillis

25. Hypertext Avant La Lettre, Peter Krapp

26. Network Fever, Mark Wigley

Afterword: The Demystifica-hic-tion of In-hic-formation, Thomas Keenan

 

 

Editorial Reviews

"With this revision, editors Wendy Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher have made a major resource that much more indispensable. Ranging from media archaeology to critical discourses of race, class and technology, to close readings of net porn, this collection balances not only the old and the new, but also the specifics of media materiality and globally-conscious theoretical inquiry." —Peter Lunenfeld, Department of Design Media Arts, UCLA

"The new edition of New Media, Old Media not only expands but intensifies the bold enterprise of media history. Global in its reach, and dealing with political economy and postcolonialism, physics and environmental critique, law and war, citizen journalism and queer theory among many other topics, New Media, Old Media overturns simplistic notions of continual progress, rewriting the very concept of historical process, and making clear that media in all their variety are the very material of history. A crucial handbook for all students of media, of history, and of the challenges we will face in the future." —Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London

From the Publisher