New Media, 1740-1915 (Media in Transition)

Rating:
Summary: Matthew Purdy in THE IOWA REVIEW says --
Review: "New Media, 1740-1915 traces a history of the dialogue between media and society that has continued into the present. The title alone is somewhat startling, pairing an emphatically contemporary coinage with a time frame well before the dawn of modern technology as we've come to think of it. But one of the goals of the volume is to establish a context for our own notion of new media and how its newness is constructed. . . . All of the devices in New Media, 1740-1915 were new media in their respective eras, and in a sense they are still new. They are- Gitelman and Pingree use Bruce Sterling's term- 'dead media,' media no longer used and, in many cases, long since forgotten.These devices never got the chance to become fully enmeshed in the fabric of everyday life; the telegraph and phonograph evolved, the rest faded away. As such, they appear to us today perpetually strange, embalmed in their own original novelty. The volume's central lesson, then, is not to become blinded by the promises of our own new media. Because it isn't new at all."