Media Studies: 1450, 1890, 2010

Readings

Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B. Pingree. New Media, 1740-1915. MIT Press, 2004, pp. xi-xxxiii, 91-264. ISBN: 9780262572286.

Clanchy, Michael T. "Looking Back from the Invention of Printing." In Resnick, Daniel P. Literacy in Historical Perspective. Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, 1983, pp. 7-22. ISBN: 9780844404103.

Uricchio, William. "Television's First Seventy-Five Years: The Interpretive Flexibility of a Medium in Transition." In Kolker, Robert. The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media. Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 286–305. ISBN: 9780195175967.

———. "The Future of Television?" In Snickars, Pelle, and Patrick Vonderau. The YouTube Reader. National Library of Sweden, 2010, pp. 24-39. ISBN: 9789188468116.

View the videos on Prof. Uricchio's Web site.

Questions

1. In our discussion of British industrialization, we talked about the limitations of technological determinism as a causal explanation for change over time; Allen, at the end of the day, came back to technological determinism to explain British industrialization. Is "Media Studies" just another way to repackage technological determinism, or do the authors we have read this week provide a more nuanced view of cause and effect, and change over time?

2. Based on our readings this week, can you imagine writing a single, unified history of media? Would it begin with the appearance of the printing press in Europe, or earlier? Would it end with today's "digital revolution," or at an earlier moment?

Partial Bibliography

A. General

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780262631594.

Williams, Raymond. "The Technology and the Society." Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Routledge, 2003, pp. 9-31. ISBN: 9780415314565.

Ong, Walter. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. University of Chicago Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780226629766.

———. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 9780415281294.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780804732338.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780814742952.

Uricchio, William. We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities. Intellect, 2008. ISBN: 9781841502076.

B. History of the Book

Clanchy, Michael T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307. Blackwell, 1993. ISBN: 9780631168577.

Saenger, Paul. Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780804740166.

Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. Translated by David Gerard. Verso, 2010. ISBN: 9781844676330.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780802060419.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1980. ISBN: 9780521299558.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780226401225.

McKenzie, Donald F. Making Meaning: 'Printers of the Mind' and Other Essays. University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. ISBN: 9781558493360.

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Translated by Lydia Cochrane. Princeton University Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780691054995.

McDermott, Joseph P. A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China. Hong Kong University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9789622097827.

Meyer-Fong, Tobie. "The Printed Word: Books, Publishing Culture and Society in Late Imperial China." Journal of Asian Studies 66 (August 2007): 787-817.

Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publication (SHARP)

C. Histories of Other Media, and Media Change

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electronic Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1990. ISBN: 9780195063417.

Nye, David E. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. MIT Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780262640305.

Flichy, Patrice. Dynamics of Modern Communication: The Shaping and Impact of New Communication Technologies. Translated by Liz Libbrecht. Sage, 2009. ISBN: 9780803978515.

Uricchio, William, and Roberta Pearson. Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780691021171.

Charney, Leo, and Vanessa Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. University of California Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780520201125.

Schwartz, Vanessa. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780520221680.

Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers. Walker, 2007. ISBN: 9780802716040.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780804738729.

Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book, 1480-1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780199262168.

Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780195153736.

Urton, Gary. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. University of Texas Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780292785403.

Thorburn, David, and Henry Jenkins. Rethinking Media Change: The Esthetics of Transition. MIT Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780262701075.

Chapman, Jane. Comparative Media History: An Introduction: 1789 to the Present. Polity, 2005. ISBN: 9780745632438.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. MIT Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780262572477.

Acland, Charles. Residual Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780816644728.