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A newly materialist approach to the study of media technologies is emerging in several fields, including cultural studies, digital humanities, and science and technology studies (STS). Yet most technology scholarship in the communication field, informed by classical media research, still follows a broadly constructivist line focused on the meanings, appropriations, representations and semiology of communication technology and its uses. This chapter explores the conceptualization of communication and media technologies at the intersection of STS and communication studies, surveying and comparing key concepts or schools of thought in each field. A framework for mediation is proposed as a way to theorize material artifacts, communication practices, and social arrangements or structures as mutually-constitutive elements of communication and media technology.

Fulton reminds us that the “print revolution” not only stretched over centuries but also that print co-existed with other media practices well into the seventeenth century, including manuscript letters. Indeed, print continued to carry somewhat of a “stigma” for such authors as Shakespeare, Milton and Donne; when their works were printed, they were often pirated editions from which the author made no money and over which he had no control (the famous example being the “bad quarto” of Hamlet). Arguing for the importance of media specificity and media materiality, he illustrates his argument with a letter from John Donne, recently discovered, written on gilt-edged paper, showing how the content and the materiality intertwine to create rich patterns of meaning.

Using the recent donation of the Deena Larsen Collection to the University of Maryland as an example, Kirschenbaum discusses the ways in which digital objects challenge standard archival practices and assumptions. As he argues, digital objects are in a literal sense re-created each time they are accessed, a situation that poses unique problems for keeping detailed records of the datastream flow. He also notes programs that have chosen to archive obsolete machines as well as the objects that play on them, a strategy that places the archivist in the gritty material world of the engineer and circuit designer. The implication is that at every stage and level, archiving must transform to meet the challenges of born-digital objects, from theory to criteria for best practices to practice itself. This is what he calls the “.txtual condition.”

This chapter discusses the role of location-aware technologies such as smart phones and GPS devices in overwriting urban landscapes, creating dynamic new meanings that people can access by moving to certain locations. Because the information is linked to a physical site, it participates in creating paths that define a user’s movement through the landscape, as well as imbuing the landscape with semiotic, emotional and narrative meanings through messages left there.

This chapter emphatically reminds us that media did not begin with the printing press (a point that William Johnson also makes clear). Moreover, Brantley argues for the particular insights that medieval media can bring to media archeology and media theory. Rather than present us with epochal shifts, she argues, medieval media enable us to see gradations of change in which innovation and tradition interact in ongoing negotiations over meaning. Illustrated with a brilliant reading of a medieval Pater Noster, Brantley shows the interaction with image and text, Latin and vernacular.

John Zuern’s chapter picks up on the theme of recursivity in his discussion of Brecht’s radio play Lindbergh’s Flight compared with the digital Flash work by Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley, My Name is Captain, Captain. He argues for the advantages of a comparative approach, especially for digital literature in comparison to print works and to works in other media, such as Brecht’s play. In his reading, the comparison with Brecht serves to highlight the moral and ethical dimensions of the digital work. Just as Brecht removed Lindbergh’s name from his work after Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathies became apparent (calling it The Flight Over the Ocean), so in My Name is Captain, Captain., Lindbergh is not only the parent who suffered because Bruno Richard Hauptmann kidnapped and inadvertently killed his child but also the hero-pilot who failed to use his notoriety to move his culture toward a better world. In a stunning display of deep reading, Zuern shows how the media-specific aspects of My Name is Captain, Captain train the reader to read its complexities through the process of reading.

In this chapter, Drucker asks questions about the migration of letters from print to screen, noting that the status of letters cannot be resolved through technology alone but necessarily involves philosophical and even perceptual questions. In this respect, her essay complements Kirschenbaum’s insistence that the “.txtual condition” invites a wholesale re-examination of the assumptions underlying archival theory and practice. Any given letter, she argues, emerges from the interplay between the concept of the letter and what it essentially is, a situation rendered unusually complex in digital media.

This chapter moves the discussion from reading communities to the reading individual, especially the child reader. As books produced specifically for children begin to emerge as the distinct genre of children’s literature around 1800, the possession of a book becomes increasingly identified with the formation and possession of a self. A book, Crain observes, was frequently the first commodity object that a child would own. Regardless of its content, a book was thus a training ground for commodity culture and for the formation of a subject defined by consumption.

This chapter illustrates what it would mean to read a digital literary text not primarily for its content but rather for traces of its underlying generative code. Taking as his tutor text a collaborative writing project that seven writers/programmers produced “live” for five days in a London gallery, Marion explains the elaborate mix of algorithmic procedures, random functions and Markov chain generators that subjected what the writers wrote to interventions that both transformed and mixed with their content to become the output text for the project.

While most scholars are aware that bookrolls (a subset of scrolls with a set of specific characteristics and typically employed for literary texts) lacked punctuation, what they may not know is that the omission was not a result of ignorance or lack of imagination but a deliberate choice not to employ reading aids. Johnson beautifully contextualizes this choice in his discussion of how bookrolls were read and what functions they served when the Romans adopted them (first century AD).

Dwarf Fortress, an online computer game, attracts dedicated players who devote untold hours to it, yet it sacrifices the realistic visuals so dominant in most computer games in favor of computational intensity. Its procedures put into action multiple agents and agencies, whose interactions then create the environment and its inhabitants (human and nonhuman) as emergent results. Players can intervene by giving the dwarfs commands and making changes in the environment, but their control is never absolute, as the nonhuman mechanics of the game create unexpected and unpredictable consequences. That such a difficult and esoteric game would have generated its own community of expert readers/writers is perhaps not surprising (providing a striking parallel with Johnson’s discussion of the expert communities of readers/writers of bookrolls in the Greco-Roman period); more startling is the appearance of premodern literary forms such as the annal and chronicle.

This chapter narrows the inquiry to the kinds of practices associated with job printing. Arguing that the multiply ambiguous and ill-defined phrase “print culture” may productively be understood to mean the culture of printers, she shows that job printing—printing of bookkeeping forms, tickets, stock certificates and the like—was a major economic driver in print shop economies over several centuries. She points out that such products as letterheads were not meant to be read in the usual sense—certainly not subjected to “close reading”—but rather functioned to inscribe a corporate voice into communications between firms and individuals. These forms, she argues, did not have readers but rather users.

This chapter considers mobile displays that are not only public but live and interactive, as in an LED display on the side of a building that shows text messages sent by people passing. Enacted in different installations with variations, these public art works share certain features that challenge traditional modes of understanding in the humanities, especially the assumption that art endures and can be archived, shelved, and otherwise made permanently available. In addition, they are crafted to disturb the environment, creating new kinds of relationships between people moving through ambient space and the landscape through which they move.