New Media, Old Media A History and Theory Reader

This comprehensive anthology of original and classic essays explores the tensions of old and new in digital culture. Leading international media scholars and cultural theorists interrogate new media like the Internet, digital video, and MP3s against the backdrop of earlier media such as television, film, photography, and print.

New Media, Old Media is a comprehensive anthology of original and classic essays that explore the tensions of old and new in digital culture. Leading international media scholars and cultural theorists interrogate new media like the Internet, digital video, and MP3s against the backdrop of earlier media such as television, film, photography, and print. The essays provide new benchmarks for evaluating all those claims; political, social, ethical, made about the digital age. Committed to historical research and to theoretical innovation, they suggest that in the light of digital programmability, seemingly forgotten moments in the history of the media we glibly call old can be rediscovered and transformed. The many topics explored in provocative volume include websites, webcams, the rise and fall of dotcom mania, Internet journalism, the open source movement, and computer viruses. New Media, Old Media is a foundational text for general readers, students, and scholars of new media across the disciplines. It is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the cultural impact of new media.

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

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.