Sunday, July 27, 2008

HEADFIRST INTO A DILEMMA: HISTORIOGRAPHY, CONTINUED

In a recent post, I argued that too many histories of the media focus too much on the discourse surrounding the media, and neglect the material qualities of the media themselves. I maintain this position, but in the last few weeks, I've been thinking about how some of the best historical work in media studies has succeeded largely because they de-center the object of analysis. In other words, much as works of history of communication technology that focus almost exclusively on, say, newspaper reports about a certain medium (many inspired by Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New, a truly superior work) fail to deliver much because of their tendency to recapitulate tired ideas about utopian and dystopian expectations (Marvin, and Carey before her, always did better than this), histories that focus almost exclusively on the technology as a thing in and of itself reify the 'set-aside-ness' of the communication technology in question, and this leaves us with some pretty weak historical work, too.

A colleague recently suggested to me that Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought--a history of the U.S. from 1815 to 1848--did a better job with the history of the telegraph than many other books that took a more telegraph-centric look at things. The point: Howe (a bona fide historian) does better talking about the telegraph because he's not talking about the telegraph itself, or even about the discursive domain surrounding the telegraph. It's a superior piece of media history because it's not trying to be the history of a medium, which allows it to be a multivariate and broad exploration of all kinds of things happening in the U.S. as the electrical telegraph was coming into being (keeping in mind that the original 'telegraph' wasn't electrical, or American). So, all those issues in economics, culture, military history, race, gender, class, politics, power, regionalism, and literature get pulled into the analysis.

So, maybe it works like this:
--histories about technologies themselves are often too limited in scope
--histories about the discourse around the technologies have become a kind of one-note reminder of the constructedness of all things (an idea that is important, but not really sufficient in all cases to explore or exhaust a particular area of study)
--histories that go broad and don't focus on a communication technology are the best

To write good histories of the media, maybe we need to stop looking at the media.

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