Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Response to the Response, Part 1: History and New Media

This entry is going to be the first in a series of responses to Dave’s post of last week, which has got me to thinkin’:

First, about the noted tendency for many media historians to dismiss the importance of the Internet, or of new media generally, as just the same-old, same-old. I agree that this is annoying, and I also admit to doing some of it myself. I want to offer several different but compatible explanations for what I think might be going on here.

Most media historians, like most other academics, are geeky, and also very often insecure in their geekiness. Part of their insecurity comes from the awareness that they are experts in a subject in which almost all other people have very little interest, and regard as more or less useless. Hence, in their continual effort to prove their relevance, and also in order to preen before their fellow academics, obscure references to historical personages or events or technologies will inevitably pop up. “You tell me that the Internet is inherently democratic, and yet, don’t you know what Forysthe P. Wigglesworth III, nineteenth-American abolitionist, adventurer, and inventor of the epilecticoposcope, had to say about the utopian rhetoric surrounding the telegraph?” Followed by a (not terribly germane) quote from Wigglesworth, and a knowing smile.

Then too, the ready dismissal of new media’s significance is a cheap way to claim political sophistication, or a kind of old school radicalism: oh, I am just too, too historically aware to buy into all that hype.

A more justifiable rationale for this sort of argument, at least seven or eight years ago, when propaganda about the Internet was ubiquitous and rarely challenged, was simple weariness about the claims made on its behalf (Darin Barney has a nice quote at the beginning of his book Prometheus Wired from John Perry Barlow, in which Barlow calls digitized information “the most profound technological shift since the capture of fire.”) A reminder about historical perspective often felt apropos. Nowadays there is less need, although some of us (again I would probably include myself here) do tend to slip back into what has become something of a reflex response.

This is offered more in the spirit of explanation than exculpation. The pattern that Dave describes is intellectually lazy and boring, and because of this essentially helps makes the case for those many people who would rather we just forget all about history when talking about modern media technologies.

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