@gitelmanIntroductionMediaHistorical
tags:: #Annotations #Gitelman
[!info] - Cite Key: @gitelmanIntroductionMediaHistorical - Link: Gitelman.pdf - Bibliography: Gitelman, L. n.d. Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects. Available at http://web.mit.edu/uricchio/Public/television/Gitelman.pdf [Last accessed 18 January 2023].
Annotations¶
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Imported on 2023-01-21 11:48 pm¶
Thoughts and Ideas:¶
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight challenge readers to imagine what a meaningful history of today's new media might eventually look like as well as to think about how accounts of media in general should be written.
Page 1 2023-01-21#5:07 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Note
Asks the reader to think about how our media will look like in history and how media should be stored in history.
Page 1 2023-01-21#5:09 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight In each case, history comes freighted with a host of assumptions about what is important and what isn't about who is significant and who isn't—as well as about the meanings of media, qualities of human communication, and causal mechanisms that account for historical change.
It is important to distingush what was important in the expansion of media and what wasn't. As well it is just as important to determine what parts of the media are meaningful versus useless. Think about what pieces of media truly changed humanity or gave meaning to things.
Page 2 2023-01-21#5:18 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight legacy of the Enlightenment, this mental map by convention separates human culture from nonhuman nature. Art and other nonscientific pursuits arise from or represent culture, while science represents nature
There is a separation in the way humans express their culture and nature and determining that split allows for a better understanding of the meaning behind media.
Page 4 2023-01-21#5:29 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Media muddy the map. Like old art, old media remain meaningful. Think of medieval manuscripts, eight-track tapes, and rotary phones, or semaphores, stereoscopes, and punchcard programming: only antiquarians use them, but they are all recognizable as media. Yet like old science, old media also seem unacceptably unreal. Neither silent film nor black-and-white television seems right anymore, except as a throwback.
Media is ever evolving. Some pieces of media have evolved, and new creations have been inspired by past ones. Media can also be a lesson of what not to do or what to improve on and get better at. All media gets out dated, and it can be put into two categories, the piece was expanded on such as the idea of a phone or looked at as what not to do again such as black and white TV.
Page 4 2023-01-21#5:34 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Media are so integral to a sense of what representation itself is,
Expanding on this point, when we humans try to show something or represent something in some way we are always using a form of media and media can almost be defined as humans representing something.
Page 4 2023-01-21#5:36 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight But media are also historical because they are functionally integral to a sense of pastness.
Through media we are able to look into the past.
Page 5 2023-01-21#10:46 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight A photograph, for instance, offers a two-dimensional, visual representation of its subject, but it also stands uniquely as evidence, an index, because that photograph was caused in the moment of the past that it represents.
Photos are evidence of a piece in time, captured and shared into the future. There are ways for images to be altered or artifical images (such as paintings) that my depict a specific scene but is not the scene itself.
Page 5 2023-01-21#10:49 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight one helpful way to think of media may be as the scientific instruments of a society at large.
Interesting way to think of media.
Page 5 2023-01-21#11:02 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight They look through the instrument the way one looks through a telescope, without getting caught up in battles already won over whether and how it does the job.
We tend to use media or inventions without questioning why it was created or what it went through to be created. We just use it for its function and don't even take a second to ask "Why did we decide to create this?"
Page 5 2023-01-21#11:05 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight The success of all media depends at some level on inattention or "blindness" to the media technologies themselves
If we understand how a piece of media works fully, we the excitement of using it and more think about how it can be improved. A perfect real life example is video games, to a child or a person who doesn't play a game a lot, the first couple times they play they are blind to all the game's flaws. The people who consistently the game and learn it fully tend to notice all the problems in the game, and it becomes unenjoyable to play as they are always criticizing Page 6 2023-01-21#11:09 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight The introduction of new media, these instances suggest, is never entirely revolutionary:
Every creation of media takes time to build and improved upon. There is no one piece of media that magically changes the entire world in that moment. This can be related to like an alien giving us a revolutionary piece of media, most likely we would have no idea how to process what it is and it would be useless because we don't understand its use or how it was created.
Page 6 2023-01-21#11:16 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight media become authoritative as the social processes of their definition
Media has the ability to create social norms
Page 6 2023-01-21#11:19 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight separated out or forgotten,
For example the internet has been built into our world and it is hard to think of a world without it.
Page 6 2023-01-21#11:19 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight people may converse through a telephone and forget the telephone itself, the context of telephoning makes all kinds of difference to the things they say and the way they say them.
These types of media have become so standard in today's society that we tend to forget its a piece of media. The internet is a great example of this. I wonder if other pieces of media in history have become so standard that people forgot that it was a piece of media? maybe like paper?
Page 7 2023-01-21#11:26 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight I define media as socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation.
How the author Gitelman defines media
Page 7 2023-01-21#11:27 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight they include a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions,
We have almost set invisible 'rules' on the media we use. There is a standard or a specific way to use a piece of media and if you use it a wrong way you aren't using it right.
Page 7 2023-01-21#11:33 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight norms and standards can and do change, because they are expressive of changeable social, economic, and material relationships.
The way we use media is ever-changing. As an example the internet was already widelyy used before COVID-19. During COVID-19 the internet expanded even more and new ways of using it emerged. For example online school or remote work.
Page 8 2023-01-21#11:36 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight pecificity is key. Rather than static, blunt, and unchanging technology, every medium involves a "sequence of displacements and obsolescences, part of the delirious operations of modernization,"
Media cannot be vague, specifiying our media is important.
Page 8 2023-01-21#11:38 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Bolter and Grusin have trimmed out any mention of human agents, as if media were naturally the way they are, without authors, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, programmers, investors, owners, or audiences.
They are saying media is created by itself but it takes humans to shape it into a medium that can be shown to others.
Page 9 2023-01-21#11:42 pm
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Media are more properly the results of social and economic forces, so that any technological logic they possess is only apparently intrinsic.
Media is natural created through society and moves through it. Its seen as essential to society.
Page 10 2023-01-21#11:45 pm
Thesis¶
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight the ways scholars and critics do media history, but it is more importantly about the ways that people experience meaning, how they perceive the world and communicate with each other, and how they distinguish the past and identify culture.
Thesis statement: - Ways media is recorded (In history) - How we see and perceive the world and its meaning - How culture is identified
Page 1 2023-01-21#5:09 pm
Definitions / concepts¶
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight Is the history of media first and foremost the history of technological methods and devices? Or is the history of media better understood as the story of modern ideas of communication? Or is it about modes and habits of perception? Or about political choices and structures? Should we be looking for a sequence of separate "ages" with ruptures, revolutions, or paradigm shifts in between, or should we be seeing more of an evolution? A progress?
Question to keep in the back of our mind during the reading and course.
Page 1 2023-01-21#5:14 pm
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight Which kind of historical subjects are media?
Great question to think about. It is important to determine what is media and what isn't as many things may seem like a piece of media but are not.
Page 3 2023-01-21#5:24 pm
[!quote|#ff6666] Highlight Forget that the word media is rightly plural, not singular. Media are. A medium is.
Important to remember that media is a broad concept and cannot be focused onto one specific area. It is a medium in which we humans communicate, express ourselves, etc
Page 2 2023-01-21#5:19 pm
Relating¶
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Fukuyama proposed what he described as "a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy"
For example, we know what may be happening over seas, whereas in the past, people mainly knew what was happening locally in there town or city. Technology has Expanded our reach around the world
Page 3 2023-01-21#5:20 pm
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight the general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media" so that soon, "a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium"
Media is becoming more of a non-physical object and the very meaning of a piece of media is being destroyed. It is presented through one medium rather than many, this is the internet.
Page 3 2023-01-21#5:22 pm
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