Description
Book SynopsisDigital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. This book argues for the need to understand digital culture - and its social, political, and ethical ramifications - in historical and philosophical context.
Trade Review“Anyone who teaches courses in digital culture or media studies knows how difficult it is to find scholarly essays on new media that consider these developments in relation to social and technological precedents.
Memory Bytes fills this gap.”—Brian Goldfarb, author of
Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom“Memory Bytes is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship taking the current moment of media change as an incitement to re-examine earlier moments in media history. The range of media, historical periods, and disciplinary perspectives is spectacular, representing interdisciplinary collaboration and conversation at its very best.”—Henry Jenkins, coeditor of
Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular CultureTable of ContentsIntroduction / Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil 1
Part I. Intellectual Histories of the Information Age
Imperial Attractions: Benjamin Franklin's
New Experiments of 1751 / Laura Rigal 23
From Heat Engines to Digital Printouts: Machine Models of the Body from the Victorian Era to the Human Genome Project / David DePew 47
The Erasure and Construction of History for the Information Age: Positivism and Its Critics / Ronald E. Day 76
Part II. Visual Culture, Subjectivity, and the Education of the Senses
More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture through
Hale's Tours, IMAX, and Motion Simulation Rides / Lauren Rabinovitz 99
Stereographs and the Construction of a Visual Culture in the United States / Judith Babbitts 126
The Convergence of the Pentagon and Hollywood: The Next Generation of Military Training Simulations / Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi 150
Part III. Materiality, Time, and the Reproduction of Sound and Motion
Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History / John Durham Peters 177
Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, The Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls / Lisa Gitelman 199
Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics / Scott Curtis 218
Part IV. Digital Aesthetics, Social Texts, and Art Objects
Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric Networks in New Media / N. Katherine Hayles 257
Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions / Thomas Swiss 283
Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime / Vivian Sobchack 305
Selected Bibliography 331
Contributors 335
Index 339
