listening to repeating

Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric is now out on McFarland.  You can get it there, or at Amazon, among other locations.  In it, I have a short piece, “Novel Cartographies, New Correspondences,” which just so happens to be the last chapter (#27) in the book.

What’s up with the oblique title?  The chapter’s a gesture toward thinking of how the production of new media can foster community-based learning and engagement with one’s local institutions (such as universities).  Put another way, how does web-based new media correspond with people’s actual, everyday practices (as opposed to simulating them or rendering them virtual), and how might it enable social change?

And so the chapter describes how neogeography is one such vehicle for correspondence.

Thanks to Heather Urbanski for being a fantastic editor.

Today I’ve been reading New Media, 1740-1915 (edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree), especially the chapters on telegraphy by Paul Young and Katherine Stubbs.  I came to this work about two years too late, but better late…

In her article, “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions,” Stubbs directs us to Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes, a Volume of Choice Telegraphic Literature, Humor, Fun, Wit & Wisdom (published in 1877), which is now digitized (in .pdf or .txt) and available online for free.  What’s smart about Stubbs’s argument is that it historicizes the telegraph within its own context and conditions rather than reading it as the origin of the Internet (92).  She also opens a space for further technoculture studies inquiry, namely because she frames telegraphic literature as a complex site where the telegraph is understood in often contradictory terms.  It is not only the simultaneous freedom from material constraints and control of information, but also another means of reproducing social inequalities (106). Indeed, for some the telegraph isn’t so liberating. If you are at all interested in technoculture studies, particularly work on technology and embodiment, then I highly recommend this chapter. 

Elsehwere in New Media, 1740-1915, Paul Young’s “Media on Display: A Telegraphic History of Early American Cinema” looks at correspondences of telegraphy with early cinema.  Although his approach is quite different from Stubbs’s, it’s nevertheless quite compelling.  For one, it attends to how the telegraph — as a technology — influenced both how audiences engaged early cinema (as a “visual ‘telegraph’” (257)) and how film represented shifts in space and time.  Three films he points to include:

The Life of an American Fireman (1902-1903), which is excerpted below (note the cool telegraphic alarm):

The Lonedale Operator (1911), a still of which is below, where telegraphy comes to the rescue:

And The Great Train Robbery (1903), which I mention in a recent post about Anderson’s “Respectability”:

Now what Marinetti implies by the “telegraphic image” and “telegraphic lyricism,” I’m not so sure.  But I’m working through it.

Print Texts Cited:

Stubbs, Katherine.  “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions.”  New Media 1740-1915. Eds. L. Gitelman and G.B. Pingree.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 91-112.  

Young, Paul.  “Media on Display: A Telegraphic History of Early American Cinema.”  New Media 1740-1915. Eds. L. Gitelman and G.B. Pingree.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 229-264.