Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit? Jay David Bolter Georgia Institute of Technology, [email protected]
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Criticism Volume 49 | Issue 1 Article 5 2007 Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit? Jay David Bolter Georgia Institute of Technology, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Bolter, Jay David (2007) "Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit?," Criticism: Vol. 49: Iss. 1, Article 5. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol49/iss1/5 050 rev-bolt (105-118) 3/3/08 8:44 AM Page 107 JAY DAVID BOLTER Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit? Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, by Lisa Gitelman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. 221. $36.00 cloth. Avatars of Story, by Marie-Laure Ryan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Pp. xxiv + 275. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, by Johanna Drucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xviii + 291. $40.00 cloth, $27.50 paper. WHAT DO Manuel Castells, Lev Manovich, Will Wright, Howard Rheingold, Paul Dourish, Christa Sommerer, Margaret Morse, and N. Katherine Hayles have in common? They all create or study digital media artifacts. What else do they have in common? As far as I can see, nothing. Their diverse backgrounds and expert- ise mirror the diversity of digital media today. Popular writers on new media often tell a story of convergence to some single technological future, but what we are seeing today is a rich diversity of forms of production and critical approaches. The areas of digital media production include communications and publishing software, games and other entertainment software, digital art, and experimental design. The disciplines studying digital media include mass communications and sociology, human-computer interaction, art history and theory, film theory and history, literary theory, and the relatively new field of media studies itself. Even if we limit ourselves to the intersections of art, entertainment, and digital media technology, it would be difficult to tell a coherent story that includes all the forms of production and critique. Instead of attempting an overview of digital media today, then, I am going to use three recent works as the basis for a discussion of three overlapping issues. Lisa Gitelman, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Johanna Drucker have written three very good books in media studies. Gitelman cites some earlier works of Drucker, but Criticism, Winter 2007, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 107–118 Copyright © 2008 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 107 050 rev-bolt (105-118) 3/3/08 8:44 AM Page 108 108 Jay David Bolter otherwise there are no cross-citations, despite the numerous references and sub- stantial indexes in each book. Gitelman’s book is a historical study that compares the reception of two “new media” technologies in American culture: the phono- graph at the end of the nineteenth century and network computer communica- tions in the 1960s and ’70s. Ryan is a narratologist who is trying to classify the functions of narrative in digital and other contemporary media. Drucker’s book, apparently not about digital media at all, examines contemporary visual art, focusing on painting and photography of the 1990s. Yet the question Drucker raises about the relationship of art and popular visual culture can (and should) also be posed for the growing body of digital art. Each of these books contributes to a debate about new media, although no two of them participate centrally in the same debate. The Newness of New Media The fact that another term for digital media is “new media” opens one such debate. For popular writers today, there is no question that digital media are essentially and necessarily new. For them, digital technology constitutes a revo- lution in communication and representation, to which each development in hardware and software (the World Wide Web, the DVD, GPS, even Second Life and YouTube) makes its contribution. The technology companies understand- ably promote this view. According to Steve Jobs, for example, Apple alone has been responsible for three revolutionary developments: the Mac, the iPod, and now the iPhone. Newspaper and magazine writers on technology as well as many academics fall easily into this rhetoric of the new. They assume that they must emphasize the computer’s uniqueness to justify it as a new medium, so they try to show that digital technology possesses a set of characteristics that set it apart from all previous media. The assumptions of novelty and medium-specificity have filtered down from the writings of the high modernists of the 1950s and ’60s, such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, and today constitute what we might call “popular modernism.” It would be pedantic to try to avoid the term “new media” altogether. We do, however, need to understand the cultural work that the term is made to do, and, where appropriate, we need to challenge the assumptions of popular mod- ernism. Lisa Gitelman provides such a challenge in Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Gitelman’s field is comparative media studies, now sometimes called “media archaeology.” Such scholars examine earlier media and media forms in both their technical and their cultural contexts. They are par- ticularly concerned to get behind the ossified narratives that are told about the development of such media. Media archaeology often deals with the reproduc- tive or broadcast media of the early twentieth century (photography, phonogra- phy, film, and radio), and it often makes implicit comparisons between the 050 rev-bolt (105-118) 3/3/08 8:44 AM Page 109 Complicity in Digital Media and Art 109 reception of those media and the reception of digital technology today. Many media archaeologists have focused on the prehistory and early history of film in an attempt to take us beyond the simple (American) version of the story that sees D. W. Griffith, as he saw himself, as the master who figured out what film is really for. Although Gitelman resists labeling her work as media archaeology, she seems to me to share the goals of the media archaeologists in seeking to draw a more nuanced picture of the cultural contexts in which media are used. In general, media archaeologists reject the view that film, television, or the computer have developed toward some single perfect communications form. As Gitelman puts it: “[M]edia are unique and complicated historical subjects. Their histories must be social and cultural, not the stories of how one technology leads to another, or of isolated geniuses working their magic on the world” (7). The complex historical subject that Gitelman chooses is not, in this case, early film; she focuses instead on the cultural life of the phonograph from 1878 to about 1910, which she compares with, or at least juxtaposes to, the develop- ment of digital networking and the World Wide Web from the 1960s to the 1990s. Gitelman is a meticulous historian, as she details Thomas Edison’s first (largely unsuccessful) attempt in 1878 to promote the phonograph as a medium for public performance, and then the second wave of promotion in the 1890s as a device for office dictation (again largely unsuccessful) and for music entertain- ment (as “nickel-in-the-slot” public phonographs). After 1910 the phonograph was established in its eventual role as a home entertainment technology. That Edison and others eventually “got it right” becomes for Gitelman a case study in the subtle interactions between producers, consumers, and cultural contexts. Her approach is to attend closely to the vocabulary of contemporary advertising and newspaper descriptions in order to appreciate, for example, how the noun “record” came to signify a changed relationship between speech and writing. Gitelman also points out how women as “new media users” of the phonograph affected its technical development as well as marketing. Gitelman brings this same method to her study of the Internet when she focuses on how the word “document” changes during the development of the dig- ital transmission of messages over the ARPANET and the beginning of word pro- cessing with Douglas Engelbart’s remarkable “Online System.” Gitelman is also fascinated by the threat that the World Wide Web, developed around 1990, seems to pose to the very notion of historically fixed documentation. She offers as a test case a “document” that the World Wide Web Consortium, headed by Tim Berners- Lee, characterizes as “the least recently modified Web page.” The page has not been changed since 1990, but what “unchanged” means in this case is that the HTML code has not been modified, although the page is now different in every other way and is in a sense rewritten every time we display it in our browser. Gitel- man notes that “[t]he least recently modified page is offered to readers as a histor- ical document within a context that complicates the very grounds of its historicity” 050 rev-bolt (105-118) 3/3/08 8:44 AM Page 110 110 Jay David Bolter (126). For Gitelman, the practices and the vocabulary of the Web today seem to challenge the very possibility of ever writing the history of this new medium. Gitelman is one representative of a varied group of media historians whose work provides historical contexts for understanding the digital. As I have said, film historians have had perhaps the greatest impact: we could mention Thomas Elsaesser, Tom Gunning, and many others.1 Researchers on the reception of the telegraph, television, and radio include William Uricchio, Carolyn Marvin, and Jeffrey Sconce.2 Contemporary media philosophers and historians in Germany include Friedrich Kittler, Sybille Krämer, Dieter Mersch, and Peter Gendolla.3 There are European and Canadian scholars, including André Gaudreault, Jürgen Müller, and Yvonne Spielmann, who characterize their work as the study of “intermediality,” the relationships between and among various analog and elec- tric as well as digital media.4 Together, these researchers are producing a large body of historically sound scholarship.