History of Media - Periodization, Technology And The "general Accident", Historical And Technological Media, Ubiquitous Media, Current Studies In Media History
human culture society
The term media history is almost a tautology when the historic is distinguished from the prehistoric by the presence of recording media. History is always already mediated. A distinct domain of historiography whose object is human communication technologies will to this extent always be tempted to assimilate all human history to itself. Among late-twentieth-and early-twenty-first-century media historians, this principle has advanced to the stage at which alternative programs for understanding human activity—terms such as society, culture, economy, and power—appear as either abstractions lacking the empirical bases of media and mediation, or as derivatives of them. Media history, it can be argued, explains society, culture, and politics better than those concepts explain media.
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The most common periodization employed distinguishes at the minimum oral and literate phases, indicating that oral communication (along with gesture, dance, potlatch, and other features of orality) are to be included as media. Aristotle's definition of the human being as the zoon politikon clearly regards humans as properly belonging to a polis or community, but also indicates that humans a…
Even less convinced of the need for or efficacy of planning and action are the apocalyptic critics, foremost among them today Jean Baudrillard and, increasingly, Paul Virilio. Baudrillard traces media history in four phases: (1) it is the reflection of a profound reality; (2) it masks and denatures a profound reality; (3) it masks the absence of a profound reality; (4) it has no relation to any re…
A more subtle strand of media history than this blunt confrontation of integrated and apocalyptic critics arises in the work of the Frankfurt School, the most influential essay here being Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969). Benjamin's periodization does not concern the transition from oral to literate but from the unique object …
Such macroscopic accounts of media history must be balanced against the increasing amount of scholarship devoted to
unearthing and revaluing the histories of specific moments in the history of media. Many textbooks and most popular print, online, and televisual accounts of media history share the linear model of progress (for example, color is an advance on black and white, sound an advance on si…
Two scholars, both of whose careers bridge Latin American politics and French academia, have made sterling progress toward bridging the gap between the macro and micro scales of media history. Régis Debray, best known perhaps for his account of guerrilla war with Che Guevara, has proposed a mediological analysis that, while repeating the linear model first outlined by McLuhan, does so in the …
The work of Vilém Flusser, which has begun to be translated into English in the last decade, is destined to have a major impact on media history. Exiled from his native Prague in 1939, Flusser turned his exile in Brazil and later in France into the grounds of a radical philosophy of freedom. Linking information theory with phenomenology, Flusser argues that pre-history's image-based me…
Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ——. "Letters to Walter Benjamin," 18 March 1936, in Aesthetics and Politics, by Ernst Bloch et al., 120–126. London: New Left Books, 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann …
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