New media quote
February 4, 2010 5:15 AM Subscribe
I'm looking for a quote which goes along the lines of:
"When a new media comes along people try to apply the rules that governed the older one to it."
I've Googled it to no avail, any idea what the exact quote and an attribution? (It's possibly Henry Jenkins or Pierre Levy, but I'm not sure.)
This book introduction doesn't have a similar direct quote but may lead us in the right direction (and is damned interesting, anyway). it's singing the same song. From that link (and see particularly the footnote also copied from the same source) [emphasis added]:
As many have noted, media often advertise their newness by depicting old media.* The first printed books looked like manuscripts, radios played phonograph records, and the Web has "pages." Ellen Gruber Garvey and Paul Young each explore less familiar instances in which the new represents the old in order to understand more fully the purchase that "newness" has on the process of representation. As Garvey's account of scrapbooks explains, scrapbook-makers took old media—literally the old books and periodicals they had lying around—and made them into new media in the form of scrapbooks. "Newness" in this case resonated as much with personal and domestic experiences as it did with public and collective apprehensions of novelty, posterity, or periodicity. Scrapbook-makers tampered with the meanings of the scraps they collected by collecting them, a practice Garvey refers to as "gleaning" and connects to the composition and use of the Web today. Young, on the other hand, presents a "telegraphic history of early American cinema," reading filmic representations of telegraphs as only the most obvious link between these two media, which seem, in retrospect, so different. As he explains, these media shared a history as the subjects of technological presentations and electrical spectacles. From the start, both became instruments of news reportage, one in the transmission of stories on the wire (that is, by telegraph wire services like the Associated Press) and the other in the projection of stories onto the screen in "actualities" and protonewsreels. "Newness" in this case resonated with emergent conventions for representing narrative time, with experiences of currency (of news as either new or old), and with new technology—all experiences that transform our sense of time and space.
* The remediation of one medium by another newer medium has recently been explored by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). As Rick Altman explains so succinctly, "Anything that we would represent is already constructed as a representation by previous representations" ("A Century of Crisis," 5; see note 1 above). [Note 5 says:Timothy Lenoir, "Inscription Practices and Materialities of Communication," in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir, 1-19 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7-8.]
posted by beagle at 6:11 AM on February 4, 2010
As many have noted, media often advertise their newness by depicting old media.* The first printed books looked like manuscripts, radios played phonograph records, and the Web has "pages." Ellen Gruber Garvey and Paul Young each explore less familiar instances in which the new represents the old in order to understand more fully the purchase that "newness" has on the process of representation. As Garvey's account of scrapbooks explains, scrapbook-makers took old media—literally the old books and periodicals they had lying around—and made them into new media in the form of scrapbooks. "Newness" in this case resonated as much with personal and domestic experiences as it did with public and collective apprehensions of novelty, posterity, or periodicity. Scrapbook-makers tampered with the meanings of the scraps they collected by collecting them, a practice Garvey refers to as "gleaning" and connects to the composition and use of the Web today. Young, on the other hand, presents a "telegraphic history of early American cinema," reading filmic representations of telegraphs as only the most obvious link between these two media, which seem, in retrospect, so different. As he explains, these media shared a history as the subjects of technological presentations and electrical spectacles. From the start, both became instruments of news reportage, one in the transmission of stories on the wire (that is, by telegraph wire services like the Associated Press) and the other in the projection of stories onto the screen in "actualities" and protonewsreels. "Newness" in this case resonated with emergent conventions for representing narrative time, with experiences of currency (of news as either new or old), and with new technology—all experiences that transform our sense of time and space.
* The remediation of one medium by another newer medium has recently been explored by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). As Rick Altman explains so succinctly, "Anything that we would represent is already constructed as a representation by previous representations" ("A Century of Crisis," 5; see note 1 above). [Note 5 says:Timothy Lenoir, "Inscription Practices and Materialities of Communication," in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir, 1-19 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7-8.]
posted by beagle at 6:11 AM on February 4, 2010
Looking further: the cited book by Bolter and Grusin (Remediation: Understanding New Media, probably illegal scan here), is all about this concept - so if the quote you seek is not in there, the concept certainly is.
posted by beagle at 6:27 AM on February 4, 2010
posted by beagle at 6:27 AM on February 4, 2010
There's a similar line in this article by Lawrence Lessig:
If you come to the Net armed with the idea that the old system of copyright is going to work just fine here, this more than anything is going to get you to recognize: you need some new ideas.
"This more than anything" refers to Kutiman's ThruYOU.
posted by nangar at 6:32 AM on February 4, 2010
If you come to the Net armed with the idea that the old system of copyright is going to work just fine here, this more than anything is going to get you to recognize: you need some new ideas.
"This more than anything" refers to Kutiman's ThruYOU.
posted by nangar at 6:32 AM on February 4, 2010
It's McLuhan: "The content of a new medium is an old medium."
posted by daniel_charms at 9:02 AM on February 4, 2010
posted by daniel_charms at 9:02 AM on February 4, 2010
I wrote in a paper "As Marshall McLuhan stated, it is the frameworks which change with new technologies, not only the picture inside the frame." This is the reference I have: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1964, 1994, p. 219.
posted by bwonder2 at 9:09 AM on February 4, 2010
posted by bwonder2 at 9:09 AM on February 4, 2010
Response by poster: Thanks everyone - I'm pretty sure the quote I'm looking for isn't McLuhan, however, it would seem that the ideas are, at least in part, taken from his work.
posted by johnny novak at 12:35 AM on February 5, 2010
posted by johnny novak at 12:35 AM on February 5, 2010
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posted by ddaavviidd at 5:38 AM on February 4, 2010