I’m curious to see how the issue of history will be engaged with (or not engaged with) as I read through the texts I’ve outlined for the summer. Cyberculture studies seems to be faced with the same threats of obsolescence that characterize the technologies it looks at; for example, what do we make of a study of an online community that’s now defunct? Is the work obsolete? In need of a quick patching? Does it need a version 2.0 or 3.0? Can we use it to construct a historical lineage that will inform “current-day” work, and if so, what does that process look like?
I’m glad to see that Critical Cyberculture Studies has, so far, framed the issue of history as a central one for the “field” (such as it is). Sterne’s chapter on “The Historiography of Cyberculture” points to one possible avenue for the last question I’ve raised above, and in doing so, he also establishes the importance of audio formats and technologies for cyberculture scholars. History as visibility, then, emerges as one theme. I’ll be on the lookout for others...
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4 comments:
This is SUCH important work! Often, folks rush to research and theorize the new, hottest thing. I think we've talked about how folks migrated so quickly to "new media" and suddenly it felt as if issues of access, agency, and identity were passe. I think the richest work comes when people bring history, past practices, and past scholarship into new spaces in ways that help us recognize the traces that "old" technologies and spaces leave behind. Have you read Jonathan Alexander's chapter on "The Computer Race Goes to Class?" It's a smart piece that brings the history of computers in schools in the 1980s to the current shape of the web and web usage.
Oh, crud, it's Jonathan STERNE (who you cite in your post!), not Jonathan Alexander. Alexander does LGBT rhetorics stuff in digital space. Sterne is more of a comm studies guy who does historical perspectives on cyberculture stuff.
Hmmm... this makes me think about how the term new media and the valuing (obsession?) of "newness" might, in some ways, be turning us away from approaches that would foreground various histories. It's almost like a choice is being framed between "doing new media" or "doing a historical approach to technology." I'm interested in finding pieces where both are being interwoven. I haven't read that Sterne chapter yet, but it sounds like exactly the thing I'm searching for in that post.
Your wondering about "new" media is absolutely right on! Have you read any of Angela Haas' dissertation? She defended Monday, and it's brilliant work. Part of her argument is against the seduction of "new" media, especially when it erases or turns our attention away from "old" media.
For instance, she critiques the ways in which rhet/comp scholars (especially C&W folks) have glamorized "new" media, but she carefully, historically, and critically argues that a lot of what seems "new" about new media isn't new at all.
The examples she provides includes her analysis of wampum as hypertext, and petroglyphs as visual rhetoric.
She really makes me wonder what would happen if visual/digital rhetorics were to deeply pay more attention to cultural rhetorics. That's what makes the work that YOU guys do so compelling, I think.
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