New Media, 1740-1915
New Media, 1740-1915
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新媒体，1740-1915
DOI：
10.7551/mitpress/5001.001.0001
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发表时间：
2004
影响因子：
3.6
通讯作者：
Harlen Makemson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Harlen Makemson
新媒体，1740-1915。主编：Lisa Gitelman和Geoffrey B.Pingree；马萨诸塞州剑桥：麻省理工学院出版社，2003。271页。每小时34.95美元。有时，人们很难避免发表声明--通常是在媒体上屏住呼吸地重复--关于最新技术进步将以不可挽回的方式改变我们的生活。新媒体的进步似乎是无情的，它的有益效果是命中注定的，它感知到的危险超过了它让我们的生活更方便的能力，或者它打破长期偏见的潜力。近年来，一些书籍研究了“新媒体”的历史，并对当代将互联网和相关技术视为前所未见的奇迹的趋势起到了重要的纠正作用。汤姆·斯坦蒂奇的《维多利亚时代的互联网》和卡罗琳·马文的《当旧技术是新的》就是这类书的两个著名例子；《新媒体，1740-1915》则提出了另一个例子。如果一个人在寻找成功媒体的案例研究，他或她应该把目光投向其他地方；这本书主要讨论了短暂存活下来的媒体形式。新媒体探索了这些形式在其萌芽阶段是如何被感知的，以及如何被现有的文化和媒体格局塑造的。这本书采用了马文的方法，用她的话说，就是试图发现新技术如何“协商权力、权威、代表性和知识”。这本书的十篇文章是《转型中的媒体》系列的一部分，作者们以一种经常耐人寻味的方式接受了这种方法。凯瑟琳·斯塔布斯通过分析19世纪70年代和80年代鲜为人知的“电报小说”体裁，揭示了人们对性别角色的分歧。这些由电报运营商撰写的长篇小说和短篇小说反映了该领域对女性日益增长的敌意，她们开始在数量上占据主导地位，如果不是影响力的话。在经常充斥着性色彩的故事中，作者将女性电报操作员描绘成充斥着最好的无能，最坏的是对技术本身的威胁。这篇文章不仅有效地分析了媒体在其历史时刻的作用，还提醒我们，宣称技术可以在组成群体之间公平竞争的说法往往是错误的。在一个层面上，劳拉·夏沃关于立体显微镜的文章是一个案例，研究了一项新技术的存在理由如何为了商业利益而改变。查尔斯·惠特斯通的原创设备在更好地解释视觉过程方面发挥了科学作用，他用简单的图表演示了大脑将迫使两个不同的二维元素形成一个三维图像。…
New Media, 1740-1915. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. 271 pp. $34.95 hbk. At times, it is hard to escape pronouncements-often repeated breathlessly in the media-about the ways the latest technology advances will change our lives irrevocably. The advance of new media seems relentless, its salubrious effects predestined, its perceived dangers outweighed by its ability to make our lives more convenient or its potential to break down long-standing prejudices. In recent years, a few books have studied the history of "new media" and have served as importan t correctives to the contemporary tendency to see the Internet and related technologies as never-before-seen wonders. Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet and Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New are two notable examples of such books; New Media, 1740-1915 proposes to be another. If one is looking for case studies of successful media, he or she should look elsewhere; the book largely addresses media forms that survived just briefly. New Media explores how these forms were perceived in their infancy and shaped by the existing cultural and media landscape. The book adopts Marvin's approach which, in her words, seeks to discover how new technologies "negotiate power, authority, representation, and knowledge." The authors of the ten essays in this volume, part of a Media in Transition series, embrace this approach in often intriguing ways. Katherine Stubbs lays bare the fissures over gender roles by analyzing the littleknown genre of "telegraphic fiction" during the 1870s and 1880s. These novels and short stories written by telegraph operators were a reflection of the increasing hostility toward women in the field, who were beginning to dominate in numbers, if not influence. Authors portrayed female telegraph operators as incompetent at best, threats to the technology itself at worst, in tales often laden with sexual overtones. Not only does the essay effectively analyze the medium in its historical moment but reminds us that proclamations of technology leveling the playing field among constituent groups are often wrong. On one level, Laura Schiavo's essay about the stereoscope serves as a case study for how a new technology's reason for being can change for commercial interests. Charles Wheatstone's original device served a scientific purpose in better explaining the process of sight, demonstrating with simple diagrams that the mind would force two dissimilar two-dimensional elements into one three-dimensional image. …