Always Already New ─ Media, History, and the Data of Culture

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she askswhat it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks,Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects andinstruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographsand the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestivelytoward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at theend of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of thetwentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as muchas to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanisticthought, after all--part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman'sargument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a newperspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history.Making extensive use ofarchival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked texteach emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of publiclife and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history ofthe Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might beproducing the conditions of its own historicity.

Joshua Abrams is a doctoral candidate in the Theatre Program at CUNY Graduate Center,where he is currently working on his dissertation entitled, "Staging Alterity: The Ethicsof Performing Difference(s) in Postmodern Performance Praxis." He is Managing Editor ofthe journalWestern European Stages.