Residual Media - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816644721 ISBN 13: 9780816644728

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007

Synopsis

In a society that breathlessly awaits “the new” in every medium, what happens to last year’s new? Ample critical energy has gone into the study of new media, genres, and communities. But what becomes of discarded media? In what manner do the products of technological change reappear as environmental problems, as “the new” in another part of the world, as collectibles, as memories, and as art?

Residual Media grapples with these questions and more in a wide-ranging and eclectic collection of essays. Beginning with how cultural change bumps along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts, the contributors examine how leftover artifacts can be rediscovered occupying space in storage sheds, traveling the globe, converting to alternative uses, and accumulating in landfills. By exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media, the essays here combine theoretical challenges to media history with ideas, technology, and uses that have been left behind.

From player pianos to vinyl records, and from the typewriter to the telephone, Residual Media is an innovative approach to the aging of culture and reveals that, ultimately, new cultural phenomena rely on encounters with the old.

Contributors: Jennifer Adams, DePauw U; Jody Berland, York U; Sue Currell, U of Sussex; Maria DiCenzo, Wilfrid Laurier U; Kate Egan, U of Wales; Lisa Gitelman, Catholic U; Alison Griffiths, CUNY; James Hamilton, U of Georgia; James Hay, U of Illinois—Champaign-Urbana; Michelle Henning, U of the West of England; Lisa Parks, UC Santa Barbara; Hillegonda C. Rietveld, South Bank U; Leila Ryan, McMaster U; John Davis, Alfred U; Collette Snowden, U of South Australia; Jonathan Sterne, McGill U; JoAnne Stober, National Archives, Canada; Will Straw, McGill U; Haidee Wasson, Concordia U.

Charles R. Acland is Professor and holds the Concordia University Research Chair in communications studies at Concordia University, Montreal.

About this title

Synopsis

Suggesting that a disproportionate amount of energy in media studies is concerned with the new, Acland (communication studies, Concordia U., Canada) offers these 19 interdisciplinary essays as a corrective shift in focus to residual media--or "reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media technologies and practices"--and

About the Author

Concordia University, Canada

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816644721
• ISBN 13: 9780816644728
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Acland Charles R.