This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording

No Neat Distinctions between Genres

Read collectively, almost every publication referenced in this essay contains hyperbole, dramatization, or prose bordering on science fiction. What’s more, most of these popular publications privilege the pleasing aesthetics of magnetic audio, stressing its noise-free character, ease of erasure, and amenability to productive listening. In so doing, they tend to eclipse or inaccurately depict the particulars of brittle wire, glitchy playback mechanisms, and isolating earpieces. And yet, curiously enough, most of them explain magnetic recording with precision. For instance, recall Reeve’s two-page demonstration in The Dream Doctor. It reads like a technology journal or patent of its time. Although such explanations do not always make for an engaging read, they do demystify aspects of magnetic recording for audiences who are unaware of the process. Plus, they trouble assumptions about the content of popular representations—a troubling that would flatter Reeve’s realist sensibility. His scientific detective stories construct and enact technologies to perform speculative functions without entirely abandoning the material specificities of their processes. This claim is not to say Reeve never stretches the affordances of those particulars. He certainly does. It is to say that materialist histories can be comprehensive without dichotomizing writings as “popular” (or “cultural”) and “expert” (or “technical”). Indeed, when it comes to learning about the stuff of media and technologies, neat distinctions between genres can be misleading.

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page is referenced by:

Prose Bordering on Science Fiction In his analysis of the medial ideology of electronic text, Kirschenbaum (2008, 38) observes the following: “Industry leaders may have grasped the appeal of this ideology even earlier than fiction writers or academicians. In 1982, four Bay-area entrepreneurs cofounded a new company devoted to network enterprise computing. They called it Sun.” In the case of early magnetic recording, a similar dynamic emerges, with people in industry first deploying a medial ideology of magnetic audio. Importantly, however, these entrepreneurs used techniques from fiction in their own technical writing and speeches.

(This note comments on the page titled, “No Neat Distinctions between Genres.”)

This page has paths:

This page is referenced by:

This page references: