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

Medial Ideology

In Mechanisms, Kirschenbaum (2008, 36) contextualizes and defines medial ideology in the following way: “Jerome McGann has used the phrase ‘Romantic ideology’ to describe the manner in which modern literary criticism of the Romantic poets has been characterized by ‘an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations.’ I believe electronic textual theory has labored under similar uncritical absorptions of the medium’s self- or seemingly self-evident representations. While often precisely Romantic in their celebration of the fragile half-life of the digital, the ‘ideology’ I want to delineate below is perhaps better thought of as medial—that is, one that substitutes popular representations of a medium, socially constructed and culturally activated to perform specific kinds of work, for a more comprehensive treatment of the material particulars of a given technology.”

(This note comments on the page titled, "Mystifying the Technical Particulars.")

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page is referenced by:

Mystifying the Technical Particulars Consider the 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition in London, the ephemeral lavishness of which fascinated Walter Benjamin, namely due to correlations between such lavishness and free trade. There are also Thomas Edison’s demonstrations of electric light at the 1881 Paris Exhibition and the phonograph at the 1889 Paris Centennial of the French Revolution. The list goes on, and one persuasive interpretation of these demonstrations is that they foster myths of the lone inventor, often a textbook hero of some entrepreneurial class in US culture. Such myths reduce a set of complex activities (e.g., the labors of production, research, and advertising) to a single product borne by a genius scientist or engineer. They also bolster bootstrap narratives of upward mobility not unlike a Horatio Alger story. Moreover, the mystification of a technology enables what Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) calls a “medial ideology,” or mass attention to the formal qualities of a given medium at the expense of a technology’s material particulars. In the case of the telegraphone, the aesthetic appeal of magnetic wire’s perfect record overshadowed the physical limitations of the technology’s hardware and the labor involved in creating it. In many ways, the telegraphone was vaporware at the turn of the century.

This page references:

Mystifying the Technical Particulars