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1. 1 2013-11-16T22:12:19-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339 Notes Jentery Sayers 2 Notes for the Article plain 2013-11-17T09:02:31-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339

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• 1 2013-10-18T13:13:15-07:00 The Telegraphone 5 The telegraphone was prematurely delegated a number of uses and imbued with a number of meanings before it became widely available. plain 2013-11-17T15:15:38-08:00
  In the following paragraphs, I explore this articulation of early magnetic audio with perception, memory, faith, and record making, examining texts published between the 1870s and 1910s. Oscillating between technical, business, cultural, and literary approaches to media and technologies, my aim is not to privilege one approach over the others. It is to exhibit how they collectively inform a series of historical incongruities, all of which are anchored in a device called the telegraphone.
  As this essay’s object of inquiry, the telegraphone becomes an overdetermined site of a shared investment: noise-free magnetic audio. Put to a variety of uses and saturated with an array of meanings, it was imagined as a way to individuate people through immersed listening to high-fidelity sounds. It also corresponded with the opportunity to store and consolidate those sounds for later listening: to defer what was once ephemeral. Both of these tendencies were compounded by claims that magnetic recordings were perfect documentations of actuality. For instance, Smith’s thread was perceived as immediate precisely because of its magnetic character. It would not “inscribe” or “write” sounds. It would "capture" and "impress" them, affording reliable, indexical relationships without perceivable traces remaining on the storage medium. But regardless of its rhetoric, the telegraphone was a commercial failure. It was never available for widespread consumption.
  Still, the once-new device helps us better understand how people initially learned to simultaneously ignore, trust, and desire magnetic storage—to examine how faith in magnetic recording emerged between the 1870s and 1910s, well before now-ubiquitous hard drives (not to mention seemingly unlimited cloud storage). Put this way, the story of a failed sound machine offers a prehistory for contemporary computing, invested as it often is in the automagical transubstantiation of magnetic impressions (on platters) into data expressions (on screens and through speakers).

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• 1 2013-10-18T13:13:15-07:00 The Telegraphone 10 The telegraphone was prematurely delegated a number of uses and imbued with a number of meanings before it became widely available. plain 2013-11-17T16:01:29-08:00