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August 1, 2005
Dusty Fossils and Dead Media
Ken offers an important challenge to the "hype narratives" associated with the emergence of new media. Basically, as Ken notes, the narrative goes as follows: "a new medium will remove [or] replace an older, related medium, and in so doing send that old medium to the junk bin of history." These naratives often turn out to be false, of course, as Ken illustrates. Typewriters haven't killed writing. Hypertext hasn't killed the practice of reading books. Ken's making this claim in response to a Rob Pegoraro Washington Post article investigating hype that podcasts "will turn radio into a dusty fossil," but I think that Ken's comments also apply to the current claims that cinema is being replaced, or maybe displaced, by the Internet and video games.
Ken argues that these claims are often incorrect because they confuse "the current function of the medium with the medium itself." He adds that these claims also ignore "the importance of temporality in assessing mediation." To use Ken's podcast-radio comparison, radio's liveness is something that podcasts cannot emulate. I'd add here that there are "industrial" factors as well. Radio, film, and the publishing industry are powerful industries that are very interested in sustaining their profitability and may, in fact, also have an interest in perpetuating the illusion of crisis.
Still, there are certainly "dead media" out there, including many "proto-cinematic" visual technologies such as the camera obscura and magic lantern that now exist solely as curiosities more than anything else.
Posted by chuck at August 1, 2005 11:02 AM
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Comments
Paul Levinson makes a similar argument pretty effectively in The Soft Edge, particularly about radio (which went through an earlier bout of death throes with the introduction of television). Radio is, in fact, his case study for the ways that the media ecology adapts as new forms are introduced. Older forms are not killed off by new ones, but they do shift into new niches in order to survive.
Posted by: KF ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://chutry.wordherders.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 1, 2005 12:43 PM
Thanks for the reference, KF. Might be a useful read for one (or more) of my media studies courses.
Posted by: Chuck at August 1, 2005 2:37 PM
It's probably worth drawing a distinction between media that saw broad adoption like radio or TV and media that may have had a heyday as a fad or just plain failed. It's such a canonical book I don't know if I should mention it, but Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New has a great discussion of dead media around the time of the introduction of the telephone. My favorite is a Hungarian landline broadcast service, which failed, not because of its goofy technology, but programming was in Magyar, a prestige dialect few subscribers would have spoken.
Like KF, I would argue that the introduction of TV is probably the best case study of one medium replacing another, and we clearly have radio today. This displacement was conscious on the part of broadcasters: at one point, stations were simulcasting television shows as AM radio programming.
As far as podcasts replacing talk radio, I think that ignores a lot of class issues in the United States. My general sense is that Rush Limbaugh's and Bill O'Reilly's audiences are drawn from the working classes who might have the radio on in their trucks or in their shops. In addition, the call-in format allows listeners to share their views without needing to write or just sit in front of a computer. It provides interactivity in a pretty accessible way. I'm not sure how likely these audiences are to pick up an iPod to subscribe to podcasts or develop the audio production skills to create their own podcasts.
Posted by: McChris at August 1, 2005 2:50 PM
McChris, good points about social class issues and talk radio. I don't really see that format disappearing anytime soon, especially given the relative accessibility of call-in radio, which requires little activity or expenditure on the part of the listener.
Podcasts might, however, provide new discursive strategies for talk radio, just as political talk radio could (and perhaps already does) inform podcasts.
Posted by: Chuck at August 1, 2005 3:04 PM