We've looked at the human origins of media technology in how materials mined and manufactured, and we've speculated about the future by learning about some of the challenges of e-waste recycling. Today, we turn our attention to the present.
There's a phrase I like (ok, there are many) from Ted Nelson's classic book Computer Lib/Dream Machines where he writes
We live in media as fish live in water.
I take Nelson to mean that media is ubiquitous. He goes on to say that "we must invent the molecules of our new water," so this is a sort of call to arms for agency.
But I think there's another meaning here, too. Think about a fish's point of view. Is a fish wet? If you'd lived in water your whole life, would you know more or less about water than you do now? I think we have a more vivid concept of water than a fish does because for us, water is a place to go, or a thing to choose. For fish, water just is.
Now think about how this image of the fish in water applies to media. What is it like to have electricity in your home? What is it like to own a TV in your house? What is it like own a DVD or Blu-Ray player? I would guess that if these things have always been true for you, it might be difficult to describe what that's like without thinking of yourself and your daily life from another point of view. Sometimes we have to make the things around us seem strange to understand them better.
To start doing this kind of thinking, I'd like for you to read an essay by Erkki Huhtamo called "What's Victoria Got To Do with It? Toward an Archaeology of Domestic Video Gaming" (PDF availabe in Slack). This was published in an anthology called Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, but the essay isn't mainly about video games. Rather, the idea that Huhtamo wants us to think about are the history of how the living room becomes the place for media consumption.
As a "media archaeologist," Huhtamo is interested in how we can recognize our present moment by looking for similar patterns in different contexts. And by looking at those patterns, we can understand how both contexts (the past and the present) are shaped by forces like class, gender, economics, and more. I really like the "shopping cart" analogy Huhtamo uses to introduce the idea of context:
A person pushing a shopping cart through the aisles of a supermarket may feel absolutely free to choose whatever he or she wants, but the shopper's choices have been preconditioned by all kinds of determinants: peer group preferences, lifestyle issues, educational discourses, promotiona l strategies, and media feeds. "Personal taste" and "freedom of choice" are large ly illusions, at least if treated as absolutes.
So here's your task for today: read this essay to learn about the contexts for optical media in the Victorian era. Pay attention to the ways that the Victorian context attaches itself to the specific media and the situations for their consumption. Then, think about the device you're studying for the Object Lesson assignment. Are there any parts of its story that are similar to any of the examples in Huhtamo's essay?
If not, can you think of other devices in your home -- a video game console, for example -- with an arrival story similar to the stereoscopes and zoetropes in Huhtamo's essay?
Can you follow Huhtamo's method to read into the technology in your home as artifacts of today's culture?
Reflect on and discuss these things in today's Slack channel: #discuss-home-media.