Marvin 1990
Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New
If our own experience is unique in detail, its structure is characteristically modern. It starts with the invention of the telegraph, the first of the electrical communications machines, as significant a break with the past as print- ing before it. In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the com- munications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraph's original work.
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In the long transformation that begins with the first application of electricity to communication, the last quarter of the nineteenth century has a special importance for students of modern media history. Five proto-mass media of the twentieth century were invented during this period: the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless, and cin- ema.
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The present study modestly attempts to push back those beginnings to the late nine- teenth century, when Anglo-American culture was fascinated by the communicative possibilities of the telegraph, the telephone, and the incandescent lamp—choices that may come as a surprise to contem- porary sensibilities focused on twentieth-century mass media.
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…it has rendered in- visible important aspects of electric media history, and perhaps of me- diated communication generally. It does this in part by fixing the social origin of electric media history at the point when media producers be- gan to service and encourage the appliance-buying demand of mass audiences. Everything before this artifactual moment is classified as technical prehistory, a neutral boundary at which inventors and tech- nicians with no other agenda of much interest assembled equipment that exerted negligible social impact until the rise of network broad- casting.
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New electric media were sources of endless fascination and fear, and provided constant fodder for social experimentation. All de- bates about electronic media in the twentieth century begin here, in fact. For if it is the case, as it is fashionable to assert, that media give shape to the imaginative boundaries of modern communities, then the introduction of new media is a special historical occasion when pat- terns anchored in older media that have provided the stable currency of social exchange are reexamined, challenged, and defended.
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The present study is not, therefore, an effort merely to extend the traditional time line of electric media. It introduces issues that may be overlooked when the social history of these media is framed exclu- sively by the instrument-centered perspective that governs its conven- tional starting point.
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It argues that the early history of electric media is less the evolution of technical efficiencies in communication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not, and who has authority and may be believed.
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If artifactual approaches foster the belief that social processes con- nected to media logically and historically begin with the instrument, then new media are presumed to fashion new social groups called au-
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diences from voiceless collectivities and to inspire new uses based on novel technological properties. When audiences become organized around these uses, the history of a new medium begins. The model used here is different. Here, the focus of communication is shifted from the instrument to the drama in which existing groups perpetually negotiate power, authority, representation, and knowledge with what- ever resources are available.
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New practices do not so much flow directly from tech- nologies that inspire them as they are improvised out of old practices that no longer work in new settings.
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…it is less in new media practices, which come later and point toward a resolution of these conflicts (or, more likely, a temporary truce), than in the uncertainty of emerging and contested practices of communication that the struggle of groups to define and locate them- selves is most easily observed.
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Chaotic and creative experiments with new media and thought experiments with their imaginary derivatives attempted to reduce and simplify a world of expanding cultural variety to something more fa- miliar and less threatening.
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New kinds of encounters collided with old ways of determining trust and reliability, and with old notions about the world and one's place in it: about the relation of men and
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women, rich and poor, black and white, European and non-European, experts and publics.
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Discussions of electrical and other new forms of communication in the late nineteenth century begin from specific cultural and class assumptions about what communication ought to be like among par- ticular groups of people. These assumptions informed the beliefs of nineteenth-century observers about what these new media were sup- posed to do, and legislated the boundaries of intimacy and strangeness for the close and distant worlds they presented to their audiences.
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Focused on the point of mass production, artifactual communications history has failed to recognize that electricians were as deeply involved in the field of cultural production as in the field of technical production. Technological historians also have treated elec- tricians exclusively as technical actors, accepting mostly at face value the boosterism of their professional rhetoric. As citizens with attach- ments to families, communities, and social amenities as strong as any that connected them to their profession, their role was somewhat dif- ferent, however. The stamp of society on them was nowhere more visible than in their uneasiness about the impact of new media on fam- ily, class, community, and gender relations.
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Media are not fixed natural objects; they have no natural edges. They are constructed com- plexes of habits, beliefs, and procedures embedded in elaborate cul- tural codes of communication. The history of media is never more or less than the history of their uses, which always lead us away from them to the social practices and conflicts they illuminate.
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New me- dia embody the possibility that accustomed orders are in jeopardy, since communication is a peculiar kind of interaction that actively seeks va- riety. No matter how firmly custom or instrumentality may appear to organize and contain it, it carries the seeds of its own subversion.
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