Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit?

Gitelman's book is a historical study that compares the reception of two "new media" technologies in American culture: the phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century and network computer communications in the 1960s and '70s. The complex historical subject that Gitelman chooses is not, in this case, early film; she focuses instead on the cultural life of the phonograph from 1878 to about 1910, which she compares with, or at least juxtaposes to, the development of digital networking and the World Wide Web from the 1960s to the 1990s.\n (World of Warcraft is the most influential example of a computer game genre that Ryan could have discussed, because the shared communication in MMOs poses interesting problems for a theory of narrative.) Social computing is often about identity formation: the participants in MySpace or Facebook create Web pages to describe themselves, and they add their notes and other interventions to the pages of their friends. The posters on YouTube, which Google purchased in 2006 for more than 1.5 billion dollars, are mimicking and at the same time contributing to the mass marketing of videos and popular musica market that is orders of magnitude greater than that of contemporary art.