The Four Practices?: Challenges for an Archaeology of the Screen

Over a decade ago I began calling for a new branch of media studies – “screenology” or “archaeology of the screen” — claiming that its “focus should not be only on screens as designed artifacts but also on their uses, their intermedial relations with other cultural forms and on the discourses that have enveloped them in different times and places.”¹ I was motivated by a contradiction I encountered repeatedly in both popular and critical discourses: the overwhelming presence of screens in contemporary life was not accompanied by any systematic knowledge about their identities, including the media practices they are part of and