Together with Liz Ellcessor, Luke Stadel, and Sarah Murray, I had the chance to see some of the great work being done in science and technology studies at SCMS. The MSTS SIG is sponsoring eight panels at this year's conference. My calendar is marked to get to as many of the following panels as possible:

Thursday, March 31, 2016, 09:00AM-10:45 AM
F5: Rage Against the Machine

Thursday, March 31, 2016, 05:00PM-06:45 PM
J14: Technologies of Losslessness: Media History in Perpetuity
J18: Between and Beyond Borders: Media Infrastructures, Technology, and Geography

Friday, April 1, 2016, 12:15PM-02:00 PM
L19: Centering on the Peripheral: Design Histories of Home Media Networks

Saturday, April 2, 2016, 11:00AM-12:45 PM​
O21: Cybernetic Cinema

Saturday, April 2, 2016, 01:00PM-02:45 PM
P16: The Technicity of Surveillance

Saturday, April 2, 2016, 05:00PM-06:45 PM
R22: A Machine for Recreating Life: Film and Reproduction

Sunday, April 3, 2016, 09:00AM-10:45 AM
S13: Liveness in Medical Media

More info to come on other panels that caught our eyes in this year's program.

In the course of research over the past five years or so, I have come to feel a growing need to build an approach to media hardware that might open up deeper analysis of nonhuman actors. How might we read into technologies in the way we read into the form of pieces of art or the products of popular culture? How can we do this without confining ourselves to merely technical and engineering concerns? Before explaining where this line of questioning has led me—to what I provisionally call a critical hardware approach to media studies—I would like to think about how this approach relates to what are likely to be two of the most important and influential books to come out this year. 

Jussi Parikka opens his recent book A Geology of Media (2015) with a reconsideration of media materialism, opening up a critique that might seem to preempt a critical hardware approach on the grounds it insufficiently accounts for the sociocultural aspects of media technologies. In the context of German media theory and its outgrowths, Parikka argues, materialism has come to refer to having know-how of the science and engineering of media technologies, old and new alike, and the technical operations of their use. What this growing emphasis on nonhuman actors leaves out, however, are many of the fundamental concerns of critical studies, not least issues of affect, embodiment, and labor. The pendulum of media research has quickly swung far away from the semiotics of media toward a potentially inert materiality. In response, Parikka seeks to correct this pendular movement by reading outward from contemporary media and media practice toward the environmental contexts, physical inputs, energy, and waste that go into media before they can ever do whatever it is they do. The focus of the book is of course geology: the solidity of the ground beneath our feet, the centuries of sedimentation and material transformations that have made possible our media today, and the mineral flows and material ecologies that make possible any media ecology. It is an account that understands media technologies and human beings alike as arising from the dust of the earth. For this reason, it starts not from the organic or from what Stiegler calls “the organized inorganic” of technics but instead from the geophysical and reads outward into space and backward into history to reconceptualize media materiality beyond Friedrich Kittler’s engineering-technical vision.

If Parikka’s project marks a fault line in media research today, the contours of a rift that might come to shake the ground media scholars stand on, then John Durham Peters writes from the epicenter of the seismic event, at the moment when, as the world shakes and as the familiar pieces of representation fall like pictures from the wall, everything appears in a different light. Extending the idea that not all media are modern, an idea shared by Parikka and the German media theorists and notably encapsulated in Lisa Gitelman’s book title Always Already New (2006), Peters makes the case, wryly, that even the flip side of this insight—the term new media itself—has passed its prime and risks restraining our attention to the human-built world. For media are not only new and old technologies; they are elemental: “Media are not only about the world . . . they are the world” (21). “Wherever data and world are managed,” Peters argues, “we find media” (22). 

What joins together the accounts by Parikka and Peters is their expansive vision, their efforts to read outward to the world that folds together with media and, in Peters’ case, the world as it composes mediatic flows: earth, skies, and oceans. What I have in mind here under the heading of a critical hardware approach to media studies necessarily builds on these expansive understandings of media. Without this context and the new critical perspective it affords, no close reading of media hardware is possible. Yet, in light of these other inquiries, I believe there is much more that can be done by deploying the tools of the critical tradition toward parsing the semiotic-materiality of media, reading into technologies as texts. Moreover, I believe there is a way to do this without succumbing to the narrowly technical/engineering vision Parikka critiques. The analytical tools of the critical tradition, such as rhetorical analysis and semiotics, are especially well suited to studying technologies that themselves have been treated practically in terms of their own “grammars.” Edward Stevens (1995), for instance, devoted a volume to “the grammar of machines.” In upcoming posts, I will consider several other influences for such an approach, particularly Bruno Labour’s notion of “folding humans and nonhumans into one another,” and outline some strategies for tackling specific cases of hardware analysis.

References

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Stevens, Edward. The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States. Yale University Press, 1995.

Recently, I signed on to teach a course in the Fall on Media and Technology at Goucher College. The course will explore how new media technologies have shaped and complicated our culture and society while bearing in mind, as Lisa Gitelman has noted, that all media were once new. It will consider new media of today and yesterday, including print, sound recording, radio, film, television, and online multimedia. The critical goals of the course are twofold. Students will be expected to apply the tools of critical content analysis to a range of media prevalent today. Through the analysis of narrative, visual form, sound design, and interactivity, students will address issues of cultural representation and identity construction as they have shifted over the course of different media epochs and as they are evolving today in a rapidly changing media environment. Beyond this, the course will explore macro issues of how media affect the lived social environment in ways related to but not always centered on their content, such as ownership, labor, and the material transformations of architectures and infrastructures.  

This latter objective is, to my mind, one that deserves far wider attention in media studies today. The analytical tools of the critical tradition, such as rhetorical analysis and semiotics, which have been used to great effect in studying content, are also especially well suited to studying technologies that themselves have been treated practically in terms of their own “grammars.” It is worthwhile to consider how critical analysis might be expanded for “parsing” the languages of machines, whether mechanical, electronic, and symbolic. This will be on my mind for SCMS 2016.