New Media Theory

I found myself reading Kittlet’s article in a state of confusion. Mostly because i felt that I had more questions than anything in regards to his claims. But the section that most baffled me was when he talked about how “One is informed-mainly, unfortunately, thanks to the jumbo jets. In the jumbo jet,media are more densely connected than in most places.” Now i don’t know how accurate that is nowadays, but as I was reading, i remember thinking and actually writing on my margin “What? WHAT?!!!” I even read that section to a few friends who responded in the same manner.




Then the next dayJet blue incident occured. And then I found an interesting article in the Fox News website in which many of the passengers described a heightened sense of distress due to the fact that they could actually see their ordeal on the plane televisions. This immediately made me think of Kittler’s article. It simply put that confusing section about the jet planes into perspective. I still disagree about it being the most densely mediated situation that one can be in today, but I defintely understand that the degree of today’s mediation in planes is intense enough to provoke a sense of immediatcy or just an intensefied immediacy as in the case of Thursday’s flight passengers.

Before Gitelman delves into a very weird discussion of the paranormal in her chapter about Automatic Writing, she makes some interesting observations about the early connections between the typewriter and the phonograph. In the case of both mediums, the subject is made somewhat anonymous: with a phonograph we can’t tell the race of the speaker, and with the typewriter we can’t tell the gender of the writer. I think this kind of anonymity inherent in inscription is an extremely important aspect; one that we definitely see playing out in the anonymity of the internet. There have been many questions about what the internet is doing to discussions of race and gender, given that neither must be explicitly stated, but I think this question dates back to the very first automatic writing machines that transformed the words/thoughts from one’s body into a more uniform platform.




Gitelman also speaks of “the urge to transcribe lived experiences”–a statement which rings especially true when looking at the ubiquity of navel-gazing bloggers. Not only has writing given us the means to turn our own lives into narrative adventures, but the internet has given us the ability to share these narratives with the world at large. There are many different levels of anonymity that can be assumed when one becomes a blogger–hiding one’s name, face, gender, race, or location–but the fact remains that even in the most explicit scenarios, there is still a desperate need to be read and validated in our inscription of experience onto virtual medium.