Abstract
A history of digital media: An intermedia and global perspective offers a review of the computer, the internet and the mobile phone to discuss the recent history of digital media. This book aims to lay the groundwork for the study of digital media history and critiques the reductionist definition of digital as solely in contrast to analogue, ‘as if they were two extremes on a scale’ (p. 7). Instead, the authors argue for a more nuanced and long-term perspective of digital and focus Chapters 2–5 on pushing back against three common fallacies they identify in media studies literature: (a) the newness ideology; (b) the alienation inherent in constant change or constant continuity; and (c) the winning technologies narrative. These fallacies treat communication technologies as linear, un-problematic and innovative breakthroughs. The authors complicate that view by contextualizing the histories of the computer, the internet and the mobile phone.
Methodologically, this text follows in the footsteps of media historians such as Lisa Gitelman, Jonathan Sterne and Benjamin Peters, among others, to rely on a ‘toolbox’ approach to blend media history with political economy of communication, science and technology studies and cultural studies. Subsequently, this text is most instructive for the undergraduate studying the importance of digital media histories. The Learning Materials at the end of each chapter are an unexpected boon to aid in classroom discussion of the book, facilitating an opportunity for greater engagement with the concepts within each chapter.
Of particular interest to readers is Chapter 4, which provides an introductory overview of mobile phones and examines tensions between the predicted (based on landline phones) and the unexpected affordances of the mobile phone to conclude there is nothing inevitable about mobile telecommunications. This chapter examines small case studies of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standardization in Europe, the social role of text messaging, the confluence of 3G, smartphones and a mobile internet, the global penetration of mobile phones and the sociocultural impact of mobile connectivity. This chapter, and the entirety of the book more broadly, would benefit from drawing on primary source material and incorporating more original analyses. However, as an introductory text for undergraduates, the authors provide a broad range of examples well suited to classroom discussion.
One strength of this text is Chapter 5’s critique of media convergence to instead emphasize intermediality to examine the interwoven nature of media today and its contextual tensions of continuity and change. Analysing the impacts of digitization on various industries, from music to publishing to film, the authors argue that the conversion to digital did not necessarily revolutionize these media products but instead digitization ‘favored the interweaving of different media’ and ‘a growing interdependence between politics, technologies, aesthetics, markets and practices, which were previously distinct and separate’ (p. 209).
The book concludes with a discussion of myths and counter-hegemonic narratives in digital media history. Balbi and Magaudda critique the trend in digital media history to focus on the mythology of ‘heroes’ – such as Steve Jobs, Google, Bill Gates, AT&T, among others – in digital media. They argue that future histories should instead seek to normalize digitization and ‘scale down its exceptional nature and study it as just one phenomenon among others in the media and communication history panorama’ (p. 221). The authors conclude that this text lays the groundwork to provide counter-hegemonic evidence to these prevailing myths and express the hope that this book inspires students ‘to stretch out the digital media history field considering other interrelated media, other geographical case studies, other historical continuities and breaks’ (p. 222).