Systematizing Technique
Casey Boyle, Nathaniel A. Rivers
“I am speaking here about a curative imaginary, an understanding of disability that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention.” –Alison Kafer1  “The question of politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures for managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence, and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence.” –Lauren Berlant2 “We therefore need to better acknowledge what lies beyond the here-and-now timeframe adopted by... Read more...
Historical Dictionary of Media Usage
Nikolaus Wegmann
ANECDOTE: “We have big ideas,” says Newt Gingrich (Speaker of the US House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, and prominent member of the Republican party) while speaking at a struggling inner-city public school in Chicago, adding his voice to the debate about public education in America.1 He doesn’t propose to solve systemic educational issues through conventional means such as recruiting additional teachers or spearheading new reforms. Instead, Gingrich places... Read more...
Historical Dictionary of Media Usage
Heiko Christians
Concerning Didactics In 1938, the renowned New York publishing company William Morrow printed an extensive study of the history of revolution by the scholar of constitutional law, sociology and history Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who in 1933 had been driven out of Germany.1 With the title Out of Revolution: An Autobiography of Western Man, Rosenstock-Huessy aimed at nothing less than to lay the foundation for a “dictionary of Europe’s cultural and political... Read more...
Case Studies in Technique
Victoria Simon
Looking back on how the iPhone’s usability “changed our lives,” a journalist from CNN remarked: “It helped bring a slice of computing to a whole new audience, including technophobes, kids, senior citizens and people with visual or hearing impairments. Suddenly users could navigate their phones with a few swipes of the finger.”1 In the cultural moment of the smartphone and tablet, the allure of the touchscreen is that its ease... Read more...
Case Studies in Technique
Shannon Mattern
There was a time when Google and its brethren defined themselves as forces for good and enlightenment, as spaces where we crowdsourced knowledge and shared the most intimate details of our lives. We held up “openness” as an inherent virtue; we were building a “commons.” Those days have passed. We now recognize the vulnerabilities inherent in unfettered transparency and the indiscriminate collection of data. As countless journalists and activists and... Read more...
Case Studies in Technique
James J. Brown Jr.
Recent work in media studies and by journalists has made it clear that the digital spaces we inhabit are maintained by people who are tasked with sifting and filtering abusive and harmful content. Coining the term “commercial content moderation” (CCM) to describe the largescale, global effort to filter user-generated content, Sarah T. Roberts has brought attention to this crucial labor, an often opaque process that is sometimes viewed as proprietary... Read more...
Systematizing Technique
Jeffrey Moro
On October 15th, 2017, the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a map of wind speed probabilities associated with Hurricane Ophelia’s imminent landing on Ireland and the British Isles (figure 1). That a tropical storm had grown to hurricane strength in the otherwise cold waters of the north Atlantic was unusual enough, but NOAA’s map was strange as well. It cut off its predictions abruptly at 60°N... Read more...
Histories of Techne
Jocelyn Holland
The concerns that arise over the use of technology in the classroom – what kind of technology to use, how frequently, and in what manner it should be integrated – are some of the most pressing pedagogical questions today. Those participating in this debate might be surprised to hear that intellectuals and self-described “technologues” around 1800 also considered the challenges of integrating technology into university curricula. People who were thinking... Read more...
Histories of Techne
Liam Cole Young
I. What is the relationship between techniques of scholarly labour and textual production, on the one hand, and the ideas and concepts they articulate, on the other? This question has received attention across a variety of disciplines, though perhaps less than we might have expected.1 I approach this question by exploring the scholarly techniques and administrative labour of one figure associated with the emergence of media and communication theory, Harold... Read more...
Historical Dictionary of Media Usage
Heiko Christians, Matthias Bickenbach, Nikolaus Wegmann
Reference works promise easy access to knowledge. Efficient and readily accessible, they facilitate speedy orientation. Amid the increasing proliferation of reference works as databases and keyword-searchable online texts, it may seem unusual to publish our HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF MEDIA USAGE as, of all things, a book. But the book is only an obsolete format if one understands it merely as a simple container for knowledge. The book can do more. The editors... Read more...
Historical Dictionary of Media Usage
Hannes Mandel
“Media are what their usage makes of them.” –Historical Dictionary of Media Usage For decades, despite its stellar career in academia, the concept of “medium/media” has surprisingly remained somewhat elusive. Few disciplines operate under as loosely, or at least as variously defined a name as Media Studies, and the already hackneyed German phrase Irgendwas mit Medien (“something having to do with media,” a popular career aspiration among college students in... Read more...
Histories of Techne
Mingyi Yu
An influential textbook from the field of computer science, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1985), begins with the provocation that the subject it introduced “is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers.”1 Rather, its authors, Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, sought to establish a more philosophical basis for interest: The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in... Read more...
Case Studies in Technique
The cure is worse than the disease the stutter-doctors decided around 1910, having asked their patients for years to talk in “queer modes of voice” or in sing-song to circumvent the speech impediment.1 Edward Wheeler Scripture, a physician and experimental psychologist who directed the speech clinic at Columbia University, considered stuttering to be among the gravest ailments of speech. Not able to express himself to others, the stutterer “shuts himself... Read more...
Systematizing Technique
Matthew Hockenberry
Cultural techniques, as Bernhard Siegert conceives them, are the “operative chains that precede the media concepts they generate.” Media may determine our situation, Friedrich Kittler once suggested, but they do so under circumstances already existing, encoded in them long in the past. Moving from the emphasis of early German media studies on technology towards an elaboration of the technical, the study of “cultural techniques” continues a Kittlerian interest in the... Read more...
