The readings this week describe the various challenges of conducing historical media research. Uricchio’s “Historicizing Media in Transition” opens and closes with referneces to Herodotus. Uricchio describes the Heredotus story as one of decentralization: “[Herodotus’] encounter with Egypt, its history, customs, and inhabitants, produced an epistemological vertigo of sorts… [He] was confronted by the inescapable realization that not only was Greece not the center of the civilized world, but that Egyptian civilization, evidently thousands of years older, had provided the Greeks with the elements which they took to be identifying marks of their own civilization” (23). The article addresses the commonplace practice of conducting medium-specific histories and calls for a multi-faceted approach to media histories.
James Carey’s “The Problem of Journalism History” suggests that the problem is they way in which journalism history is conducted. He says that journalism history is often “dull and unimaginative” (3). He notes the lack of exploring the cultural history of journalistic reporting. He says that journalism is not static, but ever changing.
“Early American Film” by Tom Gunning shows the different ways in which a film historian can approach research and also that different approaches can develop different conclusions. Most notably, he shows that different conclusions can all be true, which fights against the idea of a grand narrative. The way in which he really emphasizes this idea is when he discusses the different theories of the classical system. In this analysis, he summarizes the work of different scholars who all see different things as separating early cinema from classical cinema. For example, Noel Burch separated the two via IMR and PMR — institutional mode (Hollywood film) and primitive mode (underdevelopment of early cinema). While Kristen Thompson separates the two by saying the classical cinema focused on storytelling.
Briggs and Burke say that “media need to be viewed as a system, a system in perpetual change in which different elements play greater or smaller roles” (4). In this article, they suggest that there is no initial starting point that a historian can fall back on to begin their analysis of communication history: when does one start? The invention of the alphabet? Printing? Radio? The interesting point made by Briggs and Burke is that history and communication (media) cannot be separated. This point is supported via an excellent analysis of the media’s role in the Afghanistan/Iraq war. One cannot tell the story (history) of what happened without a discussion of the media.
“Things that Shape History” by Giorgio Riello was an exciting article to read because it offered three methods of exploring histories of material culture: history from things, history of things, and history and things. It goes through three case studies that show how each of the three methodologies are practiced. While “The Case of the Missing Footstool” by Glenn Adamson is an entertaining analysis of how one can study things that are absent. In the article he makes the case that the things that are absent from historical record are just as important as the things that are there.