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Media in Transition 6: Summary Perspectives

Moderator: James Paradis
Mary Bryson Marlene Manoff John Durham Peters Thomas Pettitt: April 26, 2009; Running Time: 1:14:15

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

At the end of the three-day Media in Transition conference, panelists swap impressions and reactions, offering some notional themes for future symposia.

Mary Bryson frames her comments as “a mash-up aggregation.” The conference’s “massive disagreements and sometimes awkward silences and gaps” were beneficial, “as we make our way in the present imperfect of media studies.” For Bryson, a key question arose: “What time is it here?” The past, present and future are now intertwined in media studies, and often in “incommensurable tension.” The next conference might wish to “mobilize and re-territorialize” itself across borders, making itself available in multiple host locations.

The traditional discourse around libraries and archives no longer serves us well, observes librarian Marlene Manoff, who calls for a “new terminology to describe or think about collections of digital objects, especially when they involve new services and functionalities.” She was “happy to hear a universal acknowledgment of the volatility and mutability of the digital record,” yet finds herself “still at a loss when it comes to questions about what should or should not be saved.” Colleagues in the profession have been “discussing the social and political implications of selection decisions for a long time,” and today, with so many people creating and collecting digital objects and files,” she perceives “a much broader conversation,” although there is yet “no cultural consensus” about these issues.

John Durham Peters offers three observations: He first addresses the difficulty of organizing knowledge in a field as diverse as media studies (or for that matter, in other modern scholarship). Peters likens media studies to “a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities.” He also gives “two cheers for breakdown,” for the ways that archives fail to conserve “all kinds of stuff.” He asks if we would regard Sappho as such a good poet “if we possessed all 12 of the books.” He’s not trying “to praise barbarians who want to burn libraries,” but to point out that “what counts as historical record is exceedingly malleable.” His last comment involves the “interesting reversibility” of transmission and storage. To “transcend time, we must use up space, just as to transcend space, we must use up time.”

Thomas Pettitt admits to an identity crisis of sorts -- that “those of us who do literature but who have lost faith in literature as a rounded concept are not quite certain what it is that we do.” Possibly as a result of the welcoming nature of the conference, he wonders if “over time, literature studies people will find our true identity within media studies.” Literature is a form of culture production whose scholars focus on aesthetics, particularly those in a verbal form. The conference was absorbed with questions of quantity (“megas and teras”), but asks Pettitt, “Have we neglected (aesthetic) quality as a factor?” And finally, he found confirmation in the notion that “advances in media technology are taking us back to conditions as they were before some of the mechanical inventions.” Is this “business of the future looking rather like the past?”

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“If modern Shakespeares wrote masterpieces of hypertext fiction, will modern archivists work as hard to preserve them as my heroes, the typographers A, B and apprentice C did to transfer Shakespeare’s plays from manuscript to print?”

Thomas Pettitt

About the Speakers

Moderator: James Paradis

Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing, Program Head, Writing and Humanistic Studies, MIT

James Paradis is a noted scholar of literary and cultural perspectives on scientific rhetoric in the 19th century. His main fields of interest are Victorian Cultural Studies and Science and Technical Communication. This critical scholarship is highlighted by his books T.H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (1978), and Samuel Butler: Victorian against the Grain – A Critical Overview (2007).

Paradis has also made significant contributions to the field of technical writing and communication. Together with Muriel Zimmerman he co-authored The MIT Guide to Science and Engineering Communication (1997) in order to strengthen the communication skills of MIT undergraduates.

Mary Bryson

Professor in the Faculty of Education,and Director of the Center of Cross-Faculty Inquiry, University of British Columbia

Mary Bryson received her M.Ed. in Education from Tulane University and her Ph.D. in Education from OISE, University of Toronto. From 2004 to 2007, she was Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology and Special Education at the University of British Columbia. She earlier served as the Chair of Queer Studies in Education SIG, at the American Educational Research Association. Bryson has received the 2000 Pioneer in Technology and New Media award from the Wired Women Society.

Marlene Manoff

Associate Head and Collection Manager, MIT Humanities Library

Marlene Manoff has a Ph.D. in English from Brandeis University and Masters Degrees in comparative literature (UCLA) and library and information science (Simmons). She has published articles on the politics of building library collections and on the political and social implications of electronic text. Her essays include “The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives”, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines” and “The Symbolic Value of Libraries in a Digital Age”.

John Durham Peters

F. Wendell Miller professor of Communication Studies, University of Iowa

John Durham Peters is a media historian and social theorist. He is probably best known for his first book, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, which traces out broad historical, philosophical, religious, cultural, legal, and technological contexts for the study of communication. He has held fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Peters pursued studies at Brigham Young University and graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Utah, where he also earned his M.A. in Speech Communication. He received in Ph.D. in Communication Theory and Research from Stanford University in 1986 before accepting a faculty appointment at University of Iowa.

Thomas Pettitt

Associate Professor of English, University of Southern Denmark

Thomas Pettitt teaches English literary and cultural history in the late-medieval and early-modern periods. He received his Ph.d. from Odense University in 1996. His research focuses on tradition-borne texts and performances such as ballads, folksongs, legends, customs and folk drama.

He has published in such academic journals as Folklore, Journal of American Folklore, Renaissance Drama, and European Medieval Theatre.