RESEARCH SEMINAR, Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster

 

Title: “There is something new under the media, or rather, something ancient”

 

Speaker: Gabriele Balbi, Post-Doctoral Researcher, University of Lugano

 

Date: 14 March

Time: 3:00-5:00 pm

Room: A6.7, Harrow Campus, University of Westminster, Northwick Park tube (Metropolitan Line)

 

All welcome, but please contact Dr Anastasia Kavada at [log in to unmask] if you wish to attend

 

Abstract: The relationship between old and new media is one of the key questions of media history and, more generally, of media studies. This presentation provides examples taken from the last 200 years of media history that configure at least 4 different, and sometimes overlapping, phases in this relationship: imitation, specification, change, and continuity.

First, when a new medium enters society, it often imitates the old ones. This is a practice of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2002) useful for new media in order to find their nature, but also useful for society at large, which may look at the new in light of the old. A process of diversification, secondly, happens when a new medium really becomes something new, diversifying from the old, when it loses its uncertainty and finds a more stable nature (Uricchio 2004, Peters 2009). Thirdly, when a new medium seems to overcome the old one, the latter starts imitating the new one and changing its nature in order to survive in the media ecology; this is an “impulse of continuity” (Thoburn and Jenkins 2004) that forces old media to change, to recast, and to find new social meanings and new users. Finally, there is also a static phase. Not every old medium affects new ones, not every old must change only because of the new. Overlooking at the continuity of old media, at their long standing relevance in media systems is a mistake often made by media historians (Edgerton 2007).

My contribution to this discussion is twofold. First, I aim at proposing a general theory on this topic, based on these four different phases. Second, in order to better understand each phase, I give examples taken from my own research - mainly based on unpublished archival material, on the history of optical and electric telegraph, fixed and mobile telephone, circular telephone, wireless and radio in Italy - and from media history literature.

 

Biography: Gabriele Balbi is Post Doctoral researcher in History and Theory of Communication at the University of Lugano, currently visiting scholar at Columbia University and University of Westminster and Douglas Byrne Marconi Fellow at Oxford University. He published two books (Le origini del telefono in Italia, 2011 and La radio prima della radio, 2010) and several articles in international journals like Media History, Technology and Culture, Media, Culture and Society, International Journal of Communication, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, ICON on media history and history of telecommunications.