Lauren Rabinovitz

Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture

Digital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to counter such ahistoricism, arguing for the need to understand digital culture—and its social, political, and ethical ramifications—in historical and philosophical context. Looking at a broad range of technologies, including photography, print and digital media, heat engines, stereographs, and medical imaging, the contributors present a number of different perspectives from which to reflect on the nature of media change. While foregrounding the challenges of drawing comparisons across varied media and eras, Memory Bytes explores how technologies have been integrated into society at different moments in time. These essays from scholars in the social sciences and humanities cover topics related to science and medicine, politics and war, mass communication, philosophy, film, photography, and art. Whether describing how the cultural and legal conflicts over player piano rolls prefigured controversies over the intellectual property status of digital technologies such as mp3 files; comparing the experiences of watching QuickTime movies to Joseph Cornell’s “boxed relic” sculptures of the 1930s and 1940s; or calling for a critical history of electricity from the Enlightenment to the present, Memory Bytes investigates the interplay of technology and culture. It relates the Information Age to larger and older political and cultural phenomena, analyzes how sensory effects have been technologically produced over time, considers how human subjectivity has been shaped by machines, and emphasizes the dependence of particular technologies on the material circumstances within which they were developed and used. Contributors. Judith Babbitts, Scott Curtis, Ronald E. Day, David Depew, Abraham Geil, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, Lisa Gitelman, N. Katherine Hayles, John Durham Peters, Lauren Rabinovitz, Laura Rigal, Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Swiss

Body Shots: Early Cinema's Incarnations (review)

racism which marked inter-racial ‘justice’ in the Jim Crow South, it bore only modest resemblance to the mob atmosphere associated with the ‘legal lynchings’ described by George C. Wright whom she cites. Second, the author claims more than her evidence permits. Because immigrants composed neither of the mobs which she considers, she can scarcely claim that they were asserting their whiteness by ‘lynching to belong’ or that this violence persuaded native-born whites to expand their definitions of whiteness. Furthermore, in claiming that women played a central role in one lynching, she strains credulity with her interpretation of the role of three wealthy sisters who hosted a ball on the same night. “There is no evidence to suggest that the Parker sisters or their family had anything to do with the lynching,” she admits. “But it must be remembered that their lavish party occurred at exactly the same time. It is possible that some of their male guests were dancing with the Parker sisters . . . Their minds would have been filled with idealized images of white southern womanhood, and some of these guests may have slipped away from the festivities to join an established ritual of southern white racial hierarchy occurring only a few blocks away. At least on a symbolic level, the Parkers’ party provided a vivid backdrop to the violent celebration of white dominance” (91). Finally, Nevels frequently deviates from her ostensible objective, an examination of expanding ‘whiteness.’ It often seems that this objective is subordinate to the exploration of the minutiae of county politics which, she claims, created the atmosphere in which immigrants could seize their whiteness. However, the relationship is often tenuous, unclear, or unpersuasive. Additionally, her organization and her digressions repeatedly interrupt the flow of the narrative, creating redundancy and discontinuity. Her insertion of comments, such as “before her story can be told, a few words first need to be said about [. . .]” (77), often signal these unwelcome digressions. The University of Texas-Pan American Brent M. S. Campney

The National Conference of the Society for Cinema Studies New Orleans, Louisiana April 3–6, 1986

Session: Phenomenology and Film Session: “Narration” Sessions: Parody and Bakhtin Session: EARLY CINEMA Session: Approaches to Interpretation Session: Trends and Concepts in Chinese Cinema Session: Narrative in Japanese Cinema Classical German Film Theory Session: Hitchcock and Authorship Session: JERRY LEWIS Session: Women and the Avant garde Sessions: Television and Reception Theory. Theorizing Television: Text, Textuality, Intertextuality. Session: Legal Issues in Film/Video Workshop Session: Intertextuality and Ideology Session: The Promotional Text SCS Cinematheque/Videotheque