Wanda Strauven

The Archaeology of the Touch Screen

On October 16, 2011, the online version of the Dutch daily paper NRC Handelsblad posted a link to the YouTube clip »A Magazine is an iPad that does not Work«, where we see a one-year old girl interacting with both an electronic tablet and a paper magazine.1 To her frustration, the magazine is not responding to her touch commands. But she perfectly understands how the iPad works ... In Dutch we use the expression »dat is kinderspel« (that’s child’s play) to say that something is very easy to do, so easy that even children can do it. The YouTube clip very literally illustrates this saying regarding new media. Technology is not just becoming user-friendlier, but also truly infant-friendly, by developing an intuitive, almost natural language. But the video also shows the technophobes among us the drawback of such a development: the next generation will no longer be able to read ›normal‹ papers (i. e. texts printed on paper). The idea of adolescents being ahead of their time and surpassing the generation of their parents in technological terms is nothing new. It is a recurring commonplace or topos of our media history, as media-archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo would put it.2

The Kid Selfie as Self-Inscription: Reinventing an Emerging Media Practice

Adopting a media-archaeological perspective, Alexandra Schneider and Wanda Strauven suggest putting the kid selfie in relation to different intertwining genealogies of writing (-graphy) practices, which are all centered around the idea of “inscription”—a notion borrowed from James Lastra’s study of nineteenth-century sound technologies. In particular, the authors look at selfie videos made by young children with all kinds of portable media devices, connecting their playful activity to older art and media practices, such as drawing and sound recording. The kid selfie, Schneider and Strauven argue, can be understood as a way of reinventing the adult selfie, which is in itself still a rather new media practice. By looking at concrete examples of kid selfies, they ask: What makes a selfie a selfie? Is a selfie only a selfie if it is made with the intention of making a selfie and not shared on a social network site? What are the limitations and potentialities of the selfie? And how are they explored or “hacked” by today’s youngest media users?

Waste: An Introduction

With this special section we do not endeavour to synthesise the on-going debate. We rather aim at adding something to it by concentrating on the less obvious or hidden side (or ‘hidden agenda’) of waste, both from a contemporary and a historical perspective.

‘The Sown and the Waste’ – or, the psychedelic writing of film history

The word ‘psychedelic’ was coined in the 1950s by psychiatrist humphry osmond to describe hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline and LSd – but this essay will not be about either the history of ‘head’ films or how to write film history on acid. What I want to do is to show what film historians can learn from J.h. hexter’s writings on the rhetoric of history, including a look at what he meant when he wrote about how historians use language ‘psychedelically’.

Early cinema’s touch(able) screens: from Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou

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