By: Kristine Smitka

Kristine Smitka — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:22:49 +0000

Your first question made me think of the work of new media studies scholar Lisa Gitleman, who argues that media are ““socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation” (Always Already New 7). Henry Jenkins builds on her work, defining a medium as both a technology that enables communication and the social practices that surround this technology (Convergence Culture 13). For these scholars, the medium is a socialized form; the book is imbedded in a social practice. This scholarship, perhaps, mirrors the metaphor of the double helix put forward by McGann (and Bornstein) where bibliographic and linguistic codes (and for Borstein contextual codes) intertwine. While I see both McGann and Bortstein turn to the potential of the virtual, I simultaneously hear a reiteration of the impossibility of extracting the potential of the medium from its imbedded social location. I read your desire to tease the physical from the social limitations of the book to be engaged with this same tension. Is there an editorial practice that can sever the double helix of formal limitation and social expectation?

Comments on: Fumbling for what we do not yet know

By: Kristine Smitka