The materiality of digital media: The hard disk drive,phonograph,magnetic tape and optical media in technical close-up

Abstract

Popular discourses surrounding contemporary digital media often misrepresent it as immaterial and ephemeral, overlooking the material devices that store and generate our media objects. This article materially ‘descends’ into a selection of prior media forms that make up the genealogy of the hard disk drive (HDD) to challenge our reliance on conceptual misrepresentations. This material analysis is used to situate digital media in a genealogy of prior media forms, to enrich our understanding of how media’s affordances arise from the interplay of both formal and forensic materiality and to demonstrate the value of reintegrating materiality back into the study of media.

Keywords

Digital hard drive history materiality media

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alkin

EGM

(1996) Sound Recording and Reproduction. Oxford: Focal Press.

Carlile

Nicolini

Langley

. (2013) How matter matters: objects, artifacts, and materiality in organizational studies. In: Carlile

Nicolini

Langley

. (eds) How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organizational Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–15.

Ceruzzi

(2003) A History of Modern Computing. London; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dourish

Mazmanian

(2013) Media as material: information representations as material foundations for organizational practice. In: Carlile

Nicolini

Langley

. (eds) How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organizational Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 92–118.

Eisenberg

(2005) The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ernst

(2011) Media archaeography: method and machine versus history and narrative of media. In: Huhtamo

Parikka

(eds) Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. London: University of California Press, pp. 239–255.

Gitelman

(2008) Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Glass

(1990) Interleaving: the right place at the right time. InfoWorld 12(50): 69.

Hall

(2011) Save our sounds: America’s recorded sound heritage project. Available at: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/sos/preserve1.html

10.

Hutchby

(2001) Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology: The Journal of the British Sociological Association 35(2): 441–456.

11.

Innis

(1964) The Bias of Communication: Introduction by Marshall McLuhan. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

12.

Katz

(2010) Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

13.

Kirschenbaum

(2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

14.

Kittler

(1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

15.

Leonardi

(2010) Digital materiality? How artifacts without matter, matter. First Monday 15(6–7). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3036/2567

16.

Library of Congress (2014) American memories: the history of the Edison Cylinder Phonograph. Available at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edcyldr.html

17.

Lievrouw

(2014) Materiality and media in communication and technology studies: an unfinished project. In: Gillespie

Boczkowski

Foot

(eds) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 21–52.

18.

McLuhan

(1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

19.

Maxfield

Harrison

(1926) Methods of high quality recording and reproducing of music and speech based on telephone research. Bell System Technical Journal 5: 492–523.

20.

Miller

(2005) Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

21.

Parikka

(2011) New materialism as media theory: medianatures and dirty matter. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9(1): 95–100.

22.

Parikka

(2012) What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press.

23.

Peters

(1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

24.

Pohlmann

(1992) The Compact Disc Handbook. Madison, WI: A-R Editions.

25.

Pohlmann

(2011) Principles of Digital Audio. New York: McGraw-Hill.

26.

Read

(1952) The Recording and Reproduction of Sound [A Complete Reference Manual on Audio for the Professional and the Amateur]. Indianapolis, IN: H.W. Sams.

27.

Rumsey

(2014) Sound and Recording: Applications and Theory. Burlington, MA: Focal Press.

28.

Sterne

(2003) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

29.

Tewksbury

(2013/1897) A Complete Manual of the Edison Phonograph. USA: Windham Press.

30.

UCSB Library (2014) Cylinder preservation and digitization project: brown wax cylinders (1895–1901). Available at: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-brownwax.php

31.

Yates

(1989) Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.