Chapter Title: Media

Chapter Author(s): Lisa Gitelman

Book Title: Fueling Culture

Book Subtitle: 101 Words for Energy and Environment
Book Editor(s): Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger
Published by: Fordham University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1hfr0s3.60

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Media

Lisa Gitelman

W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen’s Critical Terms for Media Studies (2010) includes
entries for new media and mass media but not for plain old media, while, in an essay pub-
lished the same year, John Guillory outlines “The Genesis of the Media Concept,” noting
the several centuries across which the concept of media was “absent but wanted,” until the
new communication technologies of the nineteenth century may be said to have arrived to
beg the question (Guillory 2010, 321; Durham Peters 2001). Not until the twentieth cen-
tury did the term media emerge fully in what Raymond Williams calls its “technical” sense,
designating that parade of technological forms—the telegraph, telephone, phonograph,
cinema, radio, TV—whose intensive capitalization and widespread familiarity would even-
tually help to institutionalize “the Media” in common parlance and prompt the study of
media within the academy (R. Williams 1983, 203– 4). Media, it would seem, have forever
been tricky to apprehend concisely as such, while developments in that middle distance
of the later nineteenth century seem to have been crucial. I first encountered the parade-
of-technological-forms version of media when, fresh out of graduate school, I joined the
staff of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project. Telegraph, telephone, phonograph: that is
how the Papers Project kept track of the Edison subject matter we published, but the same
index terms kept coming up in our sources too, among them magazines like The Electri-
cian (1878), The Electrical Review (1882), and The Electrical World (1883), this last pun-
ningly self-described as “a weekly review of current progress.” Even though the earliest
phonographs were mechanical rather than electrical, the parade-of-forms version of media
seems to have arrived coincident with a self-consciously electrical age.

215

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216 Media

Before media earned its new technical sense, the term referred generally to any in-
between agency or substance. Early US letters patent, for instance, specifies things like
filtering media for rendering solutions less particulate. Likewise, patents mention nutrient
media, insulating media, conductive media, grinding media for lenses, and the actuating
mechanical media of levers and gearwork, as well as light-sensitive media for photographic
processes. The jump from media in this old, general sense to the new world of electrical
communications would involve some ingenious component devices and new NETWORKS
of connection, but it further required the addition of content—meaning, messages, in-
formation, signal, and noise—absent in any appeal to filters, lenses, gears, or the like.
Today, under the influence of computing and its “new media,” one might call this crucial
addition “the content layer,” but to nineteenth-century ears that figure would have made
little sense. Better instead to think of a charge, a jolt, an electrical impulse, a live wire.
The new world of mediated communications was powerfully wired. By the 1880s, so many
telegraph lines connected to the New York Stock Exchange that one observer noted, “No
bird could fly through their network, [and] a man could almost walk upon them.” Darken-
ing the street below, this thicket of wires confirmed at a glance that Wall Street was “the
focus to which all currents of American progress and energy converge” (Stedman 1905,
quoted in Hochfelder 2013, 101). The devastating blizzard of 1888 would help to teach
New York City the prudence of burying wires rather then stringing them atop poles, but
wiring hardly slowed.
In 1884, The Electrical World declared “The Age of Wire,” acknowledging its indispens-
ability to electronic communications amid the sudden proliferation of other uses, every-
thing from barbed wire fencing to the new suspension bridges, from elevator and streetcar
cables to mattress springs and clockwork (“The Age of Wire” 1884, 106). So powerfully
did live wires and electric cables take hold of the popular imagination as a feature of mo-
dernity that the possibility of instantaneous communication without them seemed all the
more remarkable, whether encountered as the question of spiritualist communication or as
the seeming miracle of wireless telegraphy. In 1897 Guglielmo Marconi called it “Signal-
ing Through Space Without Wires.” Over the next decades, wirelessness would help to
point anew at the wire-fullness of modernity, so much so that The Wireless Age (1913), one
might say, became the Wired (1993) magazine of its day.
See also: ELECTRICITY, GRIDS, INFRASTRUCTURE, SPIRITUAL.

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