New and Now: A Plea for Historiography and Technology Haidee Wasson

<1> Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, the word "new" was persistently attached to the term "technology," a coupling intended to reference a vast range of phenomena -- computers, the internet, wireless telecommunications, satellite cinema and so on. Throughout this period, these technologies were widely heralded as global panaceas. In the pages of glossy hi-tech magazines and academic annals alike, the obliteration of racism, homophobia, sexism, and the great class divide became subjunctive to the problem of connecting everybody everywhere to emergent digital networks. Decentering old-world imperial powers and creating alternative cultural formations became battle cries for the new economy, the new world community and a new decentralized and democratized body politic. Instantaneous, immersive and transparent unions among people and places across politics and cultural difference pervaded corporate advertising, government policy documents and university budgets alike. These were, for many, exciting times. Indeed, the US economy witnessed unprecedented growth. Rhetoric about globalization promised to tear down previous barriers to world-wide prosperity, security and equality. On the surface, it seemed like a pretty good deal.

<2> Despite the cheery renderings of "new technologies" from the left and the right, there remained a vast divide in opinion about the realities of this utopia. While a majority celebrated the revolutionary and transformative aspects of emergent media, there was an equally steady cadre of naysayers. Some on the left were suspicious of the corporate-industrial-military complex that undergirded a considerable number of technology initiatives. Some on the right -- generally conservative and traditionalist scholars –- argued that new technologies heralded the imminent decay of all that mattered most: the literary, the classical, the rational and the reasoned. In short, they feared the end of humanity's forward movement, the end of progress.

<3> While disagreement about new technologies persists, the polarities of the terms by which they are understood -– from utopian to dystopian -- have softened. As Silicon Valley's bubble collapsed and post-9-11 fear set-in, "new technologies" have come to mean differently. More and more, commentators treat the whole of the phenomenon as rife with complexity and contradiction. In the North American context, the utopia has been tempered by the specters of job losses, identity theft, child porn panics and an ostensibly omni-present terrorist threat. Yet, at the same time, these same technologies have also clearly facilitated innovative networking among social groups and disenfranchised individuals, providing them previously unrealized points of contact and effective modes of public action. New technologies are widespread, diversified phenomena. Their impact resides on a vast uneven field of profit, paranoia and progressive possibility. If there is consensus that the technological present is a complicated one, there nonetheless remains the vital task of assessing these same technologies in relation to more than the "now" or the "new." They must also be understood in relation to the concept of change, itself always dependent on particular ideas about time and causation. When did the internet begin? What made cell phone-cameras the most rapid growing technology of the last 20 years?

<4> The phrase itself -- "new technology" -– is a germane site to begin. What kind of rhetorical work is being done when the term "new" is attached to the term "technology"? When did new technologies become new? When will they become old? What precisely are the forces driving them, slowing them, directing them, and aging them? I would argue that there has been and continues to be a shameful presentism and determinism pervading the discourses that constitute our techno-frenzy. The most fundamental questions of temporality and causation (motors of change) are commonly obfuscated by a virtual haze. Take for instance the most basic idea that the "new" of "new technology" is the equivalent to the technological systems ascendant "now" and "next." The logic that the new equals the now is a deeply unsettling one. Not only does it suggest an overly simplified view of our technological present (the pencil is arguably as important as eye-operated inscription systems; paper as important as a webpage) it also suggests a dangerously reductive idea about the past. In short, all technologies were once new; the new itself is profoundly historical, only identifiable in the swirl of that which pre-, post- and supra-exists it. And, this insight has great bearing on the then and the now, the new and the next, the old and the immanent -- all of which co-exist to varying forms in the present.

<5> It is debates in historiography that have provided a theater in which to explore ideas about what history is and how it should be written. Under the rubric of historiography, we investigate these concepts of change, time, and causality with the aim to developing tools of analysis and research that expand both the methods by which we write history and the objects we take to be important in this process. When co-articulated with the term technology (as concept as well as a range of artifacts and systems), a crucial field of inquiry opens up, one that has profound implications for thinking through not just the past but the present, the "now" of our technological condition. Recent debates in historiography reject the assertion that history is linear, that progress moves benignly forward, and that knowledge serves a universal constituency. Indeed, combined with movements in critical theory, cultural and media studies, a wave of scholarship is emerging that complicates the present in light of debates about the past, asserting that things either "now" or "new" are never blank, uni-temporal, a-social, or immaterial phenomena. We live in the past as much as the future. Both are informed by the intricate social, political, cultural and economic networks that constitute our historical and futurological worlds. Importantly, this work reminds us that the "new" is never as simply novel or progressive as often presumed. Technology is never singularly powerful and determinant. Indeed, inspecting the newness of previous technologies quickly reveals that the patterns and repetitions among technologies past and present humble even the most ardent prosyletizers of our present-day revolution.

<6> The challenge nonetheless remains to differentiate what is truly unprecedented and uniquely transformative from what is a pale redressing of the same. Complicating our understanding of both the present and the past will do much to help sort through this problem. In other words, as so much critical theory has taught us, new technologies exist in history; they are necessarily linked to varied concepts of change and the multiple dynamics that are its motor. All of this makes the investigation of technology and historiography –- questions of technology and its role in both the writing of and our most basic concepts of history –- all the more pressing.

<7> Thus was the lineage of this issue of Reconstruction: to provide a forum for investigating the links among technologies, history and the process of writing the past with the aim to better thinking through the present. The results published here suggest some compelling debates that are familiar as well as innovative. Collectively these essays propose a need to reject the rhetoric of "newness" in favor of a clear acknowledgement that technologies unravel and become significant only within a complex temporal and causal register. Some of these essays take technology as an object of historiographical inquiry, asking new questions of old objects. Others take select technologies as tools of interpretive and materialist historiographical methods in order to understand other phenomena. Technologies become sites of knowledge and new ways of knowing the past. Each of the contributions provide salient examples of engaged scholarship in an area of persistent and widespread importance.

<8> In his essay on the Library of Congress, "Reading Over the Shoulder of the Future at the Library of Congress" Samuel Gerald Collins, provides a thoughtful and elegant investigation of what might otherwise be considered an antiquated or old technology: the card catalogue. He does so alongside discussion of the figures and tropes of cyberspace, interweaving the seemingly pedestrian and frayed catalogue with the immediacy and sleekness of the web. Perhaps most compelling about this essay is the clear conceptualization of the present as multi-temporal. For Collins, card catalogues, books and pencils sit beside databases, websites and keyboards. The rigidity and endurance of the former coexist with the fluidity and ephemerality of the latter. He concludes with a call to acknowledge that while it might be easy to imagine the dissipation of materiality and embodiment -– things and bodies -- they remain fundamental to what knowing means in the first place.

<9> Daniel Martel's contribution "Aircraft Picture Postcards as a Tool for Influence Through Images" explores the inter-related histories of the postcard and the airline industry in a global context. Primarily, Martel is interested in using the postcard as a kind of method and source of knowledge in order to unpack one mode by which the cultural and ideological significance of air-travel has been generated. He maps a fascinating set of distinctions between the more generic qualities of images depicting planes in flight and the more culturally specific and differentiated images of planes on the ground, marked by the signs of clothing, luggage, flight attendants and passengers. His analysis of these images is astutely linked to the history of airline travel, and the varied incarnations this travel has taken over the years, from the wonders of flight observation decks to the extreme security lock-downs post-9-11. This essay provides a quick view to using one technology (postcards) to think about another (airplanes). Together they constitute one site where ideas about travel, tourism and globalization have germinated and grown. Their linking is made all the more compelling by their shared properties; both are quintessentially modern and equally dependent on ideas about mobility and connectivity. Each is semiotically rich and clearly implicated in the paradigmatic modern ideal of making the world smaller through transportation and communication.

<10> In "Of Technology and Apocalypse, or Whose Independence Day?," Christopher Keep attacks head-on the dominant narratives that situate technology within universalist and usually imperialist ideals of progress: social, economic and political. He reads the neo-conservative and somewhat infamous book by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man, as a sort of ur-script for the American Blockbuster film Independence Day. The film, not unlike the book, portrays a world in which America's manifest destiny is replayed as the ultimate end of all conflict, social difference, and forms of governance. Technology plays an instrumental role in these narratives as all manner of tools and systems become symptom and cause of this irrepressible engine of change. Keep is quick to point out the ideological function of these narratives: conflicts of sex, class, gender, race are dissolved by the juggernaut of American techno-innovation. Embodied figuratively by evil others (communism, Islam, invading aliens, terrorists) fictional and ostensibly non-fictional narratives ritualize these imperialist ideals. Keep does well to remind us of the ways in which technologies can be wholly determined by over-riding and pervasive cultural forces that seek not to understand technological change but to appropriate it for troubling and often violent purposes.

<11> Matthew Malsky extends the discussion of culture and technology in his piece entitled "Fantasy and the Concert Hall: Musical Performance in the Electroacoustic Age." Malsky traces the gradually changing relations between music and space through the introduction of electronic sound technologies. From unique compositions designed to be performed in single and specific sites to the more standardized compositions created for electronically reproduced formats that can be played anywhere, music has long been affected by the modes by which it is delivered and the conditions in which it is heard. Previously, listening space determined composition and performance. More and more, listening space is being made more malleable, subordinate to rendering technologies and delivery systems. Such tools can create the illusion of enormity in a small room, or conversely create intimacy in vast spaces. They may also enact movement within fixed and static structures. Malsky invokes Adorno to explore the repercussions of these changes in sound technology, music, and our experience of listening. He cautions us to beware of the impulse to realize an impossible transparence between mind and music, self and performer, so evident in the impulse to strive for fidelity and authenticity in electronic and digital music reproduction. Music and space are always mediated. Yet, he also reminds us that mediation need not mean full individuation, it may also retain the possibility of fostering public spaces and communal listening. This remains, in the least, a constituent component of what music should be.

<12> In the issue's final essay, Michael Gardiner's "Endless Enlightenment: Eye-Operated Technology and the Political Economy of Vision" takes to task the development of visual technologies that exercise a surveillant logic upon their subjects. Informed by Paul Virilio's provocative work, Gardiner provides a historically sweeping discussion -– from 18th Century Edinburgh to 21st Century America -– in order to consider the similar consistencies that link technological developments across time and geo-political contexts. Focusing on the contemporary development of eye-operated systems, Gardiner also makes connections across a range of visual technologies, including Benthamite urban planning, television and the internet. Throughout, points of contact are made with questions of power and politics, and a healthy skepticism prevails about persistent enlightenment ideals that equate vision with knowledge and progress. Punctuated doubts are similarly raised about the false relationships drawn between the individuating nature of many contemporary visual technologies and the promise of increased democracy. Gardiner's essay provides an interesting effort to link moments across time in which discourses of knowledge, power and vision were ascendant in the world with devastating consequences.

<13> All of these essays venture into that essential and perhaps murky field that lies between unbridled celebration and luddite rejection of emergent technologies. With balanced measures of criticism and creativity, they sketch a picture of a world layered with material and theoretical ferment, temporally complex and spatially expansive. They demonstrate that ideas about technology have long been interwoven with equally important concepts of experience, vision, knowledge, and politics. This fact has been exercised across a range of dramatically different projects, from orchestral music to postcards to geo-political acts of empire. As much as they seek to explore different objects of inquiry –- from card catalogues to optic-technologies –- they also employ an equally diverse range of methods. Yet, they share a basic assertion: discussions of technology must be rigorously engaged with debates across the humanities and social sciences. Collectively, these works assure us that the pairing of historiographical questions with technological ones is especially pressing, providing a counter-balance to the common tendency of imbuing technological phenomena with highly selective and frequently pernicious ideals that serve the few rather than the many. Aggressively investigating the past will help us to better understand what is obfuscated by the "new," encouraging us to look back, forward and all around before we decide which direction we are headed.