The document discusses the history of new technologies and how they are initially seen as novel but eventually become mainstream and standardized. It makes three key points: 1. New technologies are often built upon older technologies and are initially not seen as completely new, but as improvements on the old. Early cinema combined existing technologies like still photos and magic lanterns. 2. As technologies develop new social uses and become subject to legal regulations and economic forces, power structures seek to control the technologies and their industries, as happened with the institutionalization and Hollywood domination of cinema. 3. Technologies only become truly mainstream and taken-for-granted after going through periods of technical invention, cultural innovation, legal regulation, economic distribution

1. WHEN OLD TECHNOLOGIES
WERE NEW
PROFESSOR JOHN ELLIS
OCTOBER 2018

2. WE LIVE IN A CULTURE OF NEWNESS
GOOD
Invention
Innovation
The latest
Improved
Revolution
BAD
Tradition
Old
So last year
Basic
Preservation

3. WHAT IS ‘THE NEW’?
How does newness happen?
Is the new as new as we think it is?
What is the cost of our obsession with the new?

4. ONCE THIS WAS REALLY NEW

5. LA FEE AUX CHOUX (1896)
This has a good claim to be the world’s first fiction film
Directed by Alice Guy (later Alice Guy Blanché) 1873-1968)
The copy you’ve just seen is a (hurried) remake from 1900… the original
1896 negative had worn out
This film was ‘new’, but it was also ‘old’:
Theatrical set and performance, fairy tale, magic…

6. WHAT WAS NEW ABOUT CINEMA IN 1895?
The act of projecting motion pictures onto a big screen was new in
1895
The first films were of ‘things just happening’
A train arriving in a station; workers leaving a factory, people on the
street...
The spectacle was the important thing
“even the leaves on the trees are moving”

7. THE OLD IN THE NEW
Cinema combined:
Still photo (visual accuracy) Magic lantern (projection) Kinetoscope (movement)

8. THE NEW AS SPECTACLE:
THE ‘CINEMA OF ATTRACTIONS’
‘By its reference to the curiosity-
arousing devices of the fairground,
‘attraction’ denoted early cinema’s
fascination with novelty and its
foregrounding of the act of display…
Early cinema did not simply seek to
neutrally record previously existing
acts or events. Even the seemingly
stylistically neutral film … involved a
cinematic gesture of presenting for
view, of displaying … All such events
were absorbed by a cinematic
gesture of presentation’
(Gunning, 1993: 4).
Wanstead flats, London, 1903

9. INVENTED FOR OTHER PURPOSES
Eadweard Muybridge
Animal Locomotion: series of stills for research purposes
Discovered he could animate them: Zoopraxinoscope (1880)

10. DISAPPOINTMENT
The Telephoniscope 1879
‘Last night I was in the Kingdom of
Shadows. If you only knew how strange
it is to be there. It is a world without
sound, without colour. Everything there
– the earth, the trees, the people, the
water and the air – is dipped in
monotonous grey. It is not life but its
shadow. It is not motion but its silent
spectre [...]. And all this in strange
silence where no rumble of the wheels
is heard, no sound of footsteps or of
speech. Nothing. […] This mute, grey
life finally begins to disturb and depress
you. Maxim Gorky 1896

11. CINEMA AS NORMAL
By 1910, movie making had
become a huge
entertainment industry
By 1920, feature films were
being shown in huge purpose
built ‘picture palaces’
Cinema had standardised
Cinema had institutionalised
Roxy, New York

12. BENJAMIN PETERS
“Most modern media pass through these five periods:
1. technical invention – during which media are recognized rarely as
‘new’ and usually thought of as ‘old plus’;
2. cultural innovation – during which media develop new social uses;
3. legal regulation – during which the interested parties explicitly
contest and negotiate for media power;
4. economic distribution – which continues until media become
5. social mainstream – the point at which media are no longer new.
Then, a medium may fade to obsolescence, sometimes disappearing entirely
from social memory”
Peters, B. And Lead Us Not Into Thinking the New is New: A Bibliographic Case for New Media History New Media & Society, 2009
11(1/2) p.18 http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/nmsa/11/1-2

13. EXPLORING THE PHASES OF NEW MEDIA
PHASE 1: Technical invention
“old plus”
PHASE 2: cultural innovation
media develop new social uses

14. PHASE 3: WHEN THE MOVIES GET
INSTITUTIONALISED
Exercising power over the industry
LEGAL POWER
Fire regulations https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/untidycloseizuthrush
Leading to licencing of cinemas… and censorship

15. NEGOTIATING POWER
FINANCIAL POWER
Inventor Thomas Edison thought he could monopolise the US movie
business based on controlling the technology
But other entrepreneurs found a way around this by working in the
new state of California
By the 1920s, those entrepreneurs themselves controlled an industry
that dominated the world’s screens: Hollywood

16. REGULATION AND POWER
GENDER POWER
Institutionalisation brings fewer opportunities for women
In the early years, film cutters were usually women.
When the job was professionalised as ‘editor’, they were usually men

17. CINEMA AND THE EXERCISE OF POWER
RACIAL POWER
The port city of Wilmington, North Carolina USA had a population 39,000 in
1939.
20% (7,800) were African Americans.
This was the American South.
Cinemas were segregated.
In Wilmington, there were no cinemas
for black Americans between 1927 and 1940
The Center theatre was designed in 1937 with no separate areas for African
Americans
http://gtts.oasis.unc.edu/learn/commentary/Stillwell_Center_HighPoint.html

18. PHASE 5: BECOMING THE SOCIAL
MAINSTREAM
The dominant, usual, taken-for-granted form of a technology…
… takes some time to develop
… is not necessarily the optimum form
“Media are not fixed, natural objects; they have no natural edges. They
are constructed complexes of habits, beliefs and procedures embedded
in elaborate cultural codes of communication” (Marvin,1988: p. 8)

19. QUANTEL PAINTBOX
launched 1981
First frame-by-frame digital image editing
Designed as single one-purpose entity
Not designed on hardware/software model
Demonstrated by: NYREE KAVANAGH, MITCH MITCHELL
https://figshare.com/articles/post-graphics-paintbox-bitesize-02_mp4/7016987 (4 mins)
The range of possibilities
https://figshare.com/articles/post-graphics-paintbox-team6-medium_mp4/7026209

20. WHY DON’T WE STILL HAVE QUANTEL
PAINTBOX?
Quantel went out of business because they did not develop software to
run on general purpose computers
They thought it would compromise the quality and flexibility of what
they offered
The Quantel Paintbox in the demonstration you’ve seen has been
rescued and maintained by computer historian Mark Nias

21. THE REAL COST OF THE NEW

22. REDUCING WASTE
Keep using it if it is ‘good enough’.
Who uses all those new features anyway?
If you buy new, don’t trash but pass it on

23. BENJAMIN PETERS (slightly revised)
1. technical invention – usually thought of as ‘old plus’;
2. cultural innovation – media develop new social uses;
3. legal regulation – contesting and negotiating media power;
4. economic distribution – going worldwide
5. social mainstream – taken for granted
Then, a medium may fade to obsolescence, sometimes disappearing
entirely from social memory…
…but always leaving its waste and its traces

24. … and another thing…
Punch 1932