Content area
Full Text
Residual Media. Edited by Charles R. Acland. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Pp. 401. $75/$25.
Residual Media comprises nineteen scholarly essays examining our relationships with media technologies that no longer could be characterized as "mainstream." Editor Charles Acland does a superb job of laying the foundation for these essays in an introduction that not only previews the work of each author, but builds a sophisticated, thoroughly researched, and theoretically unifying argument about society's fascination with media that have fallen out of use. He argues persuasively that residual media give important clues as to who we are and what we value in the present, explaining that "an inappropriate amount of energy has gone into the study of new media, new genres, new communities, and new bodies, that is, into the contemporary forms. Often, the methods of doing so have been at the expense of taking account of continuity, fixity, and dialectical relations with existing practices, systems, and artifacts" (pp. xix-xx).
The first section theorizes the nature of "residual," offering frameworks for understanding both how contemporary cultural contexts lend relevance to older media technologies and how the very concept of obsolescence can be engineered in the interests of capital accumulation.Will Straw uses the eclectic example of the longlostperfume.com website to assert that "it is not simply that the Internet, as a new medium, refashions the past...