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Residual Media. Charles R. Acland, ed. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Pp. xxvii + 401. $75.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).
How do new media age? What happens to hardware and software that have passed their use-by date but refuse to discreetly decompose? And what is the history of the idea of the new? Residual Media draws its often disparate topics together under the rubric of the "living dead": the recycling, repurposing, reappropriating, and reframing of objects that have outlasted their original context, but also, more inertly, their storage, archiving, cataloguing, and collecting. Residual Media is as interested in the landfill, that is, as in the quotation. "Reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media technologies and practices" challenge triumphalist or supercessionist claims about the new driving out the old; in the process, they also pose an embarrassment to historical grand narratives more generally.
One great strength of the collection is the historical spread of the media in question. Some of the chapters focus on practices: shopping, collecting, storing, and discarding. Others turn to superseded objects: typewriters (Lisa Gitelman), vinyl records (Hillegonda Rietveld, John Davis), telephones (Collette Snowden), computers (Jonathan Sterne), player pianos (Jody Berland). Some focus on software, others on hardware; some on textual content (the suffrage press or plans for postoccupation Iraq), others on material media (from paper to vinyl). Touching on topics from museum gift shops (Haidee Wasson) to discontinued perfumes (Will Straw), the whole is quirkier than its parts.
Such a grab bag invites a strong editorial hand, and one of the striking accomplishments of Acland's introduction is to marry the conceptual ambition of academic cultural theory with the kind of fine-grained attention to particulars more often found...