Gitelmania II: "The past didn't go anywhere..."

In my reading of _Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines_ by Gitelman, I also felt a certain
worm-holding" between the way technology was consumed in the late 1800's and now, like Bob--hence the appropriation of the title (property being theft, ghost writers, aLl YoUr BaSe BeLoNg[ING] tO uS and all...). However, I was somewhat more interested in social intention in terms of how technology is used. For example, on page 68 Gitelman writes: "Amusement seemed to contaminate the pragmatic purpose of the phonograph. Participants to the convention wanted the two functions [business and entertainment] to be entirely separate, because they considered amusement wholly secondary to their product and business." When I read this passage, I immediately remember back in 1999 (again, right around the time of this book's publication) when they first started putting computers into use where I worked at the Metro Food Market corporation. Their intention was to use the computers specifically, and singularly, for payroll and store projections. When this happened, I was an office clerk at my store who was known to spend a good deal of time sitting behind a computer when I wasn't at work. So, when the computer arrived at our store, I was asked to learn to do payroll and write store projections because I was one of the few people in the store that had experience with the new technology. When I kept informing them that my "technological frame"---surely I didn't use this term them...but it seems appropriate now--was that of a gamer, more than once I was asked why someone would "waste such a powerful tool playing games." At first, the internet, solitaire, etc. were all blocked on the computer as each store was connected through an internal, closed network. Like the phonographs purchased in the late 1800's, the upper management at MFM inc. "mistook their own interests for the interests of consumers. Accordingly, they assumed that low-paid office staff and good-time Charlies lacked the necessary skill, attention, and incentive to operate the phonograph [or computer] correctly or maintain its still-quirky mechanism." (p. 68)

Yes, this is a singular example of bogus limitations being placed on a technology by a specific group, but it high-lights for me how sometimes "technological frames" erroneously pigeon-hole technologies as they, the technologies, push their way towards mainstream acceptance. Yes, computer is a powerful business tool. Yes, the computer is a powerful research tool. Correct me if I am wrong (someone...give me a verbal slap), but wasn't the concept of the internet developed by the military as a research/archival system? Did they have the foresight to see the way the internet would explode in terms of social networking, media consumption, etc. at or around the time of Gitelman's book being published? I can't imagine that they could, but there are many things in this world--income tax, for example--that I would not dream up on the worst drugs. Gitelman continues, "The inventor of the phonograph, contemporary pundits, novelists, and capitalists had all misconceived the phonograph. They had all been wrong in pronouncing the function and the future of the new technology." (p. 69)

Carrying this train of thought further, could the amalgam of scientists and programmers that initiated the internet (or whatever they called it) forecast the current way millions currently use the internet as social networking and media consumption technology? What would Al Gore have thought of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or YouTube back in the earlier conceptions of the internet(Har har har har--I'm a silly boy, sorry)? Case in point, and somehow in my mind mimicking the late 19th century reaction to hearing a human voice carried out of a machine, is the urban myth of Chuck Palahnuik's readings of his story "Guts".

At the end of his composite novel _Haunted_ (a collection of 24 stories forming a gestalt of horror and depravity), Palahnuik speaks, outside of his text, of the problems he has had giving readings of one particular short story from the collection. At each reading, members of the audience would begin fainting and/or vomiting. In one reported case, a man had a seizure in the middle of the reading. For over a year I searched for some local reading of this story by the author (http://www.seizureandy.com/stuff/guts.htm if you would like to see a text copy of this story). At a point where I was about to give up...I checked somewhere else...YouTube, and found a submission of Palahnuik himself giving a reading. I didn't faint or vomit (of course, I have read the gruesome story probably 10-15 times...), but it was fascinating to hear the story in the author's own mouth.

If you want to check it out, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7oC2ZIQ4JI . But be warned, it is one of the most horrifying, graphic stories I have ever read. But it changed the way I heard/read the story. And I think that is something that Gitelman was trying to point out. Media...technology. Strange bedfellows.

E.