Media Studies/Cultural Studies

“Residual Media, a rich and varied anthology, provides an important corrective to the prevailing rhetoric of new media.” -Jay Bolter, Georgia Institute of Technology

In a society that breathlessly awaits “the new” in every medium, what happens to last year's “new”? Ample critical energy has gone into the study of new media, genres, and communities. But what becomes of discarded media? In what manner do the products of technological change reappear as environmental problems, as “the new” in another part of the world, as collectibles, as memories, and as art?

Residual Media grapples with these questions and more in a wide-ranging and eclectic collection of essays. Beginning with how cultural change bumps along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts, the contributors examine how leftover artifacts can be rediscovered occupying space in storage sheds, traveling the globe, converting to alternative uses, and accumulating in landfills. By exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media, the essays here combine theoretical challenges to media history with ideas, technology, and uses that have been left behind. From player pianos to vinyl records, from the typewriter to the telephone, Residual Media is an innovative approach to the aging of culture and reveals that, ultimately, new cultural phenomena rely on encounters with the old.

Contributors: Jennifer L. Adams, Jody Berland, Sue Currell, Maria DiCenzo, Kate Egan, Lisa Gitelman, Allison Griffiths, James Hamilton, James Hay, Michelle Henning, Lisa Parks, Hillegonda C. Rietveld, Leila Ryan, John Seibert-Davis, Collette Snowden, Jonathan Sterne, JoAnne Stober, Will Straw, Haidee Wasson.

Charles R. Acland is associate professor and holds the Concordia University Research Chair in communications studies at Concordia University, Montreal.

University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Brad Norr Design
Cover image courtesy of Corbis