Tomorrow I am giving a keynote lecture at the National Finnish Conference on History Research 2017 entitled, “Modeling the Past — Between the History of Technology & the Digital Humanities”. I have prepared more slides than ever – 157 in all. Since I have a two hour slot, I should make it on time (an hour will do I hope). All slides can be downloaded as a PDF (43mb): snickars_presentation_turku_2017
Idag har Computer Sweden publicerat en artikel om det pågående ärende som vi forskare i projektet “Strömmande kulturarv” haft att göra med visavi Vetenskapsrådet och Spotify: Spotify försökte stoppa svenskt forskningsprojekt – ”hotar fri forskning”. Jag uttalar mig kort i artikeln, och igår publicerade också min medarbetare Rasmus Fleischer en mycket informativ bloggpost om ärendet: Hur Spotify försökte stoppa oberoende forskning – förgäves. Journalister har därefter hört av sig, men personligen önskar jag inte uttala mig mer i denna fråga. Det är visserligen synnerligen bekymmersamt när stora företag inte bara kontrollerar samtidens informations- och dataströmmar, utan även begränsar möjligheterna för forskare (eller journalister) att undersöka dem – men jag ser ingen anledning att kommentera frågan ytterligare. Den intresserade hänvisar jag istället till våra kommande forskningspublikationer.
I förra veckan pratade jag Big Data i Magnus Bremmers utmärkta Bildningspodden med Nina Wormbs (och även Cecilia Lindhé och Johan Magnusson). Poddpuffen ger en antydan om innehållet: “Varje dag bidrar våra vardagliga vanor till att spä på ett informationsöverflöd som saknar motstycke i världshistorien. Det brukar kallas big data, de enorma datamängder som vi dagligen skapar och som i allt större utsträckning påverkar vår tillvaro.” Podden ligger nu online för genomlyssning.
Nästa vecka är det dags för bokmässa i Göteborg. Jag tillhör inte dem som anser att den ska undvikas. Tvärtom. Jag kommer att delta i ett flertal samtal. Under fredagen ska jag prata “big data” med Nina Wormbs till ett kommande avsnitt av Bildningspodden. Och på torsdagen deltar jag i seminariet, Shakespeare i digitala bildningsideal. Under lördagen deltar jag till sist i två kortare samtal som nog bägge kommer att kretsa kring digital bildning, Plats för bildning – på nätet? och Gutenberg och Google – om hur nya media omformar våra liv. Som vanligt ser jag fram emot en stimulerande bokmässa.
I am currently writing an article for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Cultural History, edited by Alessandro Arcangeli, Jörg Rogge and Hannu Salmi, which will be published during 2018. My chapter will revolve around “media and mediatisation” during the 19th century (predominantly). I have just started working with my chapter – and the introduction currently reads as follows:
“There are no realities any more, there is only apparatus”, lamented the Austrian cultural historian Egon Friedell in the early 1930s. Writing a cultural history during the interwar period, media modernity finally seemed to have caught up with him and broken the spell and disenchantment of all previous ages—the Entzauberung der Welt as famously diagnosed by Max Weber—whereby traditional society and culture was replaced by secularisation, cultural rationalisation and modernised bureaucracy. For Friedell, however, even reality itself gave the impression to disintegrate into a mediated dimness, with film and radio as the main perpetrators for blurring cultural hierarchies between high and low. “As long as the cinema was dumb, it had other than film possibilities: namely, spiritual ones. But the sound-film has unmasked it, and the fact is patent to all eyes and ears that we are dealing with a brutish dead machine. The bioscope kills the human gesture only, but the sound-film the human voice as well. Radio does the same. At the same time it frees us from the obligation to concentrate, and it is now possible to enjoy Mozart and sauerkraut, the Sunday sermon and bridge.”This dreadful and mediated “world of automata” appeared in the epilogue—ultimately entitled, “the collapse of reality”—at the very end of Friedell’s majestic, three volume Cultural History of the Modern Age (1927-31), a publication which became a huge commercial success, especially in the German speaking world, but which was also translated in numerous other languages. Spanning some 600 years, “from the Black Death to the World War”, and with the main focus put firmly on ‘great men’ and their achievements in art, science and culture, Friedell’s account of cultural history has been described as personal and even anecdotal. Yet, his account is also playful and witty—a present blogger designates the book as “obscenely readable”. With his somewhat odd background (for a cultural historian) as a cabaret performer and actor, Friedell simply knew how to please an audience.
However, given his personal experience of ‘low culture’ and the ways in which various form of mass media increasingly seemed to alter reality at the time of his writing around 1930, it remains surprising how murky Friedell’s account of modern media appeared in his cultural historical overview—that is to say, if media were mentioned at all. Friedell did state that the “high-speed printing press” was the most important machine introduced during the early 19th century, and he did devote a few sentences to “illustrated journals”, and yes, his account of the 1840s firmly described the “characteristic inventions of the age” as being “telegraphy and photography”. But apart from these brief notations, Friedell was not particularly interested in cultural historical media accounts, reports or descriptions, and consequently did not write about them (until in his epilogue). Media historiographically this remains somewhat peculiar since Friedell had previously published on the ways in which perception and representation around 1900 had been transformed via the medium of film. In 1912 he had, for example, stated that films are “short, quick, at the same time coded, and [the medium] does not stop for anything. … This is quite fitting for our time, which is a time of extracts.” Taken from his essay, “Prolog vor dem Film” these remarks (and others) in many ways forebodes cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s canonised account of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction (written during the 1930s). Yet, if Benjamin took a positive stance towards mass media, especially film—Friedell’s characterisation was way more gloomy. Still, given the accounts in the epilogue of Cultural History of the Modern Age, Friedell did seem to realise—and to some extent even anticipate—mass media’s increased importance. His final remarks were contemporary, but they could also have been historicised if he would had payed more attention to the cultural history of media.
Departing from Friedell’s paradoxical acknowledgement of both a “world of automata” and his lack of interest in situating media within cultural history, this chapter will provide an overview of the cultural impact of different media forms and technologies from the early 19th century until the advent of sound film and radio (that is, approximately at the time when Friedell was completing his cultural history). Taking my cue from novel ways to perform cultural historical media research and equipped with a media archaeological perspective—which seeks to avoid telling mono-media histories of technologies from past to present—I will pay attention to both new media as well as residual media formats (as the panorama and the stereoscope), while trying to pin down how these were publicly perceived, usually at the intersection between commercial attractions and instructive entertainment. The chapter will also discuss different historiographical ways to understand the cultural history of media, as for example theories of increased mediatisation. In general, the chapter will focus broader media systems—rather than particular media forms as the daily press—and especially pay attention to hybrid forms of media culture and various forms of intermediality, and how these altered over a longer period of time. If the technical reproduction of texts and images, sounds and moving images via fast printing presses, photography and phonographic recordings as well as later cinematography, were almost unimaginable in the early 1800s, a hundred years later they were all “treated as a matter of course”. How did this happen, what changes occured and which consequences did it have for the ways in which ordinary people perceived both themselves and their world?
Häromdagen ringde journalisten Mathilda Olausson från TT – och vi hade ett längre samtal om strömmande medietjänster. Det har nu resulterat i en kortare intervju som publicerats i GP: “Så överlever musiktjänsterna trots förluster“. “Musikströmningsföretagen går med förlust – men trots det lever de kvar, år efter år.” Varför det är så försöker jag besvara.
I det senaste numret av Språktidningen (juni 2017) har jag publicerat en artikel om ordbehandling och om att skriva tillsammans, Seg start för samskrivning. Ingressen ger en antydan om vad det hela handlar om: “Våra skrivprogram ser nästan likadana ut i dag som på 1980-talet. Och det har varit trögt få skribenter att använda de nya möjligheterna till digitalt textsamarbete. Medieprofessor Pelle Snickars förklarar varför.” En PDF av artikeln kan också laddas ned här: snickars_spraktidningen.
Together with my colleagues Patrick Vonderau, Rasmus Fleischer, Maria Eriksson and Anna Johansson, we have put together a first draft manuscript around our Spotify project – just sent off to the publisher MIT Press: Spotify Teardown. Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. It is a substantial manuscript – some 80, 000 words. So what is it all about? Well, first of all the book is co-written by us five scholars, and subsequently edited, commented and revised by way of a ‘Google docs approach,’ in a collaborative and transparent fashion. Furthermore, the book contains two kinds of texts: original research chapters and what we call ‘interventions.’ By interventions, we refer to shorter types of texts that in one way or another interfere with either Spotify and/or established research methods. Our interventions are placed in between the main chapters. They can be read independently, but they are also thematically linked to discussions in previous chapters. Our four chapters each take up a simple question related to Spotify as a digital media company: (1.) Where is Spotify? (2.) When are files becoming music? (3.) How is music attended to? (4.) What is the value of free? Naturally, we hope that the MIT Press will like our book – and we look forward to the finished product (after a number of rounds of revisions). Hopefully, the book will be published early in 2018.
Today I am giving a lecture at Lund university around Spotify and digital methods. It will be an opportunity to try out some of the ideas we are currently working with in relation to the book manuscript we are finishing in our Spotify research group. Slides from the lecture can be downloaded here: snickars_lund_2017.
Today I gave a lecture at Stockholm University for the course, “Visual Sources”: “What is a visual source? Concepts like, picture, image, medium, visual and visuality will be discussed [during the course]” following its description – and my lecture focused digital images in general, and lossy compression and ‘poor images’ in particular. Slides can be downloaded here: snickars_SU_visual_sources_2017.