Thursday, April 15, 2010

11 am section

I found there to be an interesting irony in Wolfgang Ernst’s Dis/continuities that, in a way, helped to further his point. He claims that media archaeology is about uncovering the predecessors, or “rediscovering the losers in media history for a kind of benjaminian messianic redemption” (Ernst 106). This statement implies that the archival history of media is in fact a collection of the technology that came before. He comments on how new forms of technology such as the internet can and are often used to archive this history of media. “The so-called 8-Bit Museum, the homepage for 8-bit computers and video games, is an example of the computer-based Internet developing an archive of its own genealogy (an unbroken lineage so far), reminding us of the wonderful archaeological époque of the 8-bit computer when “computer”

did not automatically equal ‘Windows-PC’” (106). It is interesting that when the article was written in 2005, the “Windows-PC” was synonymous with computer, however I believe this definition has changed. While windows is by no means an technology so outdated that it will soon be found in an internet museum of its on, it has in many ways lost the association that Ernst speaks of. If one were to take a random sampling of students at Brown University, or any other college for that matter, I bet the amount of “windows-PCs” would be about the same as the number of “apples.” At some point, if Apple continues to perform as well as it has recently, there might be a day when windows does in fact fall the point of just being another archived “archaeological” element of digital media, with its “museum” existing either online or on whatever future version of the internet is in store.

-Ben Trotter

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