Media Capital: City of (not just) Print
Whether or not her references were as complete as they could have been, I absolutely loved the excerpt from Aurora Wallace's Media Capital. What I found most fascinating was her depiction of the teleautograph (a precursor to the fax machine), which was used to project news onto canvases attached directly to the facades of news buildings in Park Row (literally, bulletin boards).The teleautograph allowed an operator to draw or write, and the machine would transmit the marks made onto the bulletin boards via telegraph, or through projection. Here are some images that help show how they work:
For those who have not gotten to this reading yet, here's Wallace's description of the "information" that could be projected onto the bulletin boards through the use of the teleautograph in the years surrounding the turn into the twentieth century:
Fusing words, numbers, photographs, maps, cartoons, and spontaneous doodling, these different representational systems acting together made for a stunning live multimedia show that was instant, reciprocal, and entertaining. (60)
I've been increasingly dissatisfied with the term "print culture" as a category of analysis in periodical studies as well as cultural studies generally, because I find that it does not successfully capture what is going on in the world of media and culture (certainly in the 20th century, but even in the 19th). In my own work I see interconnections between text/print (and text that is not printed), image (both printed, like halftones, and not, like paintings), theater, and things like technology, which have much to do with print but also affect one's perception of time and light, for example. Wallace's description of the teleautograph and the news bulletin boards shows the interconnection between text, image, news, theater and spectacle, and even geography and architecture. It's a great example of how we need to think not just about the City of Print, but more ... I suppose "Culture" would encapsulate everything I'm thinking about, but obviously that's too broad a category.Even more than Scholes' notion of the "hole in the archive" constituted by missing covers and advertising pages in magazines, how do we account for non-print and non-textual elements of periodical culture? Certainly these bulletin boards, developed by the newspapers and disseminating news, are part of periodical culture even though they are not print?