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Always Already New
Gitelman's 2006 MIT Press landmark — Media, History, and the Data of Culture — that introduced the protocol concept and established the framework for understanding media as always already embedded in institutional life.
Always Already New is the book in which Gitelman formulated the core theoretical apparatus her subsequent work would extend. Its central argument: media are never simply technologies; they are technologies embedded in a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions — the protocols — that gather around a technological nucleus and determine what the medium means. The book develops this argument through case studies of early sound recording and early computing, demonstrating that the cultural meanings of these media were not determined by their technical capabilities but negotiated through institutional processes that could have produced different outcomes. The title encodes the framework's central paradox: by the time a medium has been recognized as a medium, it has already begun developing the protocols that will shape its cultural role for generations. The new is always already institutional.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from Gitelman's training in American Studies and her sustained engagement with media