CONCEPT
Borrowed Clothes
The structural feature of every new medium's early development: the protocols of the displaced medium are borrowed wholesale, fit poorly, and conceal what the new medium is actually doing until new protocols can be tailored.
Every new medium enters the world wearing the clothes of the medium it is displacing. Film was called moving pictures. Radio was called wireless telegraphy. Television was called visual radio. The borrowed language was never adequate — it described what the new medium looked like from the vantage point of the old one, which is to say it described almost nothing about what the new medium would become. But the borrowed language was all there was, because the cultural tailoring of protocols adequate to the new medium's operations had not yet begun. Gitelman's framework treats this borrowing not as a failure of imagination but as a structural necessity: users of a new medium need some framework for understanding it, and the only frameworks available are those provided by existing media. AI-assisted cultural production is currently in this phase, wearing the borrowed clothes of print culture.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The borrowed-clothes phase produces a characteristic