CONCEPT
Media Protocols
Lisa Gitelman's term for the vast clutter of normative rules, institutional practices, legal frameworks, and default assumptions that gather around any communication technology—the culture that forms around the nucleus of the device, and that determines what the technology actually means in the world.
The protocols of a medium are not the technology itself but everything that accumulates around it: how it is used, who uses it, what it is for, who owns its outputs, how those outputs are evaluated, what legal and economic structures govern its operation, and what tacit assumptions users bring to it so automatically that the assumptions become invisible.
Lisa Gitelman developed this concept in her studies of the phonograph and early internet to show that what a medium becomes is never simply a consequence of its technical capabilities; it is a consequence of the negotiations among practitioners, institutions, markets, and regulators that determine how those capabilities are used and what they mean. The protocols of print culture—the named author, copyright as property, peer review, the evaluative standards of literary criticism—were not natural features of written communication; they were constructed during print culture's own
unsettled period through contestation among publishers, courts, booksellers, and authors,