CONCEPT
Protocols (Gitelman)
Gitelman's term for the vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions — social practices, legal frameworks, economic models, habits of use — that gather around a technological nucleus and determine what the medium means.
Protocols, in Gitelman's usage, are the cultural-institutional scaffolding that surrounds any technology and converts it from a set of capabilities into a medium with a recognizable role. The nucleus — the technology itself — is inseparable from the protocols that govern its use. The phonograph is not just a device for recording sound but the recording studio, the record label, the music review, the listening parlor, and the retail shop that together constitute what the phonograph is culturally. Protocols feel natural once they settle. They are not natural. They are the residue of institutional negotiations conducted during the unsettled period of a medium's early development, and they shape who captures value, whose contributions are recognized, and what the medium can be understood to do.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gitelman developed the concept across Always Already New (2006) and the methodological writings that followed, drawing on media archaeology, science and technology studies, and the historical analysis of