Always Already New
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 AI Story
The book emerged from Gitelman's training in American Studies and her sustained engagement with media archaeology, science studies, and the history of the book. Its central intellectual move — treating media as always already saturated with institutional protocols — departs from technological-determinist accounts while avoiding pure social constructionism.
The case studies of early phonograph culture and early Internet culture establish the book's historical credentials. Gitelman demonstrates that the meanings that eventually settled around these media were contested during their unsettled periods and that the outcomes reflected institutional interests rather than inherent properties of the technology.
The book's framework has become foundational to critical media studies, media archaeology, and critical data studies. Its concepts — protocols, the unsettled period, the always-already-new character of media — appear throughout subsequent scholarship on the cultural meanings of technological change.
Applied to AI, the book's framework reveals that the conventions forming around AI-assisted production are not emerging organically from the technology but are being constructed through institutional processes whose outcomes will reflect the interests of the participants with the most power.
Origin
The book was Gitelman's first monograph after her dissertation work on Edison and early sound recording. It was published in MIT Press's Media in Transition series, an important venue for media-archaeological scholarship of the 2000s.
Key Ideas
Media are protocol-embedded. The technology cannot be separated from the institutional conventions that give it cultural meaning.
Always already new. By the time a medium is recognized as a medium, its protocols are already forming.
Contingent meanings. The cultural meanings of media are not determined by technical capabilities but negotiated through institutional processes.
Case studies. Early phonograph culture and early Internet culture demonstrate the pattern across two very different media transitions.
Framework for AI. The book's apparatus extends to the AI transition without significant modification, treating the current moment as another unsettled period.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006).
- Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Duke University Press, 2003).
- Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).