Borrowed Clothes
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 AI Story
The borrowed-clothes phase produces a characteristic awkwardness — the visible strain of a body that does not fit the garments it is wearing. This awkwardness is productive. It is the force that drives the development of new protocols, as practitioners and institutions encounter the inadequacy of the borrowed framework and improvise alternatives. The Orange Pill's notation Edo Segal ^ Opus 4.6 on the title page is a small but diagnostic example: a mathematical symbol pressed into service for a situation no existing authorial convention was designed to fit.
The phase is not merely aesthetic. It has material consequences. Authorship conventions, copyright frameworks, evaluative protocols, and pricing models all borrowed from the displaced medium continue to operate during the unsettled period — often producing outcomes that serve neither the new medium's distinctive capabilities nor the people who participate in it. The US Copyright Office's sufficient creative control standard for AI-assisted works is a borrowed garment in legal form.
The history of media transitions shows that the borrowed-clothes phase ends not through theoretical analysis but through practice — through experiments conducted by people who do not know what they are building, whose formal innovations accumulate into conventions that eventually make the new medium's distinctive operations legible and evaluable. The phase is not uniform across domains. Different institutional sectors tailor new protocols at different speeds.
Gitelman's framework implies that the critical work during this phase is not to strip the new medium of its borrowed clothes — that would leave it culturally unintelligible — but to make the borrowing visible, to see where the borrowed framework distorts and where it fits, and to participate knowingly in the negotiation of what new protocols will replace the old.
Origin
The borrowed clothes metaphor is Gitelman's articulation of a structural pattern she documented across multiple media transitions in Always Already New. The phrase captures both the necessity of initial borrowing and the poor fit that characterizes the unsettled period.
Key Ideas
Structural necessity. Borrowing is not a failure of imagination but a condition of intelligibility — without borrowed frameworks, the new medium cannot be categorized, evaluated, or used.
Productive awkwardness. The poor fit of borrowed clothes generates the pressure that drives the development of new protocols; discomfort is the mechanism of convention-formation.
Concealment by fit. The borrowed format hides what does not fit — it smooths over the distinctive operations of the new medium, making them invisible until someone notices the seams.
Diagnostic moments. Improvisations like the caret in Edo Segal ^ Opus 4.6 are visible as improvisations; they mark the places where the borrowed framework has failed and a new convention is being proposed.
The phase is political. Who tailors the new clothes, using whose measurements, for whose body — these are the questions the borrowed-clothes phase forces into the open.
Debates & Critiques
Some critics argue that the borrowed-clothes framework underestimates the degree to which institutions actively resist new protocols even when the old ones visibly fail. Gitelman's response, developed across her historical work, is that resistance is part of the mechanism — it is precisely the institutional struggle over which protocols will be adopted that determines the eventual shape of the medium's cultural role.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, Introduction.
- Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (Oxford University Press, 1988).
- Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions", in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (BFI, 1990).