Protocols (Gitelman)
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 AI Story
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 print culture. Her insistence that protocols are constructed rather than given places her in the tradition of Bruno Latour and the social construction of technology, but with a distinctive emphasis on the documentary and material residues through which protocols become visible to the historian.
The AI transition has made the concept newly urgent. The protocols governing AI-assisted cultural production — how credit is attributed, how value is distributed, how outputs are evaluated — are forming now, through the accumulated decisions of AI companies, publishers, regulators, and practitioners operating without established norms. Every choice made during this unsettled period is a proposal for a convention that does not yet exist.
The framework resists both technological determinism (the view that the technology determines its own social use) and pure social constructionism (the view that the technology is infinitely plastic). Protocols form around a technological nucleus whose capabilities constrain the range of possible protocols without determining any single outcome. Within the range of possibilities the technology allows, the choice of conventions is institutional, political, and economic.
The political stakes of the protocol concept lie in its denaturalizing force. Conventions that appear to be features of the medium itself — a book has an author, a database is neutral, software has a price — are revealed as contingent outcomes of institutional processes that could have gone otherwise. The denaturalization opens space for the question of who is shaping the conventions and whose interests they serve.
Origin
Gitelman coined her operational definition of protocols in the introduction to Always Already New, where she argued that media are always embedded in social practices, legal frameworks, and habits of use. The phrase has since become foundational to media archaeology and to the critical study of emerging technologies.
Key Ideas
Nucleus plus protocols. Every medium is a technological capability embedded in institutional conventions. The two cannot be separated analytically.
Constructed, not natural. Protocols feel inevitable once they settle but are always the contingent residue of institutional negotiation conducted during the unsettled period.
Convention-forming is political. The institutions that shape protocols are not equal in power, and the protocols that settle reflect the interests of the institutions that adopted them.
Protocols are durable. Once established, protocols persist long after the unsettled period ends, becoming the invisible infrastructure through which the medium is understood.
Denaturalization is critical work. Making visible the constructed character of seemingly natural conventions is a precondition for asking whether the current arrangement serves the people it affects.
Debates & Critiques
Critics from more determinist traditions argue that Gitelman's protocol concept risks over-emphasizing contingency and underplaying the constraints that technologies impose. Defenders respond that the framework explicitly preserves the nucleus — the technology's affordances — while insisting that the range of possible protocols is wider than determinist accounts allow. The debate recurs sharply in AI discourse, where claims that certain outcomes are inevitable often conceal institutional interests.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006).
- Lisa Gitelman (ed.), "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron (MIT Press, 2013).
- Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003).
- Wiebe E. Bijker et al., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (MIT Press, 1987).