The Unsettled Period
The unsettled period is the phase of a medium's development before its protocols have consolidated into invisible infrastructure. During this period, participants improvise — proposing conventions through their choices about attribution, disclosure, pricing, evaluation, and format. The proposals accumulate. Some are adopted by institutions with the power to validate them; others are abandoned. The outcome is not determined by the technology's properties or by philosophical argument. It is determined by the weight of institutional interests and the decisions made by the actors who hold convention-setting power. Once the period ends and conventions settle, the constructed character of the arrangement becomes invisible — the conventions feel like features of the medium itself rather than contingent outcomes of a contested process. For AI-assisted cultural production, the unsettled period is now.
In the AI Story
Unsettled periods vary in duration. The phonograph's took roughly three decades — from Edison's 1877 demonstration to the consolidation of the recorded music industry in the early twentieth century. Cinema's took two decades. The Internet's arguably took three. The AI transition may be compressed, but the structural features are recognizable: simultaneous instability in categories of authorship, knowledge, value, and the document itself; visible improvisation in formats and conventions; and the characteristic awkwardness of borrowed clothes that do not quite fit.
The period is consequential because decisions made during it acquire durability disproportionate to the time they took to make. Print culture's conventions of individual authorship, constructed over decades through the interaction of printing technology, copyright law, and the emerging publishing industry, have persisted for three centuries. The conventions that settle around AI will exhibit similar durability — not because they are optimal but because institutional conventions, once established, resist revision.
The silent middle of the AI transition — practitioners, critics, and users operating without settled protocols — experiences the unsettled period as productive discomfort. Every choice feels exposed. Every disclosure, every attribution, every evaluative judgment is made without the institutional support that settled conventions provide. This exposure is not a bug. It is the diagnostic feature of the period, and it is also the opening through which participation in convention-formation becomes possible.
Gitelman's framework insists that the unsettled period is not an inconvenience to be endured but the phase in which the most consequential decisions are made. Once the period ends and conventions settle, the institutional path dependencies lock in, and the conventions become difficult to revise even when they visibly fail. The work of the period is the work of the period — it cannot be deferred.
Origin
Gitelman develops the unsettled-period framework through extended analysis of the phonograph, the telegraph, and early Internet culture, showing in each case how the conventions that eventually settled were contingent products of institutional negotiation conducted during a brief window when alternatives were still available.
Key Ideas
Temporary window. The unsettled period is a specific, bounded phase — not a permanent condition — during which the medium's protocols are in active formation.
High consequence. Decisions made during the period acquire durability through institutional path dependency, shaping the medium's cultural role long after the period ends.
Not determined by technology. The protocols that settle are shaped by institutional interests and power dynamics, not by the intrinsic properties of the technology.
Productive discomfort. The awkwardness participants experience is the diagnostic feature of the period and the mechanism through which convention-formation proceeds.
Naturalization. Once the period ends, the settled conventions become invisible — they feel like features of the medium itself, concealing the institutional struggle that produced them.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, Chapters 1 and 5.
- Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media (Basic Books, 2004).
- Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1979).