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Believe it or not, all these are related in one way or another to my academic interests. Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, eds. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil: This collection explores, mostly, the history of new technologies, from Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity to military/entertainment uses of videogames today. Some essays – particularly Vivian Sobchack’s bizarre encomium to early QuickTime movies because they were small and choppy – were not my thing. I liked Judith Babbitts on stereographs as entertainment and then as education in the mid-19th through early 20th centuries US: she explored ways that these popular 3-D images were used to establish seeing as a preferred way of understanding, and then used as part of an education designed to give children, whatever their ethnic backgrounds, the same (unifying) experiences. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi’s essay on the military’s collaboration with Hollywood to produce better training scenarios was also quite engaging, especially when she discussed how “better” turns out to mean “narratively coherent” rather than “physically lifelike.” She was appropriately restrained in her conclusions about what the storytelling turn might mean for future soldiers, but the essay added nuance to the idea that America’s Army is training kids to blow away bad guys without hesitation. Lisa Gitelman’s essay on the legal and rhetorical battles over whether player piano rolls, with their human-unreadable holes, were “reproductions” of music and thus covered by copyright law, was helpful to me in contextualizing this early battle over copyright and new technologies. I also liked Scott Curtis on medical imagery’s dialectic between frozen images and the moving body.
Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity: Guy tells the story of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conflicts over the definition of champagne and, in part, the definition of Frenchness as something connected to but distinct from various French territories. The concept of terroir, something like the soul of the soil, that supposedly gives certain foodstuffs their unique qualities was much up for debate during the period, whereas currently the EU and France in particular give unquestioned legal protection to terms like “champagne.” Guy points out that, although often understood as a fight between capital and labor, the at-times violent disputes between vine-growers and winemakers in the Champagne region were more complicated than that. Vine-growers in the core areas of the Marne were opposed both to bottlers who wanted to use grapes from other places to make champagne and to fellow vine-growers in those other places who benefited from that practice. Meanwhile, Marne bottlers also argued that the designation champagne should be legally protected, but they wanted to limit the definition to sparkling wine bottled in the area, regardless of the source of grapes. Guy’s story thus highlights champagne as an industrial product – not just because it requires a second processing to add the famous bubbles, but also because its production and consumption were profoundly affected by changes in transportation and modern advertising that helped make champagne the beverage of celebration and of Frenchness. The book is marred by repetitions of phrases, as if a series of journal articles had been simply stitched together, though I don’t think these chapters were in fact published elsewhere. Nonetheless, I learned a fair amount about the social construction of terroir, a concept that supposedly represents a natural and immutable connection among an area of land, its inhabitants, and the products they produce.
Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy: Zelizer is a sociologist whose previous explorations of the role of money in affectionate and sexual relationships have ranged from the change over time in the damages awarded when a child is killed accidentally to the way that sex workers' use of money varies by the source of funds (welfare, work, gifts from boyfriends). Here, she takes up specifically the way that law interacts with intimate relationships that also involve the transfer of money – sexual relationships, caretaking relationships, and so on. She shows how we deploy rhetoric and law to create boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable meldings of money and affection, pretending to ourselves that we can have noncommodified relationships even when our "good" intimate relations clearly involve transfers of money and property as well as love. Though the repetition of her basic thesis is a little wearing if you read the book all at once, her careful and limited claims are a welcome addition to the literature on commodification.
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Frank takes aim at the idea that the advertising revolution of the 1960s involved cooptation of counterculture, arguing instead that the advertisers were (a) sincere in believing themselves to be rebels and (b) picking up on threads that really were present in counterculture that leant themselves to use in advertising campaigns. The trouble is that I'm not sure this is in any way a refutation of the idea of cooptation, unless cooptation is defined in a kind of silly way as something that can only be done by cynical and disbelieving exploiters. He's persuasive in showing that the young admen (and a handful of women) thought of themselves as pioneers seizing upon the new cultural freedoms also promoted by the hippies in San Francisco, but I don't find it insightful to say that an ideology of consumption and newness meshed easily with certain prominent strands of 60s counterculture, even when that counterculture proclaimed itself in favor of dropping out. You can read more about
Frank's ideas, including his perspective on more recent marketing trends, here, where he turns the well-known metaphor of the market's invisible hand into an "invisible heart" as he discusses the ethical posture of invitations to consume.
Digital Library Use: Social Practice in Design and Evaluation (eds. Ann Peterson Bishop, Nancy A. Van House, & Barbara P. Buttenfield): This collection of essays is great for anyone interested in digital libraries; an admittedly small field. Still, from the evidence of this collection, library science folks can write rings around most academics; with the unfortunate exception of the last essay, which is about a digital library of American flora, the pieces are clearly written, using jargon only and exactly when it is helpful to specifying meaning. Clifford Lynch’s contribution is a standout, focusing on how digital libraries serve new constituencies, who are often not the same people to whom they are accountable, and other ways in which digital library agendas are shaped by preexisting constraints, despite the rhetoric of revolution one often hears from digital proselytizers. Sadly, I couldn’t find it online, but Lynch’s homepage has a bunch of his other related writings. What mainly emerges from the essays is a sense of how libraries, though often imagined as mass repositories for all kinds of information, are more usefully evaluated by their boundaries – who can use them, what they collect, when and where they can be accessed – rather than simply by what they contain.
Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity: Guy tells the story of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conflicts over the definition of champagne and, in part, the definition of Frenchness as something connected to but distinct from various French territories. The concept of terroir, something like the soul of the soil, that supposedly gives certain foodstuffs their unique qualities was much up for debate during the period, whereas currently the EU and France in particular give unquestioned legal protection to terms like “champagne.” Guy points out that, although often understood as a fight between capital and labor, the at-times violent disputes between vine-growers and winemakers in the Champagne region were more complicated than that. Vine-growers in the core areas of the Marne were opposed both to bottlers who wanted to use grapes from other places to make champagne and to fellow vine-growers in those other places who benefited from that practice. Meanwhile, Marne bottlers also argued that the designation champagne should be legally protected, but they wanted to limit the definition to sparkling wine bottled in the area, regardless of the source of grapes. Guy’s story thus highlights champagne as an industrial product – not just because it requires a second processing to add the famous bubbles, but also because its production and consumption were profoundly affected by changes in transportation and modern advertising that helped make champagne the beverage of celebration and of Frenchness. The book is marred by repetitions of phrases, as if a series of journal articles had been simply stitched together, though I don’t think these chapters were in fact published elsewhere. Nonetheless, I learned a fair amount about the social construction of terroir, a concept that supposedly represents a natural and immutable connection among an area of land, its inhabitants, and the products they produce.
Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy: Zelizer is a sociologist whose previous explorations of the role of money in affectionate and sexual relationships have ranged from the change over time in the damages awarded when a child is killed accidentally to the way that sex workers' use of money varies by the source of funds (welfare, work, gifts from boyfriends). Here, she takes up specifically the way that law interacts with intimate relationships that also involve the transfer of money – sexual relationships, caretaking relationships, and so on. She shows how we deploy rhetoric and law to create boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable meldings of money and affection, pretending to ourselves that we can have noncommodified relationships even when our "good" intimate relations clearly involve transfers of money and property as well as love. Though the repetition of her basic thesis is a little wearing if you read the book all at once, her careful and limited claims are a welcome addition to the literature on commodification.
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Frank takes aim at the idea that the advertising revolution of the 1960s involved cooptation of counterculture, arguing instead that the advertisers were (a) sincere in believing themselves to be rebels and (b) picking up on threads that really were present in counterculture that leant themselves to use in advertising campaigns. The trouble is that I'm not sure this is in any way a refutation of the idea of cooptation, unless cooptation is defined in a kind of silly way as something that can only be done by cynical and disbelieving exploiters. He's persuasive in showing that the young admen (and a handful of women) thought of themselves as pioneers seizing upon the new cultural freedoms also promoted by the hippies in San Francisco, but I don't find it insightful to say that an ideology of consumption and newness meshed easily with certain prominent strands of 60s counterculture, even when that counterculture proclaimed itself in favor of dropping out. You can read more about
Frank's ideas, including his perspective on more recent marketing trends, here, where he turns the well-known metaphor of the market's invisible hand into an "invisible heart" as he discusses the ethical posture of invitations to consume.
Digital Library Use: Social Practice in Design and Evaluation (eds. Ann Peterson Bishop, Nancy A. Van House, & Barbara P. Buttenfield): This collection of essays is great for anyone interested in digital libraries; an admittedly small field. Still, from the evidence of this collection, library science folks can write rings around most academics; with the unfortunate exception of the last essay, which is about a digital library of American flora, the pieces are clearly written, using jargon only and exactly when it is helpful to specifying meaning. Clifford Lynch’s contribution is a standout, focusing on how digital libraries serve new constituencies, who are often not the same people to whom they are accountable, and other ways in which digital library agendas are shaped by preexisting constraints, despite the rhetoric of revolution one often hears from digital proselytizers. Sadly, I couldn’t find it online, but Lynch’s homepage has a bunch of his other related writings. What mainly emerges from the essays is a sense of how libraries, though often imagined as mass repositories for all kinds of information, are more usefully evaluated by their boundaries – who can use them, what they collect, when and where they can be accessed – rather than simply by what they contain.
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Happy new year,
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