Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture
Lauren Rabinovitz, Abraham Geil, eds.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 352pp. ISBN: 0822332418

Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture suggests that there ought to be a paradigm shift in how we historically understand the internet’s rise to a prominent cultural, media and technological force. one overused and simplified cliché can be replaced with another overused and simplified cliché. The book suggests that the internet, and the digital culture that it helped inspire, was such a monumental departure from what had previously existed that it requires new models in order to properly engage it. The editors of this anthology: Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil clearly find fault with this notion. Instead, they posit that the history of the digital can be found behind the curtain of the progression through electronic and mechanized media forms. In so doing, the twelve articles within Memory Bytes do not dull digital culture’s sharpness or lessen its significance. Instead, the book seems to want digital culture to take its proper place within the pantheon of media cultures. This potentially underappreciated task is accomplished through a series of interdisciplinary and inter-methodological articles that frame the social, mechanical, and economic histories of under-discussed mediums.

See the full review by HASTAC scholar Evan Johnson (a third-year PhD student in Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas) here