Thursday 23 May 2013

A German Affair?

Simone Natale reviews Media Archaeology alongside other media archaeology books (Zielinski and Kluitenberg).

The full review came out in the Canadian Journal of Communication and you can find it here.  But the first footnote is good and interesting. I better quote it in full:

"Although it has recently been largely influential in English-speaking scholarship, media archaeology is indebted to the work of European intellectuals, particularly from Germany, the Netherlands, and Northern Europe. Taking into account the context of its development is essential to comprehending its ends and means. In particular, the German-speaking tradition of scholarship brought to this field some important characteristics: its strong focus on theoretical concerns; its antiquarian vocation, manifested in media archaeology through the attention to “dead” or obsolete media and artifacts; and, last but not least, the leading role that archaeology tout court has had in German culture since the nineteenth century."