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 Sometimes I find myself thinking about the sequence, zine, blog, and podcast. I think about this in part because at one time or another I have had, or been involved with all three. In some ways each offers the same promise of DIY, self produced, media. Although I different scales of influence and material investment. To produce a zine all you need is access to a copier, or a Kinkos. That would make it possible to produce a zine. Getting it out was a different story. I did two issues of a zine when I was in college. Each had a run of about two hundred issues, available for stamps or trade. I am not sure if I got rid of all of them. A blog requires internet access, but not much technological knowledge, and can get more hits for one post in a day than an entire blog run. A podcast requires more technological knowledge, more capital in the form of a decent microphone, editing software etc., and can reach as many people as a blog, with the added bonus that if you get people to listen they will take in more. A blogpost can be read in a few minutes, but podcasts generally run an hour an episode. The history of independently produced media is a history of increased dissemination, it is easier to get more people to see or hear your ideas, but one that comes at increased cost and investment in technology.In each case we are talking only about the possibility of dissemination, a zine, a blog,  or a podcast still has to reach an audience and convince them that it is worth their time. In the days of zines the primary way of making people aware of your zine was trading it with other zines, that and the coveted review in Maximum Rock and Roll or Punk Planet. Blogs and podcasts are more or less dependent on the attention economy of vectoralist class. It also occurred to me that one could make the same jokes about zines, blogs, and podcast. To have a zine, a blog, or a podcast is to be seen as being a little too invested in your own opinion and point of view. All of which is a long introduction to say that I just found out that my old zines are available on the Internet Archive.






There is not much to say about these zines. They are objects of nostalgia for me. I am not sure why anyone else would want to read them. They are worth sharing for two reasons. One, zines and zine culture was formative of my philosophical education. I do not think that I am alone in this, I have met too many people who have come to academia through the world of punk and zines. Some of the para-academic dimension of these zines is a bit much. I remember getting a bad review from Maximum Rock and Roll for including too much Foucault and Baudrillard in my zine. They were probably right, but there was something liberating for me in seeing a strange continuity between zine rants and the polemics of theory. In the very least it made me think of writing as something everyone can and should do. Two, I actually like the cartoons. 

Editors of academic journals make general statements about criteria for accepting submissions, but more specific advice is often needed. What are the standards for history manuscripts in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, especially now that its documentation style is being changed to American Psychological Association (APA)? The journal's history articles are useful examples of how to set substantial purposes and present perceptive interpretations. As they contribute to knowledge, such studies can stimulate thought about human experience and possibilities.

The paper discusses some concepts, trends, and deficits in recent media history, and it makes a plea for a history of communication to implement media into a broader conception of social history. Therefore, we employ a wider notion of mediatization which is used in media and communication studies, and re-formulate it for historical research. On the basis of that notion, we introduce the theoretical concept of 'communicative figurations' which an interdisciplinary research group in Bremen and Hamburg developed to ask how changing media environments and ensembles interrelate with societal and political transformations. In transferring it in research on imagined communities in times of analogue media, the paper presents some early insights into an on-going project and pursues questions about the communicative construction of collectivities.

"Media always involve technologies. Understanding media means understanding their technologies. But little can be learned from just looking at redundant pieces of equipment. The rapidly developing approach of hands on history can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Hands On Media History explores the whole range of hands on history techniques for the first time. It offers both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound. Essays in the collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users. Essays outline the wide variety of approaches to understanding media history through its technologies, including the issue of fresh uses for old equipment and artefacts. Hands on media history offers a new perspective on one of the modern era's most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day?"--

FC -- Half title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Introduction -- Part I The Printing Revolution -- 1 The Divine Art -- 2 The Commercial and Industrial Media Revolution 1814-1900 -- 3 Print Media in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries -- Part II The Visual Revolution -- 4 Photography: Giving Vision to History -- 5 Cinema: The Image Comes Alive -- 6 Advertising, Public Relations, and the Crafted Image -- Part III The Electronic Revolution: From "National Neighborhoods" to the Global Village -- 7 The First Electronic Revolution: Telegraph and Telephone -- 8 The New World of Radio -- 9 Television: A New Window on the World -- Part IV The Digital Revolution -- 10 Computers -- 11 Digital Networks -- 12 Global Culture -- Bibliography -- Index.

A cutting†'edge media history on a perennially fascinating topic, which attempts to answer the crucial question: Who is in charge, the servant or the master?†‹ Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current†'day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants' relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant

Digital humanities is an important challenge for more traditional humanities disciplines to take on, but advanced digital methods for analysis are not often used to answer concrete research questions in these disciplines. This article makes use of extensive digital collections of historical newspapers to discuss the promising, yet challenging relationship between digital humanities and historical research. The search for long-term patterns in digital historical research appropriately positions itself within previous approaches to historical research, but the digitization of sources presents many practical and theoretical questions and obstacles. For this reason, any digital source used in historical research should be critically reviewed beforehand. Digital newspaper research raises new issues and presents new possibilities to better answer traditional questions.

"Hands on Media History explores the whole range of hands on media history techniques for the first time, offering both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound.
Understanding media means understanding the technologies involved. The hands on history approach can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Essays in this collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users, providing a new perspective on one of the modern era's most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day?
Engaging and enlightening, this collection is a key reference for students and scholars of media studies, digital humanities, and for those interested in models of museum and research practice."