Abstract of Kate Eichhorn's paper

Late Print Culture’s ‘Social Media’ Revolution: 

Authorship, Collaboration and Copy Machines

Dr. Kate Eichhorn 

Culture and Media Studies 

The New School University 

New York City

In the mid 1960s, Marshall McLuhan observed that “Xerox has brought a kind of revolution into the publishing world that is only being felt slowly” but one that “will be felt more and more.” Today, it’s difficult to imagine the conditions under which McLuhan could have constructed the copy machine as “revolutionary.” After all, for most of us, the copy machine is more likely to conjure up thoughts of tedious labor than technological transformation. In fact, this may explain why so few scholars in the fields of media studies, book history and publishing studies have seriously considered the impacts of this ubiquitous late twentieth-century technology of print reproduction. In this paper, part of a book-length study on the copy machine’s impact on late twentieth-century aesthetic and social movements, I argue that the copy machine—a relatively new “old technology”—did have widespread and transformative impacts on the writing, production and dissemination of texts and on the development and role of textual communities in the decades preceding the arrival of the web. More specifically, this paper locates the copy machine as a precursor to contemporary “social media.” Following McLuhan who maintained that copy machines “enable the reader to become a publisher” and further enact a “total invasion of copyright,” thereby bringing about many “reversals in the relation of publics and writers,” I argue that copy machines played an essential but hitherto under appreciated role in promoting collaborative forms of authorship and cultural production in the 1960s to early 1990s, thereby paving the way for the types of user-generated content and social interaction now associated with Web 2.0 environments.