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.

Speakers at Remix in Retrospect

I am happy to announce that the following speakers have agreed to take part in the symposium:

Professor Adriaan van der Weel, Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University
Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Modern Dutch Book History and lecturer in Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University. His research interests include the digitisation of textual transmission and popular reading and publishing. Van der Weel is member of the editorial board of Logos, Forum of the World Book Community. His most recent book project is Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge, which will appear with Manchester University Press in August 2011. 

Dr Kate Eichhorn, Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, New York
Kate Eichhorn's research is broadly concerned with the aesthetic and political efficacy of our everyday practices in those places where literature, art and social activism meet. One of her current book-length projects is Adjusted Margin: The Copy Machine as a Co-Agent of Social Change (a media history investigating how copy machines supported the rise of feminist and queer counter-publics in the late twentieth century). In addition to her research in the fields of book and publishing history, cultural studies and media studies, she is a writer and literary editor. 

Dr Adam Smyth, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Adam Smyth's research explores the literature and culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His research interests include the circulation and evolution of texts between different readers, writers, and forms of publication, and the cultures of manuscript and print. He published on textual fragmentation in seventeenth century England, on printed anthologies and on life-writing. He is currently working on a book titled Literature and Laughter in England, 1485-1660,and a book on the 1630s Anglican religious community of Little Gidding.

Dr Jenna Ng, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge
Jenna Ng is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research at CRASSH explores the intersections between image, presence and mobility in digital media technologies, particularly on how the kinesthestic in digital media images challenge screen engagements in digital culture today. She researches primarily on the cultural, technological and critical dimensions of images in digital media, with particular interests in mobile media, haptic devices, motion and virtual capture systems. Her other research interests include digital cinema, cinephilia and Asian cinema (Chinese, Japanese, Singaporean). 

James Barrett MA, HUMlab, Umeå University Sweden
Jim Barrett is a doctoral candidate at Umeå University in Sweden in English Literature and works as a teacher and researcher in HUMlab. He researches on narrative in transcultural and digital media contexts, with a particular interest in the concepts of reading and performance. He also works with digital art, virtual worlds, pedagogy that involves digital media, and digital culture. He teaches cultural studies, literature, and narrative design in 2D and 3D media. 

Feike Dietz MA, Department of Early Modern Dutch Literature and Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University
Feike Dietz' PhD-project 'Emblematic Dynamics in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century: Word, Image, Religion' is part of an international research project and focuses on the reception of the Counter Reformational emblem book Pia desideria (Antwerp, 1624) in the early modern Northern Netherlands. Her publications include an article on manuscript rewritings of printed emblem books in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.