Materiality in Media History

By Will Mari ©

T he materiality-turn in journalism and mass-

communication history both breaks from and
continues the focus on the history of objects and
artifacts that many scholars in our field have fol-
lowed since its inception. And yet the materiality
approach is distinct in that it traces its roots to sci-
ence and technology studies (STS), and is exempli-
Mari fied by the work of Bruno Latour, but also Fran-
cois-Xaxier Vaujany, Nathalie Mitev, Stewart R.
Clegg, Trevor Pinch, Ronald Kline, JoAnne Yates, and Lisa Gitelman,
to name a few STS scholars.
Some of these names may be unfamiliar to media historians, but all
have examined the historical roles of objects embedded in human sys-
tems and the role of agency in such systems. eir research and theoret-
ical approaches are worth considering and may prove helpful for the
media historian.
us, the purpose of this essay is to outline the current state of the
field with regards to media history and materiality-based approaches,
and to call for further exploration of our field with them.

Will Mari, an assistant professor of mass communication at Louisiana State Univer-

sity, is author of the book A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies.
He received his Ph.D. in communication from the University of Washington.

© 2021. The author owns the copyright to this essay.

Volume 7 (2021). Number 1 53
 Mari

Materiality’s Promise

Media historians have used materiality-led approaches to examine a

variety of issues, including the role of television in politics, the use of
the ballpoint pen, the use of the radio car in reporting news, the indus-
trial journalism of the Chicago Tribune, and the rise of newsroom com-
puterization, among other topics. Along the way, they have embraced
connected ideas from media archeology and spatial theory to help
understand the meaning and importance of place for history.
When media historians incorporate considerations of materiality
explicitly into their research, they are adding depth and complexity to
what is often a more narrative-driven field of inquiry. ere is nothing
wrong with the latter, but thinking about what the “stuff” of newsroom
life was like, to the people who used it, or what it felt like to inhabit and
work in specific places and times, adds an element of reality that
grounds history in the lives of actual people. Historians have been tak-
ing a similar approach in subtle ways for some time.
But following the cultural turn of the 1970s, which focused on
unrepresented groups and topics, the material turn of the 1990s in our
sibling disciplines, including journalism studies, sociology and Amer-
ican studies, has now come full force to media history.
is focus on materiality —“thinginess,” and its limits, as Michael
Schudson put it in an important 2014 essay in Journalism — continues
to matter and is not a passing fad. In “What Sorts of ings are ingy?
And What Sorts of inginess are ere? Notes on Stuff and Social
Construction,” Schudson takes up the question and, more importantly,
the limitations of a materiality approach — placing a label on some-
thing does not make it so. And “things” are not just material things, for
that matter, but can sometimes include practices and conventions

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 Materiality in Media History

(granted, with things built into them):

A ing is no less a ing for being a cultural convention or a social

practice to which, to some extent, individual human volition must
bow. e news interview was invented in the late 19th century. I
don’t think journalists think of the interview as having been invent-
ed but as natural, always there. It has been black-boxed over time.
It is a ing. But it is a complicated thing, a two-part ing. It is a
social thing.…

Schudson is speaking directly to materiality’s connections to Actor

Network eory, a challenging theoretical approach that defies easy
definition, but one that speaks to the shared agency (or at least the
imbued agency) between humans and technologies. In that sense, then,
when media historians are speaking of materiality, strictly, they speak-
ing of a different approach, one grounded in the ways tools change peo-
ple, and vice versa.
ey are, in this sense, using a new set of foundational presump-
tions. But perhaps the reason why media historians can feel confident in
looking at the role of objects in journalism is that they have, in fact,
already cultivated a materiality sensibility, or sensitivity, to the role of
tools in history.
In Barbara Friedman’s 2014 essay in American Journalism, “Is at
a ing? e Twitching Document and the Talking Object,” while she
outlined the positive impacts the “material turn” was having on media
history, and where the impact of such thinking might go next, she
noted that “the ability to think with things rather than through things
surely will give us wider range to talk about things important to our
field.” (italics Friedman’s).

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 Mari

“More than props,” she concluded, “the material artifacts of our

field, examined in their historical context and in their complex ‘thing-
ness,’ can lead us to new understandings about the origins and evolu-
tion of our field.”
Friedman explored this issue more with Kathy Roberts Forde in
their June 2015 essay, “‘ings at Talk:’ Materiality in Media His-
tory,” also in American Journalism. e issue contained two other arti-
cles by Rachel Plotnick and Michael Stamm, on ink and vanilla, respec-
tively, and their relationship to journalism’s production processes.

Materiality’s Limits

In the past seven years or so, in response, media historians have em-
braced the materiality approach, applying it to studies of journalism’s
“objects,” including everything from pica sticks, portable typewriters,
35mm cameras, telephones, typewriters and cars.
It is also true that for generations media historians have used histo-
ries of things to provide background to political or intellectual histories,
and examples of this kind of work include research by Gleason Archer,
Lawrence Lichty, and Lewis Weeks, among others. An examination of
the bibliographies of Warren Price and Calder Pickett, Roland and
Isabel Wolseley, and, earlier, Carl Cannon also shows a long interest in
“stuff” by journalism studies scholars and journalism historians alike.
One of the strengths of the newer, British and continental approach
to materiality is that it adds onto media history, instead of taking away
from it. Like older approaches, but with some key differences, it asks
how people in history regarded technologies during their gradual, un-
certain transitions, and as these tools were being used. It is focused on
the ontologies of things, and research along those lines can be found at

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 Materiality in Media History

the Université Paris-Dauphine, in France, and its Organizations, Arti-

facts and Practices (OAP) workshops, run by scholars such as Francois-
Xaxier Vaujany and Nathalie Mitev, at the Université de Montréal’s Ar-
tefact Lab and the University of Colorado’s Media Archeology Lab,
among other centers.
As Ben Peters points out in a 2009 essay in New Media & Society,
“And Lead us not into inking the New is New: A Bibliographic Case
for New Media History,” every “medium may have a few basic ideas
(e.g. telegraphy or distance writing) that take many forms in material
technologies.” In studying their expression, it is important to see their
long, convoluted paths.
Borrowing from Lisa Gitelman and her Always Already New (2006),
and from older ideas from Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilizations
(1934), Peters is interested in the specifics of thing-use and their mean-
ings for the people who used them, in their places and times.
And yet two distinctions are necessary here.
e first involves how materiality-as-approach works in media his-
tory versus how it functions in related fields such as sociology. Daniel
Miller, a professor of anthropology at University College London, says
that for the latter field materiality is perhaps best understood as some-
thing deeply embedded in culture and power. On a simplistic level, it
has to do “simply” with things, but on a grander level, it is more epis-
temological — who are we as historians acting in and within history?
ere is also the Marxist-materialist understanding of history,
which is related intrinsically to systems and structures of production,
i.e. labor and capital. Andrew Jones and Nicole Boivin, at the Univer-
sity of Southampton and the University of Oxford, have argued that the
material turn here is a new and different, if sometimes problematic,
phenomenon, influencing fields as diverse as economics and anthropol-

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 Mari

ogy.
Both these interpretations of materiality can help media historians
by expanding their disciplinary boundaries and encouraging creative
engagement with journalism studies, among other related disciplines.
David Ryfe, in a 2017 essay, “News Routines, Role Performances, and
Change in Journalism,” has urged his fellow scholars to take a “practice
theory” approach that is similar to how traditional journalism histories
can be enhanced within, and in conversations with, materiality.

Examples of Materiality in Media History

It may help to illustrate this distinction with some further examples.

What scholars such as Nikki Usher, Brian Creech, Susan Keith,
Juliette De Maeyer, Michael Stamm and Rachel Plotnick have done
during the latter part of this past decade is powerfully embed media his-
tory into concrete communication contexts.
Usher is coming primarily from journalism studies, but she repre-
sents an encouraging trend in which researchers from this close relative
to media history are becoming more engaged with the latter. C.W. An-
derson and Matthew Powers are examples of this crossover, with both
having written essays about the importance of media history to journal-
ism studies scholars. Usher’s Place/Space, Knowledge, and Trust in Jour-
nalism, published in Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs
in 2019, connects media history to journalism studies via a place-based
study of newsroom buildings.
De Maeyer’s article with John Delva on the history of newsroom
computerization, “When Computers Were New: Shifts in the Journal-
istic Sensorium (1960s–1990s),” published in July 2020 in Digital Jour-
nalism, is another example of media historians grounding their work in

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histories of material objects. In their case, the focus is on desktops,

screens and word-processing, and journalists’ reactions and adoptions of
these new digital tools. I explored similar themes in my 2019 book on
this same phenomenon in the American context, A Short History of Dis-
ruptive Journalism Technologies, looking at the long transition from ana-
log to digital devices in newsrooms during the latter decades of the Cold
War.
Brian Creech’s 2017 article in Journalism on the 35mm camera,
specifically the Leica (“A Newsmaker’s Tool”), examines the flexible
“material epistemology” of cameras. It carries forward arguments by Su-
san Keith in her 2014 article, likewise published in Journalism, “Horse-
shoes, Stylebooks, Wheels, Poles, and Dummies: Objects of Editing
Power in 20th-century Newsrooms.” In this piece, Keith argues for
more mid-century historical contexts for boundary objects, or tools that
delineate who is in and out of an occupation’s mandate or membership
(think typewriters, telephones and pica sticks again), and in so doing
uses Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone’s 2001 book, e Form of News:
A History. Barnhurst and Nerone argued that reporters and editors
fought over authority in newsrooms, with the balance of power shifting
over time from the latter to the former.
Plotnick’s “Tethered Women, Mobile Men: Gendered Mobilities
of Typewriting,” published in 2019 in Mobile Media & Communica-
tion, shows this material sensibility. Plotnick examines the portable
typewriter, concluding that “it is critical to understand typewriting
technologies not as fixed, single-purpose, or single-location devices, but
rather as fluid, contextual, and socially shaped devices that producers
and users co-constructed.”
Michael Stamm, in his 2018 book, Dead Tree Media: Manufac-
turing the News in Twentieth-Century North America, reinvigorates the

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 Mari

work of the late Harold Innis and his comparative, transnational, eco-
nomic history, exploring how the Chicago Tribune made its own paper
with Canadian trees, sawmills and workers. Stamm’s work follows a
long line of histories of vertical integration and the connections between
manufacturing and journalism.
Stamm’s is a synthesis approach, bringing in political, economic
and social history. On the one hand, while it contains traditional jour-
nalism-history elements (such as a brief bibliography of Robert Mc-
Cormick, the Tribune’s publisher), it also goes into fresh directions, as
when Stamm explores the intersection between material goods (paper)
and the global economy (via Canadian exports). It is therefore a good
example of media history that uses materiality in its core arguments.
e work of Denitsa Yotova, looking at Jacob Riis and his use of
the stereopticon (i.e. “magic lantern”), Julide Etem’s research on Amer-
ican “film diplomacy” during the interwar years and early Cold War,
and Lori Emerson’s examination of desktop computers during the
1990s — all of these also demonstrate a “hands-on” methodology that
is related to media history and materiality. A collection of essays on the
topic, edited by Nick Hall and John Ellis (Hands on Media History,
2020), might be of use for those interested in applying these ideas to
their teaching and research.

Next Steps for Materiality and Media History

Media historians can continue to incorporate ideas of materiality in sev-

eral specific ways.
First, media historians can read journals outside of our community,
but that often include work that closely parallels our own, including
Journalism Studies, Journalism, Digital Journalism and Journalism &

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 Materiality in Media History

Mass Communication Quarterly. Many of the media-history projects un-

derway now, and being published in these kinds of journals, involve
scholarships steeped in materiality approaches.
Second, media historians should aim to incorporate, when appro-
priate, ideas of materiality, and of space and place, into our work, not
only for the journals named above, but also in Journalism History, Amer-
ican Journalism, Media History, the Journal for Media History, and other
such publications.
ird and finally, we should push for more sophisticated, system-
atized materiality(ies). ese honor older, tried-and-true approaches to
journalism history, but reach a bit beyond them in creative ways.
In other words, as with Stamm’s work, how is one object built out
of others, or how did the conception of the use of this object come to be?
In the case of the digital tools being used to produce journalism away
from newsrooms, often remotely, for instance, what are the origins of
“portability” as a concept and as a set of tools, prior to the advent of the
computer, the car and even the telegraph? Before, then, the idea of “mo-
bility”?
Ideas and physical expressions of the portable, as Plotnick showed
with women and typewriting, varied quite a bit throughout the twenti-
eth century, and so it could be interesting to see how early TV versus
radio versus print reporters thought of the notion, at various points.
Was a tape recorder, microphone and camera “heavy” and “unwieldy”
to the latter but acceptably bulky to the former?
ere are other, similar beliefs worth interrogating, with materiality
in mind.
By bringing a holistic approach to the “stuff” of history into our re-
search, and again one that is an extension of a long line of doing so, we
can enrich our field.
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