Opening up the black boxes: Media archaeology, ‘anarchaeology’ and media materiality

Abstract

This article examines the emergent field of media archaeology as offering a materialist approach to new media and specifically the Internet, constituting a 'travelling discipline' or 'indiscipline' rather than a new disciplinary paradigm. Following the lead of Siegfried Zielinski (2006) it provides less an archaeology than an 'anarachaeology' of media archaeology, understanding this term in political as well as methodological terms. To do so it charts a trajectory through some of the sources of media archaeology, and its key theoretical articulations in the work of Zielinski and Friedrich Introduction: Situating Media ArchaeologyThis article aims to survey the emergent field and sets of methods of media archaeology with at least two key hypotheses. The first is that media archaeology can be better thought of, following Zielinski, in terms of 'anarchaeology', a rupture within contemporary media theories and histories, rather than a new discipline. Secondly that one of the key values of media archaeology is its insistence on the materiality, and material ecologies of media objects, systems and processes, contrary to the still lingering tendency to view informational technologies and processes in disembodied and immaterial terms. This is distinct from phenomenological approaches centred on an assumed human body and sensorium (see Hansen, 2006). Instead it consists of an attention to the material ecologies of human, non-human and machinic entities, the inorganic, organic and, as we shall see, geological strata that underlie technical media systems and networks, but which are frequently ignored in conventional media studies. Media archaeology is also distinct from AngloAmerican approaches to digital media that tend to be empirical, social scientific epistemologies based on qualitative and quantitative research in which data sets are analysed as traces of user practices such as linking or tagging, for example, or form the basis for digital mapping techniques such as social network analysis (SNA). While empiricism shares with media archaeology, and media materialism more generally, an interest in media objects, it constructs these objects epistemologically in terms of data and information, software and platforms, or in other words as objects of knowledge, bracketing off any non-informational aspects of their physicality. From a media archaeological perspective then, social scientific empiricism is not empirical enough, and needs to get closer to the materiality of objects such as chips, circuit boards and fiber optic cables,

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