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Abstract
What roles do media technologies, artifacts, and users play in cultural change? This dissertation focuses on the shift from analog to digital media and concentrates on the role played by copies and replication in both systems of representation to identify and analyze material practices and rhetorical claims about their cultural influence. Specifically, it identifies and critiques the influence of recording formats qua copies in the history of three forms of composition in popular-music culture—remixes, disco edits, and MP3 blogs—to ask how something that is just the same can bring something new into being. I show that a focus on an artifact’s status as a copy—an object that can be said to be the same as other things—can illuminate our understanding of the cultural changes associated with digital and network technologies. By simultaneously identifying new cultural practices that are dependent on pure copying and resurrecting histories of media use, I critique the rhetoric of remix and participation as common tropes in digital discourse. This thesis examines the ways in which digital technologies were shaped by analog ones, as well as how and why analog formats persist in an era of digital networks. This exploration highlights the materiality of all media formats and shows how everyday users have played with and exploited material affordances over the past half-century. It also ponders the persistence of romantic ideals about authorship and expression within modes of expression and discourse that seem to challenge such constructions. What do these continuities and contradictions suggest about the networked experience and the social and cultural pleasures we derive from it? By teasing out unspoken assumptions about media and culture, this thesis offers fresh perspectives on the cultural poetics of networks and artifacts and poses questions about the promises and challenges of network visibility.