Reuse, Revision, and Repurposing: Across the Lifespan of Digital Communication Technologies, Infrastructures, and Practices

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Use and reuse have shaped information, media, and communication technologies in non-linear and unexpected ways (Bolter & Grusin, 2000; Jackson, 2014; Lipartito, 2003). This panel explores historical cases in which twentieth-century digital technologies, including wiki software, personal computers, mobile communication devices, and cable infrastructure, were subject to processes of reuse, revision, and repurposing. We contend that reuse is a central factor in histories of communication technology; therefore, the conference theme of communicating across the life span applies not only to human lifespans, but also to the perceived and actual lifespans of technological devices, infrastructures, and practices.

This panel approaches the history of digital communication technologies in the twentieth century as a history replete with false starts, diversions, contingencies, and seeming failures that later came to be characterized as prescient or visionary. The panelists seek to confront teleological narratives of progress and inevitability by focusing on the failures, the unintentional, the coincidental, the convenient, and the expedient in digital communication technologies. We also interrogate the practices and self-representations of the individuals, groups, and organizations that have repurposed these technologies.

This panel focuses on 1960s-1990s United States history, but the papers explore contemporary and global ramifications. We draw upon perspectives from media studies, history of science and technology, and information science to highlight reuse, repurposing, and revision as fundamental processes in the development and popularization of digital communication technologies. Alper traces how the Apple iPad, as an assistive communication aid, remediates similar advancements in the 1970s and 1980s by electronics companies Casio and Texas Instruments in terms of technical design and functionality, as well as social and economic incentives. Examining wikis pre- and post-Wikipedia, Geiger takes an infrastructural approach to how media work to support practices of cultural production. He shows how the idea and implementation of wiki software dramatically shifted as Wikipedians adopted, then adapted a well-established technology. Jack examines nonprofit organization Junior Achievement’s use of donated and discounted personal computers to run a custom adaptation of management simulation software in an early 1980s high school economics curriculum. She argues that the computer inadvertently became the centerpiece of a visual rhetoric of technological skill and corporate-managerial identity. Kozak analyses the flexible cultural imperative leading a small, rural town, seeking to provide residents with advanced telecommunications, to repurpose plans for a municipal cable system into an information highway and finally to a provider of high-speed Internet service.

Sub Unit

• Communication History

Individual Presentations

• Speak, Spell, Touch, Tell: A History of Mobile Talking Machines - Meryl Alper, U of Southern California - Annenberg School for Communication

• “But it Wouldn’t Be an Encyclopedia; It Would Be a Wiki”: Wikipedia and the Repurposing of WikiWikiWeb, 1995-2002 - R.Stuart Geiger, U of California - Berkeley

• Filling the Frontier Void: The Visual Rhetoric of the Personal Computer in Applied Economics, 1981-1988 - Caroline Jack, Cornell U

• “If You Build It, They Will Come”: Lusk, Wyoming, and the Information Highway Imaginaire, 1989-1999 - Nadine Irene Kozak, U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Respondent

• Leah A. Lievrouw, U of California - Los Angeles