Kittler’s suggestion that media are either storage or transmission devices is an extremely powerful statement. When objectively looking at specific media, such as writing, phonographs, and cinema, one can clearly derive that either a message is attempting to be transmitted or historically stored information is being presented to the individual without additional training outside of natural enculturation. Examples of transmission and storage media are seen all throughout institutions like Universities and newspapers, entertainment devices such as television and radio, and in politics through advertisements, infomercials, columns in newspapers, etc. In terms of media being a storage device, media has the special characteristic, according to Kittler, of “storing time” in the realm of eternity (Kittler 34). This has implications, which Kittler brings up, that because media can essentially take away the humanistic characteristic of mortality, media in some sense is connected to the dead, or more religiously, the soul. He makes a strong argument by linking various religious texts with God’s instructions to write or with a story where God actively inspires an author to transcribe His words (Kittler 36-37). Also, before the technological era was in full swing, “texts and scores were [the] only means to store time” and “as long as the book had to take care of all serial data flows…words trembled with sensuality and memory “ (Kittler 33, 30). Therefore, Kittler proposes that books accomplished, in the imaginary, the work that sights and sounds do, created from the cinematograph and phonograph, through the typewriter. However, the phonograph and cinematograph were “new” because they could store time in unprecedented ways through audible and visual procedures.
Kittler’s discussion of the transmission of media is more theoretical than concrete in the excerpt from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. In books, the words of a story create no more of a meaning than the reader ascribes to it in his imagination. More formally, the “letters do not transmit a beyond which could be hallucinated by perfect alphabets as meaning” (Kittler 44) because books do not carry audible, and more or less, visual representation. Books have power because they evoke this imaginative sense in the reader and it loses this transmission when books become available via other media sources, such as movies or television shows. The reader loses the power to shape the story him or herself because images of how the producer, or author, shaped it are replacing the readers’. Unlike writing, other media are capable of restructuring people and stories beyond structure and form, natural colors and shapes, and most importantly, words originally ascribed to them. In the case of photography and photographs, which Balzac calls “the shady trick” because of its ability to eternalize a mortal, software has been developed to alter any imperfection the subject may posses, to create digitized perfection (Kittler 41). We can generalize this to all mass media because editing can be a high paying occupation if working in the right field of media, for the right company. Moving to radio, a “Jürgenson wave” refers to the white noise, or background noise, transmitted through the receiver when tuned in to certain channels with almost untraceable wavelengths (Kittler 42). These are supposedly the channels upon which the dead can communicate over. Moreover, books are not capable of transmitting anything but words and “writing, no more, no less” because other media has stripped the psychologically imaginative powers of reading, debasing a books uniqueness to merely its composition (Kittler 26).
Audio Books: ENGL 147AB 
I believe books hold a separate and unique place among forms of media, even though it is expected that they somehow function like other, more modern media because the fundamental conception of media has been changed by technology as well as advertising. Contemporary culture is obsessed with replicating media “accurately” down to the last bit— the excessive documenting craze fueled by instagram, twitter, and the like— yet we also engage freely in editing the truth. What member of the millenial generation doesn’t at least have rudimentary photoshop or other photo editing skills? Magazines are widely regarded as shells covered in the artifice of impossible models and advertising. The obsession with “truth” in medium even through the awareness of this ever-present editing creates a paradox that attempts to hold everything to some standard of “truth.” Even if writing in books cannot be trusted as the “truth” because it is not replicatory but recorded through a human medium, machines do not tell the truth either, and humans manipulate them to this effect. Consider the recent furor over David Sedaris’s “exaggerating” stories in his frequent memoirs (http://motherjones.com/media/2008/07/mojo-interview-david-sedaris). Memoir can be a form of fiction. To be blunt, who in their right mind really believes that David Sedaris’s growing up years and daily life were actually that witty? It’s not as if there’s some separate class of human beings who function on a higher level that provides well-rounded episodic life experiences wrapped in hilarious packages. Expecting a book to function like a flat recording of someone’s life is also denying the fabricational elements of other media. Do twitter mogul’s lives automatically come in 140-character segments? Does anyone’s life really look like an instagram photo or an Urban Outfitters catalogue all the time? Books can be just as imaginative and psychologically relevant as they always has, as long as they are approached from the correct angle and regarded as just what they are: books, not photographs, documentaries, magazines, or internet applications. It is equally important to always hold in mind the paradox of truthful fabrication that we engage in on a daily basis.
Susan Reid’s response (copied and pasted):
In response to Cameron Stagg’s point about Kittler’s theory of tangible media such as newspapers, cinema, phonograph, writing, and radio in correlation to social trends and enculturation, “In terms of media being a storage device, media has the special characteristic, according to Kittler, of “storing time” in the realm of eternity (Kittler 34). This has implications, which Kittler brings up, that because media can essentially take away the humanistic characteristic of mortality, media in some sense is connected to the dead, or more religiously, the soul” (From paragraph 2 of Cameron Stagg’s blog from week 2). Different forms of media used of the “modern period” (currently in transition due to the Millenial internet boom) but especially in their original form (structure of content, if you will) can then be used also as primary sources in the writing of history. For example, physical cylinders like those that David Seubert showed us in class are tangible objects (like newspaper clippings and a first edition rare 60’s album) that can tell us a lot about the social trends or public interests of a society at that time. Physical cylinders help us to see how early sound recording techniques worked.
To relate last week’s readings to this week’s readings of Dracula, in the same way that primary sources can be important in historiography, so too is the status of the person or people powerful enough to write history. Dracula’s mission of going to London is essentially his way of leaving his track and flourishing because he lives off of blood, which in this book is a metaphor and symbol for family geneology, history of royalty, legend and myth. Needless to say, blood itself is a symbol for many other things, but Dracula’s tangibility in his being and his ability to shape shift helps him in twisting history. That different forms of media can have an encoded message (as a medium) that is better seen when looking at all of the media as a whole emphasizes that Dracula’s blood and the blood he drinks are mediums of encoded message that have historical and religious overtones and implications. Throughout the book, biblical images are evoked when talking about Dracula’s presence and he emphasizes his wish to spread vampirism. Dracula spreads and leaves his mark and simultaneously secures his influence as a “lord and master” (as Renfield calls him) and as a powerful monster asserting his mythic dominance (After all, Dracula is a legend in popular history today- on the level of Frankenstein or the Wicked Witch).
Also from Cameron Stagg’s post in blog 2 where he paraphrases one of Kittler’s concepts, “This has implications, which Kittler brings up, that because media can essentially take away the humanistic characteristic of mortality, media in some sense is connected to the dead, or more religiously, the soul. He makes a strong argument by linking various religious texts with God’s instructions to write or with a story where God actively inspires an author to transcribe His words (Kittler 36-37).” This is also relatable to Dracula in the sense that he uses blood to manipulate history and when the characters describe Dracula, they use religious overtones and often speak of Dracula with biblical allusions or in a light of sacrifice in relation to Christ. For example, when Renfield describes his encounter with the Count, “I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by his assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood—relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, ‘For the blood is the life.’ (Stoker, 206). Blood is stated as the tangible medium by which Dracula becomes powerful.
Hence Dracula’s transmission of blood and the correlation of that to the downfall of main characters (Lucy, Renfield, and Mina) acts as the medium and the storage place of information in regards to shaping history, and to his comparably Christ-like traits.
-Susan Reid
Kittler is definitely concerned with the ways in which the message within a medium is able to evade the constraints of mortality by representing time itself. The idea that “media can essentially take away the humanistic characteristic of mortality” is linked to the fact that writing, sound recording and film all seek to record a place in time for future viewing. This “storing of time” is important to cultures because it allows us to historicize the various messages being disseminated in society. The fact is that before sound recording and photography, the only way for someone to encode a message in a permanent form was to write it down. It is most interesting to me that written records demand some ability of imaginative empathy from the reader and also proficiency with close reading. Whereas the phonograph and the photograph appeal directly to one of the five human senses, reading is further separated by one step because it seeks to describe the culmination of the five senses with the 26-character alphabet, as Kittler notes. Recently, MRI studies have somewhat negated Kittler’s quote that “letters do not transmit a beyond which could be hallucinated by perfect alphabets as meaning” (Kittler 44); these studies found that reading actually taps a certain part of the imagination that does cause us to internally hallucinate (as opposed to hallucinations caused by some external substance or stimulus), giving readers the ability to chemically trick their brains into responding to imagined sights, smells and sounds as if they were actually being presented to us in the space of the real. It is fascinating that such a time-honored tradition like reading has been capable of evoking the imagination, and yet it is only recently that we have been able to concretely measure imagination versus more prescribed sources of information like television and movies that essentially dictate to our sense what we are supposed to be thinking.
The way in which we read words is constantly shifting to a more digital format, and as technology advances, it allows for written messages to be engraved into or combined with different medias like visual and sonic recordings. Will the shift into digital reading change the way in which humans can use their imaginations? Does cross-media formatting mean that some sacrifice has to be made to the message? Or rather, do messages recorded in writing require a type of imagination that is in jeopardy when forced to deal with visual and sound media?