Friedrich Kittler focuses on the ways new media technologies have evolved and in turn how people now view it, in this excerpt from ‘Gramophone, Film, Typewriter’. He states, ‘What reached the page of the surprised author between 1880 and 1920 by means of the gramophone, film and typewriter – the very first mechanical media – amounts to a spectral photograph of our present as future. That is to say, with those early and seemingly harmless devices that could store and thereby separate as such, sounds, faces and documents, a mechanization of information began, which – in the hindsight of stories – already made today’s self-recursive number stream possible’ (Kittler). Kittler’s focus is explaining to the reader how the advancement in technology has made its accessibility easier to use in day-to-day life. We can make a smooth transition from one thing to another with just the touch of a button because of how evolved and advanced the media has become. We are able to move from the music industry onto the film industry with just the touch of one button, hinting at the fact that we have lost sight of the original definition of media.

This passage develops the relationship between the addresser and addressee, between the media and the messenger. There were interpertations of what literature is and does. This was enabled by the risk of cultural machines. Mechanical media during the 1900s had and aura of scarcity and discontinuity. An example that Kittler gives is the written book. It was a cultural belief that if it was not written about in a book than it did not happen. The aura of mechanical media is the idea that there is an original copy somewhere, making that very scarce. This can be related to today’s culture when most people say ‘pictures or it did not happen’. This just further proves the point that as long as the media is advancing and evolving, so are its people. Digital media is a part of the twenty-first century. Because digital media is so ubiquitous the aura is a contrast to that of mechanical media. Since it can be seen anywhere, usually at the touch of a finger the aura of the original content is stripped. This advancement in media allows for different interpretations of the original message.

In “Track Changes” by Mattew Kirschenbaum The story of writing in the digital age can be as messy as the rags that that are on the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot lead of a very high tech machine. During the period of strong growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors used it as a marvel while others used it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing talked about as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing? “Track Changes” balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the ineffable act of writing is always grounded in certain instruments and media, like quills to keyboards. Along the way, we begin to see the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, and they also explore the surprising changed reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud. Writing for a certain audience of fellow scholars who can reasonably be assumed to know it already, Kirschenbaum  uses much of the social, literary, and technological context that would have made “Track Changes” more broadly easy to get.  He really assumes, for example, that the reader needs only the smallest reminder of why the Appleor the Altair 8800 was a powerful moment in the history of personal computers. He also talks about all but extinct devices like impact printers, floppy disks, teletype machines, and the IBM Selectric typewriter like they are still familiar,  even though the fact that a strong and growing section of readers has never seen “Ñlet” or even used “Ñthem” in their natural habitat. Track Changes is a useful placeholder for a soon to be written technological history of word processing and a useful resource for those deeply into in it so much.

Wholes and Parts

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Men, Women and Masculinity by Jack Halberstam dives into a topic that for much time has been deemed to uncomfortable to talk about and that is female masculinity and lesbianism. Halberstam unravels the notion of masculinity being associated with males but instead how masculinity can exist and manifest itself in women and the female body. Halberstam also makes female masculinity come across as something that isn’t whole, I think it would stem off of what masculinity had been socially constructed upon. Thus making male masculinity ‘whole’ and female masculinity as ‘half’ or ‘part of’ – which explains ones totality.

The fright of lesbianism in this sense stems off from this masculine order and disorder. The intimidation stemming from a lesbian ‘femme’ stems from the thought of a perfect ideal lesbian who is not attracted to men, Though there is an intimidation of both the male and ‘Butch’ lesbians because it strips from one’s own masculinity and the male that is usually associated with masculinity, no longer is the bearer of masculinity in a concept of whole. Halberstam uses examples such as the “silly archive” in order to split masculinity from it’s socially constructed concept. Female masculinity in a way reclaims the very definition of masculinity thus making it open to all genders instead of being gender exclusive.

Female masculinity, as I mentioned is seen as half or part of, what this really means is that female masculinity is deemed as more weak, vulnerable which contrasts from what ‘masculinity’ is ‘supposed to be’ – strong and powerful. Though I would say, when the construction of masculinity is broken, women who are deemed “butch” would be considered a radical change in the masculine narrative. Halberstam states in page 265, in relation to the femme and butch, “the attractive lesbian who rejects them and the butch that rivals their masculinities”, the quote examines why heteronormative ‘masculine’ males feel intimidated of female masculinity – or butch lesbians and femme lesbians. Halberstam also states why men always put down women when examining the ‘female image’, anything that is deemed to manly, such as, body hair, actions, that may challenge the male image is deemed as a huge, no. This could be due to the hierarchical ways men and women are placed. In this case, men are always at the top.

Towards the end, Halberstam examines the story of a gay man being addressed by a stranger and misidentified him. The demonstration of the stranger addressing the gay man and misidentified him was in way for him to create his own wholeness/totality, to not only assert his dominance but his masculinity. The misidentified man is left in shock and is puzzled. As he has been misidentified and one who probably viewed himself as whole is now only half due to the misidentification which relates back to female masculinity.

An Act in itself

Gender trouble by Judith Butler, argues that our bodies aren’t are identities but that Gender, including in which we identify with is all a performative act. The body is examined at birth, is the sex of the baby male or female? Will we deem it a girl or boy after these examinations? The body, sex and gender go through a dysmorphia of sorts. It is continually changed, looked down upon, altered, attacked, insulted, it is a cluster of things. To the extent that if born in a particular body, the society may treat you differently, such as females, or those who identify as girls. We are made of two parts, Judith says, the outer and the inner, and the inner is an outer force that forces itself upon us. She even goes to the extent to use the soul as an example, it is thought that the soul imprisons the body but to the contrary, she believes that the body imprisons the soul. The inner self is made up of social constructs, and weirdly, these social constructs are nonverbally agreed too, like a unspoken law or rule. Sexuality, is taught from our first few steps- the way we talk, how we talk, how we dress and who we are supposed to like, despise and love. Judith uses the example of the souls imprisonment  to support her idea that gender and sexuality are socially constructed and is something that is learned in everyday society from infancy up until our adulthood.

Judith also uses drag shows as an example of how gender and sexuality is a performative act. Drag shows, which involve men who dress up and perform a gender separate from their sex – this is to both drag queens and drag kings. In this sense, Judith uses drag queens – who are a hyper representation of femininity as a way of looking at how gender and sexuality is performed in society. Through this example Judith makes it known that society and not biology, define what we all know to be gender. To the contrary of what some may say, that gender may be a sense of expression rather than a confined space – that very confined space may imprison someone or already has- the thought of being either or is already ingrained within us, I think it’s hard to imagine what it is to not be feminine or masculine, because that in itself becomes another category- another way to label one’s self – “if the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false…” (2549)