Innovation That Changed Our Lives
Wednesday, March 10, 2004; 12:00 p.m. ET

School children in America learn that media are "invented": Samuel F.B. Morse "invented" the electric telegraph; Alexander Graham Bell "invented" the telephone; Thomas Edison "invented" recorded sound. But invention is better understood as a social process than as a grammar school factoid. True innovation depends as much upon an understanding of societal norms and interests as it does upon a creative departure from them. So "new media" are always only partly new. Today's new media are often characterized in sweeping terms like "convergence" or "globalization" and "monopoly"; are there historical precedents that might be helpful in understanding such generalizations? These questions and more will be answered in a live discussion with Lisa Gitelman, director of the media studies program at Catholic University.

Lisa Gitelman is the author of "Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines" (Stanford University Press, 1999), coauthor of "Thomas A. Edison and Modern America" (Bedford/St. Martins, 2002) and coeditor of the collection "New Media, 1740-1915" (MIT Press, 2003). She has been an editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers project at Rutgers University and continues to work on issues of innovation as they relate to the history of media in the United States.

Moderator: Welcome to Viewpoint with our guest, Prof. Lisa Gitelman, director of the media studies program at Catholic University. Thank you for joining us. Let's begin.

Professor, we do often hear sweeping terms such as "convergence," "synergy," "globalization" and "monopoly" to describe the media; what are the historical precedents that might be helpful in understanding these generalizations?

Lisa Gitelman: Hello, thanks for having me. It's an interesting question. My research on Edison and the research of my colleagues at the Thomas A. Edison Papers has given us the sense that there was period at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century when globalization, synergy, and monopoly were all central issues of concern to Americans. Before digitization, electrification. I think there may have been a sense that modernization was bringing a whole new complex of media together, -- recordings, motion pictures, etc., -- at the same time that American markets expanded overseas and corporate consolidation was in the air. Echoes, not identities, but I think there are important parallels.

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New York, N.Y.: Why is the light-bulb so widely recognized as a symbol of innovation?

Lisa Gitelman: I don't know when that started exactly, though of course Edison is something of a cliché . . . One thing to think about is the way in which metaphors of illumination have long haunted Western culture. It was called the "Enlightenment" for a reason, and when we understand something we are far more ready to say, "Oh, I see!" than the more slangy, "I hear ya . . ."

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Washington, D.C.: Prof. Gitelman, could you finish this sentence: If Edison were alive today . . .

Lisa Gitelman: I often wonder where he’d be in the controversy over MP3 downloads. When phonograph records became mass market commodities it caused panic/outrage among composers and music publishers (the record companies of their day). As the inventor of the phonograph, Edison was delighted, and he felt justified. BUT, that said, there was no one more deeply invested in the statutory construction of intellectual property than him. His bread and butter were patents and copyrights.

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Washington, D.C.: Are there any plans for Catholic University to offer graduate programs in Media Studies? Are there other nearby programs you would recommend?

Lisa Gitelman: Unfortunately not at present, though that remains an aspiration (I hope my dean is logged-in . . . ). Across town, Georgetown U. has an interesting masters program called Communication, Culture and Technology. I say "interesting" because it reads "media studies" to me, like our undergraduate program at Catholic, or like the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.

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New York, N.Y.: If sweeping generalizations have limited use, what's the drawback of detailed explanations, especially with regard to multimedia presentations?

Lisa Gitelman: I should really combine this question with another one that a user has sent, about the potential trickle-down of academic expertise on the web (if I can use my own shorthand). I think it is a problem if presentation-givers or academics constantly relay the message that, "Oooo, things are complicated . . ." There is a need to balance detail with generalization, or at least to frame detailed explanations well, so that the forest/trees are clear. This is certainly a challenge on the Web, where users hardly control their contexts.

That's a too-generalized answer, isn't it?

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College Park, Md.: Lisa, as a professor of media studies, what are your thoughts on 24-hour news coverage? What do you think 24-hour news says about today's societal norms?

Lisa Gitelman: Well, I do know that many nineteenth-century Americans were utterly convinced -- as we are today -- that they were living in an impossible hail of messages, that the media had burgeoned around them to an alarming and even potentially destructive degree, that representations were taking over reality. So today we may have a problem of degree rather than of kind.

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Washington, D.C.: How are the experiences of Edison or other nineteenth-century inventors still relevant today?

Lisa Gitelman: On one level the work of Edison and his peers is still relevant because it is part of the lasting condition of modernity. In particular, Edison's systems approach -- not the light bulb but the light bulb AND the power grid, that kind of thing -- is still powerful conceptually. That's part of how we understand networks today, even at an intuitive level. On the other hand, though, the work of Edison and his peers remains relevant because the more we study them, the more we plumb the archives, the more we learn about modernization itself. Some lessons are cautionary: inventions that "failed" because of misperceptions on the part of entrepreneurs.

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New York, N.Y.: What roles might book-learning play in cultivating innovation?

Lisa Gitelman: Thomas Edison was rather famously a hands-on guy; he claimed to have been kicked out of school at a young age and was home schooled by his mother. He also claimed to have tried to read a whole library of books in his youth. Based upon his example, I'd say that book-learning is essential for innovators. What may not have a direct correlation is academic achievement.

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East Hampton, N.Y.: People often say that media technology is changing at a more rapid pace than ever before. Is this true?

Lisa Gitelman: This is hard to judge. I'm not sure there's a clear way to measure. Numbers of patents granted is a notoriously poor metric. So I think we're left to consider the ways in which media change is experienced as a *cultural* phenomenon. And as I think I said, Americans at the end of the nineteenth century also had the keen sense of being swept away by an ocean of new media forms and new media texts, and a sense of the unprecidented acceleration of technological change. Part of me suspects that we're not half as unique as we think we are . . .

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Washington, D.C. : How and why do innovations in technology get ascribed to individual inventors?

Lisa Gitelman: You raise an important issue. I think that there are many reasons why we in America remember Thomas Edison and others like him. Certainly they did important work; there's no denying that. But there seem to me to be ideological reasons why American culture (for one) and a market economy (for another) might hone in on singular individuals. The inventor, like the self-made man, the entrepreneur, is an important mental structure, a way our culture organizes its thinking/desires about individualism and about progress. In Britain, Edison is not the inventor of the lightbulb. In France he's not the inventor of the phonograph. And that suggests that we're using the idea or the category of "the inventor" to help organize our thinking even about national identity.

At a nuts and bolts level, of course, individuals want credit so they can get paid, so they can own a particular patent or control a particular trade secret. I just wanted to point out that there's more at stake, a whole symbolic or ideological level, say, where we use the stories of successful individuals to operate in the world the way we do.

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Alexandria, Va.: What sort of inventions do you think Edison and the like would approve of? What would really make Edison happy in our tech-saturated society?

Lisa Gitelman: Edison often said he was "too busy" to leave his lab and take in the world around him, whether it was to attend an event or talk to a would-be inventor. So maybe it would be hard to get a rise out of him. But I think that he would certainly be riveted by the open source movement, by the idea of individuals freely pooling their innovations.

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Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C.: Why don't we have an Edison of our time? Or do we?

Lisa Gitelman: We do, don't we? I mean, we have culture heroes and we laud entrepreneurial success. More important than identifying a single new Edison, though, I think we need to make everyone, every schoolkid, into an Edison. That is, we need a lot more tech savvy, wholesale, and I hope we can foster an empowering sense that savvy (of any kind) comes as part of a legacy, that it's part of a history -- the real Edison included -- AND that also it's a part of the disciplinary conditions -- the WAYS we think -- that are meaningful today. Edison is such a good device for learning.

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Lisa Gitelman: Thank you all for logging on!

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Moderator: Thank you so much for joining us, Prof. Gitelman. Thank you also to everyone who participated.

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