My article “Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive” (PDF) is now available online from the journal TEXT Technology (13.2):
“Extreme Inscription” attempts to articulate the grammatological primitives of the hard drive, the inscription technology that has had the single greatest impact on computing in the latter half of the 20th century. Rather than offer up yet another generalized account of electronic textuality, my objective in this essay is to examine one specific writing machine in its unique social, technical, and imaginative milieu. Random access disk storage, I argue, is the technology that embodies the “database paradigm” a critic such as Lev Manovich sees as fundamental to new media. The history of hard drive technology is treated in the essay, as is the cultural impact of new hard drive-based technologies like iPod, TiVo, and Gmail’s massive multi-gigabyte quotas. Ultimately the article seeks to establish a place for the often invisible and certainly unglamorous presence of storage technologies amid the largely visual and screen-based approaches that currently prevail in new media theory.
A more exhaustive discussion of hard drives will appear as a chapter in Mechanisms.
Posted by mgk at March 16, 2006 03:14 PMCongratulations Matt - it takes no small amount of talent to make hard drives fascinating to read about!
Posted by: Jason at March 17, 2006 09:29 AM | Link to CommentMatt,
I like how you enliven the examples from history. You imbue them with the implications for current practice and future directions.
Do you in some other part of the project discuss the question of records devoted to recording the accessing of records? I ask because it seems that the marking of the space(formating)is a kind of copying. I am puzzled as to what might be copied in the process of formating? I find your project fascinating as it steers toward the intersection of inscription, instantiation and installing.
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Two points in my reading of the Text Technology version that look like photons have shirked their duty:
p. 98
trans-historical remember[er] of things past.
p. 101
--[t]he grammatological primitives [
]
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All the best with bring more to the fore.