Scrapbooks Were A 'coping' Strategy For Old Media

Matt Locke from TEST
Scrapbooks were a 'coping' strategy for old media at a time when distribution via railroads and cheap printing processes led to an overwhelming surplus of popular magazines and newspapers. [Ellen Gruber] Garvey describes them as "a new subcategory of media - the cheap, the disposable, and yet somehow tantalizingly valuable, if only their value could be seperated from their ephemerality". Scrapbooks were one just one strategy for indexing and archiving cuttings, including commercial clipping services, but scrapbooks represented a private, vernacular response to this information revolution. This remaking of popular media is clearly a precursor of the current blogging phenomenon, and Garvey's analysis of scrapbook making introduces some concepts that are useful in discussing blogging as part of our contemporary media culture.


Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry

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