March 3, 2008
I Broke Henry Jenkins's Collectible Wax Cylinder From the 1920s
For Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies Program, who is emerging as a well-known public intellectual on topics of media and society, the medium is not the message. He is far less interested in the specific medium than he is in how people interact with the popular culture they consume. Which is lucky for me, since I recently managed to accidentally break a collector’s item in his personal media collection.
I got to know Mr. Jenkins while I was researching a profile of the scholar for The Chronicle. He’s a housemaster in a dormitory at MIT, which means that he and his wife, Cynthia, live in a spacious suite right on the campus.
Their living room is packed with media, with shelves full of books, video games, CD’s, and comic books, and some old examples of pop culture Mr. Jenkins has collected over the years. At one point he showed me an artifact from the 1920s — an Edison wax cylinder. Before flat phonograph records, this is how music was packaged and sold, though it seems hard to imagine that a four-inch-long hollow tube lined with wax can hold musical data. Mr. Jenkins’s wife had given it to him as a Christmas present.
Mr. Jenkins seemed excited to show me the cylinder, and he handed it to me so I could give it a closer look. Somehow — for reasons I still can’t explain — the instant I got my hands on the historic object, it shattered into dozens of pieces. I broke Henry Jenkins’s collectible wax cylinder from the 1920s.
Obviously I apologized profusely. His reaction: Rather than getting upset, he said something to the effect of “‘Cool, now we get to see what one of these looks like in cross-section.” Perhaps he was just being polite, but he said not to worry about it.
As I sat down to write my article, I realized that Mr. Jenkins’s argument is that the model of media consumption from the analog era has shattered. Canned media, like that wax cylinder, is less important than it used to be, he says. Now fans watch a blockbuster movie, play a video game that continues the plot, download the unrated version to watch again on their iPods, and make their own short video spoofing the film’s characters.
That last part, the part where fans remix culture, particularly excites Mr. Jenkins. He sees it as a return to folk traditions that fell out of favor when people started sitting around a phonograph player instead of performing songs for their friends. With the help of the Internet, fans are now sharing their own stories, songs, and short films, often using mainstream media as a jumping-off point. All you have to do is spend a few minutes on MySpace or other social-networking sites to find garage rock bands inspired by Harry Potter, or a video series called “Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager,” in which the Star Wars character Darth Vader is portrayed as a frustrated grocery-store employee.
I still felt horrible about breaking the cylinder, so I scoured eBay looking for a replacement. I eventually found one, and I gave it to Mr. Jenkins at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum last week, where Mr. Jenkins was a keynote speaker.
“It’s great to see the wax cylinder back,” he said. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Monday March 3, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: U. of Pennsylvania Student Pleads Guilty to Helping to Attack University's Network
Next: Campus Gossip Gets Hateful. Wait, Isn't That the Point?
>I realized that Mr. Jenkins’s argument is that the model of media consumption from the analog era has shattered.
The cylinder gave its life so a new metaphor might be born! Great post.
— Steve Lawson Mar 3, 11:29 AM #
This also leads one to consider the difficulty of finding operational devices that can actuallly play the media of the past. The problem may not be improving much with digital media.
— Al Mar 3, 05:04 PM #
Al – you’re right. I would submit, though, that a good technician could fabricate such a device. No one can reproduce the actual recordings.
Last time I visited my 81 year old father, I carried away his copies of wax recordings (disks) of his old radio program from the late 1940’s – early 1950’s. I had a heck of a time finding a phonograph that could play an old 78 RPM disk, but eventually I did find one. My hope is that the disks, which were “home made”, do not deteriorate any further, and that I can pass the disks – and the phonograph – on to my grandson someday.
— FB Mar 4, 09:06 AM #
Al—you are right. The problems of longevity can be greater in the digital world, because you must have compatible technology for both the physical media (CD, DVD, etc.) and the files themselves. If you leave a CD sitting in an archive for several years, the CD might be in great shape, and there might be lots of devices for reading CD media, but the files stored on it might be unreadable by current software applications.
I still have 3.5” floppy discs that are in great physical shape, and I have computers at home and work with floppy drives. The computers can read a floppy, and show me the file directory…but, alas, they often have no clue what program created a given file or how to provide access to the contents.
FB is correct, too, that options exist for fabricating “backwards compatible” technologies. This is actually true for both hardware AND software, there are efforts out there to replicate “obsolete” software environments to run older files. However, the likelihood that a particular technology will be fabricated in such a fashion depends largely on the popularity of that technology—lots of software programs come and go, and formats for which no one cares to fabricate a reader may pass into unredeemable obscurity.
— Erin Mar 4, 09:37 AM #
When I read this article, I thought of a video that I saw a couple of years ago when a guest on a TV show was showing a wax cylinder and it suddenly collapsed into pieces while he was holding it. You are not alone. At least you didn’t have a national TV audience, although I imagine your reaction was pretty similar to this guy’s. Unbelievably, I managed to find it again by typing “break wax cylinder video” into Google. The video is the first result and this article is the second…
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/59777/tech_tv/
— Mike Mar 27, 04:04 PM #