Lisa Gitelman: Always Already New, Media, History and the Data of Culture

I feel as though this reading is particularly tough to follow in the aspect that it cannot hold your attention for very long.  As I trudged along reading about the "history" of media, all of the information seemed very basic, and to me, extremely dull.  To be honest, I felt as though I was reading thirty-one pages of a textbook on basic computer knowledge that most ten year old's could understand.

I do agree on one thing.  The abundance of citing manuals is astounding as a student.  Having to learn many different styles, which are changing constantly, makes a challenge to find a happy medium between finding a source and citing the source correctly.  Gitelman used a phrase which I found somewhat humorous, "Each new edition will address itself to more and more publication formats, more and more varieties of orange juice, while a total theory of documents and a final system for documentation remain forever out of reach."  The orange juice part made me chuckle.

On a serious note, it is hard to correctly document information and give credit if so many different styles exist.  Especially when they keep changing.  Learning how to document old types of media with new types of media will remain a challenge, but it seems like the hope of it becoming easy will never happen.  Much to Lisa Gitelman's distress.