One of the things I find myself continuing to think about is Gitelman’s argument that “all new media emerge into and help to reconstruct publics and public life, and that this in turn has broad implications for the operation of public memory, its mode and substance. The history of emergent media, in other words, is partly the history of history, of what (and who) gets preserved—written down, printed up, recorded, filmed, taped, or scanned—and why” (26). This idea of “the history of history,” of who gets to be preserved, and how, and why, seems pretty interesting, especially the fact that thinking about emergent media’s role in all this allows us to consider how it is that an emerging form of media can be “less a causal agent of change than it [is] fully symptomatic of its time” (29). And I think that’s it’s interesting that Gitelman explores, specifically, aural media and the manner in which “the early history of sound recording makes visible the ways in which new media emerge as local anomalies that are also deeply embedded within the ongoing discursive formations of their day, within the what, who, how, and why of public memory, public knowledge, and public life” (29).

As someone who collects records, this has me thinking about the tangibility of sound and how aural texts might be made material through something like tinfoil—or an iPod—for as Gitelman explains, “Tinfoil offered a new, precise sort of quotation, in effect, or a way of living with the question of quotation as never before. To put it another way, the tinfoil souvenirs suggested that oral productions might be textually embodied as aural reproductions, rather than as the usual sort of graphic representation, spelled out and wedged between quotation marks on a page” (40). I wonder if this speaks in any way to Levy’s discussion of podcasting as a “democratizing agent” (246); are podcasts, like tinfoil “textually embodied as aural reproductions,” and is it this embodied reproduction that helps it to be this democratizing agent?