10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17422
application/pdf
2038-3460
17422
2
en
Paolo Magaudda
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Damon Krukowski, The New Analog. Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, MIT Press, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
9
Book Reviews
2019-01-31
2023-06-25
2019-01-31
2023-08-31
206-209
TS
Paolo Magaudda
2018
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17422
206
University of Padova
2038-3460
2
en
209
Damon Krukowski, The New Analog. Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, MIT Press, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17422/16274
9
206                                                              Tecnoscienza – 9 (2)

future oriented, since at the moment the book provides inspiring ideas
more than empirical evidences.


References
Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
       University Press.
Paay, J., Kjeldskov, J. and Skov, M. (2015) Connecting in the Kitchen: AnEmpirical
         Study of Physical Interactions while Cooking Together at Home, in Pro-
         ceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Coopera-
         tive Work & Social Computing, CSCW ‘15, New York, ACM, pp. 276–87.
Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography, Thousand Oaks, CA., Sage.




                                      ***

   Damon Krukowski
The New Analog. Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, Cam-
bridge MA, MIT Press, 2017, pp. 240

Paolo Magaudda University of Padova

    The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World is a
book by the musician, journalist and poet Damon Krukowski, focused on
the implications of the shift from analog to digital technologies in music
production and circulation. Although this is not a book rooted in science
& technology studies, but an essay for a wider and non-academic, it anyway
offers several relevant points of interest for a STS audience interested in
music and sound technologies. This is especially true for those of us in-
volved in the field of sound studies, which is the way STS has approached,
in the last fifteen years, the role of technology in relation to music, sound
and the acoustic environment – a field distinctively leaded, among others,
by prominent STS scholars such as Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld
(Pinch and Bijsterveld 2003; 2012).
    Before entering more deeply into the issues The New Analog raises for
STS-oriented sound studies scholars, let me quickly present what the book
is about and its major thesis. First of all, The New Analog’s author, Damon
Krukowski, is a musician (drummer for the late ‘80s alternative rock band
Galaxy 500) and journalist (for major music magazines like “The Wire”
Book Review                                                                207
and “Pinchfork”), also having a scholarly affiliation with the Berkman
Klein for Internet and Society at the Harvard University (where Krukowski
has also been student when younger). The book presents an outline of mu-
sic digitalization’s process from analog devices to digital technologies, ex-
panding its insights across the whole history of recorded music (for in-
stance, making parallels between the issues raised by the technology of
player piano at the end of the nineteen century, with the case of the file
sharing platform Napster one century later) and mixing this story with au-
thor’s own experiences as both listener of LP and Spotify and musician
approaching analog recording studios at the beginning of the ‘80s. Hence,
the seven book’s chapters deal with many relevant issues related with the
shift from analog to digital technologies, including the role of stereophonic
hearing and microphones in creating the listening space, the change in
sonic media and supports, the relation between music volume and percep-
tion, the means to exchange music and the role of noise as sonic as well
social element. The main thesis of the work is that the adoption of digital
technologies, in production, circulation and consumption, mainly pro-
duced a “demolition” of the role of “noise”, intended not just as the noise
characterising analogue recordings, but more generally the noise as the
presence of a real life in our mediated environment, an important part of
our situated experience of time and space. Above all, as the author points
out in the conclusion, digitization results in the filtering of all information
not considered relevant by entities like Spotify or Facebook, thus contrib-
uting to lose those pieces of humanity and the sense of situatedness that
were represented, in the analog age, by a stratified and unavoidable noise.
    As the reader can see from this quick picture, the points of interest for
scholars involved in sound studies and music technologies are manifold,
first of all because the author delivers what, as STS scholars, we would
address as the consequences of a change in music infrastructuring process.
However, at the same time, as STS scholars we could also be deceived, as
the author does not intercept any of the major literature in sound studies
and especially among STS works dealing with some of the major topics of
the book, notably the role of noise, the topic of Karin Bijsterveld’s 2008
book Mechanical Sound. By the way, the intellectual references enriching
Krukowski’s work fall short also to grasp many of the most recent contri-
butions in the social and cultural study of sound, excluding notably the
first book by Jonathan Sterne on the cultural history of sound reproduction
(Sterne 2003); hence, most of the intellectual references of the book remain
anchored to classical – but at the same often addressed – works, including
for example the writings by John Cage, Glenn Gould and Walter Benja-
min. While it would not be fair to complain about the lack of STS-oriented
references in this kind of book (as said mostly devoted to a non-academic
audience), what is anyway interesting to ask is how much Krukowski’s
book could be interpreted as a lack of penetration of STS-inspired litera-
208                                                           Tecnoscienza – 9 (2)

ture in sound studies among essays, journalist accounts and other disserta-
tions targeting a general audience of listeners, musicians and music enthu-
siasts.
     That said, the book not only is very enjoyable to read for scholars in
music technologies, but it also offers several examples that resonate very
loudly with STS concepts and sensibilities. As anticipated, many of the is-
sues raised by the author are good instances of what occurred, at different
level, during the deep and quite fast modification in music infrastructures,
in doing so bringing light to some rarely addressed consequences of digit-
ization of music circulation. A very nice example is the account, partially
based on author’s own experience, about the changes occurred in music
shops (by the way, an issue very poorly addressed both in sound studies
and popular music studies, maybe with the notable exception of Pinch’s
study on the Moog synthesizer; Pinch and Trocco, 2002). Indeed, in chap-
ter 4, the author describes some of the infrastructural consequences of the
shift from LPs to CDs, a change which included not only issues in sound
quality, but also a transformation in shops’ political economy: the recon-
figured materiality of the smaller and less prone to be damaged CD was
instrumental in the emergence of huge mega-shops, like those established
by the chain Tower Records, which opened a big flagship store in Boston
in 1989. However, changes triggered in music infrastructures by the CD
were not affecting just issues in political economy and distribution systems,
but also smaller and more situated issues, like for passage from LP to CD.
The question was not only that stealing music records became easier, due
to the smaller dimension of a CD over a LP, but also because the new dig-
ital format allowed for different surveillance and anti-thief systems, which
evolved from the human bag-checker, located at the entrance of the shop,
to non-human metal detectors, able to reveal the presence of metal strips
attached as anti-thief systems to the CD, enclosed in plastic boxes. As con-
sequence, “employees no longer had to watch while you browsed to make
sure you weren’t pocketing good. And there was no reason for them to
engage you in conversation” (p. 96).
     Insights like this discussed by Krukowski (many other regard, for ex-
ample, the change in how musicians experienced the relationship with
technology in recording studio) can enrich the understanding of the infra-
structural shift in music, especially when translated through STS notions
(i.e. in relation to “delegation” processes to non-human artefacts of previ-
ously human-based activities; see Akrich & Latour, 1992). In sum, despite
not being a book based on STS concepts, The New Analog represents an-
yway an inspiring reading for those scholars that aim to explore further the
implication of digitization and over the music world.

References
Akrich, M., and Latour, B. (1992). A summary of a convenient vocabulary for the
       semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies, In W.E. Bijker and J. Law
Book Review                                                                  209
        (Eds.), Shaping technology/building society: Studies in socio-technical
        change, Cambridge, MIT Press.
Bijsterveld, K. (2008) Mechanical sound: Technology, culture, and public problems
        of noise in the twentieth century, Cambridge, MIT Press.
Pinch, T., and Bijsterveld, K. (2003). “Should one applaud?”: Breaches and bound-
       aries in the reception of new technology in music, in “Technology and Cul-
       ture”, 44(3), pp. 536-559.
Pinch, T. and Bijsterveld, K. (Eds.). (2012). The Oxford handbook of sound stud-
       ies, Cambridge, Oxford University Press.
Pinch, T. and Trocco, F., (2002). Analog days: The invention and impact of the
       Moog synthesizer, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Sterne, J. (2003) The audible past: Cultural origins of sound reproduction,
       Durham, Duke University Press.




                                      ***

    Elisa Giomi and Sveva Magaraggia
Relazioni brutali. Genere e violenza nella cultura mediale [Brutal rela-
tionships. Gender and violence in media culture], Bologna, Il Mulino,
2017, pp. 240

Tiziana Piccioni University of Padova

    Identity and differences are seen as the effects of relationships, techno-
science – thus media – as the expression of male instances. This work is to
be read as a thoughtful investigation to which Science and Technology
Studies feminist scholars have much contributed. Giomi and Magaraggia
have focused their attention on media products starting from the classical
assumption that, in order to narrate the social world, media draw concep-
tual and linguistic tools from the same social world, and, by narrating it,
they also build it in a certain measure. Within this framework, the authors
relate gender violence, gender order, and media representations one to the
other, in order to support the idea that violence representations contribute
to the process of gender status, and that gender representations supply the
construction of violence. They show how this double process is achieved
between different media objects gathered around two discursive knots, i.e.
violence against women and – on the other hand – violence performed by
