| Across many everyday contexts and technological devices, we encounter over and over again a mechanical-translation act called scanning, performed by flatbed scanners, photocopiers, barcode readers, televisions, x-ray airport security scanners, fax machines, retinal eye scanning, MRI scanning, ultra-sonography, and earth-orbiting satellite imaging. What all of these separate devices have in common is the same core technological mechanism and mode of action---the mapping of differences along a surface to be known by a lensless apparatus that detects via probe-signals. Despite being mobilized to very different uses and within a large diversity of networks and media assemblages, scanners arise from a common genealogical source---the conceptual union of photography to telegraphy. Scanners appear everywhere in our modern infrastructure. It is impossible to avoid these devices, as they mediate even the most basic transactions in everyday life, such as purchasing food at the grocery store or checking out a book at a college library. Yet neither historians of technology nor media scholars have addressed this quotidian device which enables so much of modern bureaucracy in business, government and education to function. While the scanner's absence from the landscape of critical thought precisely marks the problem of the unremarkable in viour scholarship, the metaphor of scanning remains present in both common and scholarly discourse. Scanning may, at various times, stand in for a model of attention, a form of reading, or serve as a simile for searching and/or diagnosing. The imagination of the scan well precedes its appearance as a technology, which further indicates the necessity of understanding this unexamined medium. This dissertation project investigates the object of the scanner as a term for organizing the imagination and materialization of an entire suite of technologies that we encounter daily. Conceived as a social history of technology married to a film and media studies paradigm, this dissertation examines the scanner as a form of machine-perception that, while it extends the dominant conception of the camera-prosthesis, stands as its own unique model of perceptual mediation. The scanner remains unique in media studies because so much of its identity depends upon the place it holds within the historical conditions of the intermedial assemblage in which it has been mobilized. Through a series of case studies in which I loosely divide scanning technologies into genres of perceptual and epistemological function, I triangulate the epistemic role of the scanner in each of its respective media networks. |
