On The Writing Practice And Research Orientation Of Friedrich Kittler's Media History Study

With the development of media technologies,the media itself has a growing influence on people's feeling,living and people's usage of media.Traditional communication researches are basically based on texts and contents,which cannot meet the needs of explaining the current communication conditions and media environments,nor can it help to understand the history of media itself.The emergence of media studies(science)is a response to this challenge brought by technology developing.As an important scholar of media history and media research,Friedrich Kittler brings new inspirations and research experiences to media research.The analysis of the specific practice and research orientation of Kittler's book on media history provides a very important practical and theoretical reference for us to think about the development direction of media history study.This paper is mainly carried out from the following three aspects: firstly,briefly summarize Kittler's life experience and academic career;Secondly,introduce and analyze four representative works of Kittler,which contain Discourse Network 1800/1900,Gramophone Film typewriter,Optical Media and The Truth of Technological Word;Thirdly,through the comparison between Kittler's thoughts and his thoughts sources,and the analysis of Kittler's influence on the research direction of media history,find Kittler's research orientation of media history.Through reading,analyzing and comparing,this paper concludes that Kittler is adhered to the materialistic concept on media,and he developed an “engineering”method on media history study.During the tracing of the rupture of culture,Kittler found media's impact on culture development.He finds the priority of media,which means that media condition forms the historical conditions that allow culture to“select,storage,and process its relevant data.” His media aporiori and information materialism concepts has greatly raised the academic community's attention to media itself.At the same time,this paper extracts Kittler's media view and media history research method.Through the introduction of Shannon's information model,Kittler opened up a research path that is different from the tradition media history research way.Kittler refuse to view media as an “intermediary” between human and the outside,instead,for Kittler,media is absolutely some kind of engineering structure.Hence media study can avoid touching the feeling and meaning related with human.With that research orientation,kittle can complete media study from the perspective of media itself.Kittler focuses on the “engineering” structure of media,ask about how a media engages in the selection,storage,processing course of data,and the actual functions and essential differences between different mediums during that course.Kittler's research orientation broadened the research of media history study.