Jonathan Sterne. Mp3

Jonathan Sterne's first book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003), helped launch the wave of scholarship now called sound studies, and more recently he is the editor of what may become the definitive anthology in the field, The Sound Studies Reader (2012). He is also co-editor, with Lisa Gitelman, of a new media-studies book series, “Sign, Storage, Transmission,” in which this book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, is the first entry. I mention this background because to those unfamiliar with the author's work, the title of the latest book could be misleading, suggesting a subject both topically narrow and historically shallow. On the contrary, like William Blake seeing “a world in a grain of sand,” Sterne hears a whole history of ideas about hearing and communication in an MP3 file. Indeed, MP3s take on an importance in inverse proportion to their diminutive size, as Sterne unpacks the layers of ideas, values, assumptions, institutional dynamics, and commercial aspirations underlying the format's development and rise to global ubiquity

Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Media, Communication, and Education