Off the Record
The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America
By David Morton
Rutgers University Press
David L. Morton examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology, using the history of sound recording as the focus. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity. Morton’s approach to the topic differs from most previous works, which have examined the technology’s social impact, but not the reasons for its existence. Recording culture in America emerged, Morton writes, not through the dictates of the technology itself but in complex ways that were contingent upon the actions of users.
Each of the case studies in the book emphasizes one of five aspects of the culture of recording and its relationship to new technology, at the same time telling the story of sound recording history. One of the misconceptions that Morton hopes to dispel is that the only important category of sound recording involves music. Unique in his broad-based approach to sound technology, the five case studies that Morton investigates are :- The phonograph record
- Recording in the radio business
- The dictation machine
- The telephone answering machine, and
- Home taping
Off the Record is a novel and exciting look at the relationship of technology and culture in an area which touches our everyday lives.
The most fascinating aspect of Off the Record involves tracing the complex paths by which devices that are now commonplace originally came into being, gained markets, and slowly evolved. Each chapter is filled with brave hopes, false starts, mistaken social assumptions, and solutions that were almost, but not quite, right. Morton does a fine job of demonstrating multiple contingencies in the by-no-means-certain evolution of now-familiar technologies.
DAVID MORTON is research historian for the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University.
Introduction
High culture, high fidelity, and the making of recordings in the American record industry
The end of the "canned music" debate in American broadcasting
"Girls or machine?": gender, labor, office dictation, and the failure of recording culture
The message on the answering machine: recording and interpersonal communication
The tape recorder, home entertainment, and the roots of American recording culture
High culture, high fidelity, and the making of recordings in the American record industry
The end of the "canned music" debate in American broadcasting
"Girls or machine?": gender, labor, office dictation, and the failure of recording culture
The message on the answering machine: recording and interpersonal communication
The tape recorder, home entertainment, and the roots of American recording culture