#edison's_light

[ecbrenn]

Edison projected into various social spaces the possibility of a technology of power and incandescent light, making it intelligible in terms of prior communications concerning his own accomplishments and wizardry, prior gas lighting technologies, prior electrical accomplishments, and existing systems of property, patents, news, finances, politics, technological communication, and domestic life.

This is pertinent to my project… invention from prior knowledge/prior meaningful spaces. Adds the idea of invention out of prior discourses or frames of reference. Bazerman 349. 

[ecbrenn]

As a technology on its way to successful integration finds its satisfactory representation within each system, it takes on system-appropriate meanings and loses other meanings which are not germane to the discourse. In this way, the technology becomes something different in each representational realm: a legal entity, a financial entity, an end product of a production process, a series of costs, a social desirable, and so on. If it fails to take on any essential identity, its presence as a potentially successful technology is to that extent weakened, perhaps with negative consequences for the presence of the technology.

What it means to "invent light" is different depending on who you're presenting the invention to… Bazerman 339. 

[ecbrenn]

Inventing Invention

I had a meta moment while I was reading The Languages of Edison's Light, and it stemmed from buying my book used on Amazon. I read it through the lens of this class: invention. That dictated what I found important as I read--the idea that inventing light was not just about inventing light; the invention of a persona surrounding Edison, of his credibility, of the utility of the product, of this masculine world becoming feminine; invention of a material object facilitated by text... in short, I invented the salient topics as I read. I invented a lens that I then applied to the book, and it was an "invention" lens. 

But there are other ways this book could have been read, and I caught a glimpse of some of those lenses as I worked my way through Bazerman's text. There is the lens of genre, the lens of communication, etc. And then there is the lens employed by the previous owner of this book: the lens of fact gathering. Whoever owned my book previously underlined liberally, and one of their primary concerns was with facts. They included marginal notes reiterating the "important" points on each page--dates, people's names, info about patents. Whoever read this book previously invented their own meaning, which was to learn about Edison. To remember dates and particulars. Just as Edison built a light that was, in reality, so many things, so too did this book offer layers waiting to be mined for meaning.