Digital Media and Information in Society/Student Journals/MyNameIsPixul/Critical Analysis of Phonographs and Photographs

The Analysis

In 1905, Austrian physicist Ernst Mach published Knowledge and Error, a work in which he reflects upon what the future of human knowledge could be. He specifically links it to improvements of picture and sound recording because, as he puts it, "Colour photography and cinematography will further enhance the natural look, and the phonograph will do the same on the acoustic side."

Sabine Plaud uses this sentiment as a starting point for her 2007 paper, "On Photographs and Phonographs: New Techniques of Recording and their Influence on Mach's Conception of Knowledge". She points out that when Mach's paper was published, phonographs were used primarily for recording speech, rather than music, which is the reason why he identifies the phonograph as furthering human knowledge. Plaud compares the writings of Mach with those of other authors who touched on similar ideas in order to analyze how accurate their predictions were; she uses other academic papers for this purpose.

Plaud concludes with another quote from Mach: "Words are comparable to type, which spare the repetition of written signs and thus serve a multitude of purposes; or to the few sounds of which our numberless different words are composed. Language, with its helpmate, conceptual thought, by fixing the essential and rejecting the unessential, constructs its rigid pictures of the fluid world on the plan of a mosaic, at a sacrifice of exactness and fidelity but with a saving of tools and labor."

(The paper)