New media technologies incite powerful ambivalences in their earliest users. However, it is this resistance to new media that helps to shape media forms (the novel, the television sitcom) and the media practices (absorptive reading for pleasure, being a "couch potato). My comparative account of these episodes in the articulation of print and television avoids a normalizing developmental model of media transition and offers some lessons for our ongoing development of the Internet as an infrastructure for humanities knowledge. 

This paper looks at the ways in which television is constructed as a cultural object. It suggests that despite the relative antiquity of the medium, its status and uses are still a matter of contestation. In this, a focus on the constitution of and contestation over new communication technologies draws attention away from the fact that older communications technologies are by no means stable in their cultural positioning and meanings. I would argue then that while vernacular theory takes television as a cultural resource of programs which might archived and understood as 'heritage', academic criticism has largely taken the programs to be unimportant. In this, I see continuing contestation over what this 'old communications technology' is, and the uses to which is should be put.

The field of the history of the book, an area of steadily increasing scholarly activity, has often sought in recent years to apply the lessons learned from the study of new printed media to the emergence of new electronic media. This paper will argue that, in many ways, these lessons may not be as useful as we historians of the book hope. Differentiating between revolutions in media and revolutions in distribution, using the "publishing revolution" in 19th century America as an example, I hope to examine the ways in which the history of the book can help us understand the ways people use new electronic media, as well as the ways in which the field hinders such understanding.