7. Media Archaeology and Critical Theory of Technology

This chapter examines the ways in which media archaeology addresses technological change. The term media archaeology encompasses a range of different approaches and attitudes to technology, from those that seem to embrace a certain kind of technological determinism to others that use archaeological perspectives to critique the idea of progress and produce nonlinear accounts of technical history. The aim here is to place these accounts in the wider context of critical theory of technology. The chapter pursues this argument through a close reading of the work of Walter Benjamin, Wolfgang Ernst and Bernard Stiegler.