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Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America. By David Morton. Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. xii + 220. Photographs, notes, index. Paper, $22. ISBN: Cloth 0-813-52746-5; paper 0-813-52747-3.
In recent years, historians of technology have begun to move away from technical studies of innovation in order to examine technology users. David Morton has added a sociocultural analysis of sound recording in America to this growing literature with his new book, Off the Record.
Off the Record traces the cultural history of sound recording from the invention of the phonograph in 1877 to the widespread adoption of cassette tapes in the 1980s, focusing on how new technologies fit into (or in the case of failed technologies, did not fit into) specific social contexts. Much of Morton's analysis of sound recording before 1940 concentrates on corporate development and professional recording practices, whereas his discussion of postwar recording emphasizes mass-market consumers and the various uses they made of domestic recording technologies. The book is arranged topically and includes sections on subjects as disparate as the phonograph, studio recording, magnetic recording technology, dictation equipment, and rerecording technology (e.g., cassette tapes). Although Morton does not examine the increasingly popular digital technologies of the 1980s and 1990s, such as compact discs, he speculates that the digitalization of sound recording will continue.