Folk Media: Alan Lomax’s Deep Digitality

Abstract

This article reconsiders American folklorist and broadcaster Alan Lomax as a medium theorist. I examine how Lomax’s engagement first with the phonograph and then with digital computers came to inflect his understanding of “the folk” (or at least how this tendency is inscribed across his writings and projects). I also use Lomax’s engagement with media to critique aspects of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s work. I argue that Lomax’s “deep digitality” is not an abstract, sovereign world of code rendering particular media finally obsolete (as it is for Kittler); Lomax simply sought to plug Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s “nomad”—which he just calls “the folk”—into the machine. Lomax thus points toward a fascinatingly utopian assemblage of always-embodied voices and digital systems.

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