Intriguing review of the new book “What is Media Archaeology?”Near the beginning of What is Media Archaeology?, the author notes that the resilience of vinyl records, 8-bit games and Sony Walkmans as ‘zombie media’ correlates with the childhood preferences of a generation that is now hitting early-middle age. This is surely correct. Nintendo and Sega have become a new generation’s rocking horses and train sets. Without wanting to be too reductive, you can’t help but notice that media archaeology, as practiced here, is a mode of critical analysis historiographical essay plus that brings together many of the formative cultural building blocks of the Generation X demographic. Parikka drops names with the same rapidity that 1990s rappers namechecked brands. (And there’s often reason to be grateful for this: What is Media Archaeology? opened up several new literatures for me.) Alongside the sophisticated middle-class consumer preferences and jaundiced post-Cold War politics sit references to all the popular cultural theories imbibed by the part of that generation that stayed on at university to get PhDs. In this sense, much of What is Media Archaeology? seems peculiarly familiar and second hand, even as it stakes out ostensibly new territory. A valid, albeit narrow way, to understand the book’s argument is as the intellectual conspicuous consumption of a Western educated scholar of thirty-to-forty something vintage. As Kittler himself attempted to historicise how the theories of thinkers like Freud and Lacan were shaped by changes in media technology, it doesn’t seem wrong to subject Parikka, a lecturer/practitioner at Winchester School of Art, to similar treatment. ‘Media are not pseudopods for extending the human body’, wrote Kittler, ‘they follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it’. This is a sentiment that the generation which grew up hiding behind the sofa from Skynet’s cyborg agents can instinctively share.