“Neither good, nor bad; nor neutral”: he Historical Dispositif of Communication Technologies Andreas Fickers Introduction In 1985, Melvin Kranzberg, then professor for history of technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding editor of the journal Techno- logy and Culture, delivered the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in which he explained what had al- ready come to be known as Kranzberg’s Laws—“a series of truisms,” accord- ing to Kranzberg, “deriving from a longtime immersion in the study of the development of technology and its interactions with sociocultural change” (Kranzberg 1986, 544). he aim of this article is to relect on Kranzberg’s irst law, which basical- ly says that technology is—in sociological terminology—an actor category (Latour 2007). 1 Conceptualizing technology as actor category means that to think about the agency of technology and technological artefacts and to relect upon the social and cultural meaning of technology and what it does to those using it for speciic purposes—for example for journalists producing television news, documentaries or radio features. As historian of technology and media, I’m especially interested in how technology is co-producing our perception of reality and how we can study and conceptualize the complex relationship between media technologies and mediated realities. Rather than focusing in a more narrow sense on the role of technology in the ield of journalism, this article relects on the symbolic meanings in- scribed into and attached to media technologies in order to demonstrate how the discourse of “newness”—that is the technological imaginary that accom- 1 he six laws are: 1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral; 2. Invention is the mother of necessity; 3. Technology comes in packages, big and small; 4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, non-technical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions; 5. All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant; 6. Technology is a very human activity—and so is the history of technology.