This week's Disquiet Junto coincided with me re-reading Jonathan Sterne's excellent book, The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. In it, Sterne traces the pre-history of sound reproducing technology and demonstrates that each new technology was less a brand new era in human development, but rather a new way to meet an old desire. Examining the cultural forces that led to these developments in sound technology really does feel like studying pre-history, because the mediums themselves very quickly took on a life of their own and created their own set of new desires, as Marshall McLuhan repeatedly observed.