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logical further development for photography in the media environment. If one looks back at the history of how it was used in the mass media, which was only briefly touched on here, the most recent technological change in photography, i.e. its connection to electronic media, represents nothing more than an extension of precisely these media functions and their being made more effective. It was not until the advent of the Internet that the options aired by the early phototexts of a non-site-specific availability and an unrestricted circulation of images could actually be redeemed. In doing so, this continuation of objectives and applications, which from the beginning were associated with photography, oscillates between democratization and commercialization, between the ideal of a general accessibility of media technology and the problem of its dependence on the mechanisms of the economy and industrial production.

Digitalization

The technological transformation of photography is

 

a natural consequence of its intermediality. In the same way the screening process constituted the condition for its integration into the medium of mass printing, its digitalization is the condition for its implementation into the universal medium of the computer. The substitution of the analog through the digital—or more precisely: analogo- numeric—process took plate in several stages and on different technological levels: that of the recording, the processing, and the transmission of data.

From a media-archeological perspective, the screening of photographic masters for the purpose of their automatic transfer onto printing plates can already be described as a form of digitalization: The continuous tonal values of a photochemical master are broken down into discreet units, i.e. black dots and white blanks. [38] This breaking down is at the same time the condition for coupling photography with electric telegraphy. [39] , on the media historical connection between photography and telegraphy. In order to be able to transmit photographic images per telegraph, the image to be sent is screened into fields, which are then assigned discreet signs according to

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