Kittler’s book interprets the history of media technology related to three inventions (gramophone, film and typewriter), spanning the period from the early 19th century and the present time, while also mapping the opportunities which arose from them, particularly through reflecting on changes in literature. The scholar’s approach allows for the extrapolation of the paradigms of the media and literary theory, structuralism, psychoanalysis, (electro)acoustics, and the military, and brings the element of technology into the discussion on the media constitution of man and his overcoming of this element, which shapes the next stage of this development. Tying new discursive practices to the advances in recording and reproduction technologies, and their subsequent links to the psychic apparatus (in the cybernetic sense of the word) represents a radical step, a "symbol” of which Kittler has become.