This essay discusses what the topical approaches to history—digital history and different concepts of historical temporality—have to offer for media history studies especially in terms of defining a common theory of media history. The outcome of the essay is that since often media historical approaches essentially take the plurality of media historical time and the layering of media forms for granted, these new trends do not provide a key for a ‘grand theory’ of media history. Whilst the new possibilities that digital history provides for media history are substantial, the advantages are first and foremost methodological. Since media history essentially consists of both breaks and outbreaks, different layers with a different logic and tempo in which the context of a given time and space is crucial, to find one’s own body of theory for media history is not even necessary.

本文讨论了历史的主题方法——数字历史和不同的历史时间性概念——必须为媒体史研究提供什么，特别是在定义媒体史的共同理论方面。这篇文章的结果是，由于媒体历史研究方法通常本质上认为媒体历史时间的多元化和媒体形式的分层是理所当然的，这些新趋势并没有为媒体历史的“宏大理论”提供关键。虽然数字历史为媒体历史提供了巨大的新可能性，但其优势首先在于方法论。由于媒体历史本质上由中断和爆发组成，具有不同逻辑和节奏的不同层次，其中给定时间和空间的背景至关重要，