New media spread fastest by being folded into existing local practices

Evidence

And yet, despite this proliferation, Pera would consolidate itself as a film cluster; in fact, as the cluster. It might be tempting to ‘explain away’ this fact through a cultural-essentialist reasoning that cinema was alien to the traditional Muslim Turkish domestic culture. This explanation, however, would not apparently be valid: on the contrary, as the first-ever historian of Turkish cinema, Rakim Calapala, had stressed, the Muslim masses had little difficulty in embracing cinema (Calapala, 1947, cited in Mutlu, 2002, p. 98); pointing to the fact that cafes showcasing traditional shadow plays were used to expose Turks to cinema, Arslan convincingly argues (2005, p. 31) that ‘the import had become local’ as an ‘existing setup’ was used ‘to incorporate [it] into existing spectatorial practices.’ — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 822

Categorization

• QUESTION: If Muslim audiences embraced cinema immediately, what non-cultural mechanism actually kept the industry’s firms fixed in Pera?
• STORYSTEM: Shadow-play cafes as the covert distribution channel for a Western novelty — a strong engine for a story about imported technology going local.