Kittler, Friedrich (1943—2011) German media theorist born in Rochlitz. His family moved to Lahr in 1958 to escape from East Germany. He went to University in Freiburg, studying Romance philology, German studies, and philosophy. He completed his doctorate on Swiss author and poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in 1976 and his habilitation on modern German literary history in 1984. He worked at Kassel University and the Ruhr University between 1986 and 1993. In 1993 he was appointed to the chair of media aesthetics and history at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Influenced by the work of Derrida, Jacques, Foucault, Michel, and Lacan, Jacques, and writing against the hermeneutics conventions embodied in the work of Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Kittler developed a discourse analysis of media history that focuses on the fact of media technology, rather than its specific content. In contrast to McLuhan, Herbert Marshall, Kittler did not treat media as a prosthetic extension of ‘man’, but rather argued that media---or, the inscription system (Aufschreibesysteme) as he called it---creates the necessary conditions in which ‘man’ can come into being. Kittler’s most well-known works in English are Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990) and Gramophone Film Typewriter (1999).