Media Culture Final

Gender

Seen as most basic point of identity, social taught & culturally inscribed.

Body

Contested terrain, competing meanings & ideas about gender played out.

Gender roles

Inessential & culturally given, appear natural.

Voyeuristic scopophilia

Controlling gaze for sexual pleasure, wanting to have object.

Narcissistic scopophilia

Pleasure in looking at human form, wanting to be object.

Repressive hypothesis

Idea that sexuality has been increasingly repressed & confined within bourgeois family, rendered secret & silenced.

Theories of descent

Race as primordial element of identity rooted in body.

Theories of consent

Race defined by self-ascription & subjective belief.

Race

Floating signifier; category of identity produced through politics on terrain of culture.

Racial project

Erase culture & assimilate into white colonial culture.

Natal alienation

Institutionalized exclusion & cultural degradation.

Subjective dehumanization

Constitutes individual as sign for all people of colour & wipes out specificity.

Stereotype

Rigid, simplistic form of typified, fixes boundaries of normal to express power.

Racial stereotypes

Denigrated second term if binary made to live as pure difference in relation to what has historically been naturalized as center of meaning

Racial formation

Ways race maps social & cultural meaning onto different types of human bodies, changes from place to place & in different historical moments.

Decolonization

Generative & creative, producing new ways of being in world.

Intersectionality

Co-implication of forms of identity create distinct experiences of oppression with different impacts.

Medium theory

Materiality of communications media; intervene in world out of balance.

Innis

Focused on empire & communications, material staples.

Staples thesis

Resources exploited & extracted by tech. & interests of foreigners, leading to unstable & dependent nations.

Media

Means by which people & institutions bind themselves together.

Constitutive power

Formal structures & material elements of different media of communication.

Dirt research

Flow of material goods, systems developed around them & dynamic interconnections between them.

Dialectical relationship

Mutually shape each other in on-going process.

Time bias

Durable media.

Space bias

Light & portable media.

Technological habitat

Produce certain identities & communities.

Monopolies of knowledge

Society as cluster of mediated expressive forms; individuals control institutions & tech. wield power.

University

Mechanisms for disseminating information.

Infrastructure studies

Systems function in background of everyday uses/forms of expression & grow up around them.

Infrastructures

Invisible, unnoticed material systems & structures upon which our everyday life depends.

Critical infrastructure studies

Distribution of media.

Computationalism

Age dominated by computers, equating humans to machines.

Critical data studies

Explores challenges posed by reliance of large data sets to make decisions about lives.

Big data

Collection of data as dominant engine of world exonomy.

Algorithm

Opinion embedded in math; attempts to compute human needs into info.

Recursive

Breaks down into smaller parts & fixes to solve biggest problem.

Predictive

Drive by inference & designed to solve projected problems, optimizing results.

Culture machines

Operate dialectically; food on input & solve for future problems, shaping & changing inputs.

Data subjects

Make certain things/people visible & others invisible, replacing human forms of expertise & judgement.

Algorithmic

Connotes special kind of social power.

Algorithmic impacts

World-making; frame world in certain, interested ways that have agency.

Invisible class

System predicated on metrics & rewards, designed & handed out in unaccountable ways.

AI Hype

Marketing jargon (myth-making) makes AI future feel inevitable, works by anthropomorphizing (humanizing) tech.