intro to media studies

media

artifacts and technologies that process, store, and/or transmit information

Theodor Adorno

german philosopher

marxist

“media is not of the masses but it should be”

Walter Benjamin

german jewish philosopher

marxist

“the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”

Benedict Anderson

anglo-irish political scientist

printing press made way for “imagined communities”

Marshall McLuhan

Canadian media theorist

“the medium is the message”

“Understanding Media: the extensions of man”

imagined communities

sense of connection with a large group of people who you won’t meet

origin of media studies

emerged in mid-twentieth century

originally primarily of content and mass media

most recent inclusions in media studies

algorithims, infrastructure, AI, data, surveillance, connection between mental health and social media

Nakamura

“mass media does not hail all bodies equally”

“often fundamentally at odds with the aesthetic and economic needs of the people they claim to liberate”

tiled rendering

an assemblage of images/data into one whole representation

*the standard means of constructing digital images

ICT’s

information and communications technologies

digital divide

the gap between those who have access to modern ICT’s and those who dont

mechanical reproduction

the advent of photography and print technology

*the democratization of art*

art is more accessible

montage

a sequence of images arranged one after another to convey a particular meaning

Richard Schechner

“performance is twice performed behavior”

“visual culture as performace”

twice performed behavior

all forms of human activity are a performance assembled from other actions we have taken in the past

Judith Butler

“gender is a performance”

“what are the categories through which one sees”

form over content

McLuhan doesnt care what the content means, but the impact of technology itself

the medium

short form vs a long book

the message

ex: short form videos train our attention span to crave fast, visual content

prioritizes immediate entertainment over deep focus(long book)

John Berger

the invention of the camera changed the way people see art

technological determinism

primary and only driving force of social, economic, cultural progress

technology decides history

oversimplifies how society works by claiming digital tools dictate human behavior

the global village

electronic media shrinks the planet into a single community where everyone is interconnected

“the globe is no more than a village” -McLuhan

overlooks that digital access is not global