IMS FINAL

Introduction to Media Studies -- Study Guide for Final Exam (Thursday December 19)  

Fall 2024  

Be sure that you understand the following terms and concepts and how to apply  them:  

  • Socrates argument about writing

    • The rhetorical performance is about persuasion through verbal performance and intonance, not by reading something that has already been written

    • You can’t get the full gist of what someone is saying if you don’t know their tone

    • Example: People rely on written texts instead of exercising their memory. Socrates argues that writing encourages forgetfulness

    • I’m more likely to remember things I’m studying for if I recite it out loud or watch a video/lecture on it rather than if I’m just reading information off of a piece of paper.

  • Public sphere  

  • Idealized concept where private citizens come together to discuss the pressing issues of society

    • Could be physical, social, or media

  • Habermas’ idea of the ideal public sphere is:

    • A social setting outside of the state, the family, and the economy where the public can come together to discuss issues and topics. 

    • Resembles a participatory democracy where private interests are disregarded and public opinion can be formed.

  • Social Media: “ideal” public sphere because it brings together a broader public not limited to a physical place, also adheres to the role of stimulants, as social media and technology is a type of addictive stimulant. 

    • Role of anonymity allows for more broader ideas to be shared with safety

    • Twitter (X), youtube, and reddit are examples of social media platforms that allow for these public spheres. Whatsapp, messages, snapchat, and instagram do not allow for a discussion, it is more 1 to 1. 

  • Public spheres are disappearing because of a massive upward movement in wealth, struggles with income inequality.

    • Low-income areas/individuals are usually less educated about political issues because they don’t have as much access to engaging in discourse in public spheres (lack of time, money, and spaces in general)

    • Highlights the idea that public spheres are not accessible to all

  • Ideology 

    • Ideology - the values and beliefs that structure the society that we live in

    • A particular thing can change meanings in different contexts

    • Bros but indispensable, shared set of values and beliefs through which individuals live out their complex relations to a range of social structures

    • Widely varies and exist at all levels of all cultures

    • Inform our everyday lives in often subtle and barely noticeable forms

    • Manifested in widely shared social assumptions about not only the way things are but the way we all know things should be

    • You should learn the tools of semiotics in order to understand the myths of the society that we live in

  • Interpellation 

    • How we are “hailed” by ideologies/messages, that say “hey you!”

    • We are hailed or summoned by ideologies, which “recruit us as their authors and their essential subject”

    • We are “always ready” subjects- spoken by and for the ideological discourses which greet us at birth and before, into which we are born and are asked to find out place

    • This is not only about how we are addressed by images/text/words etc. it is also about how we are shaped by the process of interpellation to believe those rules

    • Hey you, police siren, ads, pop culture, political speeches, etc

    • Interpellation is a collective address to many that is made to feel personal - we all experience it as personal

    • We can reject it - we can register when we don’t feel spoken to 

    • It feels good to share the dominant values of a society and to feel a sense of belonging in society

    • It is often difficult to reject the dominant values and beliefs of any given society (to resist interpellation)

  • Hegemony and counter-hegemony 

    • Hegemony

      • Antonio Gramsci introduced the concept of hegemony

        • Dominant ideologies are often presented as common sense

        • Dominant ideologies are in tension with other forces and hence constantly in flux

        • Relations of domination do not involve coercion but consent

        • Dominant class wins the consent of subordinate classes to a system that necessitates their subordination

        • The ways a dominant class leads in a given society, even those are the most disadvantaged are incited to believe in the very system that oppresses them 

        • No single class has hegemony, it’s a state or condition of a culture arrived through negotiations

        • Ideas, values, and beliefs circulate through society. Ideas become more dominant not based on a system of coercion, but through consent

        • Constant struggle against challenges

    • Counter-hegemony

      • Relationships of power/class are constantly in flux, hence dominant ideologies must constantly be reaffirmed

      • Counter-hegemonic forces, such as political movements or subversive cultural elements emerge and question the status quo of how things are

      • They are often incorporated into the dominant culture

      • Ideologies are in tension with other forces and hence constantly in flux

  • Panopticon – panoptic gaze  

    • In panopticon prison, a central watchtower “looks” upon the prisoners, yet they can never tell if the power is manned or not

    • Prisoners self-regulate because they always feel watched

    • Major effect is to include in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power

    • Opposite of dungeon, visibility is trap

    • Power should be visible and unverifiable (prisoner can never know if he is being observed)

    • Panopticon as metaphor - surveillance and self surveillance in society

    • Contemporary examples

      • Routine surveillance of traffic/speed - “red light cameras”

      • Surveillance cameras throughout urban environments

  • Discipline in everyday life 

    • Disciplining the body to conform - clothing, furniture, movement, posture

    • Disciplining of spatial activities - enclosures, partitions

    • Disciplining of time - the timetable

    • Correlation of the body and gesture - handwriting training

    • Body object articulation - weapon, tools

    • Creation of docile bodies which do not resist and can be of use

  • Visuality - countervisuality 

    • Visuality includes not only social codes about what can be seen and who is able and permitted to look but also the construction of built environments in relation to these looking practices

    • Visuality - how the visual is caught up in power relations that involve the structure of the visual field as well as the politics of the image

    • Power is enacted in distributed and complex ways through visual means in everyday life

    • Countervisuality - the struggle for “the right to look” which is as much about a claim to autonomy as it is about a right to challenge and disrupt the power of visuality

    • political struggle against hegemony, and that it's not just about images, but about the right to the real. He identifies three "complexes of visuality" that have supported structures of power: the plantation, the imperial, and the military-industrial complex. Mirzoeff explains how each of these complexes has been countered by groups such as the enslaved, the colonized, and opponents of war.

  • Binary oppositions (constitutive otherness)

    • Concepts from structuralism

    • Cultural units are recognized and maintained through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and differentiation 

    • Binary oppositions: culture/nature, man/woman, white/black, sacred/profane etc

    • These are reductive and distinctions between them are often actually blurred and overlapping

    • They represent power relations rather than natural categories

    • Unmarked (norm) and marked categories

    • The Other

      • Opposition of self and other

      • The other becomes the vehicle through which the self is organized 

      • In racialized terms, the other is that which is not the self, abject, foreign

      • Dehumanization - the matter of life and death

      • How is the other represented? How do we represent people and the places who are significantly different from us?

  • Race as category/social construction 

    • Race is a legal, social, and cultural investigation rather than given in nature, and the knowledge of race and its deployment are exercises of power expressed in the encounter among groups for control over resources

    • Race as a technique of power identities arbitrary differences such as skin color, hair texture, nose and eye shapes, and thinness of lips as sites of knowledge about variations in human intelligence, capacity, creativity, development, indeed what it means to be human

    • Categorizations of race:

      • Colonial legacies

      • Scientific taxonomies

      • Orientalism

      • Diversity categories

  • Foucault’s concepts of technologies of the self and technologies of power

    • not only a device but a social practice that enforces operations of power and systems

    • Demonstrated through tech of production, sign systems, power, and the self

      • Technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things

      • Technologies of sign systems - permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification

      • Technologies of power - determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject

      • Technologies of the self - permit individuals to  effect by their own means a certain number of operations on their own bodies, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality..

    • Technology = structured forms of action

    • Conjunction between power and knowledge

    • Technology is not a ‘thing’ but rather a nexus of interlinked elements

  • Analog and digital technology – qualities and differences  

    • Analog 

      • Continuous

      • ramp/dial

      • Analogous

      • Image-grain-depth 

      • Original-copy

      • Copies degrade in quality

      • Objects

    • Digital 

      • Discrete

      • steps/units

      • Encoded

      • Image-piels

      • All copies same

      • Easily reconfigured and transferable

      • Electronic storage on chips

    • The digital image

      • Transformation from analog to digital 

      • Analog image of grain/depth to digital pixel

      • Digital capacity for reconfiguration/circulation

      • Change from unique image to shared image

      • Speed-instantaneity

    • Analog - digital image

      • Analog - continuous, image grain depth, original copy, copies degrade in quality, photograph as object

      • Digital - discrete, image-pixels, all copies same, easily reconfigured and transferable, electronic storage on chips

    • Analog vs digital image 

      • Analog - unique image

      • Digital - sharing is primary value, not specific image

  • Technological determinism /Autonomous technology 

    • Tech is what pushes us forward in society

    • Primary driver of social and cultural change – THIS IS NOT TRUE!

    • Tech is NOT the primary driver of social and cultural change

    • Macluhan thinks this is true but he is WRONGGGG

    • Utopian idea: internet is so awesome

    •  Over investment of power in technology that does not include the social and cultural factors of change

  • Utopian and dystopian visions of new technologies  

    • Hopes - utopian visions of new tech will connect people, sole inefficiency, and bring world peace

    • Fears - moral panics, threat to family, out-of-control tech, autonomous technology

  • Technoscience  

    • Combination of science and technology

    • Acquisition of new knowledge, development of new tech, creation of new objects

    • Combines fields like biology, engineering, and computer science

    • Innovation driven - tech spurs discovery, very utopian view

    • Collaborative process

    • Examples include biotech, AI, space exploration, and nanotech

  • Langdon Winner’s concept of artifacts have politics 

    • Langdon Winner’s “artifacts have politics”

      • Technologies are not autonomous; they are shaped through social and economic factors through arrangements of power and authority

      • Technology is a way of carrying something–usually a message–out

    • Examples

      • Architectural designs - urban planning, campus designs, disabling designs

      • The internet - cold war context of techno-political relationships between the government and universities/companies

      • Container ships - had enormous socioeconomic consequences

  • Blackboxing of technology  

    • Blackbox - a device, system, or object which does not reveal any information about its working

    • Designed not to be adaptable

    • Pervasive use of computer chips

    • DIY CULTURE AIMS TO RESIST BLACKBOXING

  • Definition of data 

    • Data is the contemporary system of valuation

    • “Big data” is our era’s Mass Media, it is composed of many smaller bits of data

    • Data is often visualized

    • We use past data to speculate about futures

    • Data often remains hidden

    • Data is not the same as facts, when something is proven wrong it is no longer a fact, but data is always data (bad or good data)

  • Role of data in consumerism and everyday life

    • Crisis in marketing in early internet era, new tech changes audiences

    • By 2000s, understanding that Web search is key–browsing can be tracked

    • Mobile phone adds key data point: location of consumer

    • Today – high speed data brokering

    • Consenting to tracking/data collection for consumer convenience makes us vulnerable citizens

    • We are valued for our data, which we allow to be “harvested” from us

  • Digital hyperconnectivity – definition  

    • Recast social relationships – with new obligations, expectations, and anxieties

    • Converted culture into an endless stream of digital content

    • Revolutionized economic life

    • Upended politics, eroding public sphere and creating polarization

    • Permeated and colonized the self, reshaping our habits, emotions, and ways of thinking

  • Digital hyperconnectivity and how it has changed the self 

    • Hyperconnectivity and the Self

      • Early internet culture romanticized digital connectivity as enlarging the space

      • Possibilities for selfhood - playing anonymous roles, exploring parts of self, other selves, digital connectivity seen as emancipation from family, hierarchies, inequalities, unchosen obligatory communities

      • Internet ideology about liberation, libertarian individualism, entrepreneurial culture, techno meritocracy

    • The idea that people could find virtual communities to substitute for in person communities

    • Early internet ideologies - libertarian individualism, if you have good enough tech skills, you can succeed in the real world regardless of social level

    • Hyperconnectivity objectifies the self

    • HYPERCONNECTIVITY QUANTIFIES THE SELF

    • Hyperconnectivity produces the self 

      • Digital hyperconnectivity affords new opportunities to produce the self (entrepreneurial self, influencer)

    • Hyperconnectivity governs the self 

      • Encourages us to govern the self through sociotechnical systems rather than from within (through technologies of power rather than technologies of the self - Foucault

    • Hyperconnectivity has colonized the self, reorganizing our attention and reshaping our ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling

    • Digital hyperconnectivity in relation to the self - it’s an extension of self

      • Objectifies the self by creating new ways of seeing ourselves from the point of view of others which is done through constant engagement

      • We are seeing ourselves externally through the eyes of others – when you’re on IG, you’re thinking about who will see it and how they will see it

      • Looking at yourself like an object

      • Quantifies the self

      • All selves become quantified by steady diets of numbers and data

      • HYPERCONNECTIVITY PRODUCES THE SELF

        • Affords new opportunities to produce the self

        • Through posting things where u can say whatever, you can produce this idealized version of yourself

  • The attention economy  

    • Human attention is a scarce resource in a media-saturated world, treated as a commodity by platforms, advertisers, and content creators

    • Media platforms compete for user attention, using algorithms to prioritize engaging content

    • Monetization - content is often monetized through ads and stuff where user attention = revenue

    • Consequences

      • Fragmentation - shorter attention spans, with users quickly moving between content

      • Superficial engagement - shallow or fleeting interactions with content, like “clickbait” headlines

      • Algorithmic influence shaping what users see, reinforcing echo chambers and filtering out diverse viewpoints

    • Shifts how people consumer information, entertainment over education

  • The surveillance state 

    • Governments use surveillance to control their populations, deter crime, and repress dissent and rebellion 

    • Can take many forms: automated license plate readers, facial recognition tech, monitoring social media posts, collecting data from phones, and collecting cell phone location data

    • Video surveillance cameras in cities, homes, workplace, roads - networked, panopticon view (recorded and live), police body cams, drones

    • Analog surveillance cameras (often not watched and minimally recorded) became digital surveillance networks)

  • Biometric surveillance  

    • Surveillance tech of the body

      • Facial recognition

      • Retinal scanning

      • Palm scans

      • Voice

      • Genetics (DNA fingerprinting)

    • Use of a person’s biological characteristics to identify and track them, often without their consent

  • Surveillance capitalism 

    • Uses data collection to produce market share, gain profits, and sell stuff

    • Information capitalism that aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control

    • A radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism - where valuations routinely depend on eyeballs rather than revenue as a predictor of remunerative surveillance assets

    • Epistemic inequality - unequal access to learning, vast difference of what we know and what is known about us

    • Data prediction is trading in human futures

    • Privacy is not private, it’s public

    • Surveillance dividend (lucrative markets of prediction)

    • Economies of scope (best algorithms require lots of variable data)

    • Economies of action - herding, nudging, modifying action (Pokemon Go)

    • Surveillance capitalism has turned epistemic inequality into a defining condition of our societies

    • They have knowledge and all privacy now rests with them 

  • Privacy in context of surveillance capitalism  

    • Defying surveillance capitalism

      • Using masks to avoid surveillance

      • Countervisuality

      • Certain makeup that does similar things

      • Certain drag makeup does the same

      • Anti flash outfit

      • Obfuscation - a tactic where it is the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with data and stuff

      • Noise 

      • Parody and lowbrow humor being unrecognized

      • warplay/codewords - code languages that you have with people

    • Forms of resistance to surveillance society

      • Countervisuality to facial recognition - masks, deflectors

      • Obfuscation - deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection (bots, noise, repetition)

      • Parody and lowbrow humor (being “unrecognized”)

      • Wordplay, code words

  • Facial recognition – how it works, problems with it  

    • Facial recognition scary as hell

      • On smart phones

      • At airports

      • To let people into an event or to bar them from an event

    • Problems with facial recognition

      • False positives

      • Mistaken identifications in crime cases

      • Calibrated to whiteness, misrecognizes or erases people of color

      • Used to monitor children (Tencent uses to prevent children gaming at night

      • Big data potential for fraud/hacking/crime)

  • De Certeau concepts of strategies and tactics 

    • Michel de Certeau: Tactics and Strategies 

      • Strategies are structures created by institutions through which people have to navigate (television programming schedule, surveillance cameras, turnstiles, time schedules, etc.)

      • Tactics are the small temporary gestures used to resist these systems by those without power: evading surveillance, doing personal stuff at work, using VPN, pirating content, using proxy server

  • Cyborg – in popular culture and real life  

    • Combination of machine and human

    • IRL, many individual bodies incorporate machine elements

      • Pacemakers, diabetic monitor, eye lenses, cochlear implants, prosthetic limbs

    • In movies it’s a lot more dramatic

  • Relationship of bodies to tech devices  

    • Computers wear down bodies

      • Devices are disciplining bodies to adapt to their use–by becoming so intrinsically woven into our devices, we’re changing the role of the body at work, initially primarily for women

    • Personal computing extends the above to everyone

    • Smartphone use structures the mobile body

    • Tech disciplines bodies

    • More tech are sold to respond to bodily pain of tech use

    • Implied imperative that humans must adapt to this tech use

  • The quantified self  

    • Practice of individuals using tech to track and record various aspects of daily lives

    • Like the apple watch tracking sleep aura ring tracking sleep blah blah blah

    • Goal of gaining deeper self knowledge and potentially improving wellbeing

  • Self-tracking technologies

    • Similar to stuff about the quantified self, causes people to become more conscious of certain things in life

    • Gathers, records, and analyzes data about oneself

    • Plays into social pressure

    • Can promote health, could also pressure it

  • Artificial intelligence/AI – definition, how changing work and life 

    • When we are confronted with new tech, we are faced with a lot of hope and a lot of fear

    • “Smart” machines can make unsmart users 

      • Socrates warning that new tech can also deskill – we don’t remember things as often because we don't have to

    • Machine “intelligence” makes us question/need to define human intelligence

    • Dystopian Futures of Science Fiction

      • Fears of humans losing control of their destinies because of technological advances, machines, artificial intelligence

      • Fears of destruction of planet by technologies unchecked by humans

      • Equation of science with rationality is seen at expense of emotion, empathy

      • Fear that autocratic regimes will use technologies to control citizens completely

      • Rejection of technological optimism

    • Depictions of science fiction AI have elements of emotion, humanness

    • Fear of stealing away jobs

    • Uses of AI

      • Search engines

      • Digital assistants

      • Social media

      • Online shopping

      • Job screenings/interviews

      • A lot more

    • Game changer of generative AI

      • Aims to create new data – aims to make more objects that look like the data it was trained on (prior to this AI was predictive)

      • It generates texts, images, video, etc

      • Tarleton gillespie - “Generative AI and the Politics of Visibility”

        • Generative AI can reify, demean, and erase social groups and traffic in stereotypes

        • marked/unmarked - when prompt does not specify unmarked identity, it generates normative narratives (“tyranny of the unmarked”

        • (“superficial clumsy diversity”) emphasis on genre in AI replicates heteronormativity/whiteness

        • Generative AI tend to reanimate the historic imbalances of visibility in media

        • As designed it is generic, centrist, normative, and banal

      • Genres tend to replicate norms

    • What are the actual threats of AI?

      • Deskilling at work and in daily lives (writing and reading skills, memory)

      • Worker displacement

      • Loss of control over decision making

      • AI hallucinations

        • AI is still crude

        • ChatGPT create another character who spun out a whole narrative

        • Machine gets hallucinatory

        • There are parts of how its working that aren’t entirely understood by the programmers that produce something hallucinatory

      • Normalization of the role of AI in everyday life

      • Emotional attachment to nonhuman entities

      • Inherent biases embedded in these systems get normalized