Lecture2Review

=Lecture One Review= This is just a copy of of the Professor Jones powerpoint text to use as a reference/guideline, add any notes or links you may have that elaborates on his points for each heading. toc

Media Analysis
• Analysis of media form, genre • Technological analysis and determinism: • Critical political economy • Cultural Studies

Brainstorming Genre
• What defines a genre? • How can we break down definitions to increase analytical precision? • What benefits exist in doing so? To whom? And when do we hit a point of ridiculousness in doing so? • What genres exist?

Principles to consider..
• All media forms can be classified into genres (some deliberately or inadvertently bridge or mix forms) • All media forms involve technology (in the broadest sense of the word) • All media have economic, political and cultural consequence • Holistic understanding of media systems leads to a more grounded, less biased understanding

Mass/Public Media & Society
• C. Wright Mills backgrounder • Institutionalization of mass society and its shaping of mass media (sociotechnical system)

Notes:
Mills is an American Sociologist who studied the power structure in the United States. 

Public v. Mass
Public • Localized culture • Horizontal power structure • Relatively equal ratio of leaders/followers • “Jack of all trades” Mass • Global culture, with little individuation • Centralized power structures • Few leaders, many followers • Specialization and division of labour

Implications for Media Form
• Mass media for mass audiences in mass societies • Competition for amount of eyeballs, media as big business • Mass media as central bonding experience • Mass media as centralized cultural control structure

Demassification
• Rise of the postmodern / postindustrial / information age • Individuals and localized communities reemerge and gain in importance • Media as tools of creation and expression, not simply passive channels • Examples?

Society and Media as STS
• Sociotechnical systems - not technologically determined or socially shaped, but a mix of the two forces operating concomitantly • In this case, does mass culture drive the formation of mass media? Or, is it the other way around?

Manovich
• Language of New Media - distilling the core essence of new media forms into eight propositions (a good example of media genre analysis for the Wiki?) • More of a technological determinism approach, although does look at social and economic factors • N.B. “New Media” is not a chronological distinction (although newer examples are more likely to be “new”)

New Media vs. Cyberculture
• Proposes a distinction - new media studies as studies of new cultural forms and structures vs. the social use (e.g., gaming culture, digital divide issues) • Is this a clear distinction?

Notes:

 * Cyberculture
 * networking
 * social
 * New Media
 * computing
 * culture

New Media as Distribution
• Looks at new media explicitly as channel - mediated through digital transmission, in whatever form • Is this useful? Three limits noted - a) media forms change b) are changing towards network distribution and c) is there any common ground b/w computer mediated forms, anyway?

New Media as Software Controlled
• Use of data structures, modularity, automation to create the cultural form • Digital photography/video as example; due to common technical standards for coding and manipulation, media objects can be manipulated (sometimes automatically) with ease • Other examples - e.g., embedded Google content

Cultural conventions
• Uneven development - just because you can represent and manipulate something in digital form doesn’t mean it will work will in practice (e.g., film) • “morph” or “composite” - earlier conceptual models survive transition to new media (e.g., desktop metaphor vs. alternatives)

Aesthetics of New Media
• New media technologies create their own established aesthetics • Example: DV movies and cheaper amateur production (http://48hourfilm.com/) • Builds on previous models, however - e.g., Quicktime vs. Kinetoscope

New Media as Efficient
• Computing technology executes various tasks considerably faster - e.g., 3D animation, composite photography • Efficiency opens up new possibilities and phenomena (e.g., DIY photo/video editing)

New Media as Metamedia
• New media repurposes old media, combines existing media sources (e.g., photo montage, web mashing, music sampling) • Not new, just qualitatively different (and more efficient) than previous uses (e.g., 1920s avant-garde)

New Media as Nexus of Art and Computing
• Computing becomes a more right-brain, creative process - a tool to represent and create new realities vs. simply crunch numbers (although there’s lots of that still required…)

McLuhan - Laws of Media
• Universal dynamic of media change • Represented as tetrad - four intersecting concomitant influences • Grouped into two forces - ground (historical/cultural convention) and figure (emergent forces/media)

Four Forces
• Enhancement (positive change, amplification) • Retrieval (recovery of past forces) • Reversal (new or resurgent challenges jeopardizing new media) • Obsolescence (erosion of older values/forces)