Welcome to the Media Forms blog for 2010. This is the last year for a course I’ve always enjoyed teaching. So I hope it goes out on a high note, and also that you enjoy your time studying what is a fascinating series of approached to thinking about media forms and their contexts. Please note that this blog is a continuation of last year’s, so has quite a lot of (often interesting) material from that year. I will be adding posts and links as we go.

Andrew

“It is true that all models hide a specific .. religious structure” (Flusser, writings:83).

There are a lot of ideas this week, so I thought I might post some quick, broad notes. I won’t be doing this every week, but this might be a help at this point in the course.

First up, this is useful material for the obvious reason that this bunch of ideas has come to be how we explain media events, and also lays the groundwork for how we work with media events. Less obviously, however, thinking through all these models at once make us realis that ‘To change technical models is literally to change the understanding of the world and [wo]man’s place in it‘ (Flusser, writings:78). In short, as we discussed in the lecture this week, models, theories, ideas matter—as much in media production and engagements as in analysis.

So this is useful material, but also background material (you won’t be tested on it at all, but I hope you will find it useful and return to it often .. it’s a very good summary indeed). It will form the background for our discussion of issues such as power and society, the network society, the present crisis and future in journalism (and elsewhere in media and communications), the role of media in lived experience, and even the crisis in models of how media work (such as many of those discussed in the readings).

Broadly speaking the readings cover four big themes/areas, and the tensions between them:

1. Empirical or “straight” sociological studies of media and communications, such as those surrounding media effects, often found in what is sometimes called simply American Communications studies. These focus on the details of communications (Balnaves, Donald, Shoesmith, ch4)

2. Marxist, “Neo-Marxist”, or simply put critical, big picture approaches to media and communications, such as the Frankfurt School or Cultural Studies. (Balnaves, Donald, Shoesmith, ch5)

3. The transformation of all these ideas and the processes involved, and challenging of all the above explanations for media events, in the context of recent developments in media and communications. Baudrillard’s ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ is useful here, but in fact, the advantage of the big overview we get in the two chapters from Balnaves et al is that you begin to get a clear picture of how all media theories challenge and are challenged by new theories and new media events.

4. What Vilém Flusser called, quite a while back now in the 1980s, the ‘crisis in our models’—not only for media events, but other models that are basic to cultural life. Flusser sees ‘new media’ as able to help us here (see the previous post on visualizing the financial crisis as an example perhaps). Flusser’s basic idea is that different media forms provide us with certain advantages and limits when it comes to building models for important aspects of the world/our experience. In particular, those (such as books or maps) that tend to provide spatial models, aren’t so great at dealing with more dynamic events (those that change through time). This leads to a crisis in our models that has been going on since the eighteenth century, one which more time-based media (such as video when Flusser was writing) might help us solve. Flusser also suggests that all ideas seem to end up producing models—this is really how we understand both ideas and what they might produce in the world, what we might do with these ideas. However, all models tend to embody quasi-religious assumptions.

Next week, we deal more directly with power and society issues—governance, economics and media—along with some ideas about research methods, now that we have a very broad understanding of the ideas and assumptions behind many forms of media analysis.

In week five, we begin (perhaps following Baudrillard’s ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ from this week), to ask whether networks change much of this, and if so, how.

To finish, I thought I might just list some key terms, questions and ideas mentioned in the course so far as a kind of check-list:

• What are the relations between media and communications, thinking and living?
• How do the relations between technology and culture change the above in an ongoing way?
• What is mediation?
• How do media affect things?
• Media ecology—thinking of media assemblages and their broader social/material/environmental contexts, of about what Guattari calls the interaction of the three ecologies of self/social/environment.
• What is a medium? Various definitions.
• Theories, ideas, facts, truths and models are all inter-related—but not exactly the same.
• Models are crucial if nearly always somewhat inaccurate
• The Shannon-Weaver model—the most prominent—is a linear model of sender, transmitter, signal in channel, receiver, destination.
• Media change
• Media flows (not only messages, but data, objects and commodities, etc)
• Harold Innis—material basis of media makes for different empires, different societies.
• Media ecologies are constantly shifting, evolving, mutating, diverging as much as they are converging
• All media ecologies/events/technologies/models rework the past and the future as much as, perhaps much more than, the present.
• Or, media events contain the past and push it out (differently) toward the future.
• Ian Angus on the materiality of expression (extra reading, but useful—central idea is that there is a material basis to expression, as per Innis).
• Theory, metaphor, models, media and transport are all closely related ideas.
• You can’t do without theory—even in supposedly non-theoretical everyday life. We are always theorising and putting theories to use. However, you can and should be aware of which theories you want to use (or not).
• Approaches generally frame your approach to dealing with media research. Methods are specific things you do in the process if research (eg focus groups or interviews).
• In media work, approaches, methods and concepts are often mixed.
• For us in this course, although this is somewhat arbitrary, there are something like 6 crucial periods in media theory—World Wars One and Two and the periods after, the development of satellite communications in the 1960s, of personal computing in the mid-1980s, of the web in the mid-1990s, and quite possibly now (I’ll only deal with the first two of these below).
• World War One and after—rise of democracy, fears about democracy (the ‘masses’) getting out of hand. Development of public opinion manipulation (Walter Lippmann), PR and Spin on a grand scale (Edward Bernays), along with the use and large scale-up of social sciences (eg psychology, education, sociology, media studies) in support of these aims.
• World War Two—needs of new, highly technological warfare in which “man” becomes a ‘machine in the middle’ (Paul Edwards, The Closed World), of other machines. New forms of training (eg via training films), new understanding of psychology (in battle, in post-traumatic stress disorder), new communications—and ideas about communications—developed in field of battle. Out of this comes computing, cybernetics (the science of feedback between and within humans, machines and animals), new concepts of the human mind (it’s like a computer), and much of the basis for present models of media, communications and information theory (often all of these developed by the same small group of people).
• After WW2, models of media and other related areas, such as thinking processes, start to resemble each other much more than before.
• Medium specificity (radio, but also, for example, painting as opposed to theatre) matters
• It’s often been media practioners who have developed media theories and models (eg D.W Griffiths and parallel editing in the cinema, the engineers developing new communications systems after WW2).
• Media effects—the questions of the literal effect media experience has on people. Simple version is that it’s like a hypodermic needle with an immediate and dramatic effect (eg making people violent). More complex version exist however (eg Cultivation theory—that is, effects happen over time with repeated exposure).
• The above is an example one one of the major approaches to media analysis—that attempting to empirically describe, on the ground, what media do, or are capably of doing. Balnaves et al Chapter 4 covers this well—audience can be conceived as passive or active or somewhere between, effects can be immediate or occur over time (or not occur in any simple way at all); there are questions about diffusion of media effects and the diffusion of media innovations, about whether ‘opinion leaders’ are involved; about the ‘uses and gratifications’ involving more active media use; effects might be direct and powerful, or might be more limited but just as powerful (e.g agenda setting, framing, priming, or the way that the structure of media fits into the structure of society and of individual lives)
• Constructivism is, simply put, the idea that we construct our world, and can construct our world. It is not just given.
• There are different forms of what we might call more big picture, critical approaches to media events. These include those that identify ideologies and ‘ideological apparatuses’ (which bring us to ‘false consciousness—that is, we mistake an illusion for our real situation, and we do so because it suits someone else, some other group in society, usually those in charge, or making a profit from this whole situation). Then there are the related ‘critical theory’ approaches such as those coming out of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse etc). Then there is the question of a “public sphere”.
• Finally, Baudrillard takes this all a step further, suggesting the collapse of the useful interaction between private experience and the public sphere. Instead everything just “circulates” through the ‘ecstasy of communication’. There is a double (cold as opposed to hot—Baudrillard is following McLuhan here) ‘obscenity’ in which everything is seen, screened, communicated (but not to be meaningful—the meaning is communiction itself).

Walter Lippmann: ‘[world is very complex, subtle and variable] although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the world’ (in Balnaves et al:75). Is Lippmann right? Who controls the models? Which models do we use at any given moment and what are the consequences?

I’ve been running this course off and on since 2000 - along with many fine colleagues, such as Chris Chesher and Scott Shaner. This is the second last time it will run, but I’ve completely revamped the course in any case. I’m pleased with the way it’s turn out.

There’s a course outline downloadable from here. Ed Giles and Rowan Tulloch will be teaching the course with me, so that’s great too.

I’ll be using this blog to post on media events and issues, and to aggregate other items of interest.

There’s also a new network literacies initiative that you should join.